Most people don’t think about hot water until it’s gone, yet behind the scenes, it can represent a major chunk of home energy use. In this episode of the Capitalist Hippie Podcast, Marco sits down with Luke Winston-Almanzar, CEO and co-founder of Reservoir, to unpack why the “boring” category of water heating is actually one of the most practical front doors to home electrification.
Luke explains the core shift Reservoir is betting on: moving from old-school electric resistance heating to heat pump technology that can deliver roughly 4x efficiency. Pairing that with software, connectivity, and control enables the system to respond intelligently to your household patterns. The conversation also goes beyond product into strategy: why installation and distribution are often the make-or-break moment for climate hardware, and what it takes to make adoption feel easy in a category that’s historically confusing and contractor-dependent.
In this episode, Marco and Luke cover:
- Why hot water is an outsized (and overlooked) driver of home energy use
- Heat pumps 101: how “moving heat” changes the efficiency math
- Turning a home system into a grid-connected thermal battery
- The go-to-market challenge: making replacement and installation frictionless
- Choosing climate problems with both impact and real scalability
Play Episode 90: Luke Winston-Almanzar, Reservoir