Episode 230 - Richard’s Smart Home 2024 Update

Speaker A: Hey, everyone, this is Richard. About once a year, Adam and I survey what we've been doing in our smart homes. This time, I have a few specific products to dive into in greater detail than usual. I'll, uh, share my experiences installing and using these products and give you my honest opinion about whether or not I'd recommend them. And we'll even talk quite a bit about a smart kitchen product. The mill food waste dehydrator. Finally, we'll check in on what Adam's been up to, which includes some potential infrastructure updates in his home. Enjoy the show.

Speaker B: Hey, everyone. I'm Adam justice from connexense, and welcome to the smart home show. I'm joined, as usual, by my co host, Richard Guenther from the digital media zone. Hey, Richard.

Speaker A: Hey, Adam. I feel like it's been forever, but it's because we've been both very, very busy.

Speaker B: I know that such is life. In today's episode, it's that time again to look at what we've been doing in our smart homes, but more specifically in Richard's smart home, because there's not a whole lot going on in mind. But I feel like I had a big year last year, so things have slowed down still recovery.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We'll focus on Richard mostly for today.

Speaker A: Fair enough. But before we get into that, we have a question for each other, as always. And this past week, we had a big apple event. It was, you know, annual iPhone day as well as other stuff. So is there anything that you were excited about or plan on getting out of this event?

Speaker B: It was a. A, uh, less exciting event, I'll say. In general, I did decide to color swap my ultra 2 when I saw that I could get like $450 on, um, trade in on the current one. So I'm like, okay, for a little bit of money, I can, I can do that. So I apologize if now I just cost you some money. But, you know, always nice to have a fresh battery. And then I'm an iPhone upgrade program guy. So if I wasn't in that, I probably would skip this year. I feel like it's kind of a meh m year for iPhone upgrades, but, you know, same kind of thing. New battery, fresh non scratch screen. Like I'm in for all of that. So less exciting as of now, I'm more excited for kind of all the software stuff that's still to come. And I know, you know, having the newest, latest, greatest phone will be best for that. But yeah, I'm a little less enthused than normal on uh, what we're getting this year. How about you? I know you're still in mourning from uh, not having mini phones anymore. I think that ship is ah, fully sailed.

Speaker A: I think so too.

Speaker B: I don't remember. Did you upgrade last year?

Speaker A: I did. I finally upgraded to the 15 Pro. It's bigger and heavier than I want. But as a result of that upgrade last year, I have the guts that I need to support Apple Intelligence and that's really what I want. I'm already running the 18.1 beta. There's evidence that it's there. Apple Intelligence, not a whole lot of evidence that it's useful or living up to its promise yet. But I will say Siri is a little bit better at stuff. But the things that they promoted where you could just ask it questions about stuff that's been going on in your text and email and stuff like that isn't there yet, that that's just not working at all. I asked it to remind me what time we were recording today because you and I do all of our planning for this through these extremely sophisticated method of texting and got nothing. I got web results for Adam and Eve. It was, it was, it was ridiculous. Uh, so yeah, maybe it'll get better. But as far as my response to the Apple event, my wallet is uh, sitting unharmed this year, so there's nothing that I absolutely need. I have a 6 year old iPad Pro here that I should probably update and may end up doing that. I think. I've heard some rumors potentially of another bump. So I'm looking at possibly upgrading an iPad sometime this year. But I'm not in any hurry for anything right now and that's a good thing.

Speaker B: There you go. Save your money this year. All right, well, if you want to submit a question for us to open the show, uh, you can mark that question on either Twitter or Mastodon, uh, with the hashtag AskAdam and Richard. Or probably the best method is to send us an email at feedbackmarthomefm M. So as I mentioned in the opening, I think we're gonna focus mainly on Richard's home today. So, uh, I'll just kind of ask you some questions about kind of what's going on and you provided me with uh, a couple kind of highlights. So let's start with your innovelli dimmer switches.

