HomeTech.fm - Episode 338 - One Ring (App) to Control Them All

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, February 12th from Sarasota, Florida. I'm Seth Johnson, going solo for the first time in a long time with the show tonight. If you're just tuning in and wondering, where the heck is Jason? Well, check out episode 337. Jason does a much better job of explaining why he's decided to step back, move on from the show and focus on some productivity and thought model ideas that he's been, he's actually been plugging away at those for a couple of years now. So it's exciting for him. It really sounds like cool and creative stuff that he's getting involved in. So if you are in the productivity world,

you like to do productivity things and learn about new tools and Notion and all that good stuff, check out episode 337 so you can see where he's going and what he's up to. We've got all the links to pillars of impact on the show notes over there too. So hometech.fm slash 337 will get you there. But we're going to get started on the show tonight, much in the same format that you're used to, starting off with a few home tech headlines and some cool ideas that have kicking around for the show that we'll be implementing and announcing this month. Of course, pick of the week. Pick of the week will be up next. So let's get started. Lenar Corporation, one of the nation's largest home builders, has teamed up with a number of IoT companies to provide a suite of connected home products that will be installed in new Lennar homes and all managed by the Ring app. Homes will start with a Ring

alarm security system and Ring video doorbell, integrating with technologies from Level, Eero, Moen, Honeywell Home, and MyQ for smart garage technology. Homeowners will be able to control their compatible locks, garage door, thermostat, alarms, as well as get alerts for leak detections all in one app, the Ring app. That sounds familiar. The Connected Home by Lenar will be offered nationwide as part of Lenar's signature Everything's Included program.

Lenar installs the Ring video doorbell on the Level smart locks and the Flow by Moen and the MyQ garage door opener and the Honeywell smart home thermostat during construction and all the other devices and services are left as DIY installation

for the homeowner to do. Things like setting up the Eero Wi-Fi, I guess, would be part of that. Interesting. The package includes ring levels. Level makes those level locks that you see. A really cool product that is out there right now. I actually like these because they don't look like the normal smart door locks that we have with the big bulky battery pack on one side. These things are all like built right into the door lock itself and it's level with the door. So all the smarts are built inside of that mechanism. And I think you can still use like the door hardware you have. The little bit more, well, all door locks seem to be more pricey than I ever want to pay for them,

which explains why I haven't fixed the one on the side of my house which died randomly uh a few months ago and i'm back to using a key like an animal so i need to uh i need to find a way to replace that uh what is that thing it's a i think it's a quick set one so i think that's quick set i think slage makes that i'm not sure um but that that one the keypad died on it and it doesn't work anymore. It's not smart anymore. So now I'm going to be left over to my devices to replace it. And I might look at one of these level locks because these are really cool. Eero, of course, is Wi-Fi, does Wi-Fi 6. Moen has the flow sensor. I've got one of those here at the house. Actually, interesting story about that. It broke the other day. Don't even know why, but I sent a request in saying, hey, this thing doesn't seem to be working. It hasn't been for a

couple of months, but I'm just now getting to it. And they said, well, we normally take it back. But since we're in the middle of COVID, we'll just send you another one. You don't have to worry about sending it back. So that was kind of nice. Real painless and easy. I always worry about some of these IoT companies and what they're going to do for service when something does break down the road. Flow by Moen, two thumbs up on that one because I got a whole new setup. Like everything was included. Power supply, the little gaskets and everything that come along with it was great. So I will recommend that. Put a link to that in the show notes. We've had them on the show before. Before Moen had kind of taken an acquisition or acquiring interest in them, it was just a company called Flow. And they were just getting started. But now they're backed by Moen, have a lot more money, and I guess can ship out new product to people when they have problems. But yeah, service was great and the products, it works well. Resideo, it's the Honeywell smart home thermostat.

Liftmaster, of course, for the MyQ garage, smart garage control. And Alloy Smart Home, which is a self-guided tour technology, enables customer access to homes to allow for independent, flexible home tours. So I guess that's probably how they're kind of going over it. Resideo, I don't know how it's, you come up with a wacky name,

you're going to get a wacky pronunciation of this thing. So thanks, Greg, for pointing out how that may be pronounced. Resideo, video, Resideo, doesn't matter to me. My questions on this is, how are they going to measure success of this program? And certainly Ring and the other IOT vendors listed above that they're going to come up with, like their measure of success will be just the number of devices they get out of the door.

