HomeTech.fm - Episode 336 - Keurig Showers

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, January 22nd from Denver, Colorado. I'm Jason Griffin. And from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. Jason, what's going on? It's Inauguration Day. So we got that going for us. Yeah, yeah. So I took a couple minutes to watch it today.

It was fun. Lady Gaga was there. She was dressed like she was attending a Hunger Games ceremony. Like Lady Gaga? Yeah, she was really good, though. The music numbers were awesome. Yeah, I saw some tweets about that. I unfortunately did not plan well, had some things going on at work that I was not able to pull away from.

So I was not able to watch it today, but I'm hoping, I'm sure I can. Catch the highlights. Find it streaming tonight and I'll get, yeah, find the highlights and saw a number of tweets go by. So Seth, I'm just hoping that, you know, now we can get back to like, just kind of typical partisan bickering. Just the normal, just the normal state of politics in the U.S. Yeah. Kind of gives you a new sense of appreciation, right? Yeah.

I'm looking forward to, you know how you go into a bar and people are just talking about sports and they're just really into sports? It's been like that with politics. I'm like, maybe not, maybe not. Maybe we could just tone it down a little bit and just, you know, yeah, it's not, it's not, we're all on the same team. We're all, we're literally all on the same team. And we like our, we like to get in our little tribes and do our little, you know, chance for whatever.

Unfortunately. Yep. That is true. Yep. But it'll be nicer. I'm hoping, I'm hoping, I'm but it'll be nicer i'm hoping i'm hoping i'm hoping it'll be nicer and uh calmer calmer is what i'm looking for calm yeah that's the thing i think you know i just hope nothing i'm just glad nothing crazy happened today and i hope that uh cooler heads can prevail just feels like things have been escalating, and yeah, that's not good for anyone.

So hopefully calmer times are ahead. Yep. Well, you know what is good for everyone? Home tech headlines? You got it. Let's do it. Integrators kept trucking along in 2020 amid the chaos with 11.5% growth and a remarkable resilience

according to CE Pro 2021 State of the Industry study. There you go, State of the Union. See, I'm letting politics slip into the home tech headlines. The pandemic added jet rocket fuel, quote, jet rocket fuel, to some trends that were already well underway, such as the need for enterprise-grade home networks for streaming entertainment and work-from-home and distance learning scenarios. But COVID-19 situation can also take away the pandemic through a giant wet blanket on other trends that were promising heading into 2020, such as corporate office and bar restaurant projects. Yeah, indeed. So some interesting numbers here from CE Pro's state of the industry, not state of the union, state of the industry study. The median revenue for a custom installation company was 1.3 million. That represents an 11.5% growth from 2019. It's wild. So that's a pretty big jump there. Article goes on to say,

parsing out that total median revenue figure of, again, 1.3 million. It says about 68% of that comes from residential installation, both equipment and labor, on a median of 55 projects. Goes on to talk about about 17% of revenues came from commercial installation. And then I was surprised to see this number 15% from ongoing service and monitoring revenues. It's actually higher than I thought it would be, but it was only a 1% increase from last year. So all in all, a pretty good year overall. We've talked about that on the show. Definitely, I know all of us in the industry feel pretty fortunate to have been in the position we were this year. And tired. Tired and fortunate and tired. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. On that note,

regarding staffing, it said for most integrators, there were no cutbacks at all. Three quarters of the dealers surveyed, 75% of them said they did not reduce staff hours during COVID-19. Also, 71% of dealers never stopped working at all. There was no pause in business activity whatsoever. That seems about right from my perspective and what we saw through our national distributor. A lot of our guys, some guys were like, you know, we're at home. We can't go out anywhere. There are many states that really didn't have any lockdown.

Or if they did, the integrators were classifying themselves as essential and just kept plugging away at whatever was out there and upgrading home networks. Because I think that's what everybody did this year. Holy cow, home networking. Yeah, indeed. Well, shifting from there, speaking of the pandemic here, that's i think that's what everybody did this year holy cow home networking yeah indeed well shifting from there speaking of the uh pandemic here some news related in-person cdia training will restart at cds fisher's indiana headquarters beginning in march the association has been

providing only remote virtual training since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 the live training will be for the newly revamped certifications announced by the association earlier this year. The first Cedia training course held in person will be the Cedia Cabling and Infrastructure Technician School, and that'll be March 10th through 12th, 2021. Very cool. It goes on to say that it's a little bit of a hybrid. So there's some instruction that takes place online, of course, and then you get in there and you get to do your hands on training, which is where you learn everything. Because that's in my experience, at least with me, like I'm going to use a Jason Griffin where I'm tactile. Like I've got to put my hands on something before I really understand kind of what's going on with it and how it all pieces together.

