At last year’s CES, one of my favorite new products was the Tetra, a small countertop dishwasher that cleans the equivalent of two place settings of dishes in about 15 minutes with a single gallon of water.
The product was introduced by Heatworks, a company I had never heard of before, mostly because I was not in the business of writing about water heaters.
Maybe I should have been paying more attention because, as it turns out, the technology that powers their water heaters can be used in a variety of devices, including the company’s latest, a portable water carafe with precision temperature control called the DUO.
The DUO, which the company is introducing at CES 2019, is a battery powered portable carafe that holds up to a liter of water. The DUO can heat water to within 1° of a desired setpoint and also also includes a water filtration system.
I caught up with Heatworks CEO, Jerry Callahan, at CES Unveiled, who told me that they made the DUO because they realized how important precise water temperature was to making anything from a good cup of coffee to green tea to baby formula.
“We started with the premise that people really wanted to get the exact right temperature,” said Callahan.
I could see myself using a DUO when I’m in a hotel room (does anyone else get grossed out by hotel coffee machines? Thought so) or when I’m camping. I can also see using it for filtering drinking water on the road since I never know how good the drinking water is in any city I might be in.
When I asked Callahan when the DUO might ship, he said they were hoping that it would be available by end of the year. My assumption is that probably means first half 2020, in large part because the company missed its original promised ship date for the Tetra (which they are now promising out by Q1), and at this point the DUO is still largely in prototype stage.
You can hear my full conversation with Callahan from the show floor below.
