The Journey of MyHEAT

Creating a Tool to Visualize Waste Energy

The story goes that one day Dr. Geoffrey Hay, an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, came home to find that his house was cold. This didn’t make sense as he had designed his brand-new home to be energy efficient. His first thought was that heat must be escaping from his house somehow, but he didn’t know how or where.

Dr. Hay’s next thought was how useful it would be if he could use his smartphone to find a map of his home that showed exactly where the energy was escaping and then connect him to the right people to help fix it. Realizing that he had the capability to create this solution himself, he started down the path that would eventually lead to where MyHEAT is today.

A Timeline of Our Company’s Growth

After winning the Climate CoLab Grand prize, and receiving significant interest from cities world-wide, Dr. Hay realized that he had developed the HEAT program as far as he could in the academic sector and chose to take his research public. His vision was to offer an easy-to-use and insightful heat loss platform that could be used by individuals, service providers, and cities across the globe to empower urban energy efficiency. 

MyHEAT has grown significantly since this time. Here are some of the major milestones that have contributed to MyHEAT’s success, along with some lessons that we’ve learned along the way.

In the beginning, the heat loss platform was designed and marketed towards municipalities and companies who wanted to raise general awareness about energy efficiency. In this process, MyHEAT’s team quickly discovered the power of heat loss data in driving behavioural change and how it could also be applied to help utilities advance their energy efficiency objectives. 

From these lessons, we have further innovated our platform to enable the implementation and effective evaluation of behavioural pilots designed to drive incentive program participation and reduce energy consumption. We are pleased to report that we are just wrapping up and evaluating the first behavioural pilot that was implemented through a partnership between a municipally-owned utility, academic researchers, and the Canadian federal government. More pilots are in their early stages of development, with additional results to come.

MyHEAT Today and Tomorrow

From the launch of our first platform in 2016 to today, MyHEAT has:

Now we are preparing ourselves for global expansion. Our team is growing quickly. In fact, we’ve doubled the number of dedicated staff over the last year to keep up with our platform expansion.

We are currently working on our next-generation, world-class airborne sensor and innovative machine learning methods for faster data collection, enhanced building-recognition, increased insight, and further expansion of the platforms that we offer.

Are you interested in learning more about our company and how you can bring MyHEAT to your community? Send us an email at solutions@myheat.ca

Written by:
Chelsea Froklage, Marketing and Design Lead