Speaker A: Yeah, and I'm going to dive deeper than we normally do in our annual what's Going on shows because there's some things that I really want to think about as reviews and is this something that I would recommend or not recommend. And for the most part I, I like everything that I've been working with. This first thing, the Innovelli white switches. So I don't know if everybody's familiar with Innovelli, but they're a very small company that makes hardware in batches. And this company kind of wears its business on its sleeve. And the founder publishes all of the trials and tribulations of what's going on with the company. In their blog he talks about the challenges that they've had with ordering and funding and supply chain and all that sort of stuff, which is, as you know, a harder thing to deal with. When you're a small company, you're at the bottom of the priority list, if only ordering batches of a couple of thousands of things as opposed to people who are, or companies that are ordering millions of things with chips in them. So this company has struggled to keep product out, but one of the things that they recently announced was this new White series. And the White series takes all the goodness of their existing line of switches, which I'll talk about in a minute, and puts it into a matter based device. So historically what Innovelli has been known for has been Z Wave devices and zigbee devices. They started with Z Wave and then they expanded to include some zigbee devices that take all of their hardware and just put a different chip in it, more or less. And now all of that is available through matter. Now this brand is not one that most people have heard of because they're not generally a widely known consumer brand. They're known amongst the geeks. Z Wave is not something that general consumers are going out to buy at a store anymore. But people who are using Home Assistant or Hubitat or SmartThings, things like that, they are interested in products like these. And what's really cool about the Innovelli devices is that they are packed with customization features. So consider a smart switch as a rocker where you press on the top or you're pressing the bottom. In other words, it's designed properly as a rocker to turn it up and down or on or off. And then an LED line on the right hand side that can be used as an indicator. Maybe it shows partially filled in, depending on how bright the light is. And some of the switches also then have an additional button, a small little thin button at the top of that line of LEDs just to the right of the switch. All of this stuff can be programmed so the color of the LEDs can be triggered and you could Use that as an indicator. Maybe it's red if your garage door is open or if your alarm system isn't armed or something like that, or is armed however you want to use that. Maybe you flash it for a particular purpose. You can program what the button does, maybe it triggers a scene. You can program what long taps or double taps on either end of the rocker do. So extremely, extremely customizable. And all of this stuff uses a combination of either settings that were exposed through Z Wave properties or button taps to be able to configure the device itself and set up how you want it to behave.

Speaker B: So do you have to have some sort of hub or device from them on the other end to connect to these? Like what is the Z Wave talking to?

Speaker A: Z Wave is essentially. I don't think it's actually mesh. Maybe it is mesh, I don't remember. But Z Wave just needs a Z Wave hub. And as long as they've designed their device to expose the properties of that device in a standard manner, then more or less any Z Wave hub should be able to interact with it. Now they specialize in working with systems like Habitat and SmartThings and Home, uh, Assistant. But in theory you should be able to use any Z Wave hub. And that's the beauty of these devices. Because it's a small company, they're making these devices you worry about. All right, When I'm working with a small company, do they have longevity? What happens if they stop updating them or if they stop making them? Do I have a service that I need to work? Doesn't matter. You don't need that. It's just Z Wave just connects to your Z Wave hub, which is from a third party. They don't make Z Wave hubs, they just connect to other people's hubs. So translate that. Now to matter, it needs to connect to a matter border router and then through whatever ecosystem you're using matter with. And for me that is primarily. I'll, um, talk about that a little bit later. But primarily HomeKit, then it exposes a bunch of capabilities for you to then configure in your ecosystem. So when I connected these switches to HomeKit by adding them as a matter device, I see a couple things. I see a device that represents the indicator light and I see a, ah, device that represents the switch itself as a dimmer or as a switch. And then I have other properties associated with that that I can program. So I don't know if you've ever had like a scene controller that you've programmed where you have different options. It's like, okay, what scene are you going to trigger if this button gets pressed? What scene are you going to trigger if this get button get pressed? Or what if it gets a long press or a double press? All of that is exposed in HomeKit, so you can just program it like any other HomeKit device. In terms of how you're interacting with it and what it does in your home, it's really freaking cool.

Speaker B: Very cool.

Speaker A: Now, I mentioned that there's a lot of stuff that you can configure on the switch itself. So in terms of how the switch behaves, how fast it might actually ramp a light up or down, whether it works as a relay switch and it's a physical relay or as a dimmer is configurable. And all of that gets done on the device itself through a combination of jumping up and down on one foot, holding three buttons at a time, chanting a little bit to the gods. I mean, there's this very, very long convoluted list, I would call them configuration settings for the switch that you can manipulate. But it has to be done physically at the switch for these matter based switches because there really wasn't a way to set that up. So it could be done through software consistently through matter right now. So that's a little bit weird. But the capabilities of the switch are pretty impressive. And you, you may not actually need to do anything. It comes initially configured as a switch. Maybe that's how you want it. I set mine up to work as a dimmer. You can set that lower dim level, the top dim level, like I said, how fast it dims. So I did set all that up. The one thing that I have found, and this may be more matter than anything else, because I think we've both talked about how our experience with matter is a little bit, um, iffy so far. So the extended controls, like what I get that little side button to do, I set that up that it would trigger other lights in the room. I'd say it's maybe about 50% reliable, which is not great. Obviously you want everyone in your home, if you're teaching them that, hey, this button is going to do this thing, you want it to work all the time. And I find that I am having some challenges getting that to work consistently. But I have patience to work through this stuff and hopefully over time, and particularly as I extend the matter network in my home, that will get better.

Speaker B: Very cool. So let's see. Next on our list we had the LeGrand radiant with Netatmo. Oh, about this thing.

