(upbeat music) - Hello, and welcome to another episode of "All The Hacks," a show about upgrading your life, money, and travel. I'm your host, Chris Hutchins, and if you wanna make your home smarter and more energy efficient, which will end up probably saving you both money and time, then you're gonna love this episode with lifelong tech enthusiast, Matt Farrell, who has a huge YouTube channel called "Undecided" and a podcast called "Still Be Determined," where he explores how smart and sustainable technology can impact our lives for the better.

Now, as an avid optimizer and homeowner, I've DIY'd a lot of these things we'll discuss, but I am really excited to sit down with a real pro to talk about everything from energy savings hacks to solar, to smart home tech, like cameras, security, Wi-Fi, and a lot more. I'm pretty confident everyone listening to this episode will be able to learn and save something, so let's jump in right after this.

(upbeat music) Matt, thanks for being here. - Absolutely, thanks for having me on. It took a while for this to come together, but I'm glad we're finally able to have this conversation. - We were in the middle of trying to decide whether we wanted to make some big energy savings and monitoring investments, so I was like, "Well, let's wait, let's wait, let's wait," and finally it got to the point that I was like, "With technology evolving and budgets changing, "that's always gonna be the case.

"There's always gonna be another thing "we all wanna add to our homes." - When it comes to smart home monitoring, we're at the very early stages, and all these different companies are rolling out with all this crazy stuff that you can put in your home right now to monitor your energy, improve your battery usage, solar panels, all that kind of stuff.

It's a crazy time right now. - Now, you've been doing this for years, but you're in the process, or maybe you're even done with a new home where you're completely rethought everything, so I feel like, for a lot of us, this happens over time, but for you right now, you've probably thought about every element all in one short period of time.

- I'm actually in my new studio right now. Just moved into the house three and a half weeks ago, so we just got in. It took about two years to pull this whole house together, but yeah, I've thought about every little nook and cranny of this house, all the different smart tech I wanna put into it, the solar panel, energy storage, all that kind of stuff.

It's been a long journey. - I thought one of the things you really, really know well is around the energy and the efficiency of a home, so we'll start there, and then I wanna jump into all the other home automation, smart home stuff, and anything else we didn't cover.

So let's just start at the basics. Can you cover what are the first principles of just building a more energy-efficient home and why that's important? The first place you start is creating an airtight house. You want a house to be as airtight and well-insulated as you can. It doesn't matter what kind of tech you put into it, what kind of solar panels you put on it, if it can't hold onto its heat energy or keep heat out efficiently, your energy use is gonna go through the roof.

So you have to make sure that you're building it right to make sure that it meets certain standards. There's a passive house standard that is very popular around the world. It's gaining ground. I did not build my house to passive house certification, but I took a lot of the underlying principles into mind when putting this house together, and I worked with a company that was able to meet close-to-passive-house-level airtightness insulation values to make sure that every watt of energy I spend to heat this house stays in the house as long as it can.

- And is that something that applies only to new homes or if I'm sitting, which right now is about a hundred-year-old home, is this still something I can aspire to achieve? - Oh, yeah. You can retrofit old houses. In a lot of areas, you can basically bring in an energy guide.

In my area, I'm in Massachusetts, there's a program called Mass Save, and it's a free service through the state, and you have a energy person that comes in, evaluates your home, and they'll give you recommendations of what to do to get your house a little more airtight, a little more well-insulated to try to achieve these kind of things, and it's not like some massive, huge, you have to spend $100,000 to do it.

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit that you can really do on a house that's 100 years old to make it way, way better. I actually got an email from a listener in Arkansas who had a similar program where the state had someone come out, but they also paid for it.

So they spent a couple thousand dollars to re-insulate his attic, which blows my mind. He told me in the email, he said, "I saved about $2,000, but I'm not sure if they'll be able to do that for you in California." (laughs) I'd say the same thing here with Mass Save.

I did it on my old house. That house was built in the 1950s, and we had somebody come in, they said, "You need some more insulation, and we can blow some insulation in," and they covered, 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, I think it was like four or $5,000, and we got $10,000 worth of work done, and it made a huge difference after it was done, and it wasn't a huge expense.

Is there a thing you would call that program for someone searching? Obviously, if it's Massachusetts, it's Mass Save, but is it energy efficiency, or what would you search online if someone was in Colorado? That's a good question. You'd be searching for something along the lines of energy evaluation, perhaps, energy efficiency programs in your area.

That's something along those lines. So that's a big misconception. I think most people think, "Oh, I ain't gotta save money on home energy usage. Let's buy smart plugs." And it sounds like, "No, no, no, let's go old school. Let's make sure your home's airtight." So let's go through that.

Are there a few, even without having someone come out, places that make homes less airtight that you can focus on yourselves? Is it windows? Is it insulation in the attic? It's windows, doors, and your attic, 'cause oftentimes you'll find that there's not enough insulation in your attic, and so you can have somebody come in if it's blown-in insulation.

It's really easy to do that, and it doesn't cost that much money, but windows and doors are the biggest one. Check the air seals on the bottom of your door. A good friend of mine who's out in California, he moved into a new house, and he sent me a picture of what it looked like under his door, and he had a gap that was easily an inch from the bottom of the door to the floor, and it was just sunlight coming in.

If you have gaps like that, just go to Home Depot, Lowe's, some local store, and just get some new gaskets that you can put on the bottom of your door, seals around it. You'll be surprised how much of a difference that can make. What are some of the other big 80/20 principle things to do to affect your home energy?

The biggest use of energy comes from heating and cooling, for sure. If you really wanna trim back your energy use. If it's the middle of summer and you're trying to stay cool, and you like it 70 degrees, maybe try 72, maybe try 74. Even just one degree of difference can actually knock your bill down 5%, 10%.

So just go a little warmer or a little cooler, depending on what time of year it is and where you live. That makes a huge difference. If you live in an area like California, you have time of use rates. That's not everywhere, but if you really wanna save a lot of money, shift how and when you're spending that money, that energy.

So for instance, in California, time of use rates, super cheap overnight. What you can do is, you can over air condition your house overnight, and then basically turn the system off during the day, and let your house gradually come back up to temperature. So you're not using any energy during the day when you're trying to stay cool, because you pre-cooled your house overnight.

You're basically using your entire house as a giant thermal battery. It's the same thing where I live, in the middle of winter, I could overheat my house overnight, and let it gradually cool over the course of the day during the winter, if I wanted to try to save electricity use with time of use rates.

In California, PG&E gives you multiple rate options. There's like four or five rate plans where we live, and where my sister lives. You can choose different time of use rates. In a lot of states, it's here's the rate, and that's what you pay. But just to set some expectations, the plan we're on, which is EV2B or something, they have names and there's so many of them, from midnight until 3 p.m., we pay the lowest rates.

And then from 3 p.m. to midnight, we pay the highest rates. As inconsequential as this probably is in the grand scheme of things, if we're doing dishes, we set the dishwasher, and we just time delay it to run at midnight. Obviously, if we're charging the car, we charge it after midnight.

All the things we can do, we try to push them off to happen before three or after midnight. And so definitely, PG&E is really nice. They won't do this proactively, but on the website, you can say, run what my bill would have been for the last year on all the plans, and tell me which plan would have been the cheapest.

