Nearly 20 years in the past, Andrew Bissell was sitting in the lounge of his beachfront dwelling within the Edinburgh space. He and his spouse, Susan Lang-Bissell, had simply bought their medical imaging startup, and he was pondering his future.
“Do we retire or can we go once more?” Bissell instructed TechCrunch.
Around that point, he was leafing via a science journal when he stumbled throughout an article about local weather change, which stated there may very well be between a 30 cm to 1 meter rise in sea degree earlier than the tip of the century.
“Hang on,” he stated to himself. “If that occurs, then the lounge, the bottom flooring of this dwelling that we reside in, will likely be underwater twice a day. Then you begin excited about that being in a whole bunch of tens of millions of different houses all over the world. That’s not acceptable.”
Rather than be a part of Greenpeace — “that’s not likely what we do” — he and his spouse based Sunamp. They labored with a lab on the University of Edinburgh to plot a method to retailer solar energy as warmth that may then be used for family heating or sizzling water, what’s often called a thermal battery.
At the center of Sunamp’s thermal battery are three compounds: sodium acetate trihydrate (SAT), a meals flavoring utilized in salt-and-vinegar potato chips; water; and a sprinkling of so-called crystal behavior modifiers. SAT has been used for years in hand heaters, that are ready by heating the substance till it dissolves right into a supersaturated answer. When triggered, SAT recrystallizes, giving off warmth within the course of. The response will be reversed, permitting SAT to retailer warmth for later use, however not indefinitely. Eventually, the salt settles out of answer and refuses to recrystallize.
To enhance the longevity of SAT, Sunamp makes use of a type of acrylic as a crystal behavior modifier, which helps information the SAT into the right configuration repeatedly. “That’s each bizarre and thrilling. Weird that it occurs, however thrilling as a result of it signifies that now, as a substitute of [SAT] getting worse and worse over time, it simply stays the identical,” Bissell stated, including that the substance, which Sunamp calls Plentigrade, will last as long as 40,000 heating cycles, or greater than 50 years of day by day use.
The purpose is to utilize extra renewable energy, charging the thermal battery when photo voltaic is plentiful or charges are low cost as a result of the wind is blowing. Overnight or when the wind stops blowing, the battery can discharge, releasing warmth because the SAT crystalizes.
Sunamp already has a foothold within the United Kingdom and Italy, and it’s working to increase into different Western European international locations and the U.S. The firm is within the strategy of elevating a Series B, and Bissell stated that it’s producing income within the “tens of tens of millions vary.”
The startup’s first extensively accessible product, a compact warmth battery for home sizzling water, is focused at prospects for whom house is a premium. “Globally, possibly half of houses can afford the house to place a sizzling water tank in,” Bissell stated. “We’re for the opposite ones, those that may’t afford that house.”
