Save Money and Time with a Smarter and More Energy Efficient Home with Matt Ferrell

00:00:00.000 | Do you want to make your home smarter and more energy efficient, which will end up saving you

00:00:04.320 | both money and time? Then you're going to love this episode with lifelong tech enthusiast Matt

00:00:09.520 | Farrell, who is a pro on this topic and has more than a million subscribers on his YouTube channel,

00:00:14.800 | where he explores how smart and sustainable technology can impact our lives for the better.

00:00:20.160 | If you like what you're watching, please don't forget to click that

00:00:22.560 | thumbs up and hit subscribe to help the algorithm, so let's get into it.

00:00:31.920 | Matt, thanks for being here.

00:00:33.760 | Absolutely. Thanks for having me on. It took a while for this to come together,

00:00:37.120 | but I'm glad we're finally able to have this conversation.

00:00:39.920 | Yeah, well, we were in the middle of trying to decide whether we wanted to make some big energy

00:00:43.680 | savings and monitoring investments. So I was like, well, let's wait, let's wait, let's wait. And

00:00:46.880 | finally it got to the point that I was like, I think with technology evolving and, you know,

00:00:52.000 | just budgets changing, that's always going to be the case. There's always going to be another thing

00:00:56.320 | we all want to add to our homes.

00:00:57.840 | Oh, absolutely. It's like, this is kind of like,

00:00:59.440 | when it comes to like smart home monitoring, it's like we're at the very early stages. And it's just

00:01:04.400 | like all these different companies are rolling out with all this crazy stuff that you can put

00:01:08.320 | in your home right now to monitor your energy, improve your battery usage, solar panels, all

00:01:12.800 | that kind of stuff. It's kind of a crazy time right now.

00:01:15.360 | Yeah. Now you've been doing this for years, but I think if I'm not, if I'm not incorrect,

00:01:20.720 | you're, you're in the process, or maybe you're even done with a new home where you're completely

00:01:24.400 | rethought everything. So I feel like for a lot of us, this happens over time, but for you right now,

00:01:29.360 | you've probably thought about every element all in one short period of time.

00:01:33.040 | Yeah. I'm actually in my new studio right now, just moved into the house three and a half weeks

00:01:39.040 | ago, I think it was. So we just got in, it took about two years to pull this whole house together,

00:01:44.480 | but yeah, I've, I've thought about every little nook and cranny of this house,

00:01:48.080 | all the different smart tech I want to put into it, the solar panel, energy storage,

00:01:51.760 | all that kind of stuff. I thought one of the things you, you really,

00:01:55.360 | really know well is around the energy and the efficiency of a home. So we'll start there.

00:02:00.000 | And then I want to jump into all the other home automation, smart home stuff and anything else

00:02:05.120 | we didn't cover. So let's just start at the basics. Can you kind of cover what are the

00:02:10.800 | principles like first principles of just building a more energy efficient home and why that's

00:02:16.080 | important? The first place you start is creating an airtight house. You want a house to be as

00:02:20.560 | airtight and well insulated as you can. If you don't, if you don't have a well airtight house,

00:02:25.440 | it doesn't matter what kind of tech you put into it, what kind of solar panels you put on it.

00:02:29.440 | If it can't hold onto its heat energy or keep heat out efficiently, your energy use is going to go

00:02:34.880 | through the roof. So you have to make sure that you're building it right to make sure that it

00:02:39.280 | meets certain standards. And one of those is a passive house. There's a passive house standard

00:02:44.000 | that is very popular around the world. It's gaining ground. I did not build my house to

00:02:49.200 | passive house certification, but I took a lot of the underlying principles into mind when putting

00:02:55.760 | this house together. And I worked with a company that was able to meet kind of close to passive

00:03:00.560 | house level airtightness, insulation values to make sure that every watt of energy I spend to

00:03:07.440 | heat this house stays in the house as long as I can. And is that something that applies only to

00:03:13.120 | new homes or if I'm sitting, which, which right now is about a hundred year old home, is this

00:03:18.240 | still something I can aspire to achieve? Oh yeah. You can do this to, you can retrofit old houses

00:03:23.840 | and in a lot of areas there's like, you can basically bring in an energy kind of guide.

00:03:31.040 | Usually like in my area, I'm in Massachusetts, there's a program called mass save and it's a

00:03:35.840 | free service through the state. And you have a energy person that comes in, evaluates your home

00:03:41.440 | and tells you, they'll give you recommendations of what to do. They'll tell you exactly what you

00:03:46.560 | have to do to get your house a little more airtight, a little more well insulated to try

00:03:51.360 | to achieve these kinds of things. And it's not like some massive, huge, you have to spend a

00:03:55.680 | hundred thousand dollars to do it. There's a lot of low hanging fruit that you can really do on a

00:04:00.400 | house that's a hundred years old to make it way, way better. Yeah. And I actually got a listener

00:04:05.280 | from, or an email from a listener in Arkansas who had a similar program where the state kind of had

00:04:10.960 | someone come out, but they also paid for it. So they spent a couple thousand dollars to re-insulate

00:04:16.480 | his attic, which blows my mind. He, he told me in the email, he said, I saved about $2,000,

00:04:20.960 | but I'm not sure if they'll be able to do that for you in California.

00:04:23.280 | I'd say the same thing here with mass save. It's like, I did it on my old house.

00:04:27.920 | That house was built in the 1950s and we had somebody come in. They said,

00:04:31.200 | you need some more insulation and we can blow some insulation in. And they covered,

00:04:34.560 | I think it was 60% of the cost of doing it all. So at the end of the day, my wife and I, we paid,

00:04:39.120 | I think it was like four or $5,000. And we got like, you know, $10,000 worth of work done.

00:04:44.800 | And it made a huge difference after it was done. And it wasn't like a huge expense.

00:04:49.040 | Is there a thing you would call that program for someone searching? Obviously if it's Massachusetts,

00:04:54.000 | it's mass save, but you know, is it energy efficiency or what would you

00:04:57.840 | search online if someone was in Colorado? That's a good question. I think it would

00:05:02.880 | probably be, you'd be searching for something along the lines of energy evaluation, perhaps

00:05:08.000 | energy efficiency programs in your area. That's something along those lines.

00:05:13.200 | So, so that's a big misconception. I think most people think, oh, I got to save money on home,

00:05:17.760 | home energy usage. Let's buy smart plugs. And it sounds like, no, no, no, let's go old school.

00:05:22.320 | Let's make sure your home's airtight. So let's go through that. Are there a few,

00:05:26.160 | even without having someone come out a few places that, that make homes less airtight

00:05:31.680 | that you can focus on yourselves? Is it windows? Is it insulation in the attic?

00:05:34.880 | It's windows, doors, and your attic. Cause oftentimes you'll find that there's not

00:05:40.560 | enough insulation in your attic. And so it's like, you can have somebody come in just,

00:05:43.840 | if it's blown in insulation, it's really easy to do that. And it doesn't cost that much money.

00:05:48.880 | But windows and doors are like the biggest one. Check the air seals on the bottom of your door.

00:05:52.480 | A good friend of mine who's out in California, he moved into a new house and he showed, he sent

00:05:56.800 | me a picture of what it looked like under his door. And he had a gap that was like easily an

00:06:01.280 | inch from the bottom of the door to the floor. And it was just sunlight just coming in. And it

00:06:05.680 | was just like, if you have gaps like that, just go to home Depot, Lowe's, some like local store

00:06:10.240 | and just get some new gaskets that you can put on the bottom of your door seals around it. And

00:06:15.760 | you'll be surprised how much of a difference that can make. Okay. What are some of the other big

00:06:20.960 | kind of 80, 20 principal things to do to affect your home energy? The biggest use of energy comes

00:06:27.360 | from heating and cooling for sure. So if you really want to trim back your energy use, you

00:06:33.600 | really should be like, not if it's the middle of summer and you're trying to stay cool and you like

00:06:38.560 | it 70 degrees, maybe try 72, maybe try 74. It's like even just one degree of difference can actually

00:06:45.280 | make a, like knock your bill down 5%, 10%. So just go a little warmer or a little cooler, depending

00:06:51.120 | on what time of year it is and where you live. That makes a huge difference. The other thing you

00:06:55.680 | can do, uh, that actually costs no money. If you live in an area, like I know in California,

00:07:00.480 | you have time of use rates. That's not everywhere, but if you really want to save a lot of money,

00:07:04.240 | shift how, and when you're spending that money, that energy. So for instance, in California,

00:07:10.400 | time use rates, super cheap overnight. What you can do is you could like over air condition,

00:07:15.120 | your house overnight, and then basically turn the system off during the day and let your house

00:07:20.880 | gradually come back up to temperature. So you're not using any energy during the day when you're

00:07:26.240 | trying to stay cool because you pre-cooled your house overnight. You're basically using

00:07:30.480 | your entire house as basically just a giant thermal battery. Um, it's the same thing where

00:07:34.800 | I live, like in the middle of winter, I could overheat my house overnight and let it gradually

00:07:39.120 | cool over the course of the day during the winter. If I wanted to try to save electricity use with

00:07:43.120 | time of use rates. Yeah. And what you're saying, you know, in California, PG&E gives you multiple

00:07:48.720 | rate options, right? There's like four or five rate plans where we live and where my sister lives.

00:07:53.680 | You can choose different time of use rates in a lot of States. It's here's the rate and that's

00:07:58.640 | what you pay. But just to set some expectations here, it's here's a rate from, and the plan we're

00:08:05.120 | on, which is EV2B or something, you know, they have names and there's so many of them from

00:08:11.600 | midnight until 3pm, we pay the lowest rates. And then from 3pm to midnight, we pay the highest

00:08:19.520 | rates. So our goal is like, if we're going to set the, I mean, as inconsequential as this probably

00:08:24.800 | is in the grand scheme of things, if we're doing dishes, we set the dishwasher and we just time

00:08:28.960 | delay it to run at midnight. Like if we're obviously, if we're charging the car, we charge

00:08:33.200 | it after midnight, all the things we can do, we try to push them off to happen before three or

00:08:37.840 | after midnight. And so definitely PG&E is really nice. They actually run a, they won't do this

00:08:43.200 | proactively, but on the website, you can say, run what my bill would have been for the last year on

00:08:48.800 | all the plans and tell me which plan would have been the cheapest. Oh, that is cool.

