Only 54 percent of California homes have central air-conditioning, and with heat waves getting nastier every summer, that number is starting to look like a problem. One installer’s answer isn’t a fancier compressor — it’s a shopping strategy borrowed from warehouse clubs.
The California Heat Pump Group Buy, launched last year by installation firm Vayu together with marketplace VoltHub, works on a simple premise: bundle a bunch of households together, and you can squeeze distributors for bulk pricing while lining up a neat run of installation jobs. It’s the first scheme of its kind in the state, according to Vayu founder Shreyas Sudhakar, and it currently operates around Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
Air-source heat pumps run on electricity, pulling heat from outside air to warm a home in winter and dumping indoor heat back out in summer. Sudhakar — a former Blue Origin rocket propulsion engineer — is refreshingly blunt about the tech. “At the end of the day, it’s a bunch of pipes and a heat exchanger moving energy from one place to another,” he says.
The savings are real. Once households sign up, Vayu specs out the equipment each home needs, then hunts for the best distributor deals across the whole group. “Typically, we’re getting 15 to 30 percent discounts on the equipment,” Sudhakar says.
Take Naoya Kanai, a data scientist in San Mateo. His two-story 1980s home, around 2,500 square feet, got a heat pump system for roughly $14,500, running off ductwork that was already in place. He barely registers the heat waves now. “A lot of times we’ll step out the front door [and realize] ‘Oh, wow, it was actually really hot today.'”
The concept isn’t brand new. On British Columbia’s Gabriola Island, the Energy Gabriola group has been buying in bulk since 2010 and has installed more than 1,000 units, electrifying nearly half the island’s households. “We think we’re the heat pump capital of Canada,” says Steven Earle of Vancouver Island University.
What Sudhakar learned the hard way is that timing matters. An early-2026 group-buy was, in his words, “a total flop” for lack of interest. Then summer’s heat waves hit, and the queries came flooding in. “The weather is our natural partner,” he says. Another 10 to 15 households are now in line for installs.
There’s a social ripple, too. Andrew Sissons of UK charity Nesta calls it “social contagion” — watching a neighbor install a heat pump nudges others to do the same, much like rooftop solar. He cautions, though, that quality installs and solid aftercare are what make the enthusiasm stick.
Running costs remain the catch. Harvard’s Roxana Shafiee warns that in some regions heat pumps can cost more to operate than gas furnaces. “We still see bill increases in a lot of cases,” she says. “It depends where you are.” For buyers like Ottawa’s Paul Holroyd, who spent almost $20,000 CAD for a modest discount, the math was never the point: “We didn’t do it for the payback, we did it for the environment.”