Uh, Lenar is going to have their own internal metrics on bit like customer calls for warranty support. I don't, I don't know if you know about this, but like these massive home home builders, even some of the smaller home builders that you have in the area. Um, if, if you build a home with them, they literally measure the success of the products they're putting in their homes by the number of support goals that they get. Like they have some very, very, let me say this one more time, very complicated and sophisticated support systems that are built around the home warranty.

Because as soon as they sell the home, they've made all their money that they're going to make. And anything after that is where they start losing money and they don't want to lose money. So that's where the, if anything comes up with home warranty that they have to deal with and struggle with, especially on these production homes where the margins are so, I hate to say thin and tight because, uh, any, any, uh, any home install pro kind of knows what they do with our products and how much markup they put on it and set it to the end user. But, you know, they, they do have their own sales organization to work, work with,

and they have their own, you know, marketing agency to kind of do. So they, they do track customer success stories based on the information that they get, the information that comes back for the warranty process on their home. So I'm wondering like how they measure success that way. I know that's how they're going to do, but like, what's going to make a successful Lennar smart home for the consumer? Like, will they, will they be happy with how this works? And you know, asking homeowners to do the, Hey, you got this house. It's full of stuff. You need to

set up your Wi-Fi. Your ring doorbell is on the wall over there. This is that over there. Here's a couple of instructions on how to do it. Are you on your own? I don't know. The press release that has been floating around on this story doesn't really indicate that they're going to have anyone helping set that up because I think Lenar is smart to know, uh, once you, uh, once you do that and you touch it in that way, uh, you own it. Uh, and that's what a custom integrator does. Uh, but it doesn't seem to me in this situation that they're, are hiring a custom integrator install. These are all like point products and they're all being drafted back into, uh, not drafted back, but all being controlled back into the ring interface. So that's very curious.

It sounds like this is what we've been talking about on this show for a long time. This is an interesting turn to me for Smart Home for the masses. We're looking at what it looks like when I buy a house and I just walk in and the stuff is already there. Now, there's still some setup and there still are some headaches associated with each one of these devices that doesn't make them so simple to use as just, you know, walking in the room and saying, Hey, turn on the lights and the right light turns on. But I think this is a pretty good start. This is,

this is home automation for the masses. This is what it looks like guys. So keep an eye on this So keep an eye on this. Keep an eye on this process. And hopefully we can see what it looks like in a couple of years if Lenar and other bigger home builders like KB or I can't remember. There's a couple other ones here in the States that are just massive. They're just so big. They build tens of thousands of homes a year.

They're the ones to watch when it comes to mass smart home adoption. Speaking of which, uh, Amazon is kind of getting in this game too. And of course this floats, this kind of goes around with ring too, but Amazon's disrupting the status quo. Once again,

this time in the security and smart home business, uh, with a couple of new services, uh, it's announced that it's jumped into the security monitoring business with its new $4.99 per month or $49 per year Alexa Guard Plus service. And the company's launching this

with a new free energy dashboard service that gives users details about electrical usage for individual devices and systems in their home. So Alexa Guard Plus is a subscription that offers extends, sorry, extends features from the Alexa Guard by giving customers hands-free access to emergency helpline, smart alerts without activity and other potential emergencies in their home while they're away, and new features to deter potential intruders. For example, if you're using Alexa Guard Plus,

homeowners can ask Alexa to connect hands-free to trained agents in an emergency where they can request the dispatch of medical, fire, or police assistance. So that's kind of cool. You can just yell into the air, help, I've fallen and I can't get up. And you can have the ambulance on the way. So not such a bad program. $4.99 per month is extremely low, especially even for one of those help. I can't, I fall in and I can't get up. I think those are quite a bit more per month. So, uh, interesting to see that Amazon, uh, Amazon, and of course ring is, is where that other press

release came from. It's very, it's a very, the headlines all said, Lenar teams up with the ring for smart home 2.0. And,. And it's really more than just Ring. But at the same time, it all lands back in the Ring app. It's interesting to see what Amazon, this is Amazon's play into the Smart Home. And they're going at it at multiple angles here. For the first time, Google has collaborated to create a co-branded Nest thermostat for an individual Smart Home installation company. And I'm going to put smart home installation company in quotation marks because the smart home company