00:08:52.960 | And so I will say, if you're going to make a lot of changes, maybe make those changes for a month

00:08:58.720 | and run the simulation on last month, because if you're willing to make changes, the plan that

00:09:03.760 | makes sense might not be the one that would have made sense before you implemented those changes,

00:09:07.680 | but that's a great one. What's the cost difference between the different rates that you're seeing?

00:09:13.600 | So I want to say the cost difference is about 2X on our rate plan. I mean, it's quite expensive.

00:09:22.240 | I'm pulling up the EV2B plan. It is 29 cents from, oh, wow, this is not, oh, I'm not on,

00:09:30.800 | I'm on EV2B. But as an example, there is an EVB plan, which is different. And it's 29 cents from

00:09:38.000 | midnight to 7am, 40 cents per kilowatt hour from 7am to 2pm, and then 64 cents from 2 to 9pm.

00:09:46.000 | So 29 to 64 is the range. But I think we're on EV2, maybe 2A. I can't remember the name of the

00:09:54.320 | rate plan we're on, but I just know that ours doesn't have that exact, those exact time windows,

00:09:59.760 | unless it's changed, in which case I need to reset how we're using our energy.

00:10:03.760 | Where I am, I don't have time of reuse rates yet. I heard they're coming. We just don't have them

00:10:09.600 | yet. I was actually just out in Vancouver, and I was talking to some people that they

00:10:13.520 | have time of use rates up in Vancouver, but the difference is not like what you just described.

00:10:17.760 | It might be like 12 cents versus nine cents. So it's like a really tiny gap.

00:10:23.120 | And another great thing, one benefit of an electric car is that the cost of electricity

00:10:28.800 | is often cheaper than the cost of gas. Another is that in California, at least,

00:10:32.400 | you can get on an electric vehicle rate plan for your home. And that peak pricing is a shorter

00:10:38.000 | window and a lower price. Okay.

00:10:40.560 | So like I mentioned, we go from 12 to 3 at 28 cents. And then we have 59 cents from 4 to 9

00:10:47.280 | and 48 cents at the other times. We're in the weeds right here. So I'll bring it back. But

00:10:52.080 | definitely worth if you are in a state that has different plans, figuring out which ones

00:10:57.440 | make the most sense. I'll bring it back. You said heating and air.

00:11:01.520 | I'm going to go through a few things, my thoughts, because we never had an

00:11:05.520 | air conditioner when we moved in. And so we added air conditioning.

00:11:09.920 | And as we were going through this process, we noticed that there was a lot of inefficiency

00:11:14.160 | in our ductwork, like an incredible amount that we had no idea. And so I was talking with a friend

00:11:19.520 | of mine, and she was saying... She had someone come in and say, "Wow, your ducts are really

00:11:23.600 | inefficient. Everything about your system is bad. We can replace the whole thing for this much."

00:11:28.000 | And then she called another person. They said, "Well, actually, what we can do is we can seal

00:11:31.040 | off all the vents and we can just spray something into your ducts. And it will do

00:11:35.840 | 90% of what replacing everything would have done for 10% of the cost."

00:11:40.160 | So I don't know if you've had any experience with... I don't even remember what they spray

00:11:44.720 | into these ducts. But there are a lot of different options for how you modify and build an HVAC

00:11:51.360 | system. And then I'll just share a few HVAC hacks. And then I want to hear yours, just because I

00:11:58.160 | wrote this list. Another one was we have this room I'm in right now gets significantly less

00:12:04.880 | airflow than other rooms. And so when it used to be a bedroom, if you wanted someone to sleep here,

00:12:10.480 | because it's on the ground floor, you'd have to crank the heat up in the rest of the house.

00:12:14.720 | And so one option is if your ducts are really accessible, you can add a fan in your ducts,

00:12:21.760 | which will turn on when it senses certain temperature air and blow air to try to help

00:12:26.000 | redistribute the air. Or you can get a register fan, which is what we have. So the vent actually

00:12:32.080 | has a fan built in. And when it senses cool or hot air based on a desired temperature, it will

00:12:39.120 | suck that air in faster to try to help distribute things around the house.

00:12:44.160 | So that was one big one that we had. And then the other is just we got a lot of quotes. When

00:12:48.480 | we added air conditioning, the quotes were like two to three x difference for people doing the

00:12:52.880 | same thing. And so I don't know, those are a few of mine. What about what do you think about when

00:12:57.760 | you think about an efficient HVAC system? Oh, man, it's the ductwork is a big one.

00:13:02.480 | My old house, the ductwork head was not sealed well. So all the joints were leaking

00:13:08.000 | air. And like, so one side of the house was always hot and the other side of the house

00:13:11.920 | was always cold. And we were always trying those hacks of you kind of like semi closed

00:13:16.080 | the registers on one side to try to force more pressure to get to the other side of the house.

00:13:20.800 | But when you do that, you can throw the HVAC system kind of out of balance, which is not

00:13:25.200 | good for the system as all. So the idea of the fan is a great one. It's a nice hack.

00:13:30.320 | I'm going to get into the pricey options really quick when I say this, but it's like

00:13:34.480 | heat pump all the things. Yeah. Let's talk about that, because that was a question that we had

00:13:40.720 | when we were talking to all these HVAC people about, do we want to do a heat pump?

00:13:44.160 | And unsophisticatedly came to the conclusion, no. Now feeling like I regret it, but talk about

00:13:51.200 | heat pumps. Heat pumps are the most energy efficient way to generate heat or air conditioning,

00:13:57.440 | hands down. Nothing comes close. It feels like it breaks the laws of physics,

00:14:01.680 | because like if you're talking about electric resistive heat, it's like for every unit of

00:14:06.800 | energy you put in, you get one unit of heat energy out. But with a heat pump,

00:14:11.120 | it's not generating the heat in that kind of conversion. It's just moving it. So it's taking

00:14:16.720 | heat from the air that's outside your house and it's moving it inside the house and using a

00:14:22.240 | compressor to amplify it. So for every unit of energy you put into the system, you're getting

00:14:28.240 | three or four units of energy of heat back out. And that's the same for air conditioning,

00:14:33.520 | if you're doing a reverse of that. So heat pumps are just the most efficient thing you can do.

00:14:37.840 | The downside is they tend to be more expensive upfront. So when you're trying to price it,

00:14:42.560 | it may look like a little bit of sticker shock of like, oh my God, what am I doing? This is

00:14:46.960 | 30% more expensive than this other system. That's less efficient. Why would I do that?

00:14:53.600 | You're talking about timeframes. So it's like, what's that payback period? So heat pumps might

00:14:58.480 | take three, five, six years to earn their keep. But then after that point, you're just saving

00:15:04.320 | gobs and gobs of energy and money after that point. And would that replace a furnace and an

00:15:10.480 | air conditioner unit? Or what does the heat pump replace? It replaces everything. It's like a heat

00:15:16.240 | pump. Heat pump goes both ways. In my new house, I have a geothermal heat pump, which is instead of

00:15:21.920 | extracting heat from the air, it's extracting heat from deep in the earth. There's a 400 foot well

00:15:28.080 | that was drilled in my yard. And they basically just ran a pipe, a tube down that 400 feet back

00:15:35.360 | up again. And it's got a liquid that goes through it. And it's just, it's like a giant water cooled

00:15:40.400 | PC if you know about PCs, but it's like, you're basically just taking, if you want to air

00:15:44.640 | condition, you're taking the heat from the inside of the house, you're dumping it into the earth

00:15:49.120 | and the earth is cooling down that liquid. So when it comes back up into the house,

00:15:52.240 | that's being used to cool your house. And then the reverse in winter, if it's like,

00:15:55.200 | if I'm trying to get hot air in the house, it's extracting the heat from the earth and bringing

00:15:59.520 | it in and amplifying it. So it's one system that does both. Okay. And what would, uh,

00:16:06.640 | like an upgrade cost be if someone just has a standard house, is this like tens of thousands,

00:16:12.080 | thousands? That's a loaded question. Cause it depends. Cause there's so many different

00:16:15.440 | kinds of heat pumps. You can get air source, heat pumps, which are the cheapest. Um,

00:16:19.280 | if you want to go super, I don't want to call it cheap, cheap, but like, they're still really good

00:16:22.880 | is, uh, like a ductless mini split system. That's probably the most affordable way to get

00:16:29.200 | heat pump system into your house with as a retrofit. Um, it's going to still be more

00:16:33.840 | expensive than a typical house. So let's say a typical heating system might cost you $10,000

00:16:38.720 | for an upgrade. This might cost you 14 or 13,000 or something like that. Uh, if you want to flip

00:16:45.680 | into what I did, geothermal, uh, your eyes will pop out of your head. The sticker shock, uh, kicks

00:16:52.480 | in very fast. Um, cause they can get very expensive because it comes down to the drilling of the well,

00:16:58.160 | that whole system, that whole side of it is expensive. The mechanicals in my house are

00:17:03.440 | not the expensive part. The really expensive part is drilling wells and doing all the stuff you have

00:17:08.080 | to do outside to get it to work. But at the end of the day, if you live in a place, you live in

00:17:12.800 | Massachusetts, it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter. You're using your heating and air

00:17:16.800 | conditioning quite a bit. Oh yeah. We're using our air conditioning so little that living in the Bay

00:17:21.840 | area, we didn't have it for the first 12 years. So like, you know, it's temperate enough that we

00:17:27.120 | don't need it that often. The heat also doesn't run that often. So I think if I remember right,

00:17:31.520 | the reason why we ended up not doing a heat pump was that the less you use your heating and air

00:17:36.400 | conditioning, the less, you know, the longer that our return investment will take. Um, and I think

00:17:41.920 | for us, it's, it's days a year that we use a heating and air conditioning. So it didn't make

00:17:47.280 | that much sense. Yeah. That's, it's something I always tell people when they ask me, should I get

00:17:50.720 | solar panels? It's like, I can't answer that for you. You have to figure it out yourself because

00:17:54.000 | it's such a personal thing. Like it makes so much sense for me for solar and a geothermal in my

00:17:59.280 | current place right now. But like where you live, a heat pump, the expense of that would make no

00:18:05.280 | sense. It's a, you live in an area that's very comfortable for large periods of the year and

00:18:09.120 | you wouldn't need an air conditioner for a long period of time. It would take you forever to

00:18:13.200 | earn your money back on that. So it doesn't make sense in your situation. So yeah, a hundred percent.

