Graham Hendra – Heat pump development officer (Europe), Haier – discusses the launch of the new Energy Donkey:
The Energy Donkey aims both to provide guidance and to optimise heat pump operation when it launches next week. Is this a tool that will transform tech support for installers, owners and asset managers alike? Graham Hendra thinks so, but then he did design it.
In the world of heat pumps there are two common problems: 1) Homeowners want to ask lots of questions and 2) Aftersales tech support is patchy at best.
I get it. Tech support is very expensive to provide and it’s hard to charge for this service. In my experience, the tech support always seems to be the one that the Finance departments wants to cut when savings are needed – they struggle to see its value.
I was that guy for 30 years, providing tech support for both air conditioning and heat pumps, but I gave up a couple of years ago because I got fed up with answering the same questions. These days people have chat groups set up all over the web and I could waste my whole life answering questions on these sites, often then to be shot down by people who have no experience at all in the subject. For the sake of sanity, I don’t do this anymore.
Yes, this seems to be a world where no one knows the answers but everyone has the questions. In a bid to try and help, I tried writing a few books about it (still available on Amazon) but it seems people would still rather ask complete strangers for advice on Facebook.
When you think about it, it’s pretty odd behaviour. If you wanted help with whether to get a dental crown or an implant, you wouldn’t want online advice from a retired ship’s mechanic, you’d want it from someone with experience and training. You know, like a dentist. But in heat pumps everyone seems to be an expert.
My day job nowadays in R&D at Haier is basically trying to make heat pumps better – making them simpler, easier to set up and easier to control.
But that only solves part of the problem. The questions like: “Could I have a heat pump in my house?” “Will I be cold?” or “Are they expensive to run?” cannot be solved by making a better unit.
So, I’ve decided to launch a service online which is basically me in a chat bot. Of course you could just use Chat GPT or one of its big-name colleagues, but these scrape data from everywhere, so mixed in with the good advice there will inevitably be a good deal of dross – and it’s nigh-on impossible to tell one from the other.
But the good thing about AI, it turns out, is that you can train your own bot with the right information and then give people access to it through your website. Basically, making yourself available 24/7 to all.
On 7th September we are launching such a service. It’s called the Energy Donkey and it will allow you to ask your heat pump question then give you an answer based on my experience. I have spent an age training the donkey to give you good heat pump advice. I invite you to try it at www.energydonkey.com and see for yourself.
But not only will the Energy Donkey answer your general questions, it can also see how your own heat pump is operating by talking directly to it. So you can literally ask questions such as: “Is my heat pump working ok?” “Is there enough water for me to have a shower?” “Can you tweak my system to run better?” or simply “Can you turn up the heating for me?”
Once the training has been completed in the latter part of 2026, installers will also be able to use the Donkey to tell them how to fix faults, or how to set the unit up optimally – just like speaking to a tech support engineer. But in the form of an AI donkey.
The Donkey won’t just be useful for installers either, it will also enable those who oversee multiple heat pumps, such as housing associations or local authorities, to monitor and optimise their estates.
I have found the project to be a really interesting experience – I’ve been using the Donkey to help me answer my emails for the last couple of months. It’s very good at the everyday questions such as what fuse might be needed for a specific model of heat pump, or what are the best pipe sizes for the output. So now I’m an R&D engineer with a clever apprentice. Hands up if you noticed.