Speaker A: Oh, look at you pronouncing Netatmo properly. Wow. All right. So yeah, LeGrand is known for having their name on a bunch of kind of mid level home theater stuff and electrical stuff. And the rental property that we have down at, uh, the beach has all LeGrand switches installed. If you're familiar with these, the first thing that you might notice if you've compared them to any other switch or switch flight is that they're matte finish, which is really cool. But then if you go to the store to replace a light switch, nearly every white light switch that you can find in a hardware store is going to be a glossy finish by default. The Lutron and Leviton and Eaton and all of the big brands that you find in the stores are glossy. And I think we've mentioned that I'm a little bit anal retentive about stuff and a little bit ocd and so if things don't match, it makes me a little crazy. So anything that I've needed to do in the rental property in terms of changing things up, I've just tried to buy other LeGrand Radiant stuff so that it would all match. Well, the builder, in their infinite wisdom, designed the kitchen so that the overhead lights are tied in with the light over the sink and there's a bank of switches at the sink. None of those switches control the overhead lights, which are again tied into the light over the sink. So if you're at the sink and the light over the sink isn't on, then you needed to go back to the entrance of the kitchen to turn that light on, which was just absurd. So I found a kit very much like the Lutron virtual three way kit, where it's basically a Lutron switch and then a Pico remote. And using the netatmo technology, legrund Radiant uses this proprietary radio to do something very similar. You have a physical switch that you wire in. So I replaced the main light switch for the kitchen with that. And then you have this other mini, really the surface of a switch that's just a coin battery operated switch front and you can put that anywhere. You can mount it in a normal wall plate. You can just stick it on the wall somewhere. You could discreetly put it under the edge of a counter or something. I just bought a wider switch plate than I needed for the three switches that are near the sink. I, uh, bought a four gang switch plate and attached this virtual switch to the fourth position. And it's just floating there, riding sidecar on top of next to the other switches that are actually installed in the wall. And it looks seamless. It just looks like it belongs there. So now I have the ability through this virtual switch to just turn the lights on at, uh, the sink when I'm at the sink. What a novel idea. Now I'm not doing any of this with any connected technology. This is all just through their little wired kit. But the LeGrand Radiant line with the Radiant, with Netatmo, that stuff can be connected to your Apple assistant, your Amazon assistant, your Google assistant, as well as some other stuff. Smartthings, I think, and home, uh, assistant. So if you do that, you need their bridge. And their bridge is really kind of clever. They built a bridge that, I'll use this term again, kind of ride sidecar on a plate next to a wall switch. So you can buy that as a kit too, where you get a smart switch with a two gang plate on just replaces one switch and. And then kind of hovering in that plate to the right of the switch itself is this little mechanism that acts as a bridge. And it's built into the wall. It's fully visible. It just really looks like a motion sensor or something. It's not anything anyone's going to get stressed out about. It doesn't look ugly. And voila. Be bridge built right into your wah switch. It's kind of clever.

Speaker B: Very cool.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So I will probably look into some more of these because we have other weird switch situations in the rental, and I do have stuff labeled around the house. But, you know, when you're in a rental property, you just, when you reach for a switch, you just expect it to be where you expect it to be. You don't want to have to think too hard about. Okay, around which angle or wal do I have to walk to find the right switch for these things? So.

Speaker B: Yeah. Well, uh, I look forward to reviewing, um, everything you have set up at your rental property, because we're actually going to rent Richard's space for spring break with my family. So maybe there's a whole episode just in that of me, uh, walking in and, uh, appreciating all the work you've done there.

Speaker A: I don't know if I'm excited or terrified. We'll have to see how this goes

Speaker B: or maybe, you know, you were fantastically generous and we really appreciate it in kind of cutting, uh, us a good deal there. But if you have some projects for me while I'm there, let me know. I'll go to town.

Speaker A: There you go. You need to be careful about that. All right,

Speaker B: okay, so uh, next on your list you had a Leviton smart outlet. So is this an in wall, an external. What was this device?

Speaker A: Yeah. So this is an in wall outlet. You know, I have this friend who has this company that used to make in wall outlets and they don't anymore. And so I had to figure out where to source in wall outlets because all of my connections outlets are used. And I am now kind of realizing just how powerful and how wonderfully discreet a smart in wall outlet can be as opposed to having to have like this wall wart that you're plugging something into. So I became really. Familiar is not the right word, but I guess I really like this form factor and I wanted more of it in my home and particularly in the bar area where kind of the whole area is a little bit of a display, right? Like we have glasses out, we have the bar all set up and I just didn't want to clutter it with a uh, wall wart. So I have a couple of the Leviton decora smart wall switches and they've been working pretty well. So I figured, all right, well I'll try one of their smart outlets. It's WI fi based. It works just like the other devices they make. You can pair it directly to HomeKit or you can connect it to their cloud ecosystem and then it can work with Amazon and Google. I don't need that, I just need it to work with HomeKit. So I just directly connected it to HomeKit. It has a big button on it that I appreciate because you see that there's a button there and you can easily turn it on or off by pressing it. It's a physical button on the surface so it's easy for my partner Edward to see and uh, understand. And it has one big drawback and that's that there's only one controlled outlet. And of course your old outlet and the outlet that some other companies make often have both of the outlets so that they can be controlled. So that's not great. But for the use that I have it for so far it's doing the job I need. Now I mentioned it's in the bar area. It's actually where I have just like a little accent lamp plugged in and I only wanted that accent lamp to come on if we're using the bar. So I already have a Levitin scene controller where I had a scene for bars