HomeTech.fm - Episode 221 - Meet Flo with Gabriel Halimi

Episode Date: August 10, 2018

On this week's episode of HomeTech: We are joined by Gabe Halimi, CEO and co-founder of Flo. An intelligent leak detection and water shutoff system, Flo takes water-damage protection to the next level. Tune in to hear how Flo's proactive approach to water monitoring can increase your water-use efficiency and protect your home from one of the most common causes of catastrophic damage.That, plus the latest home tech headlines including:Apple gets into the clothing business...errr... Thread GroupSonos offers Seth an (unsatisfactory) explanation of their AirPlay 2 stanceSci-Fi fans can now get their own voice-enabled HAL-9000 replicaWho killed the cable bundle?And more...Fan of the show? Want to support our efforts? Please consider becoming a Patron!

The Home Tech Podcast is supported by listeners like you. To find out more, go to hometech.fm. This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, August 10th, 2018. From Sarasota, Florida, I am Seth Johnson. And from Denver, Colorado, I'm Jason Griffin. How are you doing, Seth? Good, Jason. What's going on? Oh, not much. Just had a little false start there, but I'm excited to be with you. And no, you know, we've got a good show lined up here. Apple hit a trillion dollars this week.

That's insane. That's news, right? Yeah, I guess. Good for Apple, I guess. I saw a story. Go ahead. guess um good good good for apple i guess i was looking at go ahead i was looking at um back when i when i was like in my last years of high school after i turned 18 i was like oh i can buy stocks and i went to like this stock guy down the street and i was like can i buy some stocks and um he's like sure you know you kind of explained how to do it this that and the other

and like oh i got you know 100 that's still at at cisco you know and like i was looking at the time like apple stocks would have been like 60 cents or something like that and had i you know thrown you know a hundred dollars at them like who knows how much i haven't done the math yeah it would have been a lot of money like i i think i did the math if i had like thrown like three or four thousand dollars at it i would have had over a million dollars at this point in time. Well, at least you're not Ronald Wayne. You know that name? No, not familiar. I never knew this. I saw this on the CBS Evening News, I think is where I saw it a couple of weeks ago. There was a third founder to Apple. There was Woz and Steve Jobs and this guy Ronald Wayne, who had 10% of the company when they were founded and sold the 10%, let's see here, gave up his 10% of Apple for $2,300 in 1976

because he wanted to go chase his own dreams. And I think that was only like, I think I remember them saying that was only like 10 days after they founded the company. He was like, eh, it changed my mind. That'd be worth about $ hundred billion or more today. Well, you know, you win some, you lose some. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he, he, he made out with 23, you know, $23,000. No, 2,300. Oh, okay. Well, that's a little different. Yeah. It's a little different, but you know, that's a, that's a, well, that that's disappointing. That's how the cookie crumbles.

Yeah, disappointing, but oh well, what are you going to do? Yeah, indeed. Well, anyways, moving on, we do have a great show. Very excited to get to our interview in this episode. We had Gabe Halimi or Gabriel Halimi, who is the CEO and co-founder of a company called Flow, spelled F-L-O. And they are a very intelligent, pretty sophisticated water shutoff, water monitoring device that you can put on in your home to not only, you know, these devices have been around for a while that act as reactive devices, but this one is very, very intelligent, does a whole lot of proactive monitoring types of functions that can really

prevent those catastrophic leaks from happening in the first place, as opposed to the more reactive nature of traditional devices like this. And that's really just the beginning. I really enjoyed learning more about the device. I've been researching these types of devices for my own home and had a great time chatting with Gabe and learning about what they're doing. Yep. It's a good interview. Jason, what do you say we jump into some home tech headlines? Let's do it. In a move that has shocked the world,

Apple has joined the Thread Group, marking the company's first move into clothing. No, no way. What? That's not right. That's going to be a sound effect. That's great. No way.

The Thread Group is a wireless mesh technology that aims to make it easier for home technology devices to work together. I think it was started kind of like by Nest and then carried over to Google. Apple appeared this week as a member on Thread's website, but the company has not commented on the new membership and, of course, has not announced any new products that might use the Thread technology. So a lot to do, probably about nothing. But there you are. Apple has joined the Thread group. Yeah, hard to know what to make of that one, both from the Apple perspective and from Thread. You just haven't been hearing a whole lot about Thread.

I know it was big news when it came out, and it's still got a lot of potential, but we just haven't heard a ton of development there, so we'll certainly keep an eye on that. Yeah, looking at Thread's website, you can go to their members, and if you look at the member page, they've got all these, like, Crestron has a logo there, and Eero has a logo, and then you're like, okay, where's Apple's logo? It's just an apple. It just says Apple in text that's no no logo needed right yeah funny all right moving on here this seth this one i picked just for you following the company's ipo last week sonos chief product officer nick

millington sat down within gadget and happened to mention why the company rolled out the feature AirPlay to the Sonos One, Beam, and PlayBase, but left other speakers in the dark. That's AirPlay 2. This has been a battle cry of yours for a very long time, Seth, and I know it was a pain point when they finally released that, that it didn't have it on the older devices. Millington went on to explain that earlier speakers, such as the Play 1, released in 2013, just aren't powerful enough for AirPlay 2. And instead of focusing on features like AirPlay, the company focused on working toward updates that will allow the speaker to continue to work in the future. I don't know what exactly that means. It goes on to quote, we decided that AirPlay 2 was a bit too much of a commitment to the remaining resources in RAM. I get it.

And processor inside of the product. Instead, Sonos is saving those computing resources for updates that will let the Play 1 work in multi-room setups with the company's newer speakers. Choosing longevity over a new feature is how the company thinks it can keep customers from having to replace otherwise perfectly good speakers within a few years. You buying it? No. You buying it? No? No, I'm not.

I'm sorry, I'm not. They could have supported AirPlay. I mean, I'm sorry. There are so many speakers that came out in the time that AirPlay was in high demand and their solution was to basically plug it, plug a, what was the old Apple Airport Express with the audio output on it and use that, plug that into like an input on another speaker, which they slowly got rid of the inputs on the back of the speakers. And, you know, you couldn't even get a speaker anymore.