they're talking about is Goodman, which was an HVAC manufacturing company that makes quite a number of HVAC systems. I think, I can't really remember. I'm trying to go back, but I know that Goodman, there's a number of household names that you may know if you're in the HVAC business that are literally all the same boxes with a different name spray tagged on them. So this type of idea by putting the Goodman name on another product probably isn't very far outside the realm of what Goodman does for their normal products. So the Nest Thermostat E+, it looks exactly like the normal Nest Thermostat, but has Goodman written on the packaging. And I put my little notes here that no one will ever see. And that's true. No one will ever see that a Goodman

thermostat went in. It's not like it's branded or anything in any other way. It looks like the Nest E thermostat. So, um, kind of a cool thing, uh, that Nest has started to do this. I suspect this is probably, uh, the first in, in a couple of other arrangements that may float out over the next couple of years, uh, where Nest is kind of like partnering with HVAC companies. Um, I like this because it gets smart thermostats just like the previous story with Lenar. This gets home technology like into homes and for regular people to use. It gets this stuff into the hands of more people,

which is always a plus in moving this industry forward. Unlike integrating all with the Ring app, like this, the Nest thermostat is very connected to other platforms. Like you can go any which way with that and uh yeah i i am i'm all for that uh and it contrasts this with like the proprietary thermostats that we run across with like i'm thinking of like carrier where you you walk into the house and yeah you uh you look at the thermostat on the wall and it's like oh wow that wow, that's a crazy thermostat. And you pull it down and it's got two wires going to it because it's some kind of crazy proprietary protocol that they use.

And you can't actually use another normal Nest thermostat or anything like that with it because it's built into some kind of crazy, you know, zone system. That could exist, but they decide to put their proprietary stuff in. So I'm happy to see this. Anything not proprietary will be great. So we'll keep an eye on that and see what happens with Google down the road. And that pretty much wraps up the discussion for Home Tech Headlines this week. I do want to take a little point in time to kind of like throw out a couple of ideas that I've had for adding on to the things that we can do with the show. I do want to, and I'm working on the technology to do this, to bring more people into the show and have, you know, more of a discussion-based show. I really love to have

that with Jason. And I think that's what podcasts are best at. When we listen to podcasts, when I listen to podcasts, at least, I love the conversation between multiple people. There's a couple of shows out there that I really like that kind of have a rotating group of people, a rotating group of, I don't want to say co-hosts or hosts or whatever, but they come and they go. They always have kind of the same format, but it's loosely based on the conversations that they're having. And I really would like to see what I can do with that. The problem is, it's not really a problem. The problem is the speed I can get this show out is complicated by all of that. And I like to edit the show. I like it to be something that you can listen to

and actually hear and understand. And I don't want to do the technology side of that wrong because there's nothing worse, nothing worse than having a podcast with bad audio because that's literally all it is. It's just audio. So I want to make sure that I can get that right and have the ability to edit a show down with, I don't know, four or five people on it at the same time, where it's, you know, something that you can understand, where it's something that, uh, that sounds good. I'm not saying that Greg, I'm not saying that on the air, but we're not going to have any like little bloopity bloops, uh, in our podcast either. So, uh, I'm not sure what that's all about over there, but yeah, there's, there's a, there's a way that we can, uh, there's a way that this can be done. I have a couple of ideas around that and, uh and I'm going to be pursuing those.

Another idea that popped up kind of organically in the hub and kind of off on a side channel in the hub is to kind of have a home tech pro discussion. And I think this is a great idea. And I'm going to build this into kind of more of a Zoom room, I guess zoom, uh, room, I guess, zoom room. That's kind of a proprietary thing, uh, a zoom conversation where we can all get on for maybe 30 minutes, uh, pick a topic and set an agenda and just chat about that. And, uh, I think I'm going to leave that into kind of the, uh, the, uh, the idea of like the Patreon subscribers. If you're in the Patreon, you'll, you'll be able to do that. Um, if you're not, then, uh, it'll just kind of be off to the side and just another part of the show that maybe if you want access to, you can always get into by supporting the show,

but outside of it, it's just going to be, um, not so much pro chat, but I think we're going to lean that heavy that way, uh, simply because the pros are always the ones touching things. But I think, in my opinion, the professional channel that I've been part of for a very long time, we don't know everything. We have some good ideas, and we have some great learning experiences over the years, right? But we can also get some great ideas from DIYers and people who don't have access to the same products and machines, tools, whatever that we have as pros. I kind of find myself in that bucket right now because I'm not a dealer for anything. I work for a distributor, so I have access to some product. I have access to the programming and control systems that professionals would. But for the most part,

what I use is HomeKit. With HomeBridge, I don't actually use any main thing outside of my control for remotes for home AV. So I so I find myself kind of in that, that boat. And that's, that's the kind of discussions that I would like to, to bring up and talk about. I mean, there's plenty of things that we can chat about with home AV, home automation that don't require you to have like a license, you know, this is, this is a broad topic. And I think the more people involved, the smarter we all get. And we'll just pick a topic. We'll have an agenda maybe once.