- Oh, that is cool. - I will say, if you're gonna make a lot of changes, maybe make those changes for a month and run the simulation on last month, because if you're willing to make changes, the plan that makes sense might not be the one that would have made sense before you implemented those changes, but that's a great one.

- What's the cost difference between the different rates that you're seeing? - So I wanna say the cost difference is about 2x on our rate plan. It's quite expensive. I'm on EV2B, but as an example, there is an EVB plan, which is different, and it's 29 cents from midnight to 7 a.m., 40 cents per kilowatt hour from 7 a.m.

to 2 p.m., and then 64 cents from 2 to 9 p.m. So 29 to 64 is the range, but I think we're on EV2, maybe 2A. I can't remember the name of the rate plan we're on, but I just know that ours doesn't have those exact time windows, unless it's changed, in which case I need to reset.

How are you seeing our energy? (laughs) - Yeah, where I am, I don't have time of reuse rates. I heard they're coming. We just don't have 'em yet. I was actually just out in Vancouver, and I was talking to some people that they have time of use rates up in Vancouver, but the difference is not like what you just described.

It might be like 12 cents versus nine cents. So it's like a really tiny gap, but 2x the amount of money. Yeah, I just, I clicked the other link for EV2A, and one benefit of an electric car is that the cost of electricity is often cheaper than the cost of gas.

Another is that in California, at least, you can get on an electric vehicle rate plan for your home, and that peak pricing is a shorter window and a lower price. So like I mentioned, we go from 12 to three at 28 cents, and then we have 59 cents from four to nine, and 48 cents at the other times.

We're kind of in the weeds right here, so I'll bring it back, but definitely worth if you are in a state that has different plans, figuring out which ones make the most sense. You said heating and air. I'm gonna go through a few of my thoughts, because we never had a air conditioner when we moved in, and so we added air conditioning, and as we were going through this process, we noticed that there was a lot of inefficiency in our duct work, an incredible amount that we had no idea, and so I was talking with a friend of mine, and she was saying she had someone come in and say, wow, your ducts are really inefficient.

Everything about your system's bad. We can replace the whole thing for this much, and then she called another person. They said, well, actually, what we can do is we can seal off all the vents, and we can just spray something into your ducts, and it will do 90% of what replacing everything would have done for 10% of the cost.

So I don't know if you've had any experience with what they spray into these ducts, but there are a lot of different options for how you modify and build an HVAC system, and then I'll just share a few HVAC hacks, and then I wanna hear yours, just 'cause I wrote this list.

Another one was we have this room I'm in right now gets significantly less airflow than other rooms, and so when it used to be a bedroom, if you wanted someone to sleep here 'cause it's on the ground floor, you'd have to crank the heat up in the rest of the house, and so one option is if your ducts are really accessible, you can add a fan in your ducts, which will turn on when it senses certain temperature air and blow air to try to help redistribute the air, or you can get a register fan, which is what we have, so the vent actually has a fan built in, and when it senses cool or hot air based on a desired temperature, it will suck that air in faster to try to help distribute things around the house.

So that was one big one that we had, and then the other is just we got a lot of quotes. When we added air conditioning, the quotes were two to three X difference for people doing the same thing, and so those are a few of mine. What do you think about when you think about an efficient HVAC system?

Oh, man, the duct work is a big one. My old house, the duct work was not sealed well, so all the joints were leaking air, so one side of the house was always hot and the other side of the house was always cold, and we were always trying those hacks, like semi-close the registers on one side to try to force more pressure to get to the other side of the house, but when you do that, you can throw the HVAC system out of balance, which is not good for the system at all, so the idea of the fan is a great one, it's a nice hack.

I'm gonna get into the pricey options really quick when I say this, but heat pump all the things. Let's talk about that, 'cause that was a question that we had when we were talking to all these HVAC people about do we wanna do a heat pump, and unsophisticatedly came to the conclusion no.

Now feeling like I regret it, but talk about heat pumps. Heat pumps are the most energy efficient way to generate heat or air conditioning, hands down. Nothing comes close. It feels like it breaks the laws of physics, because if you're talking about electric resistive heat, for every unit of energy you put in, you get one unit of heat energy out, but with a heat pump, it's not generating the heat in that kind of conversion, it's just moving it, so it's taking heat from the air that's outside your house, and it's moving it inside the house, and using a compressor to amplify it, so for every unit of energy you put into the system, you're getting three or four units of energy back out, and it's the same for air conditioning if you're doing a reverse of that, so heat pumps are just the most efficient thing you can do.

The downside is they tend to be more expensive up front, so when you're trying to price it, it may look like a little bit of sticker shock of oh my God, what am I doing? This is 30% more expensive than this other system that's less efficient, why would I do that?

You're talking about time frames. What's that payback period? The heat pumps might take three, five, six years to earn their keep, but then after that point, you're just saving gobs and gobs of energy and money, and would that replace a furnace and an air conditioner unit, or what did the heat pump replace?

It replaces everything. A heat pump goes both ways. In my new house, I have a geothermal heat pump, which instead of extracting heat from the air, it's extracting heat from deep in the earth. There's a 400-foot well that was drilled in my yard, and they basically just ran a pipe down that 400 feet, back up again, and it's got a liquid that goes through it, and it's like a giant water-cooled PC, if you know about PCs.

If you want an air condition, you're taking the heat from the inside of the house, you're dumping it into the earth, and the earth is cooling down that liquid, so when it comes back up into the house, that's being used to cool your house, and then the reverse in winter, if I'm trying to get hot air in the house, it's extracting the heat from the earth and bringing it in and amplifying it, so it's one system that does both.

- Wow, what would a upgrade cost be? If someone just has a standard house, is this like tens of thousands? - That's a loaded question, 'cause it depends, 'cause there's so many different kinds of heat pumps. You can get air source heat pumps, which are the cheapest. If you wanna go super, I don't wanna call it cheap, but they're still really good, is a ductless mini-split system.

That's probably the most affordable way to get a heat pump system into your house as a retrofit. It's gonna still be more expensive than a typical house, so let's say a typical heating system might cost you $10,000 for an upgrade. This might cost you 14 or 13,000 or something like that.

If you wanna flip into what I did, geothermal, your eyes will pop out of your head. The sticker shock kicks in very fast, 'cause they can get very expensive, 'cause it comes down to the drilling of the well. That whole system, that whole side of it is expensive. The mechanicals in my house are not the expensive part.

The really expensive part is drilling wells and doing all the stuff you have to do outside to get it to work, but at the end of the day, you live in Massachusetts, it gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter, you're using your heating and air conditioning quite a bit.

We're using our air conditioning so little, living in the Bay Area, we didn't have it for the first 12 years. It's temperate enough that we don't need it that often. The heat also doesn't run that often. So I think, if I remember right, the reason why we ended up not doing a heat pump was that the less you use your heating and air conditioning, the longer our return investment will take.

And I think for us, it's days a year that we use heating and air conditioning, so it didn't make that much sense. It's something I always tell people when they ask me, "Should I get solar panels?" I can't answer that for you. You have to figure it out yourself because it's such a personal thing.