00:18:18.640 | Well, we'll come back to solar, but general other bang for your buck. Uh, I'll throw one

00:18:24.320 | out in our last house. So one of the nice things we did, maybe, maybe now's a good time to talk

00:18:28.960 | about energy monitoring. Um, we didn't have any sophisticated energy monitoring at my last

00:18:34.400 | condo, except that PG&E, the electrical utility company had smart meters. And so you could buy

00:18:41.520 | something for relatively inexpensive under a hundred dollars. It would let you get streaming

00:18:47.360 | data from PG&E from your smart meter to see how your energy usage was going. And we were like,

00:18:52.480 | gosh, why are we using so much energy? And so we just kind of went around the house,

00:18:56.240 | totally unsophisticated. And we like unplugged the fridge, plugged in the fridge. We tried stuff.

00:19:01.040 | And then we turned off the lights and we, and we saw the electricity in the house drop in half.

00:19:05.280 | And we had these crazy halogen lights that we're using up. When we turned on the lights,

00:19:11.920 | the energy double or tripled, depending on how many rooms were on. And so we realized just

00:19:17.200 | replacing all these lights with LEDs, cut our energy usage in half. Um, now we weren't using

00:19:23.920 | a ton of energy because keep in mind Bay area, not using it. We didn't have air conditioning.

00:19:28.560 | We weren't using a lot of heat, but for us, that was a big one. I don't,

00:19:32.160 | is that something that is unique to whatever lights they put in this house? Or is that a big,

00:19:36.240 | uh, savings option for people? That's a huge savings option for people. I don't think people

00:19:40.720 | realize how much money they're spending on lighting. They don't, it's just, you just don't

00:19:45.760 | think about it. Uh, and I, it's going to sound like I'm making a horrible pun, but I'm not

00:19:49.760 | like with knowledge comes power. Uh, it's like knowing how your energy is being used in your

00:19:55.520 | house. Just that alone is massive. Like you talked about that device. It's like one of the first

00:20:00.800 | devices I got was called a sense where you installed into electric panel. It costs like,

00:20:05.520 | I think when I got it, it was a couple hundred bucks and it costs like a hundred dollars to

00:20:08.080 | have installed. So I think it was like $300 all in. And then it has, I'll say AI that kind of

00:20:14.800 | has hit or miss, but it kind of tries to identify things that it's detecting on your home. So it

00:20:20.080 | will say it can figure out, Oh, that's your age prior HVAC system. That's prior air conditioner.

00:20:24.400 | That's probably your microwave. And it can start to tell you like your current use is this. And it

00:20:29.760 | will also tell you an always on category that you're, you're spending 350 Watts constantly.

00:20:36.960 | It's always running in the background. And when I found that out, I was like, where the hell is

00:20:40.320 | that 350 Watts going? Like, what is, what is using all that energy? So I just, the same thing going

00:20:44.720 | around my house, turning things off. Like there's a period where I would turn everything off in the

00:20:48.560 | house. And I looked at, okay, the house is down to five Watts. I don't know where that five Watts

00:20:52.400 | is coming from, but it's five Watts. And then it was like slowly turning things back on to figure

00:20:56.160 | out where that energy was coming from. And it was similar to you. It was like, there was some

00:21:00.480 | lighting that was running that took more energy than we expected because it wasn't led. Um, there

00:21:05.680 | were, uh, there was a dehumidifier at one point that we discovered was kind of running rogue.

00:21:09.680 | We thought it was on a schedule that was running in our garage, which could get kind of damp. We

00:21:14.080 | thought it was only running a few hours a day, but it turned out it was running like 12 hours a day

00:21:17.520 | overnight and we were asleep and we didn't know it. And so it was like wasting gobs of electricity.

00:21:21.360 | So it was like, when you know where the energy use is going in your house, it can be huge and

00:21:26.160 | you don't have to spend hundreds. You can get a device called a kilowatt. Um, you can buy them

00:21:30.000 | on Amazon for like 25 bucks. And it's basically just like one side's got the prongs, you put it

00:21:34.800 | into an outlet and then the other side's gotten, you know, you plug something into it and it will

00:21:38.800 | show you exactly how many Watts that thing you plugged in is using. So if you're curious, how

00:21:43.120 | much a lamp is using, you can literally plug your lamp into this, plug into the wall, and then you

00:21:47.360 | can monitor how much energy it's using over the next 24 hours and then determine, Oh, wow, I could

00:21:52.640 | save some money by changing that lamp out or that bulb out. So there's some very affordable ways to

00:21:57.360 | track this stuff down. Yeah. When we moved into this house, the previous owner installed a sense

00:22:01.600 | system and left it on the downside. You don't get that always on category gives you no data.

00:22:06.800 | So I don't know where it's coming from, what it's doing, but I could go turn off a lamp and maybe a

00:22:12.480 | lamp's not enough to get a good sense of whether it's having a huge impact, but I can certainly

00:22:17.920 | turn on all the lights off, turn all the lights on, turn on the furnace, turn off the furnace,

00:22:21.520 | run the oven. This house for some reason has 2 ovens and a countertop oven. So we have like 3...

00:22:27.760 | It's like which oven is actually the most expensive? And I always thought it was one.

00:22:32.960 | And I was totally wrong. We tested these 2 ovens. 2 of them were electric and we were like, "Wow,

00:22:38.160 | one of them is actually much more efficient." I haven't gotten to the point to monitor gas usage

00:22:43.600 | to tell whether the oven, the gas or the electric oven is cheaper. So that's like a level 2 game

00:22:48.480 | that I haven't played. But I was blown away testing a lot of things. Since you've done it,

00:22:53.920 | I've always heard, "Oh, you leave the TV plugged in, you leave the computer plugged in. Even if

00:22:59.280 | they're off, they're still draining energy." While that might be true, is that really where

00:23:04.560 | people should focus their time and energy? Or is it really about finding the major things that are

00:23:09.520 | causing drain? It's the major things. It's like you want to hit the low-hanging fruit.

00:23:12.880 | I mentioned my dehumidifier. When we figured that out, it was like, "Wow, we saw our energy use

00:23:18.640 | decrease by 20% just by making that one tweak." When you're talking about a television set,

00:23:24.240 | it might be pulling 2, 3 watts. It does matter. But if you have multiple TVs and multiple game

00:23:32.560 | consoles and things like that, they're all sucking 2, 3, 5 watts. It does add up.

00:23:38.640 | But that's not where I would start at all. It's not going to make a huge dent.

00:23:43.360 | There's diminishing returns. That's when you start to get to that lower tier is around that point.

00:23:48.240 | What about better appliances? Switching from a 20-year-old electric washer/dryer to a new one,

00:23:56.320 | or refrigerators or dishwashers, is that a huge opportunity to save?

00:24:00.560 | Yes, 100%. I mentioned heat pump all the things. In our new house, we got a heat pump

00:24:08.800 | clothes dryer, which uses way less electricity than our previous dryer did. It's night and day

00:24:16.800 | how much power this thing uses, way less than half. There's so many different things you can

00:24:22.960 | get with it. The Energy Star certificates here in the US, there's usually a yellow sticker on every

00:24:27.440 | appliance that gives you an estimate as to how much it will cost you over the course of a year.

00:24:32.640 | You have to take those with a grain of salt, but at least it's an apples-to-apples comparison

00:24:36.240 | between appliances. There's huge differences between refrigerators and washing machines and

00:24:41.760 | things that you can get that way. You definitely want to pay attention to those stickers

00:24:44.880 | and get the most energy-efficient appliance you can.

00:24:47.920 | And is there a rule of thumb or just a general principle on gas versus electric? I know it's

00:24:53.680 | probably very dependent on where you live and rates, but if someone's out there deciding,

00:24:59.040 | "Do I want an electric heat pump or gas dryer?" It sounds like heat pump is probably the way to go,

00:25:04.720 | but let's set that aside and go with the two standard, electric or gas dryer.

00:25:09.280 | How would you think about that decision?

00:25:13.520 | That's a tough one because gas tends to be crazy cheap. If you're just looking at dollars,

00:25:19.520 | it depends on where you live and what your electricity rates are. Gas may just win hands

00:25:24.720 | down, but I would say 99% of the time, it's going to probably be electric. It would end

00:25:30.240 | up being your best bet for something like a clothes dryer, even a non-heat pump version.

00:25:35.520 | Just because they tend to be safer, that's another thing. Gas dryers are

00:25:39.680 | fire, clothing, lint. It doesn't go well together, but electric tends to be,

00:25:47.840 | I would say, the better bet depending on which way you're going.

00:25:51.760 | What about heating? We talked about heating and cooling the house, but what about heating and

00:25:54.960 | cooling the water in the house? I guess just heating because I guess we don't really cool our

00:25:58.960 | water. On that, again, it's the same thing with the gas prices, things like that. Depends on where

00:26:06.560 | you live. In my area, going electric, again, heat pump all the things, heat pump, water heaters,

00:26:13.520 | 300% efficient for every unit of energy you put in with what you get out. Stuff like that,

00:26:19.920 | you can easily save money with an electric system over a gas system, but if you're talking just a

00:26:25.920 | plain old electric non-heat pump version, it still might be in your favor to go gas.

00:26:33.360 | But again, safety, you still have toxic fumes that can potentially leak into your house. There's

00:26:40.800 | health considerations when you're talking about gas inside your house that you want to take into

00:26:44.960 | account. For most of it, I would say it's a heat pump, water heater would definitely be the winner.

