Elaine Weir is retired, which implies that — aside from the swimming classes she teaches a number of instances every week — she has plenty of time on her arms. So in the summertime of 2019, when she noticed a Fb advert for the geothermal vitality firm Dandelion, she referred to as them as much as examine. “I had no intentions of shopping for this factor,” she says, with a conspiratorial cackle. “However my daughter suffers from bronchial asthma, so I needed to do my small half to cut back our footprint. We have been contemplating an electrical automobile, however then I noticed this…”
She agreed to let a salesman come to her residence, a 100-year-old Tudor within the New York Metropolis suburb of Scarsdale. “He defined this and that,” she says. “However when he mentioned I might do away with the air-con, that is when my ears perked up.” Like many houses, her HVAC system required a large, noisy set of outside AC condenser models. “I mentioned, ‘You imply these do not must be right here?’ They’re proper subsequent to my screened-in porch, and I can hear them in the course of the evening, they usually’re simply plain annoying.”