And once I do, you know, it's on. So like this, I think this is a great path. Like you get, you get the basic, like high level overview from what you should be doing. And you got a little bit of a little bit of knowledge going into there. And then you can go in and get all the good details, put your hands on, get the work done. Yeah. Yeah. They've got a second in-person training, the integrated systems technician. That'll be March 15th through the 19th. So interesting to see them going back. I know here in Colorado, we've got a lot of schools shutting back down again, going back remote.

So it's just on again, off again. But hopefully with the vaccine slowly making its way out there, we'll start to flatten that curve finally. Yep. Well, not in Florida. Not in Florida. We're not interested in flattening the curve. You guys are your own animal down there.

Well, speaking of Colorado, the Consumer Technology Association has named Harrison Home Systems of Lakewood, Colorado, as 2021 CTA Smart Home Integrator of the Year. The award recognizes the premier electronic system contractor in the industry. It's the most prestigious award in the 2021 Smart Home Mark of Excellence Awards program, recognizing the best in custom installation, which this year were presented during the Digital CES 2021. Jason, I recognize this company's name. Yeah. Yeah, I have a personal connection to this. The listeners to the show will probably know I worked at Harrison Home Systems for a couple of years before joining the team at One Vision. And George and Kassa, I know, have worked really hard to grow their business. They had over 100% growth in 2019.

I know that they've really been doing well with the condo market here in Denver. That's been a big, big area of growth. So they were very successful with some of the big luxury condo developments here in the city that have been very popular. And I just wanted to send a big congratulations to them. I know George listens to the show occasionally. And so George, if you're tuned in, congratulations, really a great job. Yeah. I have to get him on one of these days. I always tried to break into that condo market and never was successful, but it looks like,

it looks like he had a couple of really good ideas, like customized websites for each condo development where you can like have the customized packages put in. I was doing something like this, but more analog, like it would be like a book that I would have printed up that had all the custom packages in it. But a website seems a lot more smart, you know, smart thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've stayed good friends with a guy named Matt who still works there.

And he actually showed me the website, would have been probably a year, year and a half ago now. And it was really cool what they had put together. Yeah. So I know they've worked really hard and well-deserved. Congratulations to them. Yep. Congrats, guys. The Trump administration has added Xiaomi to the U.S. military list under the National Defense Authorization Act of 1999. The department is determined, quote, the department is determined to highlight and counter the People's Republic of China Military Civil Fusion Development Strategy, which supports the modernization goals of the People's Liberation Army by ensuring its access to advanced technologies and expertise acquired by those PRC companies, universities, and research programs that appear to be civilian entities.

Xiaomi, however, denies its connection to the Chinese military and said that it will take steps to protect the company and its shareholders. Yeah, so this isn't a big story right now, but it could be a big story later on down the road because this kind of classification kind of blacklists the company and American investors will have to start selling their shares off as it's been added to this blacklist. So I'm wondering how long this kind of lasts, because there's a lot of companies that do use Xiaomi's technology or services to build their products out. I want to say that, wasn't it, what is the company that we always talk about? Wyze? Don't they use a lot of chowme uh product yeah i well i know at least that that early on some of their early products at least did

i'm not sure how much they still do now but yeah yeah there's um there's a connection there it will be a very interesting to see what happens here so or if it's reversed i mean who knows what's going to happen in the next you know months with everything. I mean, this is, this is kind of like an administrative administration level type decision that can be made outside of the halls of Congress. So it doesn't, you know, really take any kind of thing other than executive order to, to kind of reverse these things. So now that the tides have changed, you know, maybe they'll change directions on this too, but who knows? Maybe this is going to stick.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know. Feels like kind of maybe a middle finger by Trump to China on his way out the door. On the way out the door, right? Very well could be. Very well could be. Hard to say. It's really hard to say these days.

Hard to make sense of any of it. Well, speaking of things that are hard to make sense of, it's not hard to say these days hard to make sense of any of it well uh speaking of things that hard to make sense of it's not a very good transition but i'm always confused about smart things at this point so samsung's bringing uh the smart things interface into the car you'll be able to start or stop your engine of compatible vehicles with the smart things app and activate the heater or AC before you step inside your car. This feature won't arrive until at least the third quarter of 2021. I like that. At least. Yeah. At least the third quarter. That's the Bixby release strategy. Yeah. Where's my Bixby speaker thing? Where's that Galaxy speaker?