00:26:52.240 | Are those tankless or is this a two-by-two matrix? Because in my mind, it was like you could go with

00:26:59.440 | electric tankless or tank and gas, but I guess I never processed that maybe there were two other

00:27:04.560 | options. There's other options. They're often called hybrid water heaters. I have a Rheem

00:27:10.080 | heat pump water heater. It looks like any water heater you would have seen, just a big old tank,

00:27:15.040 | but it seems to have a little hat on top of it. It goes a little taller. That taller portion

00:27:20.560 | is the heat pump just sitting on top of the tank. That's all it is. There's a resistant element

00:27:26.960 | inside the water heater, just like a regular electric water heater. It's a hybrid mode.

00:27:33.120 | You can also get heat pump systems that are also natural gas. These hybrid systems can tap into gas

00:27:40.160 | or electric with the heat pump hat on top of it. There's a lot of options you can look at.

00:27:46.240 | They tend to be more expensive than just straight up gas or straight up electric,

00:27:51.040 | but when you're talking about over the course of 10 years, water heater lasts about 10 years,

00:27:55.760 | they're going to come out ahead for sure. You still have a tank. Is that right?

00:27:59.920 | I still have a 40-gallon tank with that little heat pump hat on top of it. Then to complicate

00:28:04.880 | matters for my new house, it's actually tied into my geothermal system for my heating and cooling.

00:28:10.480 | My heating and cooling system, when it's running, a compressor is running, it's generating heat

00:28:16.000 | from the compressor itself. What the system does is it captures that waste heat from the HVAC system

00:28:22.560 | and pumps that over into what's called a desuperheater tank and basically creates

00:28:27.840 | free hot water for me. Then that desuperheater tank feeds into a regular water heater tank.

00:28:34.000 | I actually have two tanks in my mechanical room. One's the desuperheater tank that feeds

00:28:38.080 | into this heat pump water heater. The combination of the desuperheater, which produces roughly half

00:28:47.360 | of your hot water needs for free, essentially for free, tied into a heat pump water heater,

00:28:53.680 | which is 300% efficient, it's like all of that stuff ties in together. The amount of money

00:28:59.440 | I'll be spending on my hot water in my house, the estimate is like, no joke, it's like 50 bucks a

00:29:05.200 | year or something like that. It's something crazy, crazy low that I may be spending on hot water.

00:29:09.360 | I think now's a good time to tell everyone, if anyone wants to go a little bit deeper on any

00:29:12.800 | one of these topics, I'm pretty sure you have a video on every single one of them on the YouTube

00:29:16.720 | channel and then a conversation that ensues on the podcast. I'll just flag that for anyone here

00:29:22.160 | that if you're like, "Oh, I want to know more about this heat pump water heater." I'm pretty

00:29:25.760 | sure you've made a video about it because I think I watched it. There's a lot more to get there.

00:29:32.320 | A couple more last things here. I read this thing that the Department of Energy said,

00:29:37.040 | which was that if you replace your filters regularly on your air conditioner, it could

00:29:41.760 | save your energy consumption anywhere from 5% to 15%. Does that seem reasonable? That seems like

00:29:48.720 | goes in the first step thing, wow, just filters, cut your energy by 5% to 15%. Seems crazy.

00:29:58.080 | I have not heard that stat. That's new to me, but it makes sense because the older a filter gets,

00:30:04.080 | it gets filled up with lint and dust and becomes less efficient. The system has to work harder to

00:30:08.400 | move air through it. It does make sense that if you change that frequently, the air is going to

00:30:13.040 | move more freely, which means less energy use. It makes sense. I could totally see it being the case.

00:30:18.880 | Are you regularly changing filters? Because I imagine there's got to be at least a decent

00:30:23.440 | number of people listening that are like, "I haven't changed my filter in five years."

00:30:27.120 | For me, my motivation for change, I have really bad allergies. We change the filters

00:30:33.120 | on the set schedule that we're supposed to do. It's like every six months or a year,

00:30:36.960 | you're supposed to be changing certain filters out. Maybe it's every three to six for others.

00:30:40.640 | We're always living by that, mainly because of my allergy problems.

00:30:44.720 | I've been a beneficiary of that savings and I didn't realize it.

00:30:49.280 | The other hack I have here, and then if you have any other little ones,

00:30:53.520 | is that there are a lot of people that leave their water heater too hot.

00:30:56.720 | And the first time that most people realize this is when you have children and one of the

00:31:01.440 | recommendations they have, "Oh, you have kids? Turn down your water heater temp."

00:31:05.600 | And I just realized that there are some people that to get to the hottest temperature they ever

00:31:09.680 | need, it's 100%. And for some people, it's to get to the hottest temperature, it's like 70%.

00:31:14.640 | So if your shower and sink and everything go way hotter than you ever need,

00:31:20.800 | then you're probably spending energy, whether that's electricity or gas, you're spending energy

00:31:25.600 | to heat that tank up so much and then not using as much of it as you need, you're probably

00:31:30.960 | overspending. So I'd say dial it back until you maybe have gotten too far and then you can bring

00:31:36.160 | it up. I remember as a kid, when we were leaving for a trip for a week or two, we would dial the

00:31:43.200 | hot water heater all the way back to nothing and then turn it back on when we got home.

00:31:48.480 | And so that was one of the home energy hacks was when you're gone, now you've got away mode on your

00:31:54.160 | nest, which makes that easy, but you can also turn back the temperature on your water heater.

00:31:58.160 | Yeah, that's a really smart recommendation. On top of which, some of these new water heaters,

00:32:01.760 | like the one I just got from Reem, it has a smart app that you can install to it and check it,

00:32:06.800 | and it will tell you how many kilowatts you're using on your hot water. So you can gamify it

00:32:12.000 | that same way, adjusting the temperature, seeing how it affects the hot water spend you're doing.

00:32:18.320 | But it also has a vacation mode on it. And I've never seen this on a water heater before,

00:32:22.320 | where it's like, I can set a, I'm going on a trip for two weeks. I could do exactly what you're

00:32:25.920 | talking about, put it into vacation mode and it dials the temperature way back to save you energy.

00:32:29.520 | It's the stuff is getting kind of crazy. Is there, have you noticed, is there any way to monitor,

00:32:34.080 | like smart monitoring, like sense or something like that for gas? I have not come across one.

00:32:40.160 | Honestly, it's like I've, everything I've come across is like, I've found add-ons you can put

00:32:44.080 | onto water heaters so that you can monitor your water. Like I had a gas water heater and it could

00:32:49.760 | tell me how much gas I was using on that water heater. But I've never seen one that you could

00:32:54.320 | add to see how much your whole house is using and where it's going and all that kind of stuff. I've

00:32:58.480 | never seen that. I wish there was one. That'd be, that'd be nice. I have seen on water, there's a

00:33:04.640 | flume is one device that my brother-in-law has that just monitors how much water is using,

00:33:10.000 | which in his case, there was a leak in there somewhere and he got alerted to it and it was

00:33:15.280 | cost, you know, it would have cost hundreds of dollars and, and he got an alert and he figured

00:33:20.560 | it out quickly. So sometimes those systems are great as well. Yeah. I've been, I've been using,

00:33:26.000 | I used a fin. It's, it's just like the flume. There's a fin in my old house. I'm going to

00:33:30.080 | have a fin in my new house as well. It hasn't been installed yet, but it's fantastic to be

00:33:33.840 | able to know exactly how much water you're using. And it can detect even just like a slow drip

00:33:37.680 | that's coming from something in your house and alert you to that. It's, it can be,

00:33:42.000 | it can save you a lot of money. Yeah. And I think we'd be remiss if we talked about all this

00:33:45.840 | monitoring. One of the things we originally connected on that was one of the things we

00:33:49.520 | were considering installing was a span, which is like, if you want to take sense to the next level,

00:33:54.720 | you can replace your entire, um, what is it? Why, why am I playing on the name? Yeah. Your,

00:34:00.880 | your circuit panel, you can replace the whole thing and get a per circuit level monitoring,

00:34:06.400 | which I think you've done. Um, is that really just like the creme de la creme of home energy

00:34:13.040 | monitoring? It is the argument of if it's necessary or not comes up a lot because it

00:34:19.440 | is a costly venture to put one of these things in. But where the, like we talked about the sense,

00:34:23.920 | it gives you the information, but it's up to you to really make the decisions or to track

00:34:30.240 | things down where when you have per circuit monitoring, um, it's not just more granular,

00:34:37.040 | but you can also set up automations and turn specific circuits on and off, depending on what's

00:34:42.400 | going on in your home, where, so the, the, these kind of electric panels that are smart can actually

00:34:47.520 | take it to the next step and be proactive in how they're reacting to what's going on in your house,

00:34:52.400 | where the sense is just information that you're getting. Yeah. I mean, it was really interesting

00:34:56.320 | to see, and this dovetails nicely to where I want to go that if, you know, we have solar and we have

00:35:01.120 | a battery, if all of a sudden you lose power sense would automatically go in and say, Oh,

00:35:06.000 | let's turn these things off to make your battery last as not sense. Sorry. Span would go in span,

00:35:11.680 | would go in and say, let's turn all these things off to make sure your battery and your solar can

00:35:16.160 | get you as far as possible. Um, and you know, right now, little things like I need to the circuit

00:35:23.440 | breaker flip that I can go change it, or I want to turn something off remotely and fix it and turn

00:35:27.600 | it back on. Uh, I just want someone to come and actually label them, uh, our hundred year old

00:35:32.560 | house, these circuit break, these circuits are so mislabeled that I actually have no idea what about

00:35:38.880 | half of them are. And we've tried going around the house to figure out what they are. And I have no

00:35:43.840 | idea. So if there is a service where someone will just come out and figure out what they are,

00:35:47.840 | I would love it. Have you done that thing where one person's in the room and the other person's

00:35:51.920 | at the panel and you're like yelling at each other or talking over the phone of like, okay,

00:35:54.960 | I turned it off. Did it go off? No. Okay. Try a different one. And we even bought this thing that

00:36:00.080 | you like plug into the, us an outlet and you just run this thing along the sort of wall and it'll

00:36:06.400 | beep when it's there, but it's, it's not very accurate. Uh, and so we have some ways to go,

00:36:11.040 | but that dovetails nicely. So one way to save money on energy is to reduce your usage. Um,

00:36:19.600 | we talked briefly. Another one is to dial in your rate plan to match your usage,

00:36:24.400 | but a whole nother one is to just produce your own energy. So let's, I moved into a

00:36:29.040 | home with solar, so I didn't have to make a decision, but you've had to make that decision.

