Modular HVAC · plug and play · every climate
Your building sits on more energy than it uses: outdoor air, the ground, the sun, waste heat, cheap off-peak power. HYDRA is a thermal bus with click-in modules and a dispatcher that runs the cheapest source every hour of the year, the way power grids have for decades. One system. No fuel bets. No lock-in.
How it works
Every other HVAC system marries one energy source for twenty years. HYDRA holds a portfolio and re-decides every five minutes.
A low-temperature hydronic loop runs through your building. Anything that can make warm or cold water can sell into it; every room buys from it. Water moves 3,500 times more heat than air and stores it in a simple tank, not an expensive battery. The plumbing outlives every machine bolted to it.
Air, ground, sun, waste heat, combustion, storage: each is a factory-sealed module with the same three connections: two hand-tight water couplings, a plug, and a data jack. No refrigerant work, no soldering, nothing over 150 pounds. Add one this year, another next year. Swap in thirty minutes.
The CORE controller prices every connected source against live weather and your utility rates, then runs the winner: heat pump on mild afternoons, stored heat through the morning rate peak, sun when it's out, the burner only for the coldest hours. When prices change, the answer changes with them.
Who it's for
A furnace bets on gas. A heat pump bets on electricity. Whichever way prices move, half of your neighbors chose wrong. HYDRA refuses the bet: your home runs the cheap source each hour and keeps a backup for the coldest night of the decade, without a 20 kW strip-heat bank or a panel upgrade.
It grows with your budget. Start with an air module and a tank. Add solar when the panels go up, ground source when the rebate lands. Every addition is a Saturday job with hand-tight fittings, guided by the app.
On commercial tariffs you pay twice: for energy, and for your worst fifteen minutes. Electric heat with strip backup can spike 20 kW on a January morning and hand 27% of your annual HVAC bill to the demand meter. HYDRA's dispatcher shapes load so the electric side never spikes, and harvests what your building already wastes: server exhaust, kitchen heat, drain water.
Every port meters BTUs, so multi-tenant buildings and condominiums bill each suite for measured thermal energy instead of arguing over square footage. C-PACE financing fits the retrofit; the system is an assessable improvement.
Schools, bases, and municipal buildings live for fifty years; no one knows what energy costs in year thirty. HYDRA is fuel-neutral by design: the same system runs on whatever the decade offers, and a policy change strands a module, never the building. Every module fails safe on its own thermostat, so a controller fault degrades to ordinary HVAC, never to a cold school.
The dispatcher also earns: demand response, load shifting into cheap hours, and thermal storage that behaves like a battery at one-fifth the capital cost per kWh.
The lineup
Factory-sealed, wheeled, keyed so they cannot be connected wrong. Prices are launch list prices; reservations price-lock yours.
The spine: a wall-mounted bus manifold with four port stations, each with hand-tight dry-break couplings, keyed power, data, and a built-in BTU meter.
Prices every source every five minutes against weather and your tariff, runs the merit order, and manages storage. App included. Fails safe to module thermostats.
3-ton cold-climate air-source heat pump. Factory-sealed R290 monobloc, wheeled, full heating output to −15 °C and operation to −26 °C. Heats and cools.
3-ton ground/water-source unit for bore, trench, pond, or well. Highest efficiency in the line, plus compressor-off free cooling from the loop in summer.
Adapts the certified furnace, boiler, or rooftop unit you already own as the peak and backup source. Your old equipment becomes a module instead of landfill.
Harvests waste heat: server exhaust, kitchen hoods, drain water, any warm stream your building throws away. Often the cheapest heat on the merit order.
Connects thermal collectors to the bus with pump station and heat exchanger. Zero-marginal-cost heat that always wins the merit order when the sun is out.
450 L stratified thermal storage. Charges when energy is cheap, carries the rate peak, and ships dry so two people can move it anywhere.
1-ton quiet hydronic fan coil for heating, cooling, and dehumidification. One per zone; each reports its own comfort data back to CORE.
Works anywhere
We enumerate what your site offers, price each resource hourly, and deal modules to match. Same bus, same port, same dispatcher; only the hand changes.
Server exhaust from the suite next door, cold dry nights, cheap gas as the safety net.
Brutal sun, cheap midday solar, steep evening peaks: bank cold at noon, spend it at six.
Deep cold, no gas main: ground source carries the base, propane covers the design day.
Mild band, flat rates: the lean stack. Air module and a tank, with every upgrade path open.
Build your system
Tell us about the building and what the site offers. We'll draft your stack, price it, and estimate what dispatch does to your bills. Two minutes, no email required to look.
Straight answers
After a one-time professional rough-in (a 240 V receptacle per compressor port, and gas venting if you keep a burner), yes. Modules connect with hand-tight water couplings, a plug, and a data jack, and the app walks the fill-and-purge and runs a self-test before anything is allowed to start. No refrigerant work exists anywhere in the process because every refrigerant circuit is sealed at our factory.
Every module carries its own fallback thermostat. A dead controller degrades the system to ordinary HVAC, never to no heat. That rule is non-negotiable in our engineering standard.
On a mild afternoon, no; the lab-champion heat pump wins that hour. Across a year of real weather and real prices, the portfolio wins because it never runs the wrong source for the hour it's in. In our simulated northern test year the worst-case 15-year cost of choosing HYDRA was $3,400 against the best possible choice; every single-source system risked $7,000 to $15,300.
The catalog covers every hand a site can deal: deep cold (ground + burner backup), hot and dry (ice storage + night flush), humid (dedicated dehumidification on the fan coils), no gas (all-electric stack), off-grid sun (solar thermal + storage). The dispatcher does the rest. What changes by climate is which modules you buy, never the system.
Pilot installs are running now on our own buildings. Beta units follow at pilot pricing for reserved slots, then general availability as certifications complete. A reservation costs nothing, holds your place, and price-locks your configuration.