I'm thinking once, maybe fortnightly. We'll do it every two weeks. And just sit down, have a cool conversation about home automation, home technologies, and figure out what we don't know. That would be the goal. Because I don't know where these are going to lead. I we don't know. That would be the goal. Because I don't know where these are going to lead. I really don't. And I'm curious if we can get a mass of people in there talking about these things and going over these ideas.

I'm sure we can bring in representatives for brands. I'm sure that we can bring in manufacturers to talk to us and tell us, not shield their products. I'm not going to do that. But they can come in and talk to us about what their products do that's really creative in this industry. So I think there's some legs to it. I'm part of another group that kind of does this on the show space side, and it's been very successful. They've had a little bit different industry than we've had this year, being that most of them were furloughed for a long time.

And they were able to kind of sit around and chat for hours on end. I'm not going to pretend that I'm able to do that. I'm not going to pretend that you're able to do that. But I am thinking that we can sit down for a good 30, 45 minutes once every couple weeks and have a great conversation about what the state of the home automation industry is. And from there, we'll see where it goes. All the links and topics that we discussed tonight

can be found in our show notes at hometech.fm slash 338. Don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday starting sometime between seven and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. You can find out more at hometech.fm slash live. Now I've got a great pick of the week this week. This you may have seen because it has, it's gone viral. I saw this the other day and I, it's the funniest video I think I have ever seen.

So there is a lawyer who is using Zoom and unfortunately his, I can't get through this without laughing. Unfortunately, his camera had some kind of filter applied and that filter was of him being a kitten. So he's a sad kitten in this Zoom call and he has to apologize to the judge and let the judge know that he wasn't a cat after inadvertently activating the face filter somehow. Now, I did a little bit of digging on this and I found someone that this is actually built into some Dell software, some really ancient Dell software,

too. So I'm wondering how old the computer is that that is. I'm watching the video out of the corner of my eye of this this poor little sad kitten looking over into the corner. Like, please help me. I need to, I need to turn this off. This is, this is brilliant. It's probably one of the funniest things I've ever seen. If you haven't seen it, we'll put a link to it in the show note and you can check that out. But it's, it's some kind of strange Dell software that, that can take over. And I found on the internet archives that like a blog post from someone who actually had a job interview, um, got settled in dress, you know, dressed up to suit, uh, not suit and tie, but jacket and tie sat down, uh, to have his job interview, uh, with, uh, this, this, uh, education board. And, uh, he was a sad kitten the entire time. And, and he eventually

just had to turn off his camera. So Skype wouldn't pick up this random cat thing that was coming out of his video camera. This is great though. So when technology goes bad, it can be quite funny sometimes. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, you can give us a shout. Email is feedback at hometech.fm. You can visit hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form. I do want to take a quick break this week. just to mention the Patreon stuff. I did put it on pause for February, but I'm planning on letting it ride until March. So, you know, if you have any pledges in there that you want to adjust, of course, I'll also be using the patron thing to

announce some of these new ideas and, uh, plug these new ideas through that program. So if you are interested in being a patron, you can go over to your show and, uh, show and figure out how to do that. I'm not sure to let you join too much. I haven't even tried that. Um, but I might, I might kick it on, but it's when March rolls around, uh, the patron stuff will kick back in and, uh, we'll go from there. So I do want to thank everyone who has supported the show. Some big, there's been some big supporters of the show over the years. Definitely want to thank you for keeping with us and keeping the vision alive. It really does go and help me keep the show going. So thanks very much. And I just let you know, it'll kick back in starting March 1st.

And with that, we're going to wrap up another week of Home Tech. Thanks for tuning in this week. We'll be back next week. Keep an eye on the website and Twitter for some of these new ideas that will be popping up for the Home Tech Pro discussion and some of the other ideas that will be coming across. That way, you can find out more on how to do that at hometech.fm. And with that, have a great weekend, everybody. We'll talk to you later. That was a short show. I could have kept talking for another, probably another hour and a half.