A sunny Thursday late afternoon, sometime mid-June. You finish your weekly grocery trip and stop at your mailbox on the way home. Among the pile of random discounts and credit card offers you couldn’t care less about, there’s a letter from your local energy utility. It says something along the lines of:
“There’s never been a better time to electrify your home!”
It might sound nice. But then again, people have been telling you for a long time that you should replace your natural gas appliances with electric-powered ones. And when they do this, the motives are often vague: are they doing it for the climate? Or do they think electric appliances are actually better? Or do they just want to sell me something? Are there really tax incentives I can take advantage of by electrifying? Also, how hard is electrifying my home going to be?
Fortunately, there are actual answers to these questions. Today, we’re going to dive into what it’ll actually take to electrify your home —and why it might be easier than you think.
Why electrify in the first place?
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably done at least a little research on electric appliances.
But the general population, for the most part, has an old-school idea of the electric appliance—frustrating and inefficient. It’s the electric coil stove in your first apartment that took ages to heat up and then burned the pancakes you were trying to make. Or the battery-powered water heater your cousin put on the showerhead in the guest bathroom (which didn’t even get that hot anyway). These are generally not good memories.
Good news is, this idea about electric appliances is just that—old-school.
Electric appliances don’t actually have to be a nightmare to use. In many cases, they’re actually better than their natural gas counterparts. Today, electric appliances are state-of-the-art products you would actually want. Here are a few examples:
• Induction stoves (like what we build at Impulse) that boil a pot of water in 40 seconds flat.
• Water heaters (like what Harvest Thermal builds) that are just as effective as natural gas (and easier to repair).
• Heat pumps (like what Gradient, and Harvest are building) that efficiently heat and cool your house.
Even better, the government will literally pay you to install these
Back in August 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was signed into law. This act set aside of billions of dollars for homeowners who want to electrify their homes—and yet most people still haven’t taken advantage of that money.
It’s not pocket change, either. You can get up to $14k to cover your electrification, oftentimes covering most or all of the cost of the appliances and installation. (It can sometimes be hard to learn about this information, but local utilities—like CleanPower in SF—will often help you.) This is all, of course, great.
So what’s the catch?
It’s traditionally quite complicated to electrify your home
Say you want to start electrifying your home by installing an induction stove in your kitchen (if you’ve ever cooked in Europe, you’ll know these are wonderful for just about everything). Here’s a common scenario for people who live in the United States:
1. You realize that your kitchen is only wired with a 120V supply.
2. Basically every induction stove needs a 240V supply, because induction stoves use lots of power.
3. So you dive through the forums online, and quickly figure out that you’ll need to rewire your kitchen.
Quick definition: The “V” in 120V and 240V stands for “volts”. Higher voltage allows for more power to be delivered to an appliance. Unfortunately, 38% of American kitchens currently use gas stoves, which means they are more likely wired with 120V circuits (not 240).
If you only have 120V wiring in your kitchen, then installing traditional induction would mean—at the minimum—paying an electrician to come in and rewire your kitchen. That process alone can quickly snowball: holes punched into walls, new drywall installation, fresh paint, the list goes on.
Then there’s the problem of the panel. If your house is like most, you have one main electrical panel that effectively ‘routes’ electricity to different parts of your house. There’s a chance that, even if you’re willing to have an electrician install a 240V circuit in your kitchen, your panel doesn’t have the capacity to support that additional 240V circuit. Upgrading a panel can cost thousands of dollars.
And even if by some stroke of luck your panel can support a 240V circuit, it probably will not be able to support the electrification of all of your other appliances. Most panels in the United States are somewhere between 100 and 200 amps, which isn’t always enough to support a bunch of electrical appliances.
Getting a new panel installed can cost $3k+, in addition to what you’d pay to make sure there is a 240V supply where you need it for all your electric appliances. All of a sudden, electrification turns from a dream into a headache.
What now?
How plug-and-play electrification can make this all much easier
While rewiring your home can be a great path to electrification, there’s another way: plug-and-play electrification. Appliances built for plug-and-play electrification do what they say—they let you simply plug into the outlets that your house already has.
Let’s go back to the kitchen example. Your kitchen probably has a 120V outlet, which is insufficient for most induction stoves—most.
But at Impulse, we’ve built a stove that simply plugs into the outlets you already have in your kitchen. This means you don’t have to tear down any walls or install a new panel in your house: you just plug and play.
The best part? You’re not always sacrificing on performance with plug-and-play appliances. Impulse’s integrated battery doesn’t just allow for plug and play electrification. It also makes our cooktop 3x more powerful than the most powerful gas stoves on the market, and 5x more powerful than the next-best induction options.
This extends beyond stoves, too. Major manufacturers are introducing new 120V heat pump water heaters, and Gradient’s window heat pump plugs into a normal 120V outlet too! Plug-and-play solutions are becoming more common across the board, both as the technology becomes feasible and as companies are realizing that letting people electrify their homes as they are—instead of undergoing major renovations—make electrification more attainable and affordable.
There are sometimes, of course, some limitations to 120V plug-and-play solutions—they usually deliver less power. Fortunately, some manufacturers have found clever ways to get around this limitation. For us, that means building a battery into our cooktop, which delivers unprecedented power without putting a serious strain on your electrical panel.
What can you do now?
If any of this sounds interesting, or possibly made electrifying your home sound less intimidating, the next thing to do is to figure out what version of ‘free money’ you can get your hands on as you electrify.
One way to do this is to check out Rewiring America’s Home Electrification Calculator, which rounds up federal and state incentives. You may also have access to local and utility-sponsored incentives — the best way to learn about these is to check in with your electricity provider. Many utilities and Community Choice Aggregators have home electrification programs, and they’d love to help you start electrifying your home—without having to take on a major home improvement project.
You can also get help electrifying your whole home from our friends at QuitCarbon! QuitCarbon provides free, expert guidance on induction cooking, clean, modern heat pumps, mini splits, water heaters, EV chargers, solar, batteries, and more. As an ENERGY STAR® partner, QuitCarbon saves you time and money with expert guidance on projects, pricing, and rebates. When you're ready to get started, they connect you with vetted local contractors to get the job done right. We love working with them, and we think you might too!
Learn more about Impulse
And as always, if you’re interested in learning more about the Impulse stove, head here. If you work at a utility and want to learn more about us (or discuss a partnership), you can reach out to us directly at info@impulselabs.com. We’d love to hear from you.