Meet Jason, expert Heat Pump manufacturer

So I run Octopus’ heat pump manufacturing as the CEO of Renewable Energy Devices (RED), which Octopus acquired in 2022. I started this business – it’s hard to believe – on the 20th of March, 2014; so for almost ten years, we’ve been a company that manufactures heat pumps and wider green heating solutions, making and selling heat pumps in the marketplace.

It’s all our own hardware, our own circuit boards, our own firmware and software, our own very unique RED design, if you’ve seen them – those nice, compact, round-shaped heat pumps.

You know, my background, believe it or not, was a degree in civil engineering, and then a PhD mechanics. But then I went off to work for a boiler manufacturer – so I’m atoning for my sins.

Still, over 22 years, I’ve come to know the heating industry inside out; I’ve built oil boilers, condensing gas, condensing biomass with pellets, unvented hot water, ground source heat pump and air source pumps. These were all from a blank sheet of paper, cradle to the grave – so designing the concept, manufacturing – and selling.

I should add that hydrogen has its uses when it comes to other difficult-to-decarbonise sectors, like heavy transport and industry. To take one example, we’ve got the expertise to be able to generate our own green hydrogen at our factory and use it to weld pipes together, and it works brilliantly.

Still, heat pumps are the best when it comes to heating. They’re convenient – they suit people better. You know, it’s just ‘push the button – things switch on’. And it’s not just that – because they work by using a little bit of electricity to harness more heat from the environment, they can produce 3-4 times as much energy as you put in, making them over 4 times more efficient than traditional gas, or hydrogen boilers.

If you think of urban areas, there’s no heating pollution, no smog contribution, and the holy grail as I see it is that if the whole grid is green – if we’ve got 100% renewable energy powering a heat pump – then there’s a whisper of the carbon footprint of a gas boiler. I like the technology; I like the principle. That’s why I settled on making them all those years ago.

(Get further insight into all things green heating from our heat pump boffin Peter, here)

All the bells and whistles. We then made sure that we had the whole package – if you needed a water tank we made a water tank; if you wanted underfloor piping we could do that too – the whole heating system.

Then came a knock at the door, a year or two ago and Octopus said there was an opportunity: ‘You have the ideas and the expertise, we’ve got the resources and the connection to the rest of the energy world, would you like to do something together?’

I’m looking at incorporating a weather station into the heat pumps. We’re set up to use big data to figure out how to further optimise this stuff. The more data you have – the more knowledge – the more informed decisions you can make. That, alongside the connectivity of our heat pumps, really differentiates our product from everyone else’s.

Beyond that, as a part of Octopus, we’ve obviously been able to scale up. It’s wild to think that we’re going to be able to make and sell tens, hundreds, thousands of these things down the line. It’s big picture stuff. We’ve always had a good product and good ideas but to me it was about making heat pumps accessible to all; getting that technology out there and making them affordable.

At the minute heat pumps are getting a lot cheaper – starting to compete with gas boilers – but we can get the cost of these things down further, which we can and will do. I think that’s where we’ll do the greatest benefit and the greatest good for all.

I’ve been focusing on the manufacturing process for this last little while – how to better automate that and ultimately reduce the cost for customers. What we’re currently doing now is filling out a state-of-the-art facility. So not only have we designed a new heat pump, I’ve designed a manufacturing process to make it. We’re looking at a factory thousands of square feet and we’re ramping up innovative production lines that will eventually be able to churn out a new heat pump in minutes.

The way I look at it is that this current factory is a prototype. If we get it right, then it becomes a jelly mould factory which we can then replicate at scale, at locations of choice til we’re potentially producing hundreds of thousands of super efficient heat pumps every year and really leading the green heating transition. That’s the aspiration.

Well the most vivid ones for me were from the first few years of the R&D phase – I pretty much took my life savings and put them on RED, as I like to say.

Looking back on it, I started out as the nutty professor in his backyard. I installed my first prototype heat pump into my house – and it didn’t work quite right at first. I didn’t have a weather chamber, and so, in an attempt to perfect the defrost logic, I spent two weeks in the middle of winter outside writing code and uploading it to the heat pump – morning, noon, and night with my woolly hat on.

It took a bit of, you know, dedication (or pressure) from the family to make things happen, but by the summertime my first heat pump worked well and I was even able to use it to cool a celebratory beer.

I’m excited to get it done if that makes sense. It’s tempting to say that a great achievement will be switching the production line on, seeing the new heat pumps go out, but no, the greatest thing is excitement is driving down the road to the countryside and then being able to say ‘that’s one of ours at the back of that house’.

That’s the satisfaction: actually seeing these things out in the field, doing the job, to create something from nothing, literally from a piece of paper concept; to see that put into somebody’s home heating their home, producing hot water, green and efficiently.

To me, that’s the satisfaction I get out of it, you know, making a difference. It’s not about excitement in the classical sense but just that sense that, you know, I did that – we did that – we made that difference. That, to me, is the bit that excites me.