You had to buy one of their Kinect devices. So, yeah, I'm not buying it. I just don't think they ever wanted to do it because and i don't know why like i i set up airplay on my system it's not like the most customer friendly thing to do um because airplay one didn't support home like multi-room audio like it just it it played two seconds behind uh and you'd have to start it on one, you'd have to start it on the AirPlay device and then move over to Sonos and kind of pick which rooms you want. It just wasn't a good workflow for the end user at all. So I understand, you know,

why they did it. They did not adopt that, but you know, I don't know anything about AirPlay 2. And if it's more, you know, I can understand if a product made 2013 and before aren't able to support something like that. I guess I can understand that, but man, I really wish they had activated AirPlay 1 at some point, even if it was kind of an ugly hack, right? I think it would have been better, but oh well. Sci-fi fans rejoice. You can now talk to your own replica of the iconic HAL 9 computer from stanley kubrick's and author c clark's semi seminal film 2001 a space odyssey master replicas group has already achieved 358 percent funding on its indiegogo project which includes two versions of the iconic device this is a bluetooth hal 9000 okay'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

This is wild. Slow news week. Yeah. Well, you know, $500 it says on here. So yeah, $500. You get a nice little desktop HAL 9000 plus the wall version wall the wall version oh man i i think this looks pretty good no that's cool i i thought it was funny i'd buy it 58 funding clearly they're uh they they found a little niche there so yep thought it was funny moving on here this one not really a news headline per se but we thought it definitely worth sharing a great write-up from bloomberg and i'm gonna just paraphrase it a little bit. It starts out the deck, the little tagline there at the beginning of the article, every minute another six people cut the cord. The article goes on to say, the reason American consumers are abandoning their cable subscriptions is not a mystery. It's expensive and cheaper

online alternatives are everywhere. But who exactly is responsible for the slow demise of the original way Americans paid for television? That's a far trickier question. And it goes on to identify some of the different areas where cable has just been on this slow demise. So Netflix, Reed Hastings is one of the quote-unquote suspects. You've got, what's his name, Igen, Bob Igen, I think, from Disney. They talk about the bidding wars that have been going on and how it's just really run up the prices of these channels and just a couple other really interesting facets to the argument. You hear a lot about cord cutting,

and you hear a lot about pay TV subscriber, pay TV companies, hemorrhaging subscribers says this quarter pay TV giants, Comcast, charter edition, AT&T saw 744,000 subscribers disappear. Talks about many believing the day of reckoning has come for the, for the cable bundle. Um, so again, not really a news headline, but definitely worth a read. We'll include a link to it in the show notes at hometech.fm. And if you're interested in that evolving media and TV consumption landscape, to me is a fascinating topic. And this was a great read. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's an evolving landscape. And that's an industry in the midst of a massive amount of change speaking of uh speaking of change and uh you know press releases i wish happened the day before um we record the show uh last week charlie kendall architect of the amazon alexa smart home smart home initiative now works for control four so So now we know which system Charlie decided to put into his house. Yeah, that's right. CEO Martin Plain wooed Kendall after he left Amazon in April, naming him Senior Vice President of Products and Services.

Kendall replaces six-year Control 4 veteran Eric Anderson, who announced earlier in this year that he would be retiring from the company i've met eric a couple times uh it's this is going to be a he's a good guy and this is going to be a good team i think yeah yeah really really big big story i think for the professional home technology channel i think a big win for control four and and i really am excited for the company and the dealers and the users to have somebody with that kind of background come in and inject their perspective and experience into that company. And I think conversely, you hear a lot of talk these days, and I personally am very bullish on the home technology professional market. And I think

there's sky's the limit. There's a lot of opportunity for, for the, the folks out there doing this as a profession, as long as they're evolving and adapting. But you have a lot of people on the other side of the coin who think that the days are numbered for the professional integrator. And while I disagree, I certainly respect the opinion, and I know it's an evolving landscape, and I understand where those opinions stem from. But to have somebody like a Charlie Kindle with all of his experience on the DIY side come in and join the team at Control 4, I think, shows his perspective on the potential of this channel. And I wanted to quote very quickly from a blog post that Charlie Kindle put out. He says, I'm betting on Control 4. And that's the title of the blog post. And he says, during my time at Amazon, I witnessed the explosive growth in the smart home voice. The most natural interface for the home has driven consumer demand

and acceptance. The problem is getting all those individual products to work together throughout the entire home is for homeowners, they just don't want to do it. There's too much fragility and complexity for normal folks to deal with it. He goes on to say for the past 16 years, I did everything myself. He's talking about his own home, multi-room audio, smart lighting, smart sprinklers, whole home security and automation. Even for me, it was a second full-time job to make all that really work. I am absolutely convinced that the only way normal people will be able to really enjoy the benefits of a whole home smart home is with professional help. I thought that was a really interesting quote and worth sharing that perspective. Yeah, I think it justifies a lot of what we've talked about over the past four years.

Jason, it's been a long time. Yeah. I don't remember how long. Hard to believe. Four years. 221. Episode 221. Wow.

So, yeah, I think it justifies a lot of things that we've been saying and repeating that, you know, DIY is great. And it's good if you want to have, you know, color changing light bulbs. But also there are going to be and there are these products out there that are um that a pro needs to put in and a pro has to put in and there are people that are willing to pay for that time to happen you know and so there i think it's great right now we have an ecosystem that you can go out and and literally spend like 30 bucks and get a little one of these i home i devices things i can't even know the name of it. I'm looking at it over my shoulder. But I can get that and it pairs with my phone and I can

turn a light on and off and call that home automation. But I can also spend $100,000 on a crazy, you know, home setup with, you know, built in audio, you know, in-wall speakers and that kind of thing. And, you know, I'm just glad that there's an entire ecosystem out there. And hopefully, you know, it starts working together a little bit more. Hopefully we start seeing that. And I think we are. We're finally finally getting to where things when we started this four years ago, things seemed off the wall and crazy.