00:36:33.360 | So how do you think about when it makes sense to kind of produce your own energy? Uh, you know,

00:36:39.840 | maybe, maybe there's another option. I remember there was this one house in San Francisco that

00:36:42.960 | had a wind turbine on the roof. Uh, but, but how do you think about solar as an option and when

00:36:48.800 | it makes sense? Yeah, I've done this twice. Now I did it on my old house and I've done it on this

00:36:53.360 | house. Uh, the solar just got installed a week and a half ago. I'm a new house. It's still not

00:36:57.040 | turned on yet, but the way I look at it is you have to have a clear set of goals that you want

00:37:01.760 | to do. Like, what are your goals? Are you just looking to save money on your energy bill and

00:37:05.920 | come out ahead? Are you concerned about climate change? Whatever. Are you looking for energy

00:37:10.640 | security? Because power goes out in your neighborhood several times a year because

00:37:15.360 | there's big storms that come through and knock down power lines. What is it that you're trying to,

00:37:20.480 | um, solve for? And once you have that criteria, it becomes very easy to decide if solar is right

00:37:27.280 | for you or not. And it's kind of what I said earlier of like, I can't say everybody should

00:37:30.800 | go solar because it may not fit your goals. So for like me and my personal situation,

00:37:35.760 | it was, I was looking for energy security and to save some money over the long term.

00:37:40.400 | So it's like, I wasn't looking for a short term goal for saving money. But in my areas where I

00:37:45.360 | live here in Massachusetts, we get, you know, ice storms that come through bad storms in the

00:37:49.520 | winter that sometimes knock out my power lines. Um, my old house, I, we still, you know, we haven't

00:37:55.680 | had the closing yet in the old house, but I still have the span in my old house. And I got a

00:37:59.360 | notification yesterday because it was a hurricane Lee just came up the East coast of the United

00:38:03.680 | States and took out power for where my old house is. And I got the notification from span saying,

00:38:08.960 | Hey, your house, your house is on, um, backup right now. Here's how long it will last given

00:38:14.000 | its current use. And since there's nobody there, it was like, it'll last for two and a half days.

00:38:17.920 | So it didn't really matter, but it was, it's you want to get solar. If those are your goals. Um,

00:38:24.720 | and it's really easy to kind of calculate what size of system you need to do, uh, based on those

00:38:29.280 | goals, how much you want to save. Um, you can just dial it in based on your, your, your budget,

00:38:34.640 | what you're, what, how much energy you're trying to knock down. It's pretty easy to figure it out.

00:38:39.040 | Once you've got those goals, listen up, can financing be a good option to defer that cost

00:38:44.640 | or, or kind of make the ROI happen earlier? Or is, is it feel, I never really understood whether

00:38:49.680 | solar financing was like predatory or helpful. It is predatory. If you're talking about, there's

00:38:54.800 | like basically three main ways you're paying for cash, you're getting a loan, or you're doing some

00:39:00.080 | kind of lease. And it's when you get into the lease territory where it becomes very predatory.

00:39:05.280 | Um, and it really depends on what business you're talking to and what they're trying to push. I,

00:39:10.080 | I do not recommend leases at all because what ends up happening is they put a lien in your home.

00:39:14.800 | If you need to sell your house and move away, you have to figure that out. You're either going to

00:39:20.080 | have to have the solar pay to have the solar panels removed. If the new owner doesn't want

00:39:23.360 | them or the new owner has to basically take that lease over from you. And a lot of new,

00:39:28.080 | not a lot of buyers that are buying a house don't necessarily want to do that. So it can kind of put

00:39:32.480 | you into a very bad position. But if you have a loan or a paid cash, you, it doesn't have that

00:39:39.680 | same onus on you. It's like, if you have a loan, when you go to sell your house, you can use the

00:39:43.920 | proceeds from the sale of the house to pay off the loan so that the new homeowner doesn't have

00:39:47.840 | to do anything when they come in. Um, so those are the ways I would recommend doing it. But

00:39:53.040 | the fastest way for payoff is with cash, which of course, very expensive, hard to do. So you can,

00:39:59.520 | there's a lot of loans out there that have very low interest rates. A lot of States across the

00:40:02.960 | country have programs that can help you find extremely low interest rate loans to help you

00:40:08.320 | cover the costs. So there are ways to find very good financing for it. Yeah. And we mentioned

00:40:14.240 | earlier some of the programs that will come in and evaluate your home. There are also a ton of,

00:40:19.200 | uh, rebates and incentives for lower cost appliances in certain counties in California.

00:40:25.760 | You can get, I think we got our ratio, which is like a water irrigation system. It was free from

00:40:32.080 | the County based on, uh, the fact that it helps your home. So I'll just replug that. Make sure

00:40:37.200 | you go look at your utility site, your County site, and see what programs there are. Cause

00:40:41.920 | there's a lot of stuff, whether it's low interest loans or devices or discounts that you can get.

00:40:47.680 | How did you, how did you like that, uh, device? How did it work out for you?

00:40:51.680 | So we have like a drip irrigation system and we just replaced the,

00:40:56.400 | whatever that company is that everyone seems to have rain something, uh, with ratio. And

00:41:01.120 | it's really nice. You can walk around the yard, especially when you're trying to test something

00:41:05.360 | and you just kind of open the app and say, run zone four. And then you go back, Oh, that's why

00:41:09.360 | there's water on our patio in the morning. It's right here. Um, I think similar, I don't think

00:41:14.080 | it's functionally that different, but, uh, you know, when we were talking to someone who was

00:41:18.960 | helping put in a couple of trees, cause some died, uh, we were able to figure out, okay, well,

00:41:23.520 | let's run this. Let's see if it's getting too much. Let's dial it back to 10, 10 minutes instead

00:41:27.600 | of 15 minutes. And it was just a lot easier than, you know, going to a machine and like turning a

00:41:32.800 | dial on how often it runs on each zone. Uh, so I thought it was great. You know, I wouldn't say

00:41:38.320 | it's changed our lives. I think a lot of the smart home stuff, which we're we'll get to the

00:41:43.680 | benefits of it, uh, you know, are that you don't have to think about it as opposed to something

00:41:48.160 | you use every day. Right. Yeah. I was asking cause it's like, that's, I've heard that's a good way

00:41:52.960 | to save on water usage. So it makes sense that they'd be offering it to you for free. Cause it

00:41:58.000 | can really help cut down on how much water is getting used, especially in an area where water

00:42:02.320 | might be a very scarce thing. Yep. It's especially good because it's like, Oh, it rained. We're not

00:42:06.960 | going to run irrigation. Um, and that, that I think is the big feature that the city loves is

00:42:11.840 | you're not going to be using water, uh, when there's rain, which a system that was based

00:42:16.320 | off dials would obviously just not have any knowledge of the rain and it would just keep

00:42:20.720 | running. Yeah. I mean, to add on that really quick, it's like your, your call out to talking

00:42:25.280 | to utilities. It's like when I was just in Vancouver, uh, the utility up there, they give

00:42:31.040 | you a device that's like that sense energy monitor for free. Uh, and when you log into your utility

00:42:36.480 | account, it shows you live monitoring. It shows you how it's breaking down all that kind of stuff.

00:42:40.960 | It's like this stuff doesn't just benefit you. It benefits the utility, which is why a lot of

00:42:45.280 | these places are offering these systems for free. Yeah. And when it comes to solar to come back

00:42:49.760 | there, there are government tax credits that you get, uh, and a lot of things. I'm not an

00:42:54.400 | expert there. Cause we didn't have, you might be, you went through the process, but we already had

00:42:58.160 | it when we moved in. So we didn't have to think about it. Yeah. Well, it depends on where you

00:43:02.000 | live, but like here in Massachusetts, like California is of course sun country. It's like,

00:43:06.720 | you guys had the best programs for years. Massachusetts is actually like not that far

00:43:10.960 | behind California as far as what the incentives were. So there's some decent incentives that you

00:43:15.200 | can get that knock off the cost of what the system will be out of pocket. And then there's

00:43:19.440 | the federal tax rebate that you can get, which knocks 30% off your, uh, how much you owe on your

00:43:24.320 | taxes that you can claim. So when you're talking about, like, if you're installing a system,

00:43:28.160 | that's $30,000, you're knocking $10,000 right off the bat because the federal tax credit.

00:43:33.360 | And then my state knocks, you know, another 7,000 off of that. So before you know it,

00:43:37.840 | the cost of the system just got way more affordable. So that loan we talked about

00:43:42.480 | is much smaller at the end of the day. So it's, it's, there's a lot of beneficial programs out

00:43:47.440 | there, but it's, it varies state to state. Some States offer nothing like absolutely nothing.

00:43:52.320 | So it really depends on where you live. Did you pair, I I'm assuming you did

00:43:56.560 | your solar system with a battery. Yeah. Yeah. I'm personally a believer in solar

00:44:01.600 | and batteries are like, it's peanut butter and chocolate. They kind of,

00:44:04.000 | they go together so well, you kind of have them both.

00:44:05.760 | Yeah. Yeah. We have a Tesla power wall and you know, it's great. You know, power goes off,

00:44:11.440 | you're protected, but it's also great because you can collect energy when it,

00:44:17.280 | even if you don't collect it from the sun, you can collect it during off peak hours.

00:44:21.520 | And so for us, if you look at, we have these three different prices, we never pay for anything other

00:44:28.000 | than the lowest price because we've either we're either producing it from solar or we've stored it

00:44:33.360 | on the battery. Now at 1159 PM is the battery drained enough that if something were to happen

00:44:40.160 | and the power went out, we would, we would be, you know, we wouldn't have a full battery. Yes.