It makes so much sense for me for solar and geothermal in my current place right now, but like where you live, a heat pump, the expense of that would make no sense. You live in an area that's very comfortable for large periods of the year and you wouldn't need an air conditioner for a long period of time.

It would take you forever to earn your money back on that. It doesn't make sense in your situation, so yeah, 100%. - Getting the crew together isn't as easy as it used to be. I get it, life comes at you fast, but trust me, your friends are probably desperate for a good hang.

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In our last house, maybe now's a good time to talk about energy monitoring. We didn't have any sophisticated energy monitoring at my last condo except that PG&E, the electrical utility company, had smart meters, and so you could buy something for relatively inexpensive, under $100, that would let you get streaming data from PG&E from your smart meter to see how your energy usage was going, and we were like, "Gosh, why are we using so much energy?" So we just kind of went around the house, totally unsophisticated, and we unplugged the fridge, plugged in the fridge, and then we turned off the lights, and we saw the electricity in the house drop in half, and we had these crazy halogen lights.

When we turned on the lights, the energy double or tripled, depending on how many rooms we're on, and so we realized just replacing all these lights with LEDs cut our energy usage in half. Now, we weren't using a ton of energy 'cause keep in mind, Bay Area, we didn't have air conditioning, we weren't using a lot of heat, but for us, that was a big one.

- Is that something that is unique to whatever lights they put in this house, or is that a big savings option for people? - That's a huge savings option for people. I don't think people realize how much money they're spending on lighting. You just don't think about it. It's gonna sound like I'm making a horrible pun, but I'm not.

With knowledge comes power. Knowing how your energy is being used in your house, just that alone is massive. You talk about that device. One of the first devices I got was called a Sense, where you installed it into an electric panel. It cost like, I think when I got it, it was a couple hundred bucks, and it cost like $100 to have it installed, so I think it was like $300 all in, and then it has, I'll say AI, that kind of is hit or miss, but it kind of tries to identify things that it's detecting on your home.

It can figure out, oh, that's probably your HVAC system, that's probably your air conditioner, that's probably your microwave, and it can start to tell you your current use is this, and it will also tell you an always-on category, that you're spending 350 watts constantly, it's always running in the background.

When I found that out, I was like, where the hell is that 350 watts going? Like, what is using all that energy? So it's the same thing, going around my house, turning things off. There's a period where I would turn everything off in the house, and I looked at it, okay, the house is down to five watts, I don't know where that five watts is coming from, but it's five watts, and it was like slowly turning things back on to figure out where that energy was coming from, and it was similar to you.

There was some lighting that was running that took more energy than we expected, 'cause it wasn't LED. There was a dehumidifier at one point that we discovered was running rogue. We thought it was on a schedule that was running in our garage, which got in the damp. We thought it was only running a few hours a day, but it turned out it was running like 12 hours a day, overnight, and we were asleep, and we didn't know it, and so it was like wasting gobs of electricity.

When you know where the energy use is going in your house, it can be huge, and you don't have to spend hundreds. You can get a device called a kilowatt. You can buy 'em on Amazon for like 25 bucks, and it's basically just one side's got the prongs, you put it into an outlet, and then the other side, you plug something into it, and it will show you exactly how many watts that thing you plugged in is using.

So if you're curious how much a lamp is using, you can literally plug your lamp into this, plug it into the wall, and then you can monitor how much energy it's using over the next 24 hours, and then determine, wow, I could save some money by changing that lamp out or that bulb out.

So there's some very affordable ways to track this stuff down. We moved into this house. The previous owner installed a sense system and left it, and on the downside, that always-on category gives you no data. 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 lamp's not enough to get a good sense of whether it's having a huge impact, but I can certainly turn on all the lights off, turn all the lights on, turn on the furnace, turn off the furnace, run the oven.

This house, for some reason, has two ovens and a countertop oven. It's like, which oven is actually the most expensive? And I always thought it was one, and I was totally wrong. We tested these two ovens. Two of them were electric, and we were like, wow, one of them is actually much more efficient.

I haven't gotten to the point to monitor gas usage to tell whether the oven, the gas or the electric oven is cheaper, so that's like a level two game that I haven't played, but I was blown away testing a lot of things. I've always heard, oh, you know, you leave the TV plugged in, you leave the computer plugged in.

Even if they're off, they're still draining energy. While that might be true, is that really where people should focus their time and energy, or is it really about finding the major things that are causing drain? It's the major things. It's like, you want to hit the low hanging fruit.

Like I mentioned my dehumidifier. When we figured that out, it was like, wow, we saw our energy use decrease by 20% just by making that one tweak. When you're talking about a television set, it might be pulling two, three watts. It does matter, but if you have multiple TVs and multiple game consoles and things like that, they're all sucking two, three, five watts.

It does add up, but that's not where I would start at all. It's not going to make a huge dent. There's like diminishing returns, and that's when you start to get to that lower tier is around that point. And what about better appliances, like switching from a 20-year-old electric washer/dryer to a new one or refrigerators or dishwashers?

Is that a huge opportunity to save? Yes, 100%. Especially, like I mentioned, heat pump all the things. In our new house, we got a heat pump close dryer, which uses way less electricity than our previous dryer did. It's night and day how much power this thing uses. Way less than half.

There's so many different things you can get with it. The Energy Star certificates here in the US, there's usually a yellow sticker on every appliance that gives you an estimate as to how much it will cost you over the course of a year. You have to take those with a grain of salt, but at least it's an apples-to-apples comparison between appliances, and there's huge differences between refrigerators and washing machines and things that you can get that way.

So you definitely want to pay attention to those stickers, get the most energy-efficient appliance you can. And is there a rule of thumb or just a general principle on gas versus electric? I know it's probably very dependent on where you live and rates, but if someone's out there deciding, do I want an electric heat pump or gas dryer?

Sounds like heat pump's probably the way to go, but let's set that aside and go with the two standard, electric or gas dryer. How would you think about that decision? That's a tough one because gas tends to be crazy cheap. If you're just looking at dollars, it depends on where you live and what your electricity rates are.

Gas may just win hands down, but I would say 99% of the time, electric would end up being your best bet for something like a clothes dryer, even a non-heat pump version, just because they tend to be safer. That's another thing. Fire, clothing, lint, doesn't go well together, but electric tends to be, I would say, the better bet depending which way you're going.

And we talked about heating and cooling the house, but what about heating and cooling the water in the house? I guess just heating. We don't really cool our water. Yeah. (laughs) On that, again, it's the same thing with the gas prices, things like that. Depends on where you live.

In my area, going electric, again, heat pump, all the things, heat pump, water heaters, 300% efficient for every unit of energy you put in with what you get out. Stuff like that, you can easily save money with an electric system over a gas system. But if you're talking just a plain old electric, non-heat pump version, it still might be in your favor to go gas.

But again, safety, you still have toxic fumes that can potentially leak into your house. So there's health considerations when you're talking about gas inside your house that you want to take into account. But for most of it, I would say it's a heat pump, water heater would definitely be the winner.

- And are those tankless or is it kind of two by two matrix? 'Cause in my mind, it was like, you could go with electric tankless or tank and gas, but I guess I never processed that maybe there were two other options. There's other options. They're often called hybrid water heaters.