You know, we talked about in the upcoming interview, we talked about a little bit about Nest being purchased by Google for three billion dollars and that what was going on in that time period. It was, it was insane. If you go back and listen to some of those episodes. Um, so I, I, I think now it doesn't feel like that anymore. It feels like a, um, a more mature industry with more mature players definitely in it and working on, uh, on making something, uh, making the whole industry better rather than, you know, building up these walled gardens, so to speak, and, uh, doing things that way. So I'm glad to see it. I have one more, one more thing about this Charlie Kendall thing, Jason, I'm going to post over in our Slack channel, a nice little image, uh, over

there and just go ahead and take a look at it. And I want you to see if you can point out where on that graph you think Charlie Kendall was hired. Wow, that is amazing. So yeah, Control Force stock went from hovering around the $26 mark once Kendall was hired. Today, if we look at the close today, it closed at $31.76.. So, yeah. You can see the slight little peak there where a bunch of people decided to cash out their gains. But that's amazing. Yeah, that's quite a jump. Yeah. Holy smokes. I don't understand the stock market sometimes, but there you go.

So, I think we've got an $828 million market cap. So, well on their way to that $1 trillion that Apple paid. Yeah, a little work to do to get to trillion, but... A little bit of work. It puts things in perspective, huh? Get busy, Charlie. Yeah, yeah, no kidding. All the links and topics we discussed tonight

can be found on our website at hometech.fm slash 221. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which includes even further analysis, as well as other industry news that may not have made the show. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 221. What? All right, Seth. Well, why don't we go ahead and get into our interview here? Again, we have Gabe Halimi on. He is the CEO and co-founder of Flow. And let's jump in and get started. We'll come back out with a few thoughts. Hey, Gabe, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm doing awesome. Thank you, guys. How are you guys?

Yeah, we're doing great. We really appreciate you taking some time to join us. I look forward to learning more about Flow and what you guys are doing in the market. I think it's a great story. And like I said, we're excited to have you on. But before we jump into the product, why don't you give our listeners just a brief personal introduction and talk about your background in the industry? Sure. This is Gabe Halimi. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Flow Technologies. I founded the company with my dad, who's the inventor, who I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit and get into. My background is kind of all over the place. I practiced as an attorney for a number of years while I was in law school. I was an entrepreneur. I dabbled in

different businesses, but most significantly and most relevant to the flow story, I actually spent a couple of years working for a plumbing manufacturing company as their claims manager, dealing with a bunch of plumbing products that failed and the company was on the receiving end of subrogation claims. So I managed over six million dollars of product liability cases. Again, will be very relevant for the story of flow. But practice as an attorney, I ran restaurant operations for a big restaurant company. I did a bunch of different things. And then one day I stumbled into my dad's garage and to see what he was working on. And he was working on an early prototype of flow and quit my job and started working in the garage with my dad. And three years later, here we are. So yeah, it's pretty fun. Yeah. And we'll talk about all that. There's a great backstory there and how you guys sort of came across this idea for Flow and seized the opportunity.

But let's set the stage first, just the quick version, the elevator pitch, so to speak. What is Flow for those of our listeners who aren't familiar? Sure. Flow is a water monitoring and shutoff technology for the home. So it's a three-part system. First, there's a piece of hardware that installs on the main water supply line to the home. And this device learns all of the water usage for the home. There's a bunch of unsupervised machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence that's learning about water flow, pressure, and temperature, which is all three fluid mechanical elements. It can turn on and turn off the water. There's also software, which is the second part of the system. You have

a smartphone app, and the system can notify you if you have a leak in your home, if you have a vulnerability that's leading to a leak. You can push a button from your phone and turn on and turn off the water. You can see how much water you've used every day. You can just learn a lot about your water usage and your water system in general. And then the third part of the system is our support team. We don't just leave you hanging and, you know, telling you, hey, you have a drop of water somewhere in your home. We actually have a team to help you troubleshoot where the leak may be coming from and to essentially act kind of like an alarm system, but for your home water. And, you know, we're really solving two big problems with this system. The first is water damage in people's homes is actually far more likely than I think

most people think. It's five times more likely that someone will file a homeowner's insurance claim for water damage than for fire and for theft. That's about 25% of all homeowners insurance claims. And it's about a $9 billion a year problem. And so it's really frequent. About 40% of homes at some point in their life have a claim. And so there's a big problem we're solving there for homeowners. We experienced one in our own home, my father and I and the rest of our family, which again is part of the backstory that we'll get into, but it is not fun. And the other big problem is the problem of just

the drought and how important water conservation is. More important in different parts of the country, certainly I live in California. So at the time I stumbled into my dad's garage, we were in our fifth straight year of emergency drought conditions. And so having a better handle on our water usage and just preventing waste of water is, I would argue, a good thing up at anywhere in the world. Yeah, absolutely. That's great. So let's talk about it. Let's dive into that. What is the backstory? We've already heard some bits and pieces. How did you and your father, Henry, come across this idea? Yeah. So like I was saying before, my dad is the inventor of the technology. I like to call him a mad scientist of

plumbing. This guy's been in plumbing for over 30 years. He's a mechanical engineer by trade. He's invented a number of different plumbing products. So his last invention sold over 18 million units. That was a water connector that had an automatic shutoff component on it. He had his own plumbing manufacturing plant for over a decade. And so most relevant to this story, he sold his manufacturing company about 12, 13 years ago to a large publicly traded plumbing company. And then he started consulting for that company, what was supposed to be a month to month consulting gig. He ended up being there for over 10 years. And really relevant to this story is he wore two different hats while he was consulting for the company. One was the hat of an expert witness when their plumbing products would fail. Kind of like I was describing before, the homeowner's insurance industry will pay out that

claim to the homeowner, so they're covered. But then the homeowner's insurance company would frequently seek to be reimbursed for the damages that they paid out and file what's called a subrogation claim against the plumbing manufacturer alleging product liability or negligence or what have you. And so my dad was on the receiving end of literally thousands of these claims. And so he saw firsthand what a big problem this was. And being the curious guy that he is and always kind of wearing his inventor's hat, started thinking about, you know, this being such a big problem. And so how do we invent a solution? How do we avoid these kind of catastrophic claims from happening in the first place?

There's so much that helps us protect our homes. We have alarm systems for burglaries, and we have smoke detectors and sprinklers and electric circuit breakers and all these different technologies in our home that are meant to keep it safe. Yet the far more frequent occurrence is happening with water damage. And there's really nothing good on the market to protect us from that problem. This was all part of my dad's psyche kind of going back 10 years.

