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Our First Step Towards the Home of the Future

by Sam D'Amico | January 8, 2024

Meet the Impulse Cooktop

It's been just over a year since we first announced Impulse and our mission to drive electrification with battery-integrated appliances. We’ve been hard at work making strides in product development, design, manufacturing, partnerships and more. We’ve tripled the size of our incredible team, adding folks in design, engineering, product, and marketing across our San Francisco and New York offices. We’ve gone deep on understanding the massive opportunities around distributed energy storage, and the impact scalable deployment has on the global transition to clean energy.

But most importantly, starting today, we are accepting deposits to secure your Impulse Cooktop for just $249 (and also lock in the limited, discounted price of $5,499* — and that’s before major incentives apply, learn more in our FAQs).

Building any hardware is… well, hard. Building a first-of-its-kind home appliance in a year is really hard. Our team learned and grew, and we're incredibly proud to be launching our first product. But to us, this launch isn't the finish line, it's just the beginning. Because we're not just committed to building the best stove ever — we're on a mission to transform the way we power our homes and lives.

Designing the highest performing stove

In designing and producing the Impulse Cooktop, we had three goals:

  1. Deliver a phenomenal consumer product and experience

  2. Make it easier to cultivate a climate-friendly home

  3. Refuse to compromise on the quality of your everyday life

We see a world where high-performance electric appliances can redefine the way we live, while also reimagining our approach to clean energy.

So we built the Impulse Cooktop to be the best stove out there, and we think we've succeeded. Believe us, we've tested a lot of stoves. (The Impulse lab looks like an induction stove graveyard.)

From state-of-the-art proprietary temperature sensors in every custom-built heating element, to an impressive 12.8” LCD screen with removable, magnetic knobs, and 10 kW peak power — it’s unlike anything you’ve cooked on.

Whether boiling water lightning fast for boxed mac and cheese, maintaining a precise, consistent temperature for a perfect over-easy egg, or reducing a rich sauce without smoking or scorching — our cooktop up-levels everything from the everyday to the advanced.

We went beyond just designing for your cooking experience; we also made sure the Impulse Cooktop is easy to install. Thanks to our flexible wiring and a built-in 3 kWh Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) battery, you can skip expensive panel upgrades and complicated kitchen rewiring. Just plug it in and get cooking.

And unlike every other electric stove on the market, we've got your back covered during a power outage. Even when your home doesn't have power, our integrated battery will make sure that you can still count on the Impulse stove to cook approximately three meals.

Building the future of home electrification

So, why a battery? It comes down to three main reasons:

  1. Improve performance

  2. Make installation easy

  3. Pave the way towards resilient, efficient, fully-electrified homes

Let's break it all down.

Groundbreaking Performance

Stoves are very high peak power, but very low average power (they use lots of power when in use, but are not in use all the time). This means that most stoves' power is limited by the voltage they can draw from your wall, which is 240 volts.

Don't get us wrong, that's a lot of power. But it doesn't really compete with most gas stoves.

Gas burner performance typically ranges from 500 - 18,000 BTU/h (that's British Thermal Units per hour— a unit of power). In contrast, induction cooktops market performance in terms of Watts (also a unit for power), and good ones are usually 3,000 - 4,000 W – which maps to an equivalent of 21,500 -  28,500 BTU/h once you factor in induction’s improved efficiency. That said, at these power levels you quickly start to exceed the maximum power of typical home electrical connections.

Our battery completely changes that equation. Whether it's hooked up to a 120V or 240V connection, our battery charges gradually while you're not using it. Then, when you're ready to cook, it can quickly release the power it's stored up to achieve astoundingly high performance. We're talking 72,000 BTU/h. Compare that to 18,000 for the best gas stoves.

We've always been told that we have to choose between the performance of a gas stove and the efficiency of an electric one. Impulse doesn't just give you both — it does both better than anything on the market can.

Easy Installation

To maximize their performance, electric stoves have historically needed 240V connections. (For reference, a normal outlet that you'd plug a lamp or charger into is a 120V outlet.)

The bad news is, more than 30% of homes in America have gas stoves — so their kitchens aren't even wired to support a typical induction stove. Even in the best case scenario, adding a 240V connection to your kitchen will use up a lot of time and money. If you're less lucky, it can also require an even more expensive electrical panel upgrade that can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and take months to permit and complete.

That all changes with the Impulse Induction Cooktop. Thanks to its battery, our stove can run off an existing 120V / 15A outlet or 240V circuit in your kitchen. Since nearly every gas stove has a gas connection and a 120V connection, almost every kitchen in America can plug in an Impulse stove without any new electrical work. It's home electrification, without the electrician.

Pioneering Electrification

Making sure the batteries built-in to our products go beyond just improving appliance performance is a core tenet of our vision. With major help from our manufacturing partners, we’ve developed an approach that enables far-flung appliances to power the rest of the home.

By putting three kilowatt-hours of storage into your home through distributed batteries, our battery puts you in control of how you power your appliances.

Most renewable energy is produced during the day, while most at-home cooking is done in the morning or at night. This means that most of today's electric and induction stoves are powered by electricity that is generated by burning coal or gas at power plants.

The Impulse Cooktop lets you do things differently. With its battery, you can charge up your Impulse appliance when renewable energy is cheap and abundant, and then use it later when it's time to make dinner (we talk more about why this matters here).

Where we're going from here

We’re thrilled to deliver our first product and deeply inspired by the progress it marks towards our vision of deploying as many batteries through appliances (not just stoves) as possible. In the long term, this will lay the infrastructure to electrify the grid in a decentralized, rapid, and permissionless way. Our full vision sees the equivalent of 8 hours of storage added to every home (1.4 TWh across 3+ major home appliances per home, with a nationwide daily usage of 4.1 TWh based on consumption calculations here), which serves to complement even a fully renewable grid. And this is all done, unit by unit, in appliances and products people are already buying, installing, and using every day.

We’re not alone in our understanding that batteries are an essential part of reimagining the grid for a clean energy future. Just look at the numerous federal and state rebates and tax credits under the IRA – the federal incentives alone can stack to a 45 percent discount on the Impulse Cooktop, thanks to the product qualifying as both a stove and a home battery system (learn more about available credits here).

To win the fight against climate change, we have to build technologies that excite people about the impact they can make — without sacrificing the things they care about most. To us, that means creating the next generation of home appliances that make our lives easier, our homes more beautiful, and our energy system more sustainable and resilient.

The idea of Impulse may have started with an aspiration to build the perfect pizza oven, but it grew into reframing everyday home appliances — the stove specifically —as a wedge into distributed, scalable energy storage. And we're not just here for the short term — we're in it for the long haul. So the best stove ever is just step one in the journey towards whole home electrification and a clean energy future.

*Quantities limited and pricing not inclusive of applicable duties, taxes, or subsidies.

SD
Sam D'Amico