I have a Rheem heat pump water heater. It looks like any water heater you would have seen, just a big old tank, but it seems to have a little hat on top of it. It goes a little taller. That taller portion is the heat pump just sitting on top of the tank.

That's all it is. And a resistant element inside the water heater, just like a regular electric water heater, is kind of a hybrid mode. And you can also get heat pump systems that are also natural gas. So these hybrid systems can tap into gas or electric with the heat pump hat on top of it.

So there's a lot of options you can look at. They tend to be more expensive than just straight up gas or straight up electric. But when you're talking about over the course of 10 years, they're gonna come out ahead for sure. But you still have a tank. Yes, I still have a 40 gallon tank with that little heat pump hat on top of it.

And then to complicate matters for my new house, it's actually tied into my geothermal system. So my heating and cooling system, when a compressor is running, it's generating heat from the compressor itself. So what the system does is it captures that waste heat from the HVAC system and pumps that over into what's called the desuperheater tank and basically creates free hot water for me.

And then that desuperheater tank feeds into a regular water heater tank. So I actually have two tanks in my mechanical room. One's the desuperheater tank that feeds into this heat pump water heater. And so the combination of the desuperheater, which produces roughly half of your hot water needs, essentially for free, tied into a heat pump water heater, which is 300% efficient, it's like all of that stuff ties in together.

The amount of money I'll be spending on my hot water in my house, the estimate is no joke, 50 bucks a year or something like that. It's something crazy low that I may be spending on hot water. I think now's a good time to tell everyone, if anyone wants to go a little bit deeper on any one of these topics, I'm pretty sure you have a video on every single one of them on the YouTube channel and then a conversation that ensues on the podcast.

So I'll just flag that for anyone here that if you're like, "Oh, I wanna know more about this heat pump water heater." I'm pretty sure you've made a video about it because I think I watched it. And so there's a lot more to get there. A couple more last things here.

So I read this thing that the Department of Energy said, which was that if you replace your filters regularly on your air conditioner, it could save your energy consumption anywhere from five to 15%. That seems like first step. Wow, just filters, cut your energy by five to 15%. Seems kind of crazy.

I have not heard that stat, that's new to me, but it makes sense because the older a filter gets, it gets filled up with lint and dust and becomes less efficient. So the system has to work harder to move air through it. So it does make sense that if you change that frequently, the air is gonna move more freely, which means less energy use.

It makes sense, I could totally see it being 15%. And are you regularly changing filters? 'Cause I imagine there's gotta be at least a decent number of people listening that are like, "I haven't changed my filter in five years." For me, my motivation for change, I have really bad allergies.

We change the filters on the set schedule that we're supposed to do. It's like every six months or a year, you're supposed to be changing filters out. Maybe it's every three to six. For others, we're always living by that, mainly because of my allergy problems. So I've been a beneficiary of that savings and I didn't realize it.

The other hack I have here, and then if you have any other little ones, is that there are a lot of people that leave their water heater too hot. And the first time that most people realize this is when you have children and one of the recommendations they have, "Oh, you have kids?

Turn down your water heater." And I just realized that there are some people that to get to the hottest temperature they ever need, it's 100%. And for some people, it's to get to the hottest temperature, it's like 70%. So if your shower and sink and everything go way hotter than you ever need, then you're probably spending energy, whether that's electricity or gas, you're spending energy to heat that tank up so much and then not using as much of it as you need, you're probably overspending.

So I'd say dial it back until you maybe have gotten too far and then you can bring it up. I remember as a kid, when we were leaving for a trip for a week or two, we would dial the hot water heater all the way back to nothing and then turn it back on when we got home.

And so that was like one of the home energy hacks. Now, you've got away mode on your Nest, which makes that easy, but you can also turn back the temperature on your water heater. - That's a really smart recommendation. On top of which, some of these new water heaters, like the one I just got from Reem, it has a smart app that you can install to it and check it.

And it will tell you how many kilowatts you're using on your hot water. So you can gamify it that same way, adjusting the temperature, seeing how it affects the hot water spend you're doing. But it also has a vacation mode on it. I've never seen this on a water heater before where I'm going on a trip for two weeks, I could do exactly what you're talking about, put it into vacation mode and it dials the temperature way back to save you energy.

This stuff is getting crazy. Is there any way to monitor like smart monitoring for gas? I have not come across one, honestly. Everything I've come across, I've found add-ons you can put onto water heaters so that you can monitor your water. I had a gas water heater and it could tell me how much gas I was using on that water heater, but I've never seen one that you could add to see how much your whole house is using and where it's going and all that kind of stuff.

I've never seen that. I wish there was one, that would be nice. I have seen on water, there's a flume is one device that my brother-in-law has that just monitors how much water is using, which in his case, there was a leak somewhere and he got alerted to it and it would have cost hundreds of dollars and he got an alert and he figured it out quickly.

So sometimes those systems are great as well. I used a fin, it's just like the flume. There's a fin in my old house, I'm gonna have a fin in my new house as well. It hasn't been installed yet, but it's fantastic to be able to know exactly how much water you're using and it can detect even just a slow drip that's coming from something in your house and alert you to that.

It can save you a lot of money, for sure. - We'd be remiss if we talked about all this monitoring. One of the things we were considering installing was a span, which if you wanna take sense to the next level, you can replace your entire circuit panel and get a per circuit level monitoring, which I think you've done.

Is that really just the creme de la creme of home energy monitoring? - It is. The argument of if it's necessary or not comes up a lot because it is a costly venture to put one of these things in, but we talked about the sense, it gives you the information, but it's up to you to really make the decisions or to track things down, where when you have per circuit monitoring, it's not just more granular, but you can also set up automations and turn specific circuits on and off, depending on what's going on in your home.

So these electric panels that are smart can actually take it to the next step and be proactive in how they're reacting to what's going on in your house, where the sense is just information that you're getting. - It was really interesting to see, and this dovetails nicely to where I want to go, that if we have solar and we have a battery, if all of a sudden you lose power, Spann would go in and say, let's turn all these things off to make sure your battery and your solar can get you as far as possible.

And little things like the circuit breaker flip that I can go change it, or I want to turn something off remotely and fix it and turn it back on. I just want someone to come and actually label them. Our hundred-year-old house circuits are so mislabeled that I actually have no idea what about half of them are.

And we've tried going around the house to figure out what they are, and I have no idea. So if there is a service where someone will just come out and figure out what they are, I would love it. - Have you done that thing where one person's in the room and the other person's at the panel and you're like yelling at each other or talking over the phone, I'm like, okay, I turned it off.

Did it go off? No, okay, try a different one. - And we even bought this thing that you like plug into an outlet and you just run this thing along the sort of wall and it'll beep when it's there, but it's not very accurate. And so we have some ways to go, but that dovetails nice.

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Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com/deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. So one way to save money on energy is to reduce your usage. We talked briefly, another one is to dial in at your rate plan to match your usage, but a whole other one is to just produce your own energy.

So I moved into a home with solar, so I didn't have to make a decision, but you've had to make that decision. So how do you think about when it makes sense to produce your own energy? Maybe there's another option. I remember there was this one house in San Francisco that had a wind turbine on the roof, but how do you think about solar as an option and when it makes sense?