So he decided he was going to invent the solution. And he kind of had this firsthand experience of all these claims. So he knew what he was trying to avoid and learned a lot of like a specialty product, a technology that can actually prevent the water damage, not only because it could just shut off the water in the event that something happens, like a pipe burst, but really it's proactively monitoring the integrity of the plumbing system to identify a vulnerability before it turns into something catastrophic, which is very different. And so, you know, he spent a lot of time on this. And when I stumbled into the garage about three years ago to see what, you know, he was working on, it was already a fully baked idea. He already had a prototype and he had it installed on the main water supply line to his own home and showed me that he could prevent, you know, could catch in

its infancy such a small leak. And, you know, what he learned in those many years of being an expert witness is that those small leaks, the little drops of water a minute are the things that really cause those catastrophic water failures to happen. So when I saw that he could catch this little drip on the opposite side of the home, just from this one thing he had installed on the hardware in the garage, I was, I was blown away. And though I was really impressed with, you know, my dad's mastery of fluid mechanics and being this mad scientist of plumbing that he is, my mind was running towards, you know, here we are in the middle of kind of a connected home revolution. This is 2015 when Nest had just been sold, I think, to Google, as we know, for like $3 billion. And all of these exciting technologies like Ring and others were coming to the market. And so I saw a really exciting opportunity and something just

exciting to be a part of there. But also just like I explained before, the emergency drought conditions we were in in California, I really felt like this was a product that was needed for a number of reasons. And so I was really excited to get behind this and have been working on this with my dad for three years. And it's been incredibly exciting and very rewarding. Very nice. Very nice. I'm on the website now and I'm looking at the system and it looks like it's a little more compact than I would have thought it was going to be, the Flow device itself. Give us a little idea, like, how exactly that works.

How is it installed? And then, like, basically, you mentioned a couple of sensors in here to figure out the water pressure. Like, how does that work with this device? Yeah, so my dad, I mean, kudos to him. He spent really 10 years not just pulling sensors off the shelf from like a home depot or something like he reinvented all of the component sensors that go into this so um so that's why it took such a long time to develop and he wanted it to be compact enough that you can literally install it on any water supply line so the entire device takes up about about six inches on the water supply line. So it is very

compact. And inside this device, you have a flow sensor. So that reads, you know, the velocity of water that's going through the pipe. Then you have a pressure sensor, which is really important. It's worth me kind of taking a minute to just kind of focus on pressure. So, you know, flow of water is great. It can tell you when water is actually going through the pipes. The problem is if a pipe bursts and now the device is telling you, hey, water has been running for too long of a period of time or too high of a flow rate, all of these great things that we do, there's nothing really proactive about that, right? Like the water's already running, it's already ended up on the floor, and maybe has already caused some water damage. The way that we prevent pipers in the first place is really looking at the

other component sensors, which are pressure and temperature. Pressure is really important because very similar to the way blood pressure works in your body. Water pressure works in the pipes of your home. So when you go to the doctor, the first thing the doctor will want to do is check your blood pressure. Because if your blood pressure is high, that's a telltale sign that something good is not happening in your body. Your blood veins and arteries are having to work too hard. They're stressed. Eventually, organs can fail. It's really an aging on your body overall. The same is true for your home water system. If you have too high of water pressure for too long of periods of time, that's putting undue strain on the pipes, the joints,

the appliances and fixtures. And eventually, something, again, will burst. It will fail over the long haul. So monitoring pressure in real time is a very important aspect of what we do. I don't have the exact numbers, but I would say just off the top of my head, at least 20% of the homes that we install on have pressure of higher than 100 PSI, which your home water system is not meant to sustain pressure that high. And the other really important part is temperature. Depending on the part of the country you're in, this will either be a complete no-brainer or you'll be really surprised to hear this, but freezing pipes are a really big part of this massive water damage problem. So when water freezes in the pipes of the home, which could very well happen in many parts of the country, kind of back east, midwest, in mountain areas, when the water freezes, the water actually expands, creating

a pressure issue, which will cause a pipe to burst. So having a temperature sensor in line to see when the water in the pipes are starting to reach a freezing temperature can really be the difference between, you know, it being a non-event, just getting a little message that says, hey, your water's starting to freeze. You need to open a faucet and, you know, have some water running or not knowing and just forgetting, and then you have something really catastrophic, but on your hands. So we collect data every second of the day from these three sensors. And we essentially learn, we learn what's normal for that home for that time of day, that day of the week, the homeowner doesn't need to

do anything, The system automatically goes into a learning mode for the first week that it's installed. And it basically sets up different parameters of allowable water usage for different times of day and different days of the week. And when there's a problem, the homeowner is notified. They can be notified. It's kind of up to their preferences, but you can get a push notification, a text message. You can even get a phone call if something really catastrophic is happening. And then just the push of a button, you can turn on from kind of the better class of smart home devices, but applied to their water system. You can even see in real time when your water's running and how much water's running and get all kinds of fun data. So it's pretty cool. Yeah. I mean, it sounds like these types of, well, there's nothing new about a shutoff valve, right?

I've seen these for a number of years, these types of systems for a number of years. But this definitely sounds like one of the smarter ones that, or the smartest one that I've heard of because of the extra sensors that you guys have put into it. And yeah, I mean, temperature is interesting. You brought up freezing pipes. I'm not really worried about freezing pipes. I'm here in Florida. But Jason is in Denver. So, I mean, I'm sure that they have issues from every now and then. I mean, our pipes are run outside of our house on the wall. So, just bare PVC pipes. I coming up with one device that could work in freezing conditions and could work in warm temperatures, and we've had our hardware tested every which way for humidity, freezing, desert conditions. It's a pretty durable little guy.

