By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”
Cameron Doepker was inspired after graduating from SAIT in industrial engineering but it was not mice that were the source of his inspiration.
“I saw a need to provide a solution that would be highly efficient at both furnace and water heating and would be super simple to install for contractors,” says Doepker, and “It would save space for homeowners eliminating the water heater in their home.”
So he and his wife Jennifer started Gradient Thermal in Calgary, Alberta and they entered into the highly competitive and foreign dominated market of furnace manufacturing.
“Our sync furnace combines forced air space heating and on demand water heating into one. So it only needs one natural gas line and one chimney which is great for retrofit applications, but it also uses just half the space of a typical home heating arrangement,” says Doepker.
And by combining these two function in one Gradient was able to develop a sleek looking combined unit that is 95 per cent efficient.
This compact unit caught the attention of contractors looking for that better mousetrap and homeowners interested in efficiency, on-demand water heating and the compact design.
It has taken ten years, but Gradient is carving out a niche in the market, first in Alberta and now across Canada.
Today Cameron is looking to the future. “In Europe, hydrogen is becoming a thing,” he says. “And, you know, as we look to be net-zero or, to decarbonize our economy here in Alberta, one of the leading solutions is hydrogen,” he says.
So today Gradient Thermal is working on adapting their successful combi-furnace to run on 100% hydrogen.
MORE COMING IN PART II