For an idea that he dreamed up in his spare time, 63-year-old Garthen Leslie accepted a $100,000 check last week from Ben Kaufman, the 27-year-old CEO of Quirky. It’s the first of at least 5 checks of that size that the self-employed IT consultant is likely to receive this year from Quirky.
The five-year-old New York City manufacturing company is on a mission to “bring real people’s product ideas to life.” Leslie’s idea—one of many that the self-confessed tinkerer with a PhD has pitched to Quirky—is a smartphone-controlled window-unit air conditioner that learns users’ habits in order to conserve energy and cut costs while keeping them cool.
Leslie had been ruminating on his “smart air conditioner” since summer 2012. That’s when, driving from his Columbia, Md., home into Washington, he was struck by all of the cooling units hanging out of old apartment building windows. Having spent several years of his career at the U.S. Department of Energy, Leslie naturally wondered about the cost to operate them all day.
He recalls, “I realized the people who lived there had two options: Leave the air conditioner running when they’re out, adding up expenses and energy consumption, or shut it off and come home to a hot and sticky home.” A smartphone married with a new type of air conditioner could provide more flexibility, he thought: You could reduce cooling costs by turning on the air conditioner with your phone as you were leaving work and arrive home to a comfortable room.
But Leslie didn’t have the wherewithal to take his invention any further, so it remained just a pipedream on paper for six months. Then, one night in January 2013, as he was falling asleep in front of the TV, he caught Jay Leno interviewing Ben Kaufman about Quirky’s business model.
When Kaufman described how his company “bridges the gap between great ideas and real products” by developing and compensating concepts contributed by regular people, Leslie perked up. “I had defined a great idea as well as I could, but I was stuck on all this other stuff that needs to happen for it to become a product,” he says. He sleepily jotted down the Quirky URL.
A few days later Leslie created an online profile and submitted not just the air conditioner—described in two paragraphs with a crude diagram—but also another 20 or so of his inventions that had been languishing in an inches-thick file on his desk.
As luck would have it, Quirky shortly entered a partnership with GE to develop Internet-connected home appliances and devices. After the release of the first four Quirky + GE products in November, a GE partner asked Kaufman if any of his community’s inventors had submitted air conditioner ideas. From the Quirky digital archive, where the company stores the 4,000 or more product concepts it receives each week, Kaufman pulled up Leslie’s idea.
GE’s team liked it, so Quirky’s in-house design and engineering team went into high gear that December developing the smart AC. More than 2,000 members of the online invention community chimed in on sizing, specs, and the product name. At home, Leslie watched on the website as his idea joined the hundreds that had been flagged for development.
In March, Kaufman asked Leslie to take the train up to New York to visit Quirky headquarters—a sprawling 30,000-square-foot “imaginarium” for hundreds of young designers and engineers on the 7th floor of an old brick warehouse on Manhattan’s west side—to take a look at their work on his idea. When Leslie’s wife asked him what he thought he would see there, he answered, “Probably some detailed sketches or a maybe a cardboard mockup,” he recalls.
So it was an emotional moment when Leslie walked into Quirky’s meeting hall, assuming he was interrupting an event among the 200 people gathered there, to witness the unveiling of his own idea brought to life: the finished and operational 8,000 BTU Aros.
“Ben was there with the actual working product. That really blew me away. That’s a very short time frame to do almost anything,” Leslie says. “I went back to the hotel, and I just sat there trying to get my head around what had just happened. I called my wife and she didn’t believe it.”
The Quirky + GE branded Aros will be available this summer in Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Best Buy, P.C. Richard & Son, and Target. For now, the $300 smart air conditioner can be pre-ordered on Amazon, where more than $5 million in sales have already been rung up.
There’s been a recent trend at Home Depot where they are selling different central a/c thermostat controls that talk with your phone (I assume you have to have a wireless modem at home for this). The latest one is just a round knob with a led display in the middle that ‘learns’ your preferences and adjusts accordingly without you having to figure out how to program it. The idea is that people don’t bother learning how to program their thermostats and such costs them money and wastes power when they forget to turn their units off on their way to work. The bad news is, these things are priced at 150 to 200 bucks. Maybe an internet search would return cheaper versions.
Are any of you familiar with an “absorption” air-conditioner (or absorption refrigerator)? Though it sounds counter-intuitive, absorption systems perform cooling by using heat. You can run them off of solar, and I don’t mean solar PV.
Good old Wikipedia has a page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_refrigerator
My understanding is that these use about 1/10 the amount of power as a conventional refrigeration system. You might think that would make them very popular, but apparently not. They are mainly used by big power consumers, like for cooling factories, but perhaps a shopping mall or office building. I think that’s partly because of the expense of purchasing one, but also because they have an intermittency issue – they won’t cool at night, so if you need night cooling you’d also have to purchase a conventional air-conditioner as your “backup” system. This is less of a problem for factories or office buildings, which might be closed at night, and even if open still find it cost effective to run both an absorption and conventional air-con system.
Had a small refrigerator in my tent trailer that used propane. Worked OK but I’m not sure they are very efficient when scaled up if you have to burn fuel—-the “1/10 the amount of power” sounds way off.. Using solar heat or maybe waste heat from a manufacturing process might make them economical in the daytime, but you’d still have to burn fuel at night or when the process was shut down. You wouldn’t “also” need a “conventional” system at night, just a different heat source, i.e., carbon-based fuel. I guess you could generate the heat with electricity, but that has to be way inefficient and costly.
PS Although the contents of the refrigerator were cooled nicely, the exhaust heat tended to heat up the “local environment” and was not always welcome, particularly in the desert southwest.