Temperate
CarbonFix cohort
Type
Founders
Type of impact
Type of invention
About this project
Temperate are developing indoor cooling devices that could cut temperatures down to 22°C while using as little electricity as a wireless router.
Co-founded by Fergus Love-House, Charlie Bilsland and Sarah Bishop, the UK-based start-up have developed a novel way to radiate heat directly into space. This is based on the Passive Daytime Radiative Cooling (PDRC) concept, but existing PDRC technology relies on surfaces that face the sky. Temperate have found a way to make an indoor unit, which is much more flexible and appropriate for both industry and residences.
Their first product will be a refrigeration plugin that supplements cooling, cutting around ~10% of conventional energy consumption and reducing refrigerant dependence.
Our investment is enabling them to hire enough engineers to prepare for a pilot on a UK retailer’s cool chain.
Read more in our Q&A with co-founder Charlie Bilsland here, and read a short excerpt below.
Founder Q & A
“Our solution draws on a very recent innovation that radiates heat out to space in the form of infrared. The innovation works on a basic principle of physics: that heat is emitted as light. You know when someone puts a sword in hot coals in a movie? The sword lights up and gets brighter because the heat is being emitted as light. It’s the same principle at play when you feel the temperature drop on a cloudless night, as the heat on the surface of the earth is emitted into space as infrared radiation.
We’re just manipulating that principle. We take this core principle of physics and we tweak it such that we are able to turn everyday ambient heat in the world into infrared radiation in this specific spectrum and exhaust it into space.
Along the electromagnetic spectrum, there’s different types of light. [insert diagram here?] We turn heat into a specific wavelength range – 8 to 13 micrometers – that aligns with what’s called the atmospheric window. Think of it as a super highway to space. Radiation in this range passes straight through the atmosphere rather than being absorbed and bounced back, allowing heat to escape into the cold of outer space.
We aim to make an indoor cooling unit that runs on as little electricity as your wireless router, and can cool a space by around 5 degrees Celsius.”