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Zero upfront cost heat pumps: how Energy-as-a-Service works

We install it for free. You pay monthly — less than your bill today. That sounds too good, so here is exactly how the model works, what's in the contract, and when you shouldn't use it.

Stuart Cox June 2026 5 min read

Every good energy project in this country dies the same death: the equipment pays for itself in three or four years, everyone nods — and the capital budget says no. Energy-as-a-Service exists to remove that single blocker.

The model in four sentences

  1. Karnot pays for, installs, and owns the heat pump system at your site.
  2. You pay one monthly fee — set lower than what your energy currently costs you.
  3. We maintain it, monitor it and fix it for the life of the contract; the performance risk is ours.
  4. Because the fee is below your old bill, you are cash-positive from month one — not after a payback period.

That last line is the whole point. "Savings" you wait four years for are an abstraction. Spending less money next month is not.

Why we can afford to do this

No trick: the machine creates the margin. A heat pump delivers about ₱4 of heat per ₱1 of electricity, where an electric element delivers ₱1 and a boiler loses a third or more of its fuel before the heat is useful. The gap between your old cost and the new one is big enough to cover the equipment, the maintenance, and your saving at the same time. The arithmetic is in the comparisons: vs electric heating, vs LPG and diesel.

What's in the contract

  • The baseline. We measure before we promise: 12 months of bills plus a metered survey establish what your energy genuinely costs now. The fee is set against that baseline.
  • Everything included. Equipment, installation, maintenance, repairs, monitoring. If it breaks, that's our cost. Our income depends on the machine working — which is exactly the incentive you want your supplier to have.
  • A term. EaaS contracts run for a fixed period — typically several years. That's the honest commitment you're making in exchange for zero capital outlay.
  • Measured savings. The monitoring that protects us also shows you, month by month, what you're actually saving. No trust required.

When EaaS is the wrong answer: if you have idle cash, buying the system outright captures the whole saving and beats any financing over the asset's life. EaaS is for when capital is scarce, expensive, or better deployed in your actual business. Honest rule of thumb: cash-rich, buy; cash-tight, EaaS; in between, a bank green-loan (DBP, LandBank and BPI all run 5–10 year programmes) — the same survey produces the numbers the bank needs.

Who it fits

EaaS works where the thermal load is real and regular: hotels heating water around the clock, food processors with daily steam or wash-down, laundries, clinics, manufacturers. It does not fit a site whose usage is too light or too irregular to measure a saving against — and if that's you, we'll say so at the survey rather than sign you into something that doesn't serve you.

Who's offering this

Karnot Energy Solutions Inc. is a Philippine energy company in Mapandan, Pangasinan. We design, build, install and maintain natural-refrigerant heat pumps — iHEAT for commercial heat, AquaHERO for homes, iCOOL for refrigeration — across the Philippines, the UK, the US and Canada. EaaS is how we put them in reach of businesses that need the saving more than they need another loan.

Find out what your monthly fee would be

One free site survey: we measure your current energy cost and show you the EaaS fee, the bank-loan route and the outright price side by side. You pick — including "none of the above".

Book a Free Site Survey Run Your Numbers First