Elaine Weir is retired, which implies that — aside from the swimming classes she teaches a number of instances every week — she has numerous time on her fingers. So in the summertime of 2019, when she noticed a Fb advert for the geothermal power 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 wished 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 dwelling, 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 may do away with the air con, that is when my ears perked up.” Like many properties, her HVAC system required an enormous, noisy set of outside AC condenser models. “I mentioned, ‘You imply these do not need to be right here?’ They’re proper subsequent to my screened-in porch, and I can hear them in the midst of the night time, they usually’re simply plain annoying.”