One FirstLaw system replaces three things: your air conditioner, your central heating, and your hot water tank. Today, those three jobs are done by three separate appliances installed by three separate trades. We do all three with a single integrated system on one refrigerant line, installed by one crew in one visit.

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.

Today's residential heat pumps are compressor-bottlenecked: they can only move heat as fast as the compressor produces it, around 10 kW. That is enough to heat your apartment OR your shower, but not both at the same time. Plug-and-play units like Chiltrix and Arctic physically divert their compressor away from space heating the second you turn on a hot tap, so you lose comfort. Our phase-change battery decouples power from delivery: the compressor charges the battery slowly, and the battery dumps heat at over 30 kW when you actually need it. No competitor in the integrated residential category has shipped this architecture.

Quilt won at design and zoning. They build a beautiful air-to-air heat pump with room-by-room control. They do not solve the energy storage problem and they do not generate hot water. Jetson won at distribution: direct-to-consumer sales and one-day install. Their product is still a standard thermodynamic cycle inside a better business model. We work on a different layer: the underlying physics of how heat is recovered and stored. The three companies are complementary, not direct competitors.

The Big-3 (Mitsubishi, Daikin, Samsung) sell advanced air-to-water heat pumps in Europe, but their North American product lines are overwhelmingly air-to-air systems for offices and condos. Integrated DHW plus space conditioning is not a North American product category they currently serve. The closest options require external hydronic boxes, third-party hot water tanks, and custom plumbing, which is exactly the multi-trade install our product eliminates. The whitespace exists because the regulatory environment that makes this category lucrative (low-GWP refrigerant rules, gas bans, electrification incentives) is recent and the incumbents move slowly.

Yes. The unit uses an enhanced vapor-injection compressor that maintains full heating capacity down to −30°C outdoor temperature, and produces 65°C water at the same time. No backup electric strips, no second heater on standby.

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.

The peak integrated coefficient of performance is 5.46. In plain English: for every kWh of electricity you put in, the unit delivers 5.46 kWh of useful heating, cooling, and hot water combined. Conventional electric water heaters and AC units run between 1.0 and 3.5.

The C$342/yr and 36.9% headline come from a comparison against a baseline electric setup: a 12,000 BTU mid-tier ductless mini-split for cooling, a 40 to 50 gallon electric resistance tank for hot water, and standard heating, sized for a 900 sq ft Montreal apartment. Inputs are 2025 sub-contractor pricing for high-density urban multi-family construction. The 36.9% comes from comparing a baseline integrated COP of about 2.4 to our peak integrated COP of 5.46 in waste-heat recovery mode. The savings calculator above uses the same model, so you can plug in your own apartment size, climate, and electricity rate to see the result for your specific case.

The V1 lab proof of concept was built and validated in summer 2025. We are currently building V2, the alpha prototype that brings the EVI compressor, the phase-change battery, and the AI controller together into one integrated system. First field pilots with three to five units in real apartments are planned for late 2026, with commercial launch and 100+ installed units between 2027 and 2028. We have grant funding from the Dobson Cup, TechAccelR, NRC IRAP, and Mitacs, plus three U.S. provisional patents in flight. This is not a slide-only project.

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.

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.

Roughly C$150,000 in upfront CapEx (C$1,500 saved per unit times 100), plus C$34,200 per year in resident operating-cost savings. 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.

One trade, one day. Because it's a single integrated unit instead of three separate appliances, install crews complete two units per day rather than coordinating across plumbers, electricians, and HVAC techs. The single-line refrigerant split runs through standard wall sleeves.

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.

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.

Field pilots with the first developer partners begin late 2026. Commercial launch with 100+ installed units is targeted for 2027 to 2028. If you're a developer interested in the pilot program, the offer is units at cost in exchange for 12 months of performance data and a guaranteed 24-hour swap-out if anything fails.

Three layers of protection. First, three U.S. provisional patents covering the integrated refrigerant manifold, the AI virtual sensing for thermal-battery state of charge, and the multi-input controller. Second, trade secrets: the actual numerical tuning of the AI controller, the manifold flow geometry, and supplier specs are not disclosed in the patents. Third, the architecture itself is structural: cloning the efficiency would require redesigning a heat-pump water heater from scratch around direct refrigerant condensation into the battery, which removes a 5 to 7°C water-loop penalty that bolted-on PCM solutions cannot escape. By the time a clone shipped, we would have years of field data and supplier relationships.

Sodium acetate trihydrate is well-studied (we cite Dannemand 2015 in the whitepaper) but it does have known failure modes when used naively: supercooling and phase separation over many freeze-thaw cycles. The whitepaper documents the material physics and the latent heat figures we rely on. Cycle-life data is exactly what the field-pilot phase in late 2026 is designed to produce: we are offering early developer partners units at cost in exchange for 12 months of performance and degradation data. We are not asking you to take this on faith. We are asking the first five partners to help us quantify it, in writing.

Philip Becker (founder, McGill Engineering) and Jonas Maarek (founding engineer, McGill Engineering) authored the technical whitepaper themselves, including the EVI thermodynamic cycle analysis and the AI control architecture, with academic references from Skogestad and Postlethwaite (2005) and ASHRAE Handbook ch. 50 (2020). Antoine Raybaud joined the engineering team in 2026. Prof. James Forbes at McGill is the technical advisor. The cap table is clean: three founders on standard four-year vesting with a one-year cliff, no SAFEs or convertibles outstanding, federally incorporated under the CBCA. The same hands you see writing the math are building the prototype.