I've done this twice now. I did it on my old house and I did it on this house. The solar just got installed a week and a half ago on my new house. It's still not turned on yet, but the way I look at it is you have to have a clear set of goals that you want to do.

What are your goals? Are you just looking to save money on your energy bill, come out ahead? Are you concerned about climate change? Are you looking for energy security because power goes out in your neighborhood several times a year because there's big storms that come through and knock down power lines?

What is it that you're trying to solve for? And once you have that criteria, it becomes very easy to decide if solar is right for you or not. Kind of what I said earlier, I can't say everybody should go solar because it may not fit your goals. For like me in my personal situation, I was looking for energy security and to save some money over the long term.

I wasn't looking for a short-term goal for saving money. But in my areas where I live here in Massachusetts, we get ice storms that come through, bad storms in the winter that sometimes knock out power lines. We haven't had the closing yet in the old house, but I still have the span in my old house.

And I got a notification yesterday 'cause it was a hurricane Lee just came up the East Coast of the United States and took out power for where my old house is. And I got the notification from span saying, "Hey, your house is on backup right now. Here's how long it will last given its current use." And since there's nobody there, it'll last for two and a half days.

So it didn't really matter. You wanna get solar if those are your goals. And it's really easy to calculate what size of system you need to do based on those goals, how much you wanna save. You can just dial it in based on your budget, how much energy you're trying to knock down.

It's pretty easy to figure it out once you've got those goals listed up. - Can financing be a good option to defer that cost or make the ROI happen earlier? I never really understood whether solar financing was predatory or helpful. - It is predatory. There's basically three main ways.

You're paying for cash, you're getting a loan, or you're doing some kind of lease. And it's when you get into the lease territory where it becomes very predatory. And it really depends on what business you're talking to and what they're trying to push. I do not recommend leases at all because what ends up happening is they put a lien in your home.

If you need to sell your house and move away, you have to figure that out. You're either gonna have to pay to have the solar panels removed if the new owner doesn't want them or the new owner has to basically take that lease over from you. And not a lot of buyers that are buying a house necessarily wanna do that.

So it can kind of put you into a very bad position. Or if you have a loan or paid cash, it doesn't have that same onus on you. If you have a loan, when you go to sell your house, you can use the proceeds from the sale of the house to pay off the loan so that the new homeowner doesn't have to do anything when they come in.

So those are the ways I would recommend doing it. But the fastest way for payoff is with cash, which of course, very expensive, hard to do. There's a lot of loans out there that have very low interest rates. A lot of states across the country have programs that can help you find extremely low interest rate loans to help you cover the costs.

So there are ways to find very good financing for it. - And we mentioned earlier some of the programs that'll come in and evaluate your home. There are also a ton of rebates and incentives for lower cost appliances. I think we got our Rachio, which is a water irrigation system.

It was free from the county based on the fact that it helps your home. So I'll just replug that. Make sure you go look at your utility site, your county site, and see what programs there are. 'Cause there's a lot of stuff, whether it's low interest loans or devices or discounts that you can get.

How did you like that device? How did it work out for you? - So we have a drip irrigation system and we just replaced whatever that company is that everyone seems to have, Rain Something, with Rachio. And it's really nice. You can walk around the yard, especially when you're trying to test something and you just open the app and say run zone four.

And then you're like, oh, that's why there's water on our patio in the morning. It's right here. I don't think it's functionally that different, but when we were talking to someone who was helping put in a couple trees 'cause some died, we were able to figure out, okay, well, let's run this.

Let's see if it's getting too much. Let's dial it back to 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes. And it was just a lot easier than going to a machine and turning a dial on how often it runs on each zone. So I thought it was great. I wouldn't say it's changed our lives.

I think a lot of the smart home stuff, which we'll get to, the benefits of it are that you don't have to think about it as opposed to something you use every day. - I was asking 'cause I've heard that's a good way to save on water usage. So it makes sense that they'd be offering it to you for free 'cause it can really help cut down on how much water is getting used, especially in an area where water might be a very scarce thing.

- It's especially good because it's like, oh, it rained. We're not gonna run irrigation. And that is the big feature that the city loves is you're not gonna be using water when there's rain, which a system that was based off dials would obviously just not have any knowledge of the rain and it would just keep running.

- And on that really quick, it's like your call out to talking to utilities. When I was just in Vancouver, the utility up there, they give you a device that's like that Sense Energy Monitor for free. And when you log into your utility account, it shows you live monitoring.

It shows you how it's breaking down, all that kind of stuff. This stuff doesn't just benefit you. It benefits the utility, which is why a lot of these places are offering these systems for free. When it comes to solar, there are government tax credits that you get and a lot of things.

I'm not an expert there. You might be, you went through the process, but we already had it when we moved in. So we didn't have to think about it. Well, it depends on where you live. California is of course, sun country. You guys had the best programs for years.

Massachusetts is actually not that far behind California as far as what the incentives were. So there's some decent incentives that you can get to knock off the cost of what the system will be out of pocket. And then there's the federal tax rebate that you can get, which knocks 30% off how much you owe on your taxes that you can claim.

So when you're talking about installing a system that's $30,000, you're knocking $10,000 right off the bat 'cause of the federal tax credit. And then my state knocks another 7,000 off of that. So before you know it, the cost of the system just got way more affordable. So that loan we talked about is much smaller at the end of the day.

There's a lot of beneficial programs out there, but it varies state to state. Some states offer nothing, absolutely nothing. So it really depends on where you live. - Did you pair, I'm assuming you did, your solar system with a battery? - Oh yeah. I'm personally a believer in solar and batteries are like peanut butter and chocolate.

They go together so well, you gotta have them both. - We have a Tesla Powerwall and it's great. Power goes off, you're protected. But it's also great because you can collect energy. Even if you don't collect it from the sun, you can collect it during off-peak hours. So for us, we have these three different prices.

We never pay for anything other than the lowest price because we're either producing it from solar or we've stored it on the battery. Now at 11.59 p.m. is the battery drained enough that if something were to happen and the power went out, we wouldn't have a full battery, yes.

It's kind of a risk we're willing to take, but the battery's really helpful to shave that peak cost off. - But do you have power going out that much? - No, we don't, but there are a lot of places where that's the risk is if your power goes out and your battery's low because you were using it to collect cheaper energy, that would be the problem.

And to fix that, I guess you could have two batteries or just not worry about it. - Or in the case of the Tesla, 'cause I had a Tesla Powerwall in my old house, when a weather alert comes out, the system automatically charges itself up. So it's like if you had time of use rates and there was a weather alert, the weather alert would override the time of use rates to make sure that you have enough power for that power outage that might happen because a big storm's coming up.

- And how do you generally think about that? We've got Tesla Powerwalls, Tesla solar roofs. What do you think? It sounds like you don't have either of those in this new house. - No, I went with a different brand. We went with Enphase, which is a major solar company.

They have their own battery system. We had an Enphase solar at the old house with a Tesla Powerwall. This house is Enphase solar with an Enphase battery system. And part of the reason I did that, not solar, Tesla Powerwall, because of the integration between the battery system and the solar system, the way they integrate with each other is pretty cool and very sophisticated.

So I wanted to go that route. It also meant that we didn't need to get as much battery as we might need to otherwise, because tying back to the span, there's all these benefits that you can get where if you have smart energy monitoring that can control how energy is being used and when, and then these smart systems between the solar and the battery, the way they work.

