Tag Archives: hardware

August Updates: New Office, New Hires, And Making Waves In IoT

July was another big month for ecovent, and now that it’s August, it’s time for some updates. Here’s what’s kept us busy over the past few weeks.

Our New Office, 12 Channel St.

Last month, we announced we moved into new offices in Boston’s Innovation District. This month, we’re happy to share some images of our new digs. We take pride in where we work, so we put a lot of effort into making sure that 12 Channel Street is an awesome place to spend every morning, noon, and (sometimes) night.

Before:

After:

A view from the workshop:

And check out a closeup of the amazing sign that Ellen Suttle designed for us. We love it.

Welcome To Our Latest Hire, Scott Sawyer

We are also extremely excited to welcome Scott Sawyer to the team. Scott is a distributed computing and data science expert. He’s worked at Lockheed Martin and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. He’ll be helping us build amazing data analytics for your home.

Check out Scott’s C.V. and his Three Important Lessons for New Coders on his blog, 10 Flow.

Beta Systems Shipping Out This Month

We’ve had overwhelming interest in our beta program and are pleased to report that the program is now full.

We will be shipping out hardware to our test sites across the country by the end of the month. Here are Yoel and our intern Caleb, ready to send out a system.

Thank you to all our beta customers. We couldn’t do it without you, and we’re really excited to make your homes more comfortable!

We’re An IoT Leader - Help Us Spread the Word!

Last month, the Boston Business Journal named us one of the leading Internet of Things companies in Massachusetts. We’re proud to be an IoT leader. Help us spread the word by retweeting this tweet or sharing our Facebook post. Thank you all for your support.

Check out all these updates and more in our monthly newsletter. If you don’t get our newsletter yet, sign up today by clicking the massive blue button below.










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Thinking Big, Starting Small

Dip and I recently read this post by Rob Day, who goes by the handle @cleantechvc on Twitter. We think that Rob really nailed it when it comes to the next phase of cleantech. Here are a few of his points that really resonate with us at ecovent.

Customer experience: Simpler. Easier. Better. This is our mantra. We’re always thinking about the customer experience. There’s technology out there that can fix every HVAC problem under the sun, but it isn’t easy. It’s like you need a dozen advanced degrees to just set the temperature you want and keep it consistent from room to room. It shouldn’t be that way. We wanted to design something so simple you install it yourself in a single afternoon.

Execution: You can make a product with all the features in the world, but it doesn’t matter if no one wants to buy it. And that comes down to execution. Nothing could be more critical. We’ve got beta testers knocking down our door to try out our system, and we want to make sure we deliver the very best possible product at the end of the day.

Start Small, Think Big: Couldn’t agree with this one more. We’re starting with an unloved, overlooked piece of home hardware that hasn’t changed in decades. The vent. But if we make one homeowner more comfortable, we’ve achieved our goal. When we’re thinking small, that’s our mission. But when you start to consider about the levels of energy savings, peace of mind, and fine-grained control we can offer, it’s easy to see the big picture.

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We Now Have Control

Since late October, we’ve been using ecovent’s sensors to monitor the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in our CTO Nick Lancaster’s home. Although the system isn’t yet controlling Nick’s vents (that’s the next step), we can now adjust his thermostat based on the information we’re getting from the sensors. That helps us make his home more comfortable, automatically.

And since Nick’s home often has an 8 degree temperature difference between rooms, he won’t have to worry about rooms being too hot or too cold.

The next step is to install our vents in Nick’s home. Once those are up and running, every room will be set to the ideal temperature for Nick and his family. He can let the system learn which rooms he uses and when, or he can manually set the system to make a specific room a specific temperature. In the meantime, we’ll try not to mess with him by controlling his thermostat from our Boston office. But now that we have control, it’s tempting.

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