But yeah, no, you're right. The water shutoffs have been around for a really long time. But most of most of those water shutoffs, they're actuated by puck sensors. So like, right, you know, the most common leak detection technology, I still think today is people place a bunch of, you know, these these sensors, these pucks on the floor of their home garage, what have you. And so in the event that, you know, in, in one way, you're lucky enough that if you do have a water failure, it happens to hit one of these pucks, then it will send an, you know, some kind of a message back to the water shut off. And then it'll, you know, and then it'll automatically shut off the water. The problem with those are obviously, first of all, you need to have a lot of those pucks to adequately, uh, to protect your home. And then if you do have a

pipe burst, there's really no telling whether or not it will actually hit that puck. And then even if it did hit the puck, you still have water all over the floor. So you haven't really, you know, prevented the problem. You definitely limited the severity of the damage, but, um, there's no way with those puck sensors to really impact, you know, whether or not you have something, the catastrophic happened in your home at all. And that's, and that's really where we're focused. We're really focused on, you know, preventing this type of damage in the first place. Right. The damage that I've seen here, and I say that about the freezing pipes in Florida, but we definitely have pipes that burst, or toilets that, you know, the linkage on the toilet starts leaking, and, but the big ones that I've seen here are these nice condos that people have down on the

beaches, where they, you know, they're paying two plus million dollars for a condo, and the guy on the 11th floor had a leaky toilet, and two inches of water in his unit, and the guy on the 11th floor had leaky toilet and two inches of water in his uh in his unit and it it basically the 11th floor is way up there and guess what water goes down so every single unit all the way down has water damage that's exactly right yeah it's a big and most people aren't here to find that out like it it has to be the maintenance guy walking in in the morning going why is there water dripping down the elevator shaft to find out you know that there was a leaking unit? So that's the tough one.

So I quite frankly, I don't know why these aren't mandated on those types of buildings at this point. I think they will be. I mean, really, to that point, you see government in different parts of the country taking a more proactive role about how water is used. So like in California now, any new multi-residential development has to have a submetering. So they haven't gone the step of saying you've got to have an automatic water shut off yet, but at least every unit has to be separately plumbed with a separate submeter. So now tenants can keep track of their own water usage better. But, you know, most multi-residential buildings, multi-residential buildings built, you know, in the 80s or earlier, you know, they had stacked plumbing. So, you know, one tenant couldn't even tell how much water they were using and the landlord would have no idea. But, you know, to your point, a lot of the momentum that we're seeing for our product, a lot of it's actually coming through multi-residential applications for exactly that reason. You know, you get one tenant who's just not paying attention or they're

out of town. These pipe bursts do happen. And specifically with those water connectors that attach to fixtures like toilets. I mean, those are very prone, very much prone to failures at no fault of the tenant, but it just happens. And so when it does, it's not only catastrophic for that unit, it's catastrophic for a number of units underneath it. So having something like a flow device on each one of those units, so if something catastrophic does happen, it automatically shuts off the water. So it's just not, it's just, it just kind of becomes a non-issue. Then you just, you know, we, we send a, send a message over to the plumber to just come fix it. And now you do, you don't have that big catastrophic problem anymore. So yeah, we're definitely in talks with many, uh, but condo associations, big multi-residential landlords to install this on a number of units,

because it's a problem for the landlord. It's a problem for the tenants. It's a problem for the insurance company. It's a problem for property management. And now we have the technology that it can be prevented. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Zooming back into a more individual level, you alluded to plumbing being very regional, and I have to imagine there are different types of plumbing. I don't know a lot about that. And I want to shift to installation on an individual basis and that setup and user experience. And that really starts with, I've been looking at these devices myself and just trying to assess, are there certain things I should be looking for on the plumbing of my home to determine whether or not it is compatible, I guess, with flow?

How does that work for people? How do you determine that? Yeah. So there are a number of things that you want to check before you order a flow. And if you have any questions, you can always ask our support team. They're really awesome, and they have specialized understanding in different areas of how plumbing works. So they're an excellent resource. But if you go to the website, which is meetflow.com, you'll see that there are about five questions. One, you just want to make sure that you can actually access your main water supply line. If you know where your water shutoff is and if you have access to a main water shutoff for your home, then you're probably in good shape.

Two, you do need power to where this would install. So one, find your main water supply line. Two, find the closest power source because the flow device does need to be plugged into power. Three, you need Wi-Fi for your home. So this does connect to your home Wi-Fi and that's how it communicates the data to the cloud, and you can control it from your phone and that kind of thing. Four, you need a smartphone because you need to be able to interact with the system through the smartphone app. And five, you need to make sure that your water supply line is not one and a half inches or wider. I will say that most residential units in the country are three quarter of an inch line. So unless your home is

really big, I would say over 3,500, maybe over 5,000 square feet, chances are you're totally fine with our flow device. But if you have any questions about the size of your water supply line, you can check your pressure regulating valve. You can look at the pipe. Most of the time it says on the pipe what size it is. But if you have any questions, again, you can always reach out to the support operations team. They're at 844-MEET-FLOW. But I think part of where your question is going is, is this something you want to install yourself? Is this a DIY product? And the answer is no, I would not recommend.

And I frequently try to dissuade people from trying to install it themselves. The biggest reason is because you need to cut into the main water supply line. And so it's not necessarily a very sophisticated install. I mean, for a plumber, it's a very, very simple install. No more complicated than installing, you know, any other kind of water fixture in the home. But for the DIYer, because you're cutting into the main line, it means if you run into any problems, you don't have water going to your home. And so that could be a very big issue. So any plumber, even a handyman in some places, that may not be code to have a handyman do it. But really, any plumber or handyman is most likely qualified to do the installation. And we have our own

support operations team and our own network. We have a nationwide partnership with American Leak Detection, for example, and they're in 44 states and they could very easily be sent out to do the installation for you. When I have a plumbing project come up, my wife instantly knows that I'm going to Home Depot at least five or six times that day. Yeah, I can tell you that we had a, in our house here, we had a, I forget, there's a couple different kinds of valves. And we have one of the older valves, several of them down by our shutoff. And one of them was stuck. and so we needed to get it replaced so that we didn't have a stuck valve and god forbid you know something happened and we couldn't

we couldn't close the the water and so i took about half a second looking at that project and i'm fairly handy and like to like to take on projects and yeah like you start talking about the the main water line of the house and that that's not for the faint of heart so that makes a lot of sense i would definitely avoid it and but you make a really good point a lot of these water shutoffs if they're not actuated frequently enough and so you know to this is just a good point for all of your listeners to check. You want to actuate your water shutoff frequently. Don't wait years to turn that off because what happens is a lot of times because of the sediments in the water and the chemistry of it, it could cause the shutoffs to rust or just become very difficult to actuate. The nice thing about our flow device,

one of the kind of main features of our device is we run a pressure decay test on the water system. I'll explain what that is in just a second, but that test requires the water shutoff in our device to be actuated every single day. So every day we're turning the water to your home on and off. And we're doing that at a time when you don't use your water. Our system is smart enough, uses machine learning algorithms to learn when water is being used and not being used. So in the average home, we shut off the water like at 3 a.m. for a few minutes. But by doing that, it's not only checking for those small leaks, but it's also just making sure that your ball valve is working properly. And so in the event that we see that a ball valve is not closing all the way, we can send an alert to the homeowner and we can help get that fixed. So what happens with a lot of those older generation shutoff devices, the ones that you guys were referencing earlier, those have been prone to having major problems.