It doesn't mean that you need 40 kilowatt hours of storage. You might only need 20 because it's very smart and intelligent about how it uses the energy storage, which saves you money. You may be spending $7,000 or something on the span panel, but you're saving $15,000 'cause you don't need as many batteries.

The way I'm thinking about this now is I have a friend who is thinking about getting solar right now. And he was telling me how much solar he needed. And I was like, whoa, now I'm thinking, before you go through the process of solar or batteries, go through everything we talked about before.

Whether you wanna upgrade your heating system, whether you wanna start replacing your light bulbs, go through the process to dial in how much energy your home needs and bring that down as much before you jump into the process of how many panels do I need or how big of a battery do I need to support the house.

- Yeah, you nailed it. I've had people come to me and say, "Hey man, I'm looking to get this solar panel system." And they live in a large house. They share the plan with me. And it's something like a 30 kilowatt solar panel system is bonkers huge. Well, how much energy are you using?

We have two EVs and we have all this stuff. Well, you know, if you replaced all this stuff, you could probably cut your energy use down by 30%, which means you need a smaller solar panel system. You absolutely are right. You need to start with trying to figure out exactly how much you can reduce your energy use.

And then that's the number you're trying to achieve. Is there anything on the horizon or stuff that's come out really recently that's worth bringing up? 'Cause I used to stay on top of tech stuff, but not energy stuff. Is there like some new technology or product or something that you're really excited about in the next few years?

There's a few really cool things. One of which is going back to water heaters. There is something called phase change materials that are basically thermal batteries. You put energy into it, it changes the material. Think about like water goes through a phase change when it goes, turns into steam.

So you have a phase change material like it's like a wax. So it's kind of like a solid and then it becomes this soft liquidy material. It almost looks like the size of instant water heaters, a small little box. And it's made by a company called Sunamp. You basically have an electric resistive heater inside of it that charges the battery.

And then when you need hot water, cold water just passes through some tubes, the phase change material and it heats up, you got hot water. And it's crazy efficient. And that's just hitting the US market now. It's been in Europe, but it's just hitting the market here now. Another one is new battery tech that's gonna make home batteries cheaper and last longer.

There's something called a flow battery. There's a company that's trying to bring this flow battery to market that would be about the size of a small refrigerator. You could just drop off the back of your house. It's 40 kilowatt hours of storage and it would be price competitive to, I think they said a single power wall and it's got dramatically more storage and a flow battery can last you decades.

So you'd never have to change this battery. You'd buy it and it would work for you for the next 20, 30 years. Where a power wall is gonna probably hit end of life after a decade or need to be swapped out. - I've also heard that one of the cheapest home batteries out there is the Ford F-150 Lightning.

(laughing) You can power your house off that thing for like a week or something ridiculous 'cause the battery pack is so big. - Well, someone did a comparison. They said to get the battery capacity of the Ford F-150 in Tesla power walls, you'd spend more than you would with the Ford F-150.

You also get a truck. You get more battery charging for a less cost and a truck. I have at least one friend who I'm in this group of kind of nerdy tech dads. And he was like, "I think I'm just gonna buy a truck." He lives in a place where having an extra car is not a hassle.

And yes, you gotta register it and insure it and all that kind of stuff. But he was like, "I get a car and the batteries." And it ended up being a much better deal than adding on more power walls. That's another piece of tech that I'm excited about. It's called vehicle to grid or vehicle to load.

It's like when you have an EV that has bi-directional charging. So when you plug it in, it can take power, but it can also give power. It's like my Tesla Model 3 that I've got, it's the largest battery I have in my house. It's a 60 something kilowatt hour battery.

If I could plug that into my house, I may not need a battery system like a power wall or an in-phase battery because you have so much in your car right there. As a multi-Tesla owning family, do you think that's something that can come to these cars without modification or is it gonna take a lot?

That's a really good question. I have no idea. When it comes to Tesla specifically, they're the one company, they're the elephant in the room when it comes to vehicle to grid. It's like every other EV company is starting to roll this stuff out. They're the ones that are basically not doing it.

And part of the reason for that, I think, is because they have the power wall and they don't wanna eat into that market. But at some point they'll do it. I have a feeling it's gonna require a hardware change. So if you have an older Tesla, it may not be able to do this.

But on this note, the new iPhone 15s that have come out with USB-C ports now allow you to use your phone to charge your AirPods. So Apple is doing this already also. And speaking of Apple and technology and stuff, let's move a little bit. Home energy savings. We talked about saving energy.

We talked about producing your own. With an end goal of both security, but also hopefully some savings. The next big category that I know you thought a lot about in your home is kind of the opposite. It's usually where you end up spending more money than saving money. It's all around smart home and home automation.

And I've gone down a lot of rabbit holes here in the past few years. And I'm curious how you just broadly thought about a strategy because I've pieced mine together over time, but you just have a new home and you probably got the chance to think about every decision from the beginning.

How did you do that? - I was in the same boat in my old house. It was such a piecemeal patchwork of insanity that it was so easy to break. So when I was building this house, it was what are the things I'm trying to do? And what is the tech that will work together the best?

And thankfully in the smart home market right now, there's a new system called Matter, which is this broadly used system across Google, Apple, Amazon, everybody's bought into it. So if you buy new smart home tech that is Matter certified, it will work with pretty much any system. It works locally.

It's going to be very secure. So if you're a privacy centric person that only wants locally controlled smart home tech, Matter devices can do that for you. If you want to jump between Apple HomeKit or Google Home or Amazon, these devices will interoperate. That's been one of the biggest problems up to this point.

So for my new house, I was thinking along those lines of, I only want to get products that are really locally controlled, are Matter certified and kind of future-proofed and will work together. But I also wanted to make sure I was only getting things that had a purpose. I'm not a big fan of, oh, I have a smart light that can turn red and green just because it can.

That kind of stuff is not what I was concerned with. It was more about smart light switches that can turn rooms off if nobody's there for a certain period of time, stuff like that. - Okay, and what is that light switch? 'Cause when we moved into this house, we replaced all the light switches with Lutron Caseta lights, which at the time seemed like the best lighting automation system.

Certainly doesn't sense what's happening anywhere. So that was one big change we made. And fortunately, the previous homeowner had done a lot of hard wiring. So we have a Ubiquiti Unify Wi-Fi system, including Unify cameras that are mostly run hardwired. Those are the two big pieces, but I'm curious from your side, what were the components that you thought were actually useful and important in your system?

- Well, the first one was light. And we went with Lutron for the new house. Lutron is the only smart home device I've ever used that has been rock solid, never had a problem, never failed in any way, shape or form. It works with every system that's out there.

It is the cream of the crop as far as I'm concerned. So when I moved in here, I got Lutron Caseta for all the switches 'cause it ties into any system that I can basically automate things. I'm using Apple Home as my base, but I may actually be shifting that, but I can set up automations for all this kind of stuff.

If nobody's home, lights go off. If it's this time of night, certain lights go off. Room is empty for a certain period of time, lights can go off. So it allows me to set up those automations in a rock solid way that just always works. I feel great about my decision to do that 'cause we have the same system.