Did that ever come out? I feel like that totally fell off the radar. It has fallen off the radar. And literally the only people that bring it back up are Samsung. And they're like, the last event they had where they showed off a full stage of those Bixby speakers all grouped together playing the same thing and like, look how awesome this is. And then nothing, nothing. They don't ship. they never materialized.

As far as I know, they've never shipped anywhere. Interesting. The Samsung Galaxy Home, I think that's what they're called. This story goes on to say the company has also teamed up with Google to bring the SmartThings dashboard to Android audio. As such, you'll be able to control your smart home products or open your garage door from your dashboard after connecting it to a Samsung phone.

So it also emerged at CES 2020 that they announced a partnership with SmartCar, apparently to bring the SmartThings app compatibility to most new cars in the U.S. starting in October. It's an interesting idea. I, I, I, I, I do like this. I just like these types of things that integrate with cars and especially technology in cars. It just seems like it's just not going to work. Like I, I, I, car technology is so far behind. And when you do find something that feels new um and like feels modern there's always like super rough edges around it especially when as you get to start to get used as you start to use it like i have little remote start app on my phone from subaru but it's just very clunky

it's not as easy as what you would think and i I often forget to use it. If it was just like a one-click thing or something that they could easily integrate with like Siri, you know, why not? But they never have because they're a car company. They're not a technology company. So I always worry about these things and how they'll appear or if they'll ever appear. Because this was a CES announcement. So just never know. Yeah, yeah. So take it through the appropriate filter there.

But I agree with you. Yeah, it feels like cars have really lagged behind in many respects. But there do feel, feels like there are some compelling use cases there. Nothing mind-blowing, but, you know, the ability for your car and home to be a little bit more in sync about when you're coming and going and sort of preferences and things like that. You know, maybe things like if you're, I don't know, listening to music in the house, if that could sort of carry over into the car, like little things like that, that could be kind of cool. Um, it does seem like there, there's some opportunity there, but I agree with you. It does feel like car technology has generally has generally lagged

behind the home so i put over in our our slack chat the uh the uh we still haven't seen the galaxy home i have a story from roughly a year ago now it's february that's from back in february yeah 14th so and then eddie chimes in, what is that? So, yeah, as soon as we get one of these things, as soon as they ship, it's going to go in the museum because I don't think they'll ever ship. It's just been amazing to see. Right next to your Facebook portal? Next to the Facebook portal. Actually, yeah, yeah.

That'll be the showpiece that you'll, you know, there's a light shine down in the middle of the room. That's right. All right. Well, moving on from there, Signify is introducing three new Philips Hue products today, an in-wall Hue module for existing light switches, a new outdoor light bar, and a refined dimmer. So we're going to talk about each one of these in turn a little bit. This Philips Hue wall switch sounds pretty cool. So it's this module. It really is designed to solve that problem that we've talked about before, where you go out and you put the smart light bulb in your fixture and it's great.

You're controlling it from your phone and then your spouse or your roommate shuts the light switch off and all of a sudden that smart light bulb is totally useless. So this is designed to plug into the wall. It's powered by a battery. This has a five-year lifespan and it puts the intelligence inside of the wall instead of, you know, only that intelligence only existing in the light bulb itself. It's weird that it has a battery. There's a very similar product that exists out there. We've talked a little bit about it in the hub from from a company called shelly uh it's a european company and they they but they do have some ul listed product like this and it it gets its power from the switch itself yeah uh and it's basically just a relay that you can or actually they have a dimmer module now too that you can stick in in

inside uh the wall there and uh like you said, when you flip the switch, the light acts normally. But you can also go over to your smartphone and flip the switch there. And while it can't physically flip the switch on the wall, the device that's, you know, the Shelly device is in there, and in this case, the Hue device is in there, can keep track of the state of the light

and the switch independently and figure out, you know, what it's supposed to do the next time somebody comes up and of the state of the light and the switch independently and figure out you know what it's supposed to do the next time somebody comes up and flips the switch on the wall so it's a great it's a great um i think this is um a great uh product i i think we should see more stuff like this out there because i really like this idea that you can go ahead and just put these in inside either the wall or behind the fixture and, and make something smart after out of something that is out of something that's just normal. Like there there's,

you know, the light switch is a soft thing. And we've, we've always talked about it. You expect to go up the wall and you flip the light and it works. This kind of builds into that. And you're not like putting some crazy looking decor of based dimmer in you know it's just a switch you flip the switch and it works right says that uh hue wall switch will cost