00:44:44.720 | It's kind of a risk, I guess we're willing to take, but the battery is really helpful to shave

00:44:50.240 | that peak cost off. But do you have power going out that much?

00:44:53.680 | No, no, we don't have power, but there are a lot of places where, you know,

00:44:57.120 | that's the risk is if your power goes out and your battery is low because you were using it

00:45:01.520 | to kind of collect cheaper energy, that would be the problem. And

00:45:05.200 | to fix that, I guess you could have two batteries or just not worry about it.

00:45:09.840 | Or in the case of the Tesla, cause I had a Tesla power wall, my old house,

00:45:13.120 | they have the, um, when a weather alert comes out, the system automatically charges itself up.

00:45:18.800 | So it's like, if you had time of use rates and there was a weather alert, it would,

00:45:21.920 | the weather alert would override the time of use rates to make sure that you have enough

00:45:26.080 | power for that power outage that might happen because of big storms coming in.

00:45:30.000 | And how do you generally think about that? You've got Tesla power walls, Tesla solar roofs.

00:45:33.920 | Um, but what do you think you, it sounds like you don't have either of those in this new house.

00:45:40.080 | No, I went, I went with a different brand. Uh, we went with, um,

00:45:43.280 | Enphase, which is a major solar company. They have their own battery system.

00:45:48.400 | We had an Enphase solar at the old house with a Tesla power wall.

00:45:51.680 | This house is Enphase solar with an Enphase, uh, battery system.

00:45:55.120 | And part of the reason I did that and not solar Tesla, uh, power wall was, uh, because of the

00:46:01.280 | integration between the battery system and the solar system, the way they integrate with each

00:46:06.240 | other is, is pretty cool and very sophisticated. So I wanted to go that route. Um, it also meant

00:46:11.680 | that we didn't need to get as much battery as we might need to otherwise, because kind of tying

00:46:17.920 | back to the span, there's all these benefits that you can get where if you have smart energy

00:46:21.440 | monitoring that can control how energy is being used and when, and then these smart systems between

00:46:26.880 | the solar and the battery, the way they work, it doesn't mean that you need 40 kilowatt hours of

00:46:30.720 | storage. You might only need 20 because it's very smart and intelligent about how it uses the energy

00:46:35.680 | storage, which saves you money. So it's like you spend more on the, you may be spending $7,000

00:46:41.520 | or something on the span panel, but you're saving $15,000 because you don't need as many batteries.

00:46:46.320 | Yeah. Or the way I'm thinking about this now is I have a friend who is thinking about getting

00:46:51.360 | solar right now. And he was telling me how many, how much solar he needed. And I was like, Whoa,

00:46:56.320 | now I'm thinking before you go through the process of solar or batteries, go through everything we

00:47:01.280 | talked about before, whether you want to upgrade your heating system, whether you want to start

00:47:05.120 | replacing your light bulbs, like go through the process to dial in how much energy your home

00:47:09.440 | needs and bring that down as much before you jump into the process of how many panels do I need? Or

00:47:16.000 | how big of a battery do I need to support the house? Yeah, you nailed it. It's like, I've had

00:47:20.240 | people come to me and say, Hey man, I'm looking to get this solar panel system. And it's like,

00:47:23.680 | they show me like they live in a large house and they share the plan with me. And it's something

00:47:28.080 | like, you know, a 30 kilowatt solar panel system is like, that is bonkers huge. And it's like,

00:47:34.320 | well, how much energy are you using? It's like, well, we have two EVs and we have all this stuff.

00:47:38.480 | It's like, well, you know, if you replaced all this stuff, you could probably cut your

00:47:41.120 | energy use down by 30%, which means you need a smaller solar panel system. You absolutely are

00:47:46.720 | right. You need to start with trying to figure out exactly how much you can reduce your energy use.

00:47:52.240 | And then that's the number you're trying to achieve. Is there anything on the horizon or

00:47:55.760 | stuff that's come out really recently that's worth bringing up? Cause you're, you know,

00:47:59.360 | I used to stay on top of tech stuff, but not energy stuff. Is there like some new technology

00:48:05.040 | or product or something that you're really excited about in the next few years? Oh, there's a,

00:48:09.040 | there's a few really cool things. Um, one of which is going back to water heaters.

00:48:12.880 | There's something called phase change materials that are basically thermal batteries. You put

00:48:18.240 | energy into it. It changes the material. Think about like water goes through a phase change when

00:48:22.720 | it goes, turns into steam. So you have a phase change material, like it's like a wax. So it's

00:48:26.480 | kind of like a solid, and then it becomes kind of like this soft liquid material. So there's these,

00:48:32.160 | it almost looks like the size of a, um, instant water heater. It's a small little box and it's

00:48:37.120 | made by a company called sun amp. And you pass, you basically have an electric resistive heater

00:48:41.520 | inside of it that charges the battery. And then when you need hot water, cold water just passes

00:48:47.200 | through some tubes, the phase change material and heats up, you got hot water and it's crazy

00:48:52.000 | efficient. And that's just hitting the U S market. Now it's been in Europe, but it's just hitting

00:48:56.160 | the market here. Now. Um, another one is a new battery tech that's going to make home batteries

00:49:03.120 | cheaper and last longer. Uh, there's something called a flow battery. There's a company that's

00:49:07.600 | trying to bring this flow battery to market. That would be about the size of a small refrigerator

00:49:11.200 | that you could just drop off the back of your house. It's 40 kilowatt hours of storage. And

00:49:15.360 | it would be price competitive to like, I think they said a single power wall and it's got

00:49:20.720 | dramatically more storage and a flow battery can last you decades. So it's like you would,

00:49:25.520 | you'd never have to change this battery. You'd buy it and it would work for you for the next 20,

00:49:28.560 | 30 years where a power wall is going to probably hit end of life after a decade

00:49:32.640 | or need to be swapped out. I've also heard that one of the cheapest home batteries out there

00:49:38.160 | is the Ford F one 50 lightning. You can power your house off that thing for like a week or

00:49:44.640 | something ridiculous because the battery pack is so big. Well, someone did a comparison. They said

00:49:48.800 | to get the battery capacity of the Ford F one 50 in Tesla power walls, you'd spend more than you

00:49:55.040 | would. So it's like, but with the Ford F one 50, you also get a truck. Like you get more battery

00:50:01.600 | charging for a less cost and a truck. And I have at least one friend who I'm in this group of kind

00:50:08.400 | of nerdy tech dads. And he was like, I think I'm just going to buy a truck. He lives in a place

00:50:12.960 | where having an extra car is not a hassle. And yes, you got to register it and insure it and

00:50:17.600 | all that kind of stuff. But you know, so he was like, I get a car and the batteries and it ended

00:50:23.760 | up being a much better deal than adding on more power walls. That's another piece of tech that

00:50:27.520 | I'm excited about. It's vehicle, it's called vehicle to grade or vehicle to load. It's like

00:50:31.280 | when you have an EV that has bi-directional charging. So when you plug it in, it can take

00:50:36.720 | power, but it can also give power. It's like my, my Tesla model three that I've got, it's the

00:50:42.080 | largest battery I have in my house. It's like a 60 something kilowatt hour battery. It's like,

00:50:46.240 | if I could plug that into my house, I may not need a battery system like a power wall or an

00:50:50.960 | in phase battery because you have so much in your car right there as a multi Tesla own owning family.

00:50:56.880 | Do you think that's something that can come to these cars without modification or

00:51:00.960 | is it going to take a lot? That's a really good question. I have no idea if when it comes to

00:51:06.240 | Tesla specifically, they're like the one company, they're the elephant in the room when it comes to

00:51:10.560 | vehicle to grid. It's like every other EV company is starting to roll this stuff out.

00:51:14.240 | They're the ones that are like basically not doing it. And part of the reason for that,

00:51:18.560 | I think it's because they have the power wall and they don't want to eat into that,

00:51:22.080 | that market. But at some point they'll do it. I have a feeling it's going to require a

00:51:27.760 | hardware change. So if you have an older Tesla, it may not be able to do this.

00:51:31.520 | But on the, on the, on this note, the new iPhone 15s that have come out with USB-C ports now allow

00:51:37.360 | you to use your phone to charge your AirPods. So, um, they, you know, Apple, Apple is, uh,

00:51:43.520 | is doing this, uh, already also. Um, and speaking of Apple and, and technology and stuff,

00:51:50.000 | let's move a little bit home energy savings. We talked about saving energy. We talked about

00:51:54.560 | producing your own with, with an end goal of both security, but also hopefully some savings.

00:52:00.240 | Uh, the next big category that I know you thought a lot about in your home,

00:52:03.920 | that is kind of the opposite. It's usually where you end up spending more money than saving money

00:52:07.920 | is all around smart home and home automation. And I've gone down a lot of rabbit holes here

00:52:13.040 | in the past few years. And I'm curious how you just broadly thought about a strategy because

00:52:18.560 | I've pieced mine together over time, but you just have a new home and you probably got the chance

00:52:24.320 | to think about every decision from the beginning. How did you do that?

00:52:27.840 | Yeah, I was in the same boat in my old house. It was such a piecemeal patchwork of insanity

00:52:32.720 | that it was so easy to break. So when I was building this house, it was, what is my favorite?

00:52:37.280 | What are the things I'm trying to do? And what is the tech that will work together the best?

00:52:42.160 | And thankfully in the smart home market right now, there's a new system called matter,

00:52:46.400 | which is kind of this broadly used system across all like Google, Apple, Amazon,

00:52:51.520 | everybody's bought into it. So if you buy new smart home tech that is matter certified,

00:52:56.560 | it will work with pretty much any system. It works locally. It's going to be very secure.

