Heat pumps are a key component of climate-neutral buildings. For this reason, Bosch is consistently pursuing its long-term strategy and investing in the ramp-up of its development and production capacity for heat pumps. Now, some 100 million euros are going to its Portuguese location in Aveiro, south of Porto, by 2026.
The company plans to build new laboratories, two production buildings, and additional heat-pump production lines. This should also create several hundred new jobs there over the medium term. Alongside Eibelshausen in Germany and Tranås in Sweden, Aveiro is an important location in the European development and production network for heat pumps. Bosch will invest a total of more than one billion euros in expanding this network by the end of the decade.
“We’re investing now in developing and manufacturing our heat pumps to ensure we can ramp up production at the required rate. Bosch is aiming for a leading position in the international heat-pump market, which is why we are gradually building up our activities in this area,” - says Christian Fischer, the deputy chairman of the Bosch board of management who is responsible for the company’s Energy and Building Technology and Consumer Goods business sectors.
The Bosch Home Comfort Group has been developing and producing technologies for water heating in Aveiro for many years. The location is also home to the development of heat pumps for Southern Europe. In addition, the Aveiro plant will manufacture the outdoor units and wall-mounted indoor units for the next-generation, particularly quiet Compress 5800i AW and Compress 6800i AW heat pumps, which use the eco-friendly refrigerant propane. Experience gained in producing wall-mounted water heaters can feed into this. The Compress 5800i AW and Compress 6800i AW were developed jointly by various teams from Wernau (Germany) and Aveiro and produced in a manufacturing network with Aveiro, Eibelshausen, and Tranås.
At the beginning of the year, a production line for the indoor unit of the next-generation heat pumps was started up in Eibelshausen. What sets the new line apart is that the storage tanks are inserted into the heat pump’s indoor unit before it leaves the plant; previously, this was handled by specialist dealers. This significantly reduces the installation time required by the end user, while increasing system robustness and shortening transport routes. The new line benefits from the Eibelshausen plant’s decades of experience in producing hot-water tanks.
Tranås, as a long-standing Swedish heat-pump location, manufactures part of the outdoor units, drawing on its many years of experience with the technology. This location has been developing and manufacturing heat pumps for the Bosch Home Comfort Group since 2006. Its development focus is on products for the Northern European market.