39.95 or 69.95 for a two-pack launches in europe this march followed by north america in the summer so actually we'll launch in europe first and then make its way to North America later this year. Yep. I mostly see these types of product. They've existed in Europe for a long time. There's a bunch of Z-Wave product I think that exists out there that's kind of the same form factor. So I'm glad to see a company as big as Philips and is, you know, pushing this form factor here into the States. This is going to be great. Yeah. Another cool product, I think cool anyways,

is the Philips Hue Amarant or Amarant. I'm not sure how to pronounce that, but it's a $169 light bar that can be installed outdoors to sort of bathe the side of the house or hedgerow in multicolored light. A little bit pricey. So's not you know it's not a cheap thing to go out and buy but i can you know looking at the pictures of this online i can

totally see this sort of thing in some of the nicer homes where you've got nice landscaping and you really want to add some nice colored accent lighting i think this thing looks really cool yeah 1400 lumens i would say it's on on par with what i would expect to pay for like a dmx controlled rgb fixture uh like kind of kind of the same same type like i i with having philips integration and and having the wireless control and everything i would say it's probably reasonably priced like giving everything that you get in the box for 150 160 70 dollars yeah not not bad you get a nice little wall wash put a couple of these outside get some nice color on your walls yeah yeah good idea and then lastly there's an upgrade to the magnetic phillips hue

dimmer switch with a detachable wall plate that lets you and your or lets you and your family and guests control hue lighting without the app so this is not the it says unlike the new in-wall module the dimmer is a faux wall switch that adheres to any wall with tape so this is just i guess to kind of add a tactile control for those hue lights available starting january 26th in Europe and coming to North America February 23rd for $24.99. It's like a giant Pico. That's the idea behind it. That's good. Yeah.

That's it. The pregnant Pico. This thing is huge. And this is the exact kind of product I really don't care for. But I guess it's standalone. So it's nice, nice i guess in the fact that you can like if you need a light switch over here um and you don't have it you can stick this on the wall and be able to do like three-way remote control of your your light um fairly easily

right speaking of light switches jason i'm looking over your shoulder well seth I'm looking over your shoulder. Well, Seth. Still in the packaging. Still in the box. Hasn't made it out yet. Just thought I'd do that once a week check-in with you. Oddly enough, it's sitting exactly where it was when we we talked last week it's got a dust ring around it

very good i'm beyond help so anthony dropped an interesting one in the chat room here a moen showerhead with aromatherapy interesting i had not heard of this i'm not sure if this is new this week or what but it looks like a it's like a shower head with like a it's almost like a little keurig style like insert that you put in there you see that and it says uh the moen aromatherapy hand showers are uniquely designed with the ability to infuse essential oils directly into the water flow to create an incredible and sensory shower experience when desired. All right, then. Greg, so many jokes. Get your mind out of the gutter, Greg.

Nope, it's already there. I'm already there with you, Greg. A little personal time in the shower patented inley technology allowing capsules to diffuse essential oils directly into your shower water with spa inspired fragrances fragrances looks very similar to the nespresso things i wonder if you i wonder if you can use the nespresso pods and you get a nice little espresso shower. You get your espresso and your shower at the same time. Coffee, caffeine, right through the skin. That's brilliant. You might want to patent that.

I should. Start thinking about domain names too. Coffee shower. Wait, no. Anything with shower in the name could run up against rule 34 pretty quickly so no we'll we'll we'll stay away from that one good for you moan yeah yeah interesting all right well that will do it for our headlines all of the links and topics that we discussed on this week's show can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 336. While you're there, don't forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter.

We'll send you show reminders and other occasional updates from here in the world of Home Tech. Once again, that link is hometech.fm slash 336. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime between 7, 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more about how to do that at hometech.fm slash live. No mailbag this week, but we do have a pick of the week this week. We do. What you got? Sneaking in under the wire here. Just wanted to give a quick

plug to the CE Pro podcast, episode 39 just published. So this is a episode that I was privileged to go join along with our CEO there, Joey Kolchinski. And he and I went on to really talk about enabling change in your company and embracing kind of a service-first business model. So I had a really fun conversation with Arlen over there at CE Pro. There's a nice video they've put together. So you got the video or audio options. Just wanted to give that a quick plug. Go check it out. It's a topic that we think about a lot and have done quite a bit to try to get that message out there and sort of get people thinking differently

about ways to push their business forward. So go check that out. Yeah, we got to get that number up over 1% next year. That's got to go up. Indeed. Yeah, I think there's that number up over 1% next year. That's got to go up. Indeed. Yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunity out there. And we definitely get into that on the podcast. So if you're one of the Home Tech pros in our audience, definitely go check that out. We will include a link in our show notes. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week,

or great ideas for the show, give us a shout. Our email address is feedback at hometech.fm, or you can visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form. And as we do every week, we want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially to those of you who are able to financially support our efforts through our Patreon page. To learn more, head on over to hometech.fm support and learn how you can support the podcast for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over $5 will give you a big shout out on air, but every pledge will get you an invite to our private Slack chat,

