FAQ

One FirstLaw system replaces three things: your air conditioner, your central heating, and your hot water tank. Today those are three separate appliances, each with its own footprint, its own circuit and its own maintenance. We do all three with a single integrated system on one refrigerant line.

A heat pump moves heat instead of generating it. In summer, when the unit cools your apartment, it has to dump heat somewhere. Traditional ACs throw that heat outside. We capture it and use it to warm your hot water for free. In winter, the same hardware runs in reverse to heat your space.

We use a phase-change battery instead of a 50-gallon tank. The material (sodium acetate trihydrate) stores heat by melting and solidifying at 58°C. It packs four times the energy of water by volume, so the same amount of hot water fits in a unit 75% smaller than a conventional tank.

Two main jobs. First, it decides minute-by-minute how to split the system's energy between heating your space, cooling it, and charging the thermal battery, based on real-time demand. Second, it reconstructs the apartment's thermal state and the battery's state of charge from a single thermostat plus the system's own thermal signatures, so we don't need expensive physical sensors that would add cost and break over time.

Yes. The unit uses an enhanced vapor-injection compressor that holds full heating capacity down to −30°C outdoor temperature, and produces 65°C water at the same time. A standard heat pump starts losing output below −15°C.

Yes. Competitor heat pumps are compressor-limited at around 10 kW, so when you take a shower they physically divert away from heating your apartment to keep up. Our phase-change battery discharges at over 30 kW, three times faster than the compressor alone, so the unit can deliver gas-furnace-like shower performance without sacrificing space heating.

About C$342 per unit per year on average, which is 36.9% lower than a baseline electric setup. Exact savings depend on your climate, electricity rate, and household size. Use the calculator above the FAQ to model your specific case.

R-454B, the low-global-warming-potential successor to R-410A. It's classified A2L (mildly flammable), the same class new building codes are being written around. The unit is designed to current code with the appropriate leak detection and ventilation paths.

C$7,000 all-in for hardware plus installation. A traditional setup with a separate AC, central heater, and hot water tank averages C$8,500 installed, so FirstLaw is roughly C$1,500 cheaper on day one before any energy savings.

Roughly C$150,000 in upfront CapEx (C$1,500 saved per unit times 100), plus roughly C$34,000 a year off resident energy bills. You also reclaim 200 to 500 square feet of leasable amenity space at the building level by eliminating the boiler room and vertical hydronic risers.

It goes in like a ductless split. One refrigerant line between the outdoor and indoor units, through a standard wall sleeve, plus a single 240V circuit. There is no gas line, no venting and no hydronic piping to run through the building, and no separate tank to place and plumb.

Yes, and probably better than what's there now. The unit draws a steady 15 to 20 amps because it charges the thermal battery slowly through the day instead of spiking the grid every time someone turns on a hot tap. Baseline systems pull 18 to 30 amps in spikes. For new buildings this can avoid million-dollar electrical vault upgrades.

Field pilots with the first developer partners begin late 2026, and commercial launch is targeted for 2027 to 2028. If you are a developer or a mechanical contractor, the pilot offer is units at cost in exchange for twelve months of performance data, plus a guaranteed 24-hour swap-out if anything fails. If you are a resident who wants one, the useful thing you can do is tell your building owner, because that is who we sell to.

Partly, and we would rather be precise than impressive about it. We filed a US provisional patent application in June 2026 on the part that matters most, the refrigerant routing that lets one line set run four modes and push discharge gas straight into the thermal store. That gives us a priority date and the right to say patent pending. It is not a granted patent. A provisional is never examined, and we have twelve months from filing to convert it into a full application. The rest of the defensibility is in the control tuning and the manifold geometry, which we keep as trade secrets rather than publish in a filing.