00:53:01.680 | So it's like, if you're a privacy centric person that only wants locally controlled smart home

00:53:05.520 | tech matter devices can do that for you. Uh, if you, if you want to jump between Apple home kit

00:53:11.440 | or Google home or Amazon, it's like these devices will interoperate. That's one of the, been one of

00:53:17.120 | the biggest problems up to this point. So for my new house, I was thinking along those lines of,

00:53:22.080 | I only want to get products that are really locally controlled or matter certified and kind

00:53:27.680 | of future-proofed and we'll work together. Uh, but I also wanted to make sure I was only getting

00:53:32.560 | things that had a purpose. Like, I'm not a big fan of like, Oh, I have a smart light. They can

00:53:36.720 | turn red and green just because it can. It's like that kind of stuff is like, not what I was

00:53:41.360 | concerned with. It was more about smart light switches that can turn rooms off if nobody's

00:53:46.160 | there for a certain period of time, stuff like that. Okay. And what is that light switch? Cause

00:53:50.240 | I have, I, we, the things we did here, maybe I'll share what we did when we moved into this house,

00:53:55.040 | we replaced all the light switches with Lutron cassette lights, which at the time seemed like

00:54:00.160 | the best lighting automation system certainly doesn't sense what's happening anywhere.

00:54:04.480 | So that was one big change we made. And fortunately, the previous homeowner had

00:54:09.200 | done a lot of hardwiring. So we ran, we have, uh, a ubiquity Unifi Wi-Fi system and, and including

00:54:18.560 | Unifi cameras that are mostly run hardwired. Those are the 2 big pieces, but I'm curious,

00:54:25.200 | um, you know, from your side, what were the components that you thought were actually useful

00:54:29.520 | and important in your system? Well, the first one was lighting and we went with Lutron for

00:54:34.640 | the new house. Lutron is the only smart home device I've ever used that has been rock solid,

00:54:41.760 | never had a problem, never failed me in any way, shape, or form. It works with every system that's

00:54:46.240 | out there. It is like the cream of the crop as far as I'm concerned. So when I moved in here,

00:54:51.440 | I got all the Lutron cassette for all the switches and then since because it ties into any system,

00:54:56.880 | then I can basically automate things. I'm using Apple home as my base, but I may actually be

00:55:02.000 | shifting that. But it's like, I can set up automations for all this kind of stuff of,

00:55:06.000 | if nobody's home, lights go off. If it's this time of night, certain lights go off. If it's,

00:55:11.120 | you know, room is empty for a certain period of time, lights can go off. So it allows me to set

00:55:15.280 | up those automations in a rock solid way that just always works. And that was the first place I

00:55:19.840 | started. Great. I feel great about my decision to do that because we have the same system.

00:55:24.800 | What about other, I've got ubiquity unify stuff everywhere too. Cause it's like, again,

00:55:29.760 | it's kind of like the cream of the crop when you're talking about security cameras, wifi,

00:55:34.560 | setting up home networks, it really is the best. It's, it's, it's the first time I've used it and

00:55:39.760 | I love it. Yeah. I can't think of the number of times in our last home, I had to restart a router.

00:55:44.960 | I think the advantage of unify system is I have not restarted our router in over a year.

00:55:51.440 | Yep. It might restart at night when no, one's actively using it to upgrade the software. Maybe

00:55:56.000 | that's happening, but it is so solid that I just haven't had to do any restarting or anything.

00:56:01.680 | It's not the most consumer friendly to set up. And I think they're getting better there, but

00:56:06.560 | you know, that's been solid. And then, you know, almost every home internet plan is now unlimited.

00:56:13.360 | So it doesn't really matter, but it is nice that, you know, all the cameras are local.

00:56:18.880 | So, you know, we've just got a massive hard drive in the, in our kind of what's called a

00:56:23.520 | dream machine pro similar, probably to what you have, and you could still stream your cameras

00:56:27.360 | from anywhere, but you're not constantly using your bandwidth to stream, you know,

00:56:32.800 | nine cameras to the cloud, uh, and, and storing them on someone else's server,

00:56:37.760 | which just eats into your, you know, bandwidth use.

00:56:40.640 | And on top of which is recording all the time. So it's like these wifi cameras can get super cheap.

00:56:45.200 | It's like, you may miss the first 30 seconds of a motion event that was recorded because it took a

00:56:50.400 | while for the camera to realize something was happening before it recorded it, where the

00:56:54.480 | ubiquity stuff is just recording all the time. So it's like, if you need to scroll back two minutes

00:56:59.280 | before an event, you can see exactly what's going on. It's, it's definitely, I feel like I've been

00:57:05.120 | bought into the top tier kind of stuff. Um, and if you have rogue devices that are using a lot

00:57:09.920 | of bandwidth, that's another thing I noticed is that the dream machine shows you per client.

00:57:15.360 | So it shows how much bandwidth each thing is using. So if you're trying to track down, like,

00:57:19.600 | why is it like, why is my bandwidth is so high? Oh, there's this one computer that I forgot was

00:57:24.080 | on and it's doing something crazy in the background. You can track that kind of stuff down too.

00:57:27.920 | Yeah. The analytics are really interesting. I, I, you could nerd out about it. And,

00:57:33.200 | and I certainly have, I don't know if you have to, uh, what other platforms are you using?

00:57:37.920 | Are you doing things for locks? Yeah, I have a Schlage, uh, smart door locks that tie into my

00:57:44.560 | Apple home kit system. Um, I use Apple watches, so it's like, we can just walk up to the door,

00:57:48.960 | put our watch to the door and the door opens super nice to have. I was like, I don't like

00:57:53.120 | carrying keys anymore and this makes it super easy. Um, but yeah, it's, it's like I said,

00:57:58.160 | we're kind of focused on Apple home cause we're Apple, we're Apple household, but I'm looking at

00:58:02.640 | other systems. Like there's a home assistant, which is kind of a super geeky, nerdy, uh, free

00:58:08.960 | open source system that you can get that I've been playing with, not user-friendly compared to

00:58:13.520 | something like Apple. Uh, but it's very, very powerful and can do whatever you want. Um, and

00:58:18.320 | there's other systems coming online. Like there's a one called homey from Europe that's just hitting

00:58:23.120 | the U S market now that is crazy, like powerful and really easy to use. Like it is, has a user

00:58:30.640 | interface that is fantastic. So it's like, it's great to see options like that hit in the market.

00:58:34.640 | My biggest piece of advice to anyone listening that likes to kind of nerd out is don't make,

00:58:41.840 | unless you're a hundred percent sure, don't make your home smart home and security system,

00:58:46.560 | everything DIY. Cause it's fun because I feel like I did this in our last home and we bought

00:58:52.240 | this device called connected and we used all of the legacy security system, hardwired things,

00:58:58.640 | brought it online, tied it into smart things. And we had like basically a DIY home security system

00:59:05.280 | that tied into this third party that would monitor it.

00:59:08.400 | But it was all like, just, you know, with your home security system, do you really want it to

00:59:12.960 | all be DIY and based off some scripts that you wrote about what to do? And I thought it was so

00:59:18.160 | cool because it would allow you to pre-program something for your Sonos speakers to say if

00:59:23.440 | someone broke in and all this stuff. But at the end of the day, I just didn't really trust that

00:59:26.800 | it was actually going to work because I had put it all together myself. And we switched to Ring

00:59:31.440 | and we're using Ring for home security. Very happy. But I hate that we have one platform

00:59:38.800 | for security, a different platform for locks, a different platform for cameras.

00:59:44.560 | And my question is, should I just get over that and accept that if they all tie in to the same

00:59:49.200 | platform, it doesn't really matter if your light switches out and your plugs and your

00:59:53.600 | door locks are all different? I would say, yeah, you need to get over a little bit

00:59:58.000 | in the short term. But in the long term, when the thing I mentioned about matter,

01:00:02.160 | that is going to slowly become the industry standard across everything. So at some point,

01:00:07.360 | you'll be able to get some kind of security system like a Ring system that will as a paid service,

01:00:14.640 | that you're getting kind of like that monitored for you kind of thing. And it will just work with

01:00:18.880 | everything, can work with multiple platforms at once. But yeah, you kind of have to get over it

01:00:24.480 | as long as it all ties into one central place. That's the most important thing.

01:00:29.840 | So it's like if you're a Google user and you want it to all go into Google so that on your phone,

01:00:35.120 | it's all in one location, like all your cameras show up here, all your security stuff shows up

01:00:38.720 | in the app, even if it's Ring doing the security side, that's ultimately what's going to make it

01:00:43.120 | more user-friendly. And I'd call out for me the wife acceptance factor, the WAF. It's like doing

01:00:50.080 | the DIY stuff is fun because I'm a geek. I like to nerd out and do that stuff. But I had set up

01:00:54.240 | stuff on my old house that if something broke, my wife could never fix it. She would not know

01:00:59.920 | where to start. And so it was all on me to fix it, which is the stuff I'm trying to avoid in this

01:01:05.920 | house. I'm trying to get it set up in a way that she would be comfortable going in there and messing

01:01:10.080 | with automations and in a user interface that's really easy to understand and use. So it's like

01:01:14.800 | you have to think about the other people in your house as well. So otherwise, you're going to run

01:01:20.160 | into problems. Yeah, there's one company that I thought was really interesting that we didn't end

01:01:24.880 | up using because we'd already wired all these cameras. I don't know. I don't know if you've

01:01:28.240 | seen Deep Sentinel. So Deep Sentinel is a security platform that the friends I know that have used it

01:01:34.000 | love it. And it's similar to a home security system with cameras, except they have people

01:01:40.160 | that are live monitoring the cameras. So someone walks up to your porch to take a package and

01:01:46.000 | someone says... Someone on the speaker is live scene motion and talking to the person without

01:01:51.920 | you there. So it's almost like as if you have a remote security manager. You see all these movies

01:01:58.400 | where like in some rich person's house, there's a room where a guy sits with all the cameras and

01:02:02.800 | is ready to go. It's that except that person's monitoring probably hundreds of homes from one

01:02:08.560 | chair somewhere else. And so it's actually not just monitored like police station will come,

01:02:14.800 | but person will be watching the cameras and be able to proactively do things, whether it's talk

01:02:19.280 | or call the authorities or something like that. Wow. That's kind of neat. And there's also a

01:02:24.320 | little bit of a creepy factor to it to know that somebody is watching my cameras. There's something

01:02:29.680 | a little odd about that, but it's also pretty. Yeah, I think if they ever plug in like that

01:02:33.920 | service, if it could plug into an existing set of cameras would be more interesting than buying a

01:02:38.560 | whole set of new cameras for the home for all this stuff. Have you have you done a lot of with smart

01:02:43.760 | home sensors just around the house to monitor different things, whether it's temperature,

01:02:47.760 | humidity leaks, that kind of stuff? Oh, yeah. Like like in this house,

01:02:52.160 | the air is my air. The house is so airtight that it needs something called an energy recovery

01:02:56.880 | ventilator. That's always bringing in fresh outside air and exhausting stale inside air.