When you have those puck sensors placed around your home for years, you never have water damage. And then all of a sudden in year three or four, you have that pipe burst. It hits the puck and then it sends the message over to the water shut off. But because it hasn't been actuated for three or four years, now it doesn't shut off the water. And so that's something that you would not run into with our system. But whether or not you get our device, I highly recommend that everyone find where your water supply line is and just to check that shut off and make sure it's working properly in the event of an emergency so you can shut off the water and know where to go. Yeah, we discovered it when we were down there figuring out how to drain our irrigation system. And so I just started checking all the valves to make sure.

And I never knew it was something that you should do regularly, but that makes total sense. And I know it's something I've been conscious of ever since I found that stuck valve. So let's, so that covers installation and that, that makes a lot of sense. And I know like when I had the valve replaced down here for the plumber, I mean, that was like a 45 minute job. They were in and out very, very simple operation, uh, so to speak for them to do that. Moving away from the hardware and talking about the software user experience, you know, walk us through the setup and a brief overview of the day-to-day user experience of the app. I know there are several different modes as well, like home, away, and sleep mode. So if you can give us a quick overview of that, it would be

great to know. Yeah, sure. I mean, the user experience in terms of the setup is very similar to other smart home devices. If you have a Nest Cam or thermostat or a Ring device, I mean, the way you unbox it, plug it into the power, pair it to your home Wi-Fi, pair it to your smartphone. I mean, it's pretty much exactly the same experiences as those. The difference with our device is after you pair it to your smartphone and your Wi-Fi, that's when you want the professional installer to come in and actually install it on your main water supply line. But you answer a few questions during the setup process about what the size of your home is, what kind

of fixtures you have in your home. So it'll ask you, like, for example, if you have a swimming pool, because if you do have a swimming pool, then it may be totally normal at some parts of the year for it to see a hose-like water flow rate running water for, you know, an hour, two hours at a time if you're filling up your swimming pool. If you didn't have a swimming pool and water was running for two hours straight, that would much more likely be a problem. And so it would alert you sooner as to that kind of problem happening. So answering those questions really does give the machine learning algorithms a leg up in terms of learning what's normal in your home faster. Because like I explained before, there's a weak learning that the device does before it starts sending you alarms if it thinks something is abnormal. But you may have set up your device in the, you know, in the middle of

winter where, you know, you were not filling up your swimming pool that week, but then in the summertime, you know, you would be filling up your swimming pool. So the device just, it learns. The homeowner doesn't really need to do anything from the first day that you have the device professionally installed. You have a dashboard to start seeing how much water you've used every day, see your water usage in real time from a flow, temperature, and pressure standpoint. Just a couple months ago, we released a new program called Home Protect, where homeowners, if they so choose, can pay an extra $5 per month. And then what they get, in addition to all of the different security features that I've already mentioned, the automatic water shutoff and seeing your water in real time,

you actually get access to our water concierge. So we will proactively call you and help you fix problems with your water system, kind of acting as more like an alarm service for your home water. You will get a pretty cool dashboard in your app to actually be able to see where your water is going. So with the machine learning algorithms that we're running, we actually learn and can detect fixtures. So we can tell you exactly how many times you flush your toilet, how much water you use in your toilet versus your shower versus your landscaping. So you really get a much more

holistic picture of your water usage. But I think the coolest feature of that Home Protect program is that we will actually go so far as to guarantee that your home will not have catastrophic water damage. We really are a first-of-its-kind system. None of our competitors have been able to do this because they don't act proactively the way that our system does. But essentially, if you use the Flow device as intended, and you still have a pipe burst and you still have to file a homeowner's insurance claim, then flow will cover your out-of-pocket towards your deductible that you had to pay. So, but effectively, you'll never have to pay for catastrophic water damage. Again, if you're a home protect customer, I will say that, you know, you, you got to use the devices intended. And I,

I, I swear to you, this is a true story. I don't think I've ever kind of told this story on a podcast. But the only person I know of that has still had a homeowner's insurance claim while having a Flow device is my uncle, my dad's brother. It's always family. Literally, because he's had some version of the Flow device in his home for three years. And I mean, we just launched the product to the market about, you know, seven, eight months ago now. So he had like the first version three years ago and we were trying out a bunch of different things and the device did not work the way that we wanted to, which is why we didn't release it for another two years. But he was so used to the device just maybe misinforming him or having a false positive or something like that. About two months ago, he started getting

alerts on his phone. Flo was telling him, hey, you have consistent water running for an abnormal period of time. We recommend shutting off your water. He ignored the alert. We alerted him again. He ignored the alert. We called him. Our support team then got involved and called him and said, Albert, you got water running. He's like, no, no, no.

My wife is probably in the shower. My daughter, don't shut off the water. No, no, no. And finally, his daughter calls him about 20 minutes later and was like, Dad, there's there's water throughout the ground floor of the house. You know, it's in your office. And he's like, oh, man, Flo is right. And so that's like the only time we've run into that problem. So you've got to actually listen to Flo if you just ignore all of the alerts and then, you know, try to then collect on home protect, you probably

won't get very far. But if you very simply just listen to the advice that Flo is giving you and take care of your home, it's a pretty unprecedented kind of value proposition that we're able to offer homeowners. Yeah, that's a huge difference because I mean, you guys are you're putting your money where your mouth is, right? Because there's not, I can't think of anybody else that is doing that kind of guarantee in this industry. So that's a big advantage you have. Yeah, there is no one else that's doing that. And we're very comfortable doing it because, you know, we really can avoid catastrophic water damage. That's what we do.

