Heat Pumps and Heroes: A Cool Connection
The Marmite heat pump. The James Blunt of heating. And now Octopus has done something cool. TJ Root talks engineering, online warfare and the £500 idea that could change how Britain heats and cools its homes.
Who knew that one bright-eyed boy strumming his guitar, in his camo trousers would later become the scourge of Twitter (X), a heartthrob and a household name? Or this fresh-faced fella would take on the role of heat pump defender.
I remember Officer Cadet James Blount, of intake CC963 - at the Royal Military Academy, regaling his peers with whispering melodies. His softly spoken demeanour back then seems at odds with the wonderfully spiky persona he would later adopt online.
james.knuckey
James still strumming for the troops
And that's exactly the memory which sprang to mind when I interviewed Thomas Root (TJ) from Octopus Energy.
TJ arrived at where he's at - via the corridors of West Point, a spell as a Rotorhead, then whilst James (Blount) Blunt was climbing the charts - TJ was nailing his dissertation at Harvard Business School. Both high achievers. Just different fanboys and girls at the end.
The Online Battle
If you frequent the less racy world of LinkedIn rather than Twitter (X), you'll have had the opportunity to witness the keyboard warriors of boiler basher fame and heat pump brouhaha (with medals for meddling not actual war) dig deep into their thesaurus to work out ways to malign the Octopus Cosy.
The Octopus Cosy is a work of art or a bin, depending on your position. It's memorable, like Marmite. And provokes the same response. Which in marketing terms, is a massive win.
Nobody remembers what the plug junction box looks like in their home, the ECB, the boiler hardly gets a mention. But talk to people about their garden space and the aesthetics of the heating and cooling machine out there, it opens up a can of worms.
Enter TJ. A man with a degree in engineering and a role that straddles one of the most generationally important transitions of our time. Decarbonising homes.
"We didn't start making heat pumps because we thought, gosh, it would be fun to be in manufacturing. It's not fun to be in manufacturing. We didn't do it for fun, it's because the ethos of the company was from the beginning: renewable energy. And decarbonization."
His work at Octopus, to some, would seem like he is defending the indefensible. A heat pump that doesn't look like a metal monolith. But TJ harks back to the original sin. Or win.
The 'Dalek' heat pump that preceded the Cosy - Manufactured by REDTh
The Cosy came from a uniquely British background, deep in the heart of the engineering Mecca that is sometimes called Machinery Valley. And some of those original ideas merchants who made the infamous RED heat pump still reside in Octopus today.
"RED was Renewable Energy Devices in Northern Ireland. Their heat pump was very unique. It looked like kind of like a jet engine on its end."
"Northern Ireland is absolutely just a sort of unheralded hotbed of engineering and technical know-how. And there's a reason a lot of companies do a ton of work there."
The response online to insults to the Cosy has enabled TJ to spin a steady line in ripostes that probably do more to cement the profile and opprobrium around the unit.
"If you told someone to imagine an octopus heat pump in their mind, they could probably do it. They may hate it, they may have all sorts of bad things to say about it, but they could picture it."
"I joke about it's like the Jack Sparrow principle, right? You're the worst pirate I've ever heard of that, but you have heard of me."
And then, Octopus, ever the disruptor, even as a national company did something. Something cool.
A Call From Greg
It seems that in Octopus, there's a call that every senior leader has had. 'A call from Greg'. It's a wry smile that creeps across TJ's face when he tells me how things operate at the company. 'Cause it seems the flat command structure there means ideas from ordinary people can penetrate the top pretty fast.
"Believe me, our phones light up with the name Greg Jackson plenty. I don't know if and when he sleeps, but yeah, he's absolutely involved."
And Greg got an idea about cooling. So TJ and some of the brainy engineers got together. Or rather, as TJ reveals, they'd already been tinkering and he found out.
"Greg, saying, We have to do something about this, right? People need a solution for this. And we're already putting half of the technology needed to enable that in people's homes with these heat pumps. Can't we come up with the other half of it? This has to be a solvable problem."
"And wouldn't you note a couple of our guys in Northern Ireland who, they are inveterate tinkerers and inventors and innovators happen to say, you know, we've kind of been messing around with an idea on that."
And having ripped apart a conventional AC system. The Octopus 'coolernauts' took a brave step into the unknown. And they came up with the Cosy Cooler.
"We had to cut up a commercial air conditioning unit and ripped the guts out and put new stuff in to kind of use the box and built a controller for it with a Python script. And that was all it took. Greg saw and said, this is amazing. You've got to build it. Go forth and do it."
How does it work?
Rather than trying to cool a house by circulating chilled water through conventional radiators, the Cosy Cooler is being developed as an indoor cooling unit connected to Octopus's reversible heat pump system.
In cooling mode, the heat pump removes heat from the home's water circuit, while the Cooler uses a fan to pass room air across a chilled heat exchanger, transferring heat from the air into the water.
The cooled air is returned to the room, with the heat ultimately rejected outside. Condensation must also be managed, unlike in a conventional radiator system. TJ confirms the Cooler will incorporate an air filter, although it is not intended to provide whole-house air filtration.
But the tang in the taste of this new recipe for cooling was not so much the engineering. It's the bill. Currently, Octopus are pitching the Cosy Cooler system add-on at a cool £500-600 per household.
Think about that?
Hot Summers - Cool Ideas
There really is no precedent for the position we are in. TJ says:
"We had 40 days over 30 C in London last year. There were not even 40 days over 30 C in London in the entirety of the 1980s. You know, the change in the climate is rapid and undeniable."
And this is the smacker that should be making everyone sit up. We are looking at a future where devices manage our comfort levels all year round.
"It's not a heat pump anymore as we see it. It is a year-round comfort system."
"It's something you're using 12 months a year. And I think that's where we're going to get to in the UK. Where we're probably using this 12 months a at least 10, right?"
Octopus are uniquely placed to support this. They have the grid integration, they have devices they manufacture going into people's homes, which are halfway to providing cooling (only reversible heat pumps can cool too). And they have a network of engineers around the whole country. Sounds not dissimilar to another well-known energy provider, but they have one distinct example in the pink power team.
Agility.
It seems that no company can match the speed of rollout in Octopus. Maybe it's because they're different. Or maybe it's because, as TJ puts it:
"I think we're a company full of a lot of smart, fun, weird people."
"All sorts of passions and interests and backgrounds that bring us to where we are."
Which circles us back to the point that unites this announcement. If you're on the frontline supporting the transition. You can come up with ideas that nudge the decision-making homeowners are wavering on. And you need to get people's attention to do that. And the Cosy, one of Time Magazine's inventions of 2026. Does that.
The Marmite heat pump. Love it or hate it. You remember it. And that's pretty cool.
Derek Rose
Apparently - you don't have to be pretty to be a winner.
We'll be getting updated with more technical details of the Cosy Cooler over the next few months, the rendering, pricing and functions are still being developed.
If you want to follow TJ on LinkedIn and experience his responses to accusations of Cosy's aesthetic failures, you can follow him here.