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You probably don’t realize it, but your home is likely a waste-production factory, hungrily sucking down dirty energy while polluting your body with toxins. Ok, so that might be a bit much, but just about everybody’s home can be tweaked to become healthier and greener. Luckily, there’s a company in Austin dedicated to doing just that.
“Most resource use, energy use, most waste production, and most of the toxins you’re exposed to, all happen in the home,” TreeHouse President and Co-Founder Jason Ballard said. “So as a conservationist, if you really want to make a change, it should be in the home.”
Think of TreeHouse kind of like Home Depot, only with products focusing on health, sustainability and earth-friendliness. They focus their energy on helping people create and maintain homes that are smarter, and thus better for the environment and the people who live inside. Want to build a rainwater harvesting system? These are your guys. In the market for non-toxic paint, eco-friendly sealant, or hypoallergenic dry-wall compound? They got it.
Since opening their doors in 2011, the company has really taken off. A couple years ago the company wanted to sell Nest smart-thermostats.
“At first Nest wasn’t very interested in selling to us,” Ballard said. “We’re one little store in Austin and they have these giant accounts with Amazon, Apple, and Lowes. So, after calling them every month for, well, a long, long time, they agreed to allow us to sell their products.”
Today, TreeHouse is the number one selling location of Nest products in the United States. That success has led them on to other high-profile partnerships. The company recently began selling the Tesla Powerwall, a battery for the home.
“The thing that’s keeping us from moving rapidly to clean energy,” Ballard said. “Is a mismatch between supply and demand.”
Basically, if you have solar panels on your home, they collect energy throughout the day but cannot store it. So, you are left with the option of selling that energy back to the grid, and then pulling power back down from the grid when the sun goes down. Or, you need somewhere to store the energy yourself. That is where the Powerwall comes in.
“The time is coming when it’ll be possible for a lot of homes to completely make the transition into clean energy. In the coming years more and more people are going to be defecting from the energy grid because a better technology is emerging,” Ballard said. “Before I’m even an old man, I think we’ll find home batteries are as normal as dishwashers.”
If Ballard is correct and the future holds home batteries and eco-friendly paint for all of us, it holds an equally interesting future for TreeHouse. The company is looking at creating new stores across the Western United States and starting a major e-commerce push. But perhaps more interestingly, the company is also setting up their own eco-friendly accelerator, TreeHouse Labs. The accelerator will partner the company with emerging technologies and offer a soft landing for innovative products as they come to the market.
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