And so, you know, we can't say that there will be absolutely no damage. That's what we do. And so, you know, we can't say that there'll be absolutely no damage, like your pipe could burst, we'll shut it off very quickly. But you know, your rug, you know, may have some, you know, may have gotten some water, but it's going to be nowhere near any kind of like a catastrophic type of situation. And so now that we've released that, I think the we've seen a lot of interest in that. The program has worked incredibly well. Already, just in the last month or two, already 20% of our user base, over 20% of our user base has signed up for the program, all very happy. you know, love seeing that and are now promoting our product to their customers because they're seeing that we're standing shoulder to shoulder with them and both putting our money on the line with our, you know, respective programs. You know, they have an insurance product and we have our home, but guarantee. So I think for homeowners, I it, it really is a win-win all around.

Right. I'm looking at the, uh, I'm looking at the, the home protect website now, and I see that there's a insurance verification letter, and this is, this is probably something similar to what I'm, I'm used to sending out to, or I was used to sending out to my, my customers who had a, an alarmed, a monitored alarm system with, uh, with a fire system installed where you could get a small discount on your insurance, your homeowner's insurance every year. Is that something that this is that the same kind of program? Yeah, that's right.

So that's that's a letter that we provide homeowners to just let provide to the homeowners so they can share with their insurance company that that just, you know, reaffirms that they do have this program with us and it is valid there's nothing stopping uh a homeowner from you know applying for an insurance discount we you know without getting this letter uh but having this letter will usually help secure an even higher discount again it always depends on the insurance company different insurance companies they have to file state by state for different discounts so um, um, um, but, but unfortunately there's no guarantee that you will get a discount. It really depends on your insurance carrier and the state in which you live. Right. Uh, but that

letter has been pretty helpful in helping homeowners secure the highest level of a discount, um, possible from the carriers that we've worked with. Excellent. Yeah. So this looks like it's, the HomeProtect looks like it's $5 a month or $60 a year. I don't think we've touched on this, but what does the cost, what does a flow system cost you, I guess we should say, minus the professional install? Yeah. So the retail price of the device is $499. You can get it on our website.

If you refer a device to other people or if people refer the device to you, you can certainly get it for less. There is a referral program on the website. And there are a number of plumbers in different parts of the country that are also resellers of our technology. So you may be able to find it for less by speaking to your local plumber. Very cool. Well, Gabe, we're up against our time here. We really, again, appreciate you taking the time to join us on the show and talk about Flow. We are big fans here of uses of home technology that expand outside of the quote unquote

traditional sort of fun or entertaining devices and things that can actually really help people prevent damage in their home or things of that nature, just like flow, they're always really interesting topics. So thanks for coming on. If our listeners are interested in learning any more about the device or perhaps connecting with you, what would be the best way for them to do that? Yeah, check out our website. Go to meetflow.com. And you can email me at g at meetflow.com and would be happy to chat with anyone directly. Great. Well, Gabe, thanks again. We look forward to hearing from you in the future. Keep us posted. Awesome, guys. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. All right. Thanks, Gabe. All right. So that does it for our interview with Gabe. And like I said, I really enjoyed it. I think that the water protection in general is surprising to me

how common those issues are relative to other things like fire and burglary. And yet many of us, myself included, don't really have anything in place, certainly not anything sophisticated in place to proactively monitor and protect myself from that. So I know based on that interview that I'll be giving Flow a hard look and look forward to seeing what they can do. Yeah, I think I'm going to take a look at it as well. It's a pretty compelling product. And with the insurance that they kind of offer, I mean, that's $60 a year. That doesn't sound like anything to me.

I would do that in a heartbeat. We kind of joked in the interview that my pipes kind of run on the outside of my house. Well, they do, but that's because this house had to be repiped. And the pipes go from the attic attic they go through the attic and then down through so if i ever have a pipe bust inside the attic like that's gonna completely ruin ceilings and everything so i mean this is really sounds like a cool product uh i'm definitely gonna take a look at it and see see what i can do yeah yeah definitely pretty neat so don't forget

you can join us in our chat room live every Wednesday. We typically start around 7 or 7.30 p.m. Eastern, and you can find out more about joining us for a live episode at hometech.fm slash live. Pick of the week. Got a pretty cool HomeKit pick of the week this week. This is an app, of course. And I ran across this today from an announcement on Reddit that these guys came out with. But what I think that's really neat about this thing, this is your standard HomeKit app.

First off, the design of it is really nice. It's very minimal. Jason, you can probably see a picture there on the website. Yeah. This is right up my alley. I've seen a number of these HomeKit replacement apps, and the Home app is okay. They have these god-awful backgrounds,

which, thank God, they're going away. Yeah, they're pretty bad. They're horrible. But what's nice is that they're going away. So in the new beta for the Home app, the awful red flower background is gone and it's been replaced with a nice little gradient that looks really good if you put it behind your background.

So really happy to see those go. But I am a big fan of like text-based, like I know exactly where I want to go, boom, hit the button, interfaces. Like I don't need flare for flare's sake. And I think the home app has a little bit of that.'t have a lot but definitely some of the other home kit apps do this one is basic it's as basic as it gets it's like a list uh with some nice you know decent uh primary colors i get not primary colors but colors on the side uh and uh you know you've got

custom views automation scene services service groups accessories like anything that you wanted to really drill down into um you can drill down to pretty quickly on this app because everything is covered right on that one page. But what really I liked about this is that these guys have figured out how to backup and restore HomeKit configuration. And this is what they announced with their new version 3.2.0. It's only on their – there's a free version of, which you can download for free and just kind of run. But the, the pro version offers the backup and some other stuff that you can do like custom views and that kind of, kind of thing in it, which, which are great. But, uh, this will back up your rooms, your zones, accessories, mappings, service groups, scenes, automation, and custom views.

