Why Caldo Exists: The Heating Industry Failed. Someone Had to Fix It.

The UK has a strange relationship with home heating. We are an advanced nation with nuclear, gas, growing renewables, ambitious net-zero targets and some of the best engineering talent anywhere. Yet inside the average home, the heating technology looks like it fell through a time portal from 1983.

People accept high bills as normal. They accept unpredictable comfort as normal. They accept that “smart heating” means an app that turns something on and off. None of that is normal. It is a symptom of an industry that has not reinvented itself in decades.

Caldo exists because someone has to break that cycle. And that clarity did not come from an office, a lab or a consultancy report. It came from thousands of hours in real homes, seeing exactly where the system goes wrong.

I did not begin my career with a masterplan to rebuild home energy. I was running a recruitment agency on the Wirral, talking people through job moves, career pivots and salary negotiations while quietly realising I had no direction of my own. Nothing I was doing felt tangible. Nothing I was doing made a dent in the real world. Eventually, I accepted that if I wanted my life to actually matter, I needed to build something, not talk about things for a living.

A trainee dual-fuel engineer role in Liverpool came up. Four thousand people applied. Eighty were offered a place. I still don’t have a poetic explanation for how I got in. But that yes changed everything. Within the first week on the tools, I understood I had finally stepped into work that had a point. You fix something, it works. A cold home becomes warm. A family’s bills drop instantly. There is no performance review more honest than that.

The more homes I entered, from Merseyside tower blocks to rural cottages at the edge of the country, the more I saw the same pattern repeating itself with depressing consistency. The real villain wasn’t the customer’s behaviour or the energy supplier or even the tariffs. It was the heating technology itself. It was outdated, inefficient, over-promised and under-explained.

Hot water cylinders heating 100 litres every night regardless of use. Night storage heaters designed for a grid model that died twenty years ago. Heat pumps sold into unsuitable properties by sales teams with scripts, not engineers with understanding. “Efficiency” presented as a feature when, in real homes, the results told a completely different story.

The frustration wasn’t academic. The impact was immediate. These systems were draining people financially and delivering almost no control or comfort in return. It did not matter if the house was a new build in Chester or an old flat in Liverpool: the story was always the same. People were forced to adapt their lives to the limitations of their heating, instead of their heating adapting to the way they lived.

Once you see that clearly, it is impossible to unsee it.

Caldo didn’t begin as a brand idea. It began in garages, spare rooms and the back of my car, testing materials that worked perfectly in controlled conditions then melted in summer heat. Circuit boards that would trip if you shut a door too hard. Endless supplier negotiations across the UK, Europe and China. Prototyping in the real world, where a dog walking past can sabotage your thermal test, because that is how homes actually behave.

None of it was glamorous, but all of it was essential. Every failure, every test, every late night, every “what went wrong this time”, built the insight that the industry’s fundamental logic was broken. Heating hardware wasn’t failing because it needed a prettier app. It was failing because it was designed for a past that no longer exists.

The UK’s challenge is unique. Old housing stock. High electricity prices. Millions of homes unsuitable for conventional heat pumps. Customers left cautiously navigating a system that offers complexity instead of clarity. The industry answers with marketing slogans instead of engineering.

Caldo is the opposite of that.

We exist to rebuild the heating experience from first principles. Not smarter controls slapped onto outdated tech. Not efficiency measured in lab conditions. Not another gimmick pretending to be innovation. But a system that actually learns, adapts and reduces energy waste in the real world, in real homes, with real behaviours.

The purpose is simple: comfort that doesn’t punish the customer, intelligence that actually means something, and energy efficiency that shows up on the bill, not just in the brochure. That is what drives Caldo and why we are building for people in Wirral, Chester, Liverpool and far beyond. The mission is not to follow the rules of a broken system. It is to replace the system entirely.

We are still testing. Still refining. Still improving. Still learning from every home we step into. But the direction has never been clearer.
Caldo is here because the UK heating industry left a gap big enough to drive a lorry through.
And we are building the solution that should have existed years ago.