I've got Ubiquiti Unify stuff everywhere too. 'Cause again, it's the cream of the crop when you're talking about security cameras, Wi-Fi, setting up home networks. It really is the best. I can't think of the number of times in our last home I had to restart a router. I think the advantage of Unify system is I have not restarted our router in over a year.

It might restart at night when no one's actively using it to upgrade the software, maybe that's happening, but it is so solid that I just haven't had to do any restarting or anything. It's not the most consumer friendly to set up and I think they're getting better there, but that's been solid.

And then almost every home internet plan is now unlimited. So it doesn't really matter, but it is nice that all the cameras are local. So we've just got a massive hard drive in our Dream Machine Pro, similar probably to what you have and you could still stream your cameras from anywhere, but you're not constantly using your bandwidth to stream nine cameras to the cloud and storing them on someone else's server, which just eats into your bandwidth use.

And on top of which is recording all the time. So these Wi-Fi cameras can get super cheap. You may miss the first 30 seconds of a motion event that was recorded because it took a while for the camera to realize something was happening before it recorded it, where the Ubiquiti stuff, it's just recording all the time.

So if you need to scroll back two minutes before an event, you can see exactly what's going on. I feel like I bought into the top tier kind of stuff. And if you have rogue devices that are using a lot of bandwidth, that's another thing I noticed is that the Dream Machine shows you per client.

So it shows how much bandwidth each thing is using. So if you're trying to track down, why is my bandwidth so high? Oh, there's this one computer that I forgot was on and it's doing something crazy in the background. You can track that kind of stuff down too. The analytics are really interesting.

You could nerd out about it. And I certainly have, I don't know if you have to. What other platforms are you using? Are you doing things for locks? Yeah, I have Slage smart door locks that tie into my Apple HomeKit system. I use Apple watches. So it's like, we can just walk up to the door, put our watch to the door and the door opens.

Super nice to have. I don't like carrying keys anymore. This makes it super easy. And we're focused on Apple Home 'cause we're an Apple household, but I'm looking at other systems like Home Assistant, which is a super geeky, nerdy, free open source system that you can get that I've been playing with, not user-friendly compared to something like Apple, but it's very powerful and can do whatever you want.

And there's other systems coming online. There's one called Homey from Europe that's just hitting the US market now that is crazy powerful and really easy to use. It has a user interface that is fantastic. It's great to see options like that hitting the market too. My biggest piece of advice to anyone listening that likes to nerd out is unless you're 100% sure, don't make your smart home and security system everything DIY 'cause it's fun.

Because I did this in our last home and we bought this device called Connected and we used all of the legacy security system, hardwired things, brought it online, tied it into smart things. And we have basically a DIY home security system that tied into this third party that would monitor it.

But with your home security system, do you really want it to all be DIY and based off some scripts that you wrote about what to do? And I thought it was so cool 'cause it would allow you to pre-program something for your Sonos speakers to say if someone broke in and all this stuff.

But at the end of the day, I didn't trust that it was actually gonna work because I had put it all together myself and we switched to Ring and we're using Ring for home security, very happy. But I hate that we have one platform for security, a different platform for locks, a different platform for cameras.

And my question is, should I just get over that? And accept that if they all tie in to the same platform, it doesn't really matter if your light switches and your plugs and your door locks are all different. I would say, yeah, you need to get over it a little bit in the short term, but in the long term, the thing I mentioned about Matter, that is going to slowly become the industry standard across everything.

So at some point, you'll be able to get some kind of security system like a Ring system as a paid service that you're getting that monitored for you kind of a thing. And it would work with multiple platforms at once. But yeah, you kind of have to get over it as long as it all ties into one central place, that's the most important thing.

So if you're a Google user and you want it to all go into Google so that on your phone, it's all in one location, all your cameras show up here, all your security stuff shows up in the app, even if it's Ring doing the security side, that's ultimately what's going to make it more user-friendly.

And I'd call out for me, the wife acceptance factor, the WAF, doing the DIY stuff is fun. So I'm a geek, I like to nerd out and do that stuff. But I had set up stuff on the old house that if something broke, my wife could never fix it.

She would not know where to start. And so it was all on me to fix it, which is the stuff I'm trying to avoid in this house. I'm trying to get it set up in a way that she would be comfortable going in there and messing with automations and a user interface that's really easy to understand and use.

So you have to think about the other people in your house as well. Otherwise, you're going to run into problems. - There's one company that I thought was really interesting that we didn't end up using because we'd already wired all these cameras. I don't know if you've seen Deep Sentinel.

- No, what's that? - So Deep Sentinel is a security platform. The friends I know that have used it, love it. It's similar to a home security system with cameras, except they have people that are live monitoring the cameras. - Oh, wow. - So someone walks up to your porch to take a package and someone on the speaker is live seeing motion and talking to the person without you there.

So it's almost as if you have a remote security manager. You see all these movies where in some rich person's house, there's a room where a guy sits with all the cameras and is ready to go. It's that, except that person's monitoring probably hundreds of homes from one share somewhere else.

And not just monitored, police will come, but person will be watching the cameras and be able to proactively do things, whether it's talk or call the authorities or something like that. - Wow, that's kind of neat. And there's also a little bit of a creepy factor to it to know that somebody is watching my cameras.

There's something a little odd about that, but that's also pretty cool. That service, if it could plug into an existing set of cameras would be more interesting than buying a whole set of new cameras for the home for all this stuff. Have you done a lot with smart home sensors just around the house to monitor different things, whether it's temperature, humidity, leaks, that kind of stuff?

- Oh yeah, the house is so airtight that it needs something called an energy recovery ventilator that's always bringing in fresh outside air and exhausting stale inside air. And as the two pass, it's recovering the heat between them. So it keeps the energy inside the house, but it's giving you constant fresh air.

A concern with a system like that is humidity levels might get too high or CO2 levels might get kind of high. So I've got sensors all over this house that are just monitoring temperature, humidity, and CO2 and particular matter, all that kind of stuff. And I'm setting up automations in my house so that if CO2 levels get too high, the ERV will just ramp up a little bit just to make sure that air is changing as it needs to.

I definitely am in the sensor game, got them all over the place. And sensors for like if a door is open or closed. Kind of freaked out the electricians that were here the other day, 'cause they went to open the door to the mechanical room. They opened the door and the light was on.

They were like, that's weird. And they closed it and they noticed under the gap of the door, the light went off. And then they stood there for a few minutes to open the door, closing the door, open the door, closing the door, and they didn't understand what was going on.

And I came around the corner and they were like, did you do something here? And I was like, yeah, there's a door sensor. If you see over there, there's a little door sensor. It's acting like a refrigerator. The light comes automatically 'cause the room's a dark cave. You have to turn the light on.

So why not just automate it with a sensor? - And what did that automation, was that in Apple's home product? - Yeah, I bought a matter certified door sensor. That's just this little door sensor so that it uses something called thread as its network and linked it directly in the home app.

And then I just set up an automation that said, if door open, turn light on. If door closed, turn light off. - And did that need another hub in your house for those sensors to work? - Nope. - Super interesting. I have a room that needs this. It's like a dark room and the light switch is so poorly located that you have to reach around stuff.

