Major success from the Electric Home Show – 3 months before it even happens

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As you may know by now, CleanTechnica is producing its first large scale event, the Electric Home Show, in Honolulu, in April. It’s a 3 day festival of amazing earth-friendly fun, starting with a day for industry professionals, followed by 2 days of a consumer trade show with talks, workshops, and more.

The show is still 3 months away, but we’ve already seen incredible success. Quilt, a heat pump HVAC technology company with off-the-charts energy efficiency, is coming to exhibit its technology. Quilt, if you haven’t seen it, is stunningly beautiful. That’s important, because people want beautiful stuff in their home, and this is a key differentiator from ugly AC units. We, of course, love them even more because they have an industry leading 25.3 SEER2 rating, and are a climate-focused company looking to solve climate change through mass market adoption of better tech. CleanTechnica’s mission is, and has always been, to catalyze the transition to a clean energy future, so we love to promote companies like Quilt. But it’s not enough to promote them to consumers. There’s a known bottleneck in the transition to a clean energy future, and that is the contractor / installer inertia of what’s known.

 

Let’s say you’re a homeowner and you want to adopt something like a heat pump water heater. You call a plumber, and they instead push you toward a gas water heater, and, not knowing better, you go for it. You lose because now you’re committed to a fossil fuel for as long as you have that system, the natural gas companies can gauge you on price seemingly anytime they want (like they’re doing right now in the northeast, conveniently as the need for heating skyrockets due to a major cold front), the company making a cool heat pump water heater loses, and the world loses.

Little did you know, it’s just because the contractor didn’t feel comfortable with the new technology that they pushed a gas water heater on you. It’s what they know. There’s no benefit to anyone but them, and, well, they gotta eat, too.

This bottleneck is a major challenge. So our Electric Home Show includes a Pro Day, to educate contractors and introduce them to new technologies, help them understand them, meet the person they’ll call if they have installation problems, and understand the support they’ll get if there are any warranty issues. In addition, we’re giving them marketing & sales training to sell these new technologies, and having the local rebate folks come out and show them the rebates available and answer any questions.

So here we are, 3 months from the show, and we’re already finding this model to be a raging success. Yesterday, at the end of the day, I’m making cold calls to contractors, and get an AC installer on the line. I introduce the concept of the show, and tell him I’m excited to introduce him to Quilt technologies. He pulls up Quilt’s website, and is floored – he loves it. We’ve now connected Quilt with an installer in Hawaii, and who knows, he may already be a Quilt Certified Installer by the time the show rolls around! Sooner the better!

As we do the work of producing this show, this is the kind of market-moving advances we can help facilitate. Now homeowners will be able to choose an AC company that isn’t going to try to push a low efficiency system on them. They have a professional, trusted alternative that will instead encourage them to get the beautiful, energy sipping Quilt system. That AC contractor is what is referred to as a channel partner – they will be out selling Quilt to every customer going forward, allowing Quilt to roll out thousands of units across Hawaii, and help us reduce our overall energy demand substantially. AC is the biggest energy user residentially and in office buildings in Hawaii, and solving that challenge means less demand for electricity, which, just economics of supply and demand, means more affordability for all residents. As we reduce demand, and continue to install solar and wind, the state can move much more quickly toward its goal of 100% clean energy.

So fun, right?

Want an Electric Home Show in your town?

Right now, we’re building the blueprint to run this show in other cities. We’ve already seen incredible success, with companies like Rinnai being a major sponsor and coming to showcase their energy efficiency heat pump water heaters. We haven’t even started advertising the show, and it’s growing nicely on Facebook and LinkedIn just through algorithmic support and people getting excited about the show. If you, your company, or someone you know in your town wants to run an Electric Home Show, we will help you. Our goal is not to monopolize this brand so that we are the primary beneficiaries – our goal is to spread this concept far and wide as quickly as possible and allow local self-reliance to dominate the next five years of energy and sustainable development, and the home show can be a part of that. You can call your show anything you want, and as long as you follow our blueprint and do no greenwashing, we’ll be with you every step of the way. You, too, can connect local contractors with companies like Rinnai and Quilt, and move markets in your community by helping eliminate this known bottleneck. And…have an epic time doing it. I keep telling people, one $7 ticket to this show gives you a chance to test drive some EVs, ride an e-bike, see a local celebrity chef do an induction cookstove demo, watch Rivian power an electric BBQ grill and serve you a piece of grilled corn from it, and so on.

People are stoked.

If you’re interested, our Kickstarter is open right now, and you can get a territory-exclusive license to run one of these shows with our help for two years, for the low price of $2,000 (one of these available at the moment, and when that one sells, the cost will then be $3,500 for a license). We’ll help try to sell the companies CleanTechnica’s been working with forever, like the Rinnai’s, GE’s, and Rivians of the world, for your show, consult you on how to run it successfully and get thousands of people there, and really move markets.

If you’re not quite ready to run a show, you can help others run a show by chipping in a few bucks to our Kickstarter to help us ensure the show’s success. Thanks for being part of the solution. You rock!