The Hub, where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day for conversations about Keurig showers. Oh boy. Here we go. Here we go. And if you want to help the show, but you can't support the show financially, we'd appreciate leaving a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your

choice. Absolutely. Anthony says, our Reddit, the Reddit subreddit, Zune, should be our pick. And I'm going to have to go check this out to see what this is about. The Zune media player from the Microsoft Zune. Do you remember this thing it was like i do around the ipod era this is a while back all die hard community dedicated to the legacy of the zune i had totally forgotten about this it's one of those pop culture references that you see

from time to time you're like yeah everybody everybody was like, oh, you got to have a Zune. Who's got a Zune? And like everybody already had iPods at that point. There was no reason to buy a Zune. Brown Zune for the win, Ron. Totally. Yeah, they came in different colors. Zune tattoo guy. Oh, boy.

Well, yeah, there you go. A little blast from the past. Go check that one out. Well, Jason, that wraps up. A little blast from the past. Go check that one out. Well, Jason, that wraps up another week in home technology news. You got any big plans this weekend? You know, weather permitting, I'm going to try to get out and do some fishing, actually. Try to get out once a month, and this is my weekend. So I haven't checked the weather, but we're, we're hoping for that. And we actually, um, totally

not related to this weekend, but we're enjoying, um, some quiet down here. Seth, I wanted to mention to you, you might have an easier time editing my audio. And here's the reason why last week, the night after you and I recorded our furnace died. Oh, oh, and it was an old furnace. And I know you probably heard it a million times in your editing. It was a beast. It was like 25 years old. And so we were prepared. We knew it was coming. We had the money set aside and it kind of forced the issue. So we got a brand new furnace put in last week and it is amazingly quiet compared to the one I had before. Now that you say that, I did hear it come on quite often. And it wasn't a big deal because I run some audio processing over both of our audio to keep that kind of noise out.

But I could see it in the waveforms and everything where something would kick on from time to time. Oh, I'm sure. And I always thought it was... You remember a while back you had like uh some a heater or something like that that you were talking about like maybe it's an oil heater or something like that oh the space heater space heater i thought that was what was causing it because usually it was around the cold times of year so yeah yeah no no no that that space

heater is totally silent it was our big furnace which like, I know we're audio only, but right there, like 10 feet behind me. And it was a beast. And we were just kind of squeezing every last year that we could out of it and finally bit the dust. And so again, thankfully. eye in the middle of the winter because that's right who would ever care you wouldn't even know right yeah if it died in the summer so anyways we got it replaced really quickly and wasn't wasn't a huge deal but uh hopefully it'll make your editing life a little easier yeah no i can i can uncheck the remove uh audio anomalies from jason's there you go jason's audio this week and greg yes the furnace does actually exist. Somebody else installed it. Somebody else. So. IR pro. So it got done very quickly.

It's funny. Of course, I didn't really have much of a choice because our house was like, you know, 58 degrees. It was freezing in here. That would not last well over here. I mean, you know, we have pretty thin blood here in Florida. Indeed. And it can get down to like 70 and then, you know, there are problems. People are really cold in my house.

All hell breaks loose. Yeah, yeah. The blankets are coming out. Space heaters are coming out. It's like, it's only 70. The heater's on. Yeah. I don't know.

Yeah, anyways, what about you? Plans for this weekend? Nothing big going on. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. Anyways, what about you plans for this weekend? Uh, nothing big going on. No, uh, hopefully I can get some relaxation in after, uh, I,

I actually had a, a weekend warrior job to go, to go help somebody out with a, a project they had going on in the keys. So I ran down there, did some work. It cleaned up, cleaned up, uh, an amazingly old HAI slash RTI project, ripped it all out, put the new network in, new Control 4 gear, hung four TVs.

Wow. Yeah, I was busy. Yeah. So I'm hoping this weekend I can relax a little bit. Good. Good. Take your feet up. All right. Well, I hope relax a little bit. Good. Good. Take your feet up. All right.

Well, I hope you enjoy your weekend. We'll wrap up here. Short show this week. We'll be back next week. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. Yep. Thanks, everybody. See you next week.