01:03:01.600 | And as the two pass, it's recovering the heat between them. So it keeps the energy inside the

01:03:06.720 | house, but it's giving you constant fresh air. A concern with a system like that is

01:03:11.040 | humidity levels might get too high or CO2 levels might get kind of high. So I've got sensors all

01:03:15.680 | over this house that are just monitoring temperature, humidity and CO2 and particulate

01:03:19.840 | matter, all that kind of stuff. And I'm setting up automations in my house so that if CO2 levels

01:03:25.680 | get too high, the ERV will just ramp up a little bit just to make sure that air is changing as it

01:03:31.360 | needs to. So there's I definitely am in the sensor game. I'm just I've got them all over the place

01:03:36.240 | and sensors for like if a door is open or closed. I'm like I kind of freaked out the electricians

01:03:42.640 | that were here the other day because they went to open the door to the mechanical room. They'd

01:03:46.160 | opened the door and the light was on and they were like, that's weird. And they closed it and they

01:03:51.440 | noticed under the gap of the door, the light went off. And then they stood there for a few

01:03:54.240 | minutes to open the door, closing the door, open the door, closing there. And they didn't understand

01:03:57.840 | what was going on. And I came around the corner and they were like, did you do something here?

01:04:01.200 | And I was like, yeah, there's a door sensor. If you see over there, there's a little door sensor.

01:04:04.720 | It's acting like a refrigerator. So it's like the light comes automatically because the room's a

01:04:08.640 | dark cave. You have to turn the light on. So why not just automate it with a sensor?

01:04:13.520 | And what did that automation was that in Apple's home product?

01:04:17.360 | Yeah, I bought a matter certified door sensor. That's just this little door sensor that uses

01:04:22.640 | something called Thread as its network. And it's linked it directly into home in the home app.

01:04:27.760 | And then I just set up an automation that said, if door open, turn light on, if doors close,

01:04:32.000 | turn light off. Super interesting. I have a room that needs this like a dark room that every time

01:04:37.360 | and the light switch is so poorly located that you have to like reach around stuff. So

01:04:41.760 | that's next on the list. But then I'm like, gosh, couldn't we just use the ring sensors that we have

01:04:47.280 | on all these doors already? But I think ring is is kind of private in that way. Did you do anything

01:04:53.920 | for security in your house? Not yet. Because I'm Apple, I'm looking at a system called Abode,

01:05:00.320 | which is similar to ring, but it ties directly into Apple HomeKit. So it's like any sensors I

01:05:05.680 | would add could then show up in Apple Home and I could use them for different automations.

01:05:10.640 | So that's part of the reason I'm looking at that system.

01:05:12.960 | Any other smart home things I'm forgetting that you've thought about in this new house?

01:05:17.040 | I'm doing Lutron Serena shades throughout my house. And so it's the same thing. It's like

01:05:24.080 | the cost of the shades will never return on investment. So don't take this with a grain

01:05:30.320 | of salt. But I am going to be using these shades with some automations to help

01:05:33.920 | reduce energy costs because sun beaming in your house, if you're trying to keep it cool,

01:05:39.920 | warms the room. So it's like I'm going to be setting up automations based on light level

01:05:43.360 | time of day, stuff like that, temperature of the room where it could automatically drop

01:05:46.880 | the shades halfway if it's close to sunset to keep a room from getting too hot.

01:05:51.680 | I'll be doing stuff like that. Yeah, we bought Bali blinds

01:05:56.320 | through Costco and they're kind of like a DIY setup. And I can't explain why,

01:06:03.040 | but like one of them just never works and it's never the same one. It always like.

01:06:07.360 | So I can't say I support the system, but I think it was probably a third of the cost

01:06:11.760 | of the Serena shades. So like if you're okay that maybe one shade doesn't work sometimes,

01:06:18.160 | it could be a good way to save. But I will say that we have it on automations right now.

01:06:23.040 | We're on Google Home and it'll just drop the shades in the morning. I think you can even

01:06:28.240 | time shift it from sunrise and sunset so you don't have to kind of constantly change the schedule,

01:06:33.040 | raise the shades on one side of the house, drop the shades on the other.

01:06:36.320 | It's not quite smart enough to know seasonally like where is the sun in the morning, right?

01:06:41.280 | In half the year it's coming from one side of the house, half the year it's on the other,

01:06:44.880 | but it's pretty good. Comes back to the sensors. Some of these motion sensors also are light

01:06:50.000 | sensors. So if they're detecting like the lumens of the room, it's like you can say if the

01:06:54.400 | light level is higher than this, drop the shades. So it's like you can set it that way to give it

01:07:00.240 | a little more smarts. And I would also call out IKEA has some really cheap smart shades.

01:07:06.160 | The company Eve also has their version of smart shades that are much cheaper than Serena.

01:07:11.520 | Yeah, the Lutron Serena is the most expensive, but I went with them because

01:07:15.520 | just like the light switches rock solid, they always work. There's never an issue with them.

01:07:20.720 | They get kind of the highest marks you can get, but you, of course, are paying for it

01:07:24.480 | because they're more expensive. But those like if you don't have like I see the replacement of

01:07:30.000 | our shades in the future for these automated ones, like it just feels like that's coming.

01:07:34.160 | So, you know, at the end of the day, 10 years from now, you're going to probably have the

01:07:38.240 | same shades and I might have swapped them out. So you might have made some money.

01:07:41.440 | Perhaps.

01:07:43.200 | This is great. Yeah. I've tried to avoid going down the home assistant, home everything path of

01:07:51.120 | trying to hack together things on Raspberry Pis to make it all work. And it's a little promising as

01:07:56.800 | an Apple family that maybe we could do it all with Apple Home. And maybe we just need to run

01:08:02.320 | something to tie a few things together, but maybe we'll get there soon.

01:08:05.520 | One random question, which I saved because I just thought you would have an opinion.

01:08:10.160 | Do you use like AA, AAA rechargeable batteries at home or have you given up on rechargeable

01:08:17.600 | batteries? Because I feel like we bought all these like Eneloop batteries at one point,

01:08:21.440 | and I feel like they just don't hold a charge. And I'm am I missing something?

01:08:26.880 | You're not missing something. We switched 100% to rechargeable batteries. And there are some

01:08:32.080 | devices we use where it feels like we have to change them every month. It's like bananas,

01:08:37.760 | but it's because lithium ion batteries don't hold a voltage the same way as like an alkaline battery

01:08:42.800 | or a non-rechargeable lithium ion battery. Um, so it's a voltage issue. Uh, so if you get,

01:08:49.200 | if you buy batteries, you have to dispose of they'll last you six months or a year where

01:08:54.000 | the rechargeable ones only go every 30 days. It's, it's incredibly frustrating, but I use

01:08:59.760 | them wherever I can. And I try to avoid having to buy disposable batteries whenever I can,

01:09:05.680 | but I, I've gone back to it because it's unavoidable. Yeah. I would love to avoid

01:09:10.400 | that. But door locks are one where when we use rechargeable batteries on door locks,

01:09:14.880 | it just feels like it's a security risk because you leave town for a week and your batteries

01:09:19.680 | might die while you're gone. Exactly. You buy the disposal one. It'll be good for a year,

01:09:24.560 | but you put the eneloops in and they're dead in six weeks. It's, it's frustrating.

01:09:29.600 | Any, any other random thoughts? I mean, we've covered a lot, but before we wrap on things that

01:09:34.960 | you thought about when you built this new home that, you know, you wish you had maybe known

01:09:40.000 | about or thought about earlier or would recommend other people consider if they're retrofitting or

01:09:45.200 | building a home. This may be kind of a cop out of an answer, but I would say I actually just did a

01:09:49.200 | video on this recently. Keep it simple, stupid, the KISS rule. Don't, don't overcomplicate it.

01:09:56.240 | Keep it simple because as we talked about in the beginning, it's like one of the first things you

01:10:00.880 | should do is look into like energy systems, like energy advisors in your area. The simplest thing

01:10:08.160 | you could do might be just put some extra insulation in the attic and that will save

01:10:11.520 | you an incredible amount of money. You don't have to jump through all the hoops, get all the crazy

01:10:15.520 | new smart home gear, get out home assistant, do crazy smart home stuff to save money on your home.

01:10:21.760 | Just keep it simple. I like it. Yeah. I think every time I put together a system

01:10:26.400 | that relied on like some Android tablet or some raspberry pie, I've never ended up keeping using

01:10:30.880 | it. So I support that advice. And this has been great. I have a few things to, I need to go find

01:10:38.480 | one of these advisors. So that's my next step and see how airtight our home is, I guess is,

01:10:43.680 | is the first step. What, what the big, big options are, because we actually considered,

01:10:47.840 | do we need another battery? Uh, and now I'm wondering, maybe we don't. Before we wrap,

01:10:53.600 | I know you, I've watched a ton of these videos. Where should people find your home base to see

01:10:58.080 | everything you're working on and to go deeper on any of the things we talked about?

01:11:01.120 | If you go to undecidedmf.com, that's my website. It's got my YouTube videos on there. Articles

01:11:08.320 | we're writing. It's got everything. Central location would be there, including the podcasts.

01:11:14.160 | Awesome. Yeah. I I've gone down a lot of rabbit holes. Keep the KISS method in mind as you're

01:11:19.760 | going down the rabbit hole of Matt's videos. Uh, I focus on the big areas and I think you could

01:11:25.920 | probably find a lot of savings and I know you've got a lot of home automation and smart home

01:11:30.000 | videos coming soon on this new house. And I'm very excited to check them out.

Save Money and Time with a Smarter and More Energy Efficient Home with Matt Ferrell

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