If you live in an old-school New York City apartment building with steam heat—and no thermostat to control the temperature—your apartment may get so hot in the winter that you have to open the windows to cool it down. Some people actually turn on the AC while their radiators run, wasting even more energy. But a startup called Gradient is trying to make it easier for buildings to switch to greener heat pumps instead.
Gradient’s design, like other heat pumps, works for both heating and cooling: In the winter, it pulls in heat from the outside air, and in the summer, it runs in the opposite direction. It’s efficient and runs on electricity, unlike old boilers that run on fossil fuels.