Um, this has been a major complaint from the HomeKit, uh, crowd for a long time. And I think it's, it's been kind of like tough to do. Uh, but this guy has figured it out and, um, he says he's got it working. Uh, I haven't tried it yet, but, uh, I've taken a couple of backups and, uh, to get the, the, the, the paid paid app, it's like $7, which, you know, if it's, uh, if it's if it's uh if it's worth it i think it's worth it um you know especially if you can get backups out of it and especially if you like uh you know having different home kit interfaces um right yeah i think it's a good pick yeah i just did a backup actually yeah no it went right in pretty good just as we're speaking wow look at

that it's that easy yeah i saw that that news come across too and i thought that was pretty neat uh the the ability to back up especially is is is nice like they talk about the use case of you know you may have different automations set up for winter time and summertime i thought it was just one simple example to sort of crystallize where that might be useful right so the ability to quickly toggle between those is pretty neat. And I'm in agreement with you. I think the interface looks nice and clean, and that's always a good thing,

especially when you hold it up side by side to the home app that I'm currently using. These guys' website is, yeah, well, just upgrade to the beta version of iOS 12 and get rid of that stupid background that's on there. Yeah. Let's see. The website for these guys is controller-for-homekit.com,

and there's really not much there other than there's a press kit link that has all this information on it. But we'll make sure that we get this into the show notes and go out and support this guy. $7 isn't that much and it looks like he's doing a pretty good job. Yeah, totally. All right, well, moving on,

we wanted to take this part of the show to remind everybody listening about our upcoming Home Tech Happy Hour being held out at Cedia 2018. We're really, really excited about it. I'm excited for Cedia in general, but especially for our Home Tech Happy Hour. We did this last year.

Doing it again this year on Thursday, September 6th from 5.30 p.m. to 7 p.m. So we're doing it nice and early. We know there are big events. I think Control 4 has got their big party that night, and I'm sure there are several others. So we want to do this early and make sure everybody's got time to go out and still do their planned evening festivities.

Chenin Havigans, yeah. Yeah, exactly. 5.30 p.m. to 7.00. This is being held at the Field Irish Pub and Restaurant right there by the Convention Center. And if you're interested in joining us, please do. It's absolutely free to attend hometech.fm slash happy hour and please take a minute to go there and fill out the form to let us know you're coming so we've got a head count once again that's hometech.fm slash happy hour yep and we want to give a huge shout out this year uh to uh to chow main software and apps uh they have stepped up like at negative 24 hours before i i launched this thing they stepped up that's right looking at this page and uh stepped up and became our happy hour host so

uh that that's the lead level sponsorship uh of this is they'll get a couple of they've got the logo and links to the websites and everything that they do on our website but um you know if you don't know about chow mein they they, they, they have been a, uh, primarily a control for software development house. Like they've been doing control for drivers for a long time, but since like the last year or so, he's really branched out and they're, they're doing Crestron, Elan, RTI, uh, Q-SYS, which is a, uh, a huge system in the commercial. Like it's really taking off in the commercial world and, uh, URC. Uh, so they, they do two types of drivers, uh, one that they kind of like do their own and they sell their own licensing and everything. Um, if you're a dealer, they give you free showroom licensing.

Uh, and then if you're a manufacturer and you need like a, one of those drivers written for one of those systems, uh, you can contact them and they will, um, basically use their marketing power to make sure that everybody knows that you have that driver available. So, you know, the drivers are called different things in different systems. I think some systems call them modules or something like that. But it's kind of the same idea. It's all software and making machines talk to machines. So if you have that need or you want to check out their drivers, go over to chowmainsoft.com.

And, of course, links to that are at our website, website, hometech.fm slash happy hour. Just click the link at the top of the page and that'll bring you to that page too. But, um, yep. We've got them as our happy hour hosts and thanks so much, uh, Jomain. Yeah, we, we really appreciate it. And, and like you said, Seth, we, we announced it. I don't even know if we had the announcement out, if they were listening live or what, but yeah, they moved very quick to sponsor it, and that's a tremendous show of support. And I'm flattered and honored to have a sponsor for our happy hour this year. And so again, it's absolutely free for our guests to attend, and be sure to thank our sponsor if you do. We'd love to have you there. And we do have some opportunities for a friend of the show sponsor at a lower price point if you're interested in contributing so everyone can have a good time. Complimentary, we would absolutely welcome that.

And again, hometech.fm slash happy hour if you are interested in learning more. Yep, absolutely. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for the show, give us a shout out. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form.

Absolutely. We would love to hear from you. We definitely read all of those messages. So reach out if you have any of that feedback. And in closing the show, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports our efforts here, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports our efforts here, but especially to those of you who are able to financially

support the podcast through our Patreon page. If you don't know about Patreon, head on over to hometech.fm slash support. Once again, that's hometech.fm slash support to learn how you can support the podcast for as little as $1 a month. Any pledge over $5 will give you a big shout-out on air, but every single pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack channel, The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for inside baseball conversations about all aspects of home technology. We would love to have you there. If you want to help out but you can't support the show financially,

we'd appreciate a five-star review in iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. Five stars. Five stars. Five stars. That's it. We want those five stars. Jason, I'm looking at the calendar right now,

and it says here that we'll be seeing each other in San Diego in like three weeks when this airs. Yeah. Yeah. It's coming right up. Really excited. It's going to be a great show. We're at One Vision. We're doing a few workshops out there that I'll be participating in and helping, uh, lead with a colleague of mine. And so really excited for that opportunity and come by the One Vision booth on the, on the floor. If you have a

minute and want to come say hi, that's where I'll be hanging out most of the time and then of course at our happy hour so looking forward to it absolutely and uh greg's in our our chat room tonight since he's the only one there that i can tell greg gets a free plug for his uh his that's right thing uh it's a nice class what is it called the art of the takeover what is that thing called greg put it in there yeah i think it is the art is the art of the art of the takeover all right the art of the takeover. All right, the art of the takeover job. Yeah, that's it. Make sure you sign up for that class.

It sounds like a really cool class. And Greg has got a lot of good feedback last year. So go check that one out. Art of the takeover job on Wednesday morning. And it's on Wednesday morning, and he'll have it written by Tuesday night. Awesome. That's kind of how I'm feeling right now have it written by Tuesday night. Awesome. That's kind of how I'm feeling right now. It's a little daunting. Yep.

So anyways. All right. Well, thank you everybody so much for tuning in. We really appreciate it and we'll look forward to connecting again next week. Seth, thank you. Have a good week. Yep. Have a good week, Jason.