So that's next. But then I'm like, gosh, couldn't we just use the ring sensors that we have on all these doors already? But I think ring is private in that way. Did you do anything for security in your house? - Not yet. Because I'm Apple, I'm looking at a system called Abode, which is similar to Ring, but it ties directly into Apple HomeKit.

So any sensors I would add could then show up in Apple Home and I could use them for different automations. So that's part of the reason I'm looking at that system. - For your UniFi system, you have UniFi cameras. Did you tie them into Home using the third-party software that runs on a Raspberry Pi or something?

- Yes. There's multiple ways to bring them in. There's a service called Scripted that you can run on a Raspberry Pi. Home Assistant can do it. HomeBridge can do it. I have a network-attached storage device for all my video editing I'm doing. And on that NAS, I'm running a version of HomeBridge that brings all of my protect cameras into Home.

So I have feeds of everything directly in the Apple app. - I did that, but it was running on a computer and I just haven't made the leap to run it on a Raspberry Pi or something, 'cause we don't have a NAS. I was trying to run it on the Dream Machine.

There is a way to do it, and it seems possible, but I also don't want to mess with it. - It's really hacky. I looked at that, too, and I was like, there's no way. I don't want to screw this system up. It's working so well. I'll do it somewhere else.

And so I had the NAS. That's why I did it that way. - Any other smart home things I'm forgetting that you've thought about in this new house? - Oh, that's a good question. We've talked about water, the solar stuff with the span, the battery. We've covered most of the major stuff.

Blinds? Oh, yes. I'm doing Lutron Serena shades throughout my house. The cost of the shades will never return on investment. Let's take this with a grain of salt, but I am gonna be using these shades with some automations to help reduce energy costs, because sun beaming in your house, if you're trying to keep it cool, warms the room.

So I'm gonna be setting up automations based on light level, time of day, stuff like that, temperature of the room, where it could automatically drop the shades halfway. If it's close to sunset, keep a room from getting too hot. I'll be doing stuff like that. We bought Bali blinds through Costco, and they're kind of like a DIY setup, and I can't explain why, but one of them just never works.

And it's never the same one. So I can't say I support this system, but I think it was probably a third of the cost of the Serena shades. So if you're okay that maybe one shade doesn't work sometimes, it could be a good way to save. But I will say that we have it on automations.

Right now we're on Google Home, and it'll just drop the shades in the morning. I think you can even time shift it from sunrise and sunset, so you don't have to constantly change the schedule. Raise the shades on one side of the house, drop the shades on the other.

It's not quite smart enough to know seasonally where is the sun in the morning, right? In half the year, it's coming from one side of the house, half the year it's on the other, but it's pretty good. That comes back to the sensors. Some of these motion sensors also are light sensors.

So if they're detecting the lumens of the room, you can say if the light level is higher than this, drop the shades. So you can set it that way to give it a little more smarts. And I would also call out IKEA has some really cheap smart shades. The company Eve also has their version of smart shades that are much cheaper than Serena.

The Lutron Serena is the most expensive, but I went with them because just like the light switches, rock solid, they always work. There's never an issue with them. They get kind of the highest marks it can get, but you of course are paying for it. But I see the replacement of our shades in the future for these automated ones.

It just feels like that's coming. At the end of the day, 10 years from now, you're gonna probably have the same shades and I might've swapped them out, so you might've saved some money. Perhaps. This is great. I've tried to avoid going down the home assistant, home everything path of trying to hack together things on Raspberry Pis to make it all work.

And it's a little promising as an Apple family that maybe we could do it all with Apple Home and maybe we just need to run something to tie a few things together, but maybe we'll get there soon. One random question, which I saved because I just thought you would have an opinion.

Do you use AA, AAA rechargeable batteries at home or have you given up on rechargeable batteries? Because I feel like we bought all these Eneloop batteries at one point, they just don't hold a charge. And am I missing something? You're not missing something. We switched 100% to rechargeable batteries and there are some devices we use where it feels like we have to change them every month.

And it's like bananas, but it's because lithium ion batteries don't hold a voltage the same way as like an alkaline battery or a non-rechargeable lithium ion battery. So it's a voltage issue. If you buy batteries you have to dispose of, they'll last you six months or a year where the rechargeable ones only go every 30 days.

It's incredibly frustrating, but I use them wherever I can. And I try to avoid having to buy disposable batteries whenever I can. I've gone back to it because it's unavoidable. I would love to avoid that, but door locks are one where when we use rechargeable batteries on door locks, it just feels like it's a security risk because you leave down for a week and your batteries might die while you're gone.

Yep, exactly. You buy the disposable one, it'll be good for a year, but you put the Eneloops in and they're dead in six weeks, frustrating. Any other random thoughts? We've covered a lot, but before we wrap on things that you thought about when you built this new home that you wish you had maybe known about or thought about earlier or would recommend other people consider if they're retrofitting or building a home.

This may be a cop out of an answer, but I would say, I actually just did a video on this recently. Keep it simple, stupid, the KISS rule. Don't overcomplicate it. Keep it simple because as we talked about in the beginning, one of the first things you should do is look into energy systems, energy advisors in your area.

The simplest thing you could do might be just put some extra insulation in the attic and that will save you an incredible amount of money. You don't have to jump through all the hoops, get all the crazy new smart home gear, get out home assistant, do crazy smart home stuff to save money on your home.

Just keep it simple. - Every time I put together a system that relied on some Android tablet or some Raspberry Pi, I've never ended up keeping using it. So I support that advice and this has been great. I have a few things. I need to go find one of these advisors.

So that's my next step and see how airtight our home is, is the first step, what the big options are. Because we actually considered, do we need another battery? And now I'm wondering, maybe we don't. - Yeah, you might not. - I've watched a ton of these videos. Where should people find your home base to see everything you're working on and to go deeper on any of the things we talked about?

If you go to undecidedmf.com, that's my website. It's got my YouTube videos on there, articles we're writing. It's got everything. Central location would be there, including the podcasts. Awesome. I've gone down a lot of rabbit holes. Keep the KISS method in mind as you're going down the rabbit hole of Matt's videos.

Focus on the big areas and I think you could probably find a lot of savings and I know you've got a lot of home automation and smart home videos coming soon on this new house and I'm very excited to check them out. - Awesome, thanks for being here. - Thanks again.

- Wow, I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. I'm recording this outro a few days later because I went down a few deep rabbit holes. Most importantly, I set up Homebridge, which Matt and I spoke about briefly and I now have basically every device in our home all linked up and going through to Apple Home.

Anything basically that wasn't supported by Apple Home can be routed in there. I'll put a link to it in the show notes. Definitely worth checking out if you wanna get on Apple Home. Really, really happy with how it all ended up and I also ended up buying a Apple TV over the weekend so that I could set up a Home Hub so that I could use everything in Apple Home when we're not actually in the house.

If you have any questions, thoughts, feedback, definitely let me know. I always love hearing it and if you're based in LA and you wanna join me at the NAS Summit, like I mentioned earlier in the episode, I do have a few free tickets. Just go to allthehacks.com/NAS for NAS, N-A-S, and fill a few things out and I'll see if I can get you on the list for a free ticket.

That's it for this week. You can always reach me, podcast@allthehacks.com. See you next week. (upbeat music) (electronic music) (electronic music fades)