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Reshaping the way people heat their homes.
Most homes in the UK heat themselves the same way they did fifty years ago: a gas boiler, a flue, emissions released into the air every time the heating comes on. 31% of UK carbon emissions come from home heating alone. Johan and his team at tepeo looked at that number and decided to change it.
Every time one of our heat batteries comes online for the first time, I know it's another gas boiler down," says Johan. "Another step on the decarbonisation journey." For Johan and his team, that moment of a unit humming in someone's home is what all of it is for. The funding conversations, the regulatory approvals, the installer partnerships. Years of work that most people will never see, distilling into warmth in an ordinary home on an ordinary street. The ZEB heat battery boiler was their solution, storing electricity and releasing it as warmth, doing the same job as a boiler, in the same space, without any of the emissions. They knew that asking people to change how they heat their homes was a big ask. So they made it as easy as possible. Their idea was to install it in the place where the boiler has always been, in a kitchen corner or utility room. The home feels the same. What's powering it is entirely different. It charges when electricity is cheapest and cleanest, using electric heating elements to build up stored energy, then releases that warmth steadily throughout the day. No combustion. No gas. A system designed for ordinary homes, making the shift away from fossil fuels feel straightforward rather than out of reach.
Getting there is a long game. Johan's days move between investors, government officials, product teams and installers, a constant effort to keep an enormous number of moving parts aligned. "Every day is different," he says, "but most of my job comes back to speaking to people, giving them guidance and keeping things moving in the right direction." The conviction holding it all together hasn't wavered. "It takes enormous energy and perseverance to change the world of energy. We will not rest until we've achieved our goal to reshape the way we all heat our homes." Each installation is a small, specific version of that. A unit on a wall, a boiler decommissioned, a home running more efficiently than it did before.
