As utilities accelerate electrification and demand-side management efforts, the need for grid-interactive, energy efficient, and customer-centric products has grown exponentially. To help identify and promote solutions capable of meeting this need, the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE), a nonprofit consortium with membership representing more than 70% of all energy efficiency program administrators in the United States and Canada, established the Integrated Home Competition (IHC). The latest IHC Grand Prize winner, the Flair Bridge Pro, offers a unique approach to meeting these goals by better enabling control of a range of often-underserved electrified loads.
Over the IHC’s five-year history, a consistent challenge has emerged: while heat pumps have become a cornerstone of electrification planning, much of the existing residential heating and cooling landscape remains difficult to integrate into existing load management frameworks. Specifically, much of today’s load management infrastructure remains designed around central HVAC architectures, with limited support for non-ducted and hybrid systems.
In reality, millions of homes rely on boilers, electric baseboards, mini splits, PTACs, and other non-ducted systems. These systems represent a significant share of residential electric heating and cooling load, yet they remain difficult to integrate into energy efficiency, demand response, and load management programs. For utilities, this creates a growing blind spot: a large, potentially flexible load that is effectively unservable with traditional control approaches.
The “messy middle” of electrification
Electrification is rarely a clean, one-system transition. Across much of North America, homeowners with traditional heating systems are increasingly adding heat pumps to boilers or electric resistance heating systems — including for home additions and the conversion of non-ducted spaces — creating hybrid configurations that aim to balance cost, comfort, and overall system performance. For many homes, these hybrid systems function as a transitional approach to electrification, enabling meaningful emissions reductions without a full system replacement.
From a grid perspective, these configurations offer unique potential opportunities by allowing utilities to shift heating and cooling load, reduce peak demand, and coordinate multiple heat sources to improve overall system reliability. From a program design perspective, however, they introduce complexity. Many control solutions rely on invasive wiring, are built primarily for central HVAC, fall outside energy efficiency program rebate eligibility requirements, or do not scale across homes with mixed system types. As a result, hybrid and non-ducted systems are often excluded from demand-side programs despite their clear grid value.
A universal platform for grid-integrated heating
In 2025, the IHC named Flair’s Bridge Pro the Grand Prize Winner. The IHC’s expert judging panel, comprised of program managers and product engineers from leading utilities across the US and Canada, recognized the product for turning “a patchwork of devices into a unified, grid-responsive platform for the modern integrated home” citing its “retrofit elegance” and its ability to address non-ducted and hybrid system configurations that are often excluded from utility programs.
Flair was built specifically to address the “messy middle” of electrification. Rather than focusing solely on ducted systems, Flair provides a universal platform for heat pumps and traditional heating sources with a focus on grid integration and hybrid electrification. The system can connect with and manage equipment, all within a single, scalable control framework. For ductless systems, Flair Pucks are already compatible with over 200 heat pump brands.
Crucially for utilities, Flair’s platform is currently the only solution on the market capable of controlling both modern heat pumps and traditional heating systems without invasive rewiring. This significantly reduces installation complexity and supports deployment at scale across diverse housing types.
Rebate-eligible by design
With the introduction of the Flair Bridge Pro, utilities can extend rebate-eligible smart controls to a broader range of systems without increasing installation complexity. In a multi-zone home — for example, one with four mini split units and three boiler zones — integrated heating solutions using Flair would cost around $1,500* installed, and in some cases would be fully covered by rebates, compared with $3,000* or more for competitive solutions that are often not rebate-eligible and require significantly more labor to deploy.
(Based on the cost of control devices, thermostats, wiring, and installation.)
Built for load management and demand response
Flair is grid-connected by design. The platform supports utility load management and demand response programs through fleet-level visibility and open integration, the Flair API, and OpenADR 2.0b compatibility. And with broad interoperability across equipment types, Flair uniquely enables load management strategies that maintain system efficiency and customer comfort. At present, more than 70,000 Flair Pucks are active on its North American platform, providing utilities with access to real-world distributed heating and cooling loads.
Why this matters now
As utilities plan for electrification, demand growth, and increasingly dynamic grids, effective integration of non-ducted and hybrid systems has become a near term necessity. Flair provides an award-winning, rebate-eligible platform that brings these systems into the fold, transforming a historically complex segment of the market into a scalable opportunity for energy efficiency, load management, and demand response.
To learn more, sponsor, or enter the 2026 Integrated Home Competition, visit integratedhome.org.
To learn more about Flair and the Bridge Pro, visit flair.co.
