1. What are the primary markets for your technology?
2. Tell us about your existing product offering
3. What are the competitive advantages of your product compared to other comparable technologies?
4. Tell us about your new/newer products you are bringing to the market this year?
5. Can your product(s) reduce impacts on the environment and, if so, how?
6. What misconceptions do you deal with when talking to potential customers about your product?
There are a variety of barriers and misconceptions that we encounter on a fairly regular basis.
a) one misconception is that not many buildings have radiators:
Large urban centers throughout North America have core areas which were built before 1980. If a building was built/retrofitted with a boiler system, it will still have that heating system unless the building has been completely gutted. Prior to fan coils which could also provide air conditioning, the hot water (hydronic) heating units used were either radiators or convectors. There are thousands of buildings in most market sectors (except for industrial and retail).
b) another misconception is that Novitherm Heat Reflectors only work effectively behind radiators.
They also work effectively in types of convectors (baseboard, inset, cabinet, etc).
c) For many people, our product simply seems too good to be true – how can a simple /economical product produce 10% + savings?
The fact is that the design of radiators and baseboard convectors combined with a frequent lack of insulation in the walls behind them has created a significant inefficiency as boilers need to work harder to keep tenants comfortable. These systems were designed at a time when energy was cheap and energy consumption was not something people were very concerned about. Novitherm Heat Reflectors are an effective and simple solution to decease this inefficiency.
d) Another misconception is the importance of the distribution mechanisms in heating a building.
A lot of the focus, especially when it comes to energy efficiency and retrofits, tends to be on the boiler room. How you generate your heat and how efficiently it is produced is obviously very important. A brand new boiler, control and pumps might run very efficiently but still leave your building vulnerable to the inefficiencies in how the heat is distributed. The result may still be tenants with thermal comfort complaints. Novitherm Heat Reflectors help to keep the heat you produce inside your building and help to increase the thermal comfort within the building.
7. Who is your direct customer – a property/homeowner, a contractor or a distributor, and why?
Our direct customer tends to be a property/homeowner or management company as they are looking for economical ways to reduce costs. We have had the most success when working with our customers directly, but we are open to developing relationships with distributors or contractors, especially in new markets.
8. What are your corporate strategies to communicate with and educate potential customers about your products?
9. What are the market barriers to greater deployment of your product?
If Novitherm pays for a 3rd party study, it is perceived to have a ‘manufacturer’s bias and therefore discounted. Since we are a sole source product, to have an independent party pay for/conduct a study on the effectiveness of the product, is unlikely as it has a perceived narrow marketplace application vs something like a measure to save electrical consumption.
Measuring energy use and energy savings isn’t always straight forward. Sometimes it’s hard to get different owners, utilities, government bodies and other stakeholders to all agree on the ‘correct’ methodology. To further complicate matters, just as two "identical buildings" side by side with the same building usage will not have identical energy use, every building we install heat reflectors into will not have exactly the same energy savings.
As a smaller company and with so many variables impacting the product, it is very difficult to perform definitive standardized testing to get a general rating like you would by the industry for boilers or for shower heads. What we do know is that Novitherm Heat Reflectors consistently perform in market applications and our clients keep coming back when they expand their building portfolios to apply our reflector technology. We can do all sorts of case studies but at the end of the day without a standardized external rating system some people will always be skeptical about how a case study will apply to them or the authenticity of a study done by a supplier (and rightly so).
Clients who try the product tend to love it – they see the impact in their building, can perform whatever analysis they trust or simply see the impact in terms of reduction in cold complaints/reduced boiler set points, and come to us to look at the rest of their portfolio. But for potential customers who haven’t tried the product before, it can sometimes be difficult to convince them to take that first step. Although it took a long time, we are excited that we are starting to receive more recognition…" Best Practice" in the new environmental standards ‘Living Green’ for the Certified Rental Building Program of FRPO); the Toronto Tower Renewal /Enbridge Qualified Income Program and hope this will encourage new costumers to take the initiative to use our heat reflectors. At the end of the day there are a lot of savings to be had that are being wasted year after year.
10.What could gas utilities do to promote the deployment and acceptance of your product?
Heat Reflectors align well with many utility mandates and initiatives. As said before, having a utility support our product whether through incentive programs, providing information to clients or performing studies goes a long way to building consumer confidence. We will work with any utility to conduct electronic presentations to staff and/or prime customers; we conduct onsite training for Direct Delivery contractors and will respond to provide the information and/or market place trials needed so that the necessary confidence is developed for our Novitherm Heat Reflectors.
To date, we have had the most success when a utility treats our heat reflectors as a custom measure with assigned prescriptive savings. We find that this has allowed broader application of our product with less cumbersome administration and the development of more extensive programs.
One of the underlying themes of the Energy Solutions Center is to introduce products and programs that have been successfully used by one or more utilities so that the next utility would not have to "re-invent the wheel" and could save on development costs. This hasn’t been successful in our situation. We have had 15 years of successful programs with Enbridge Gas Distribution in Ontario, Canada and we were the most successful program for the Energy Efficiency Fund in Quebec, Canada. Every time we get an internal champion at an American utility, we start making progress to get a program started and then staff are given new assignments. Generally speaking, the utility people move around too frequently for us to build sustaining relationships. It would be great if there were more continuity in terms of who we are dealing with.