Novo Innovations Blog

We’ve had a few requests for more information on how Novo came about and our inspiration in creating our smart radiator valves. The idea for Novo originated 2 years ago from a group of E.ON employees to revolutionise the climate control world. With an interest in heating and cooling, we’d all seen how current solutions are hard to install, awkward to use and often expensive! Novo therefore applied to join the :agile accelerator programme, E.ON’s own internal start-up programme. Every 3 months :agile accepts applications, with a demo day at the end. If all goes well at this, then you get to pursue your dream and we were delighted to gain further support! The wider :agile team at the E.ON HQ in Germany We went from full-time employees at E.ON to pursuing our dream of smart solutions as an internal start-up, but luckily with the support of a global player in E.ON behind us. We also reinforced the team and many of our technical experts joined at this time and have stayed wit...

Extensive testing helps reveal many problems that would otherwise stay dormant. It is a somewhat daunting task to run a selection of appropriate tests and then analyze the results and make certain improvements. It is something that not only should be done during a product development, but it also should be done rigorously, which quite often means it is a bit boring. This post is NOT about that. This post is about solving these mysterious bugs and problems that appear seemingly randomly and are an absolute pain to fix, which also makes them NOT boring. It all started back in December, during an internal demo. We were still using a slightly older version of electronics and during one of the many valve activations, I saw that the SRVs temperature measurement went quite suddenly a few degrees up. This was unexpected to say the least - we had tested this hardware quite a lot before that and used the same sensor in other products and frankly never had any wrong readings. Although ...

There was no warning... ...no time to adjust or to regroup. It started just like that, all of the sudden on the 1st of January. At the time when most people were, in all likelihood, enjoying their day off, perhaps remembering the night before, perhaps revisiting their new year’s resolutions and gently debating whether they should join a gym or perhaps buy a tennis racket, I was already up to my elbows at work. The company email box, kickstarter email box and all social media were full of messages from backers and fans waiting impatiently for answers and updates. I hugely enjoy interacting with such a wonderful audience and always try to give my best answers, which means quite often I need to do a bit research, which in turn results in some inevitable delays. And similarly, in this case it took me the best part of 4 hours journey to catch up with all the messages. Next was the backerkit. I knew we were almost ready but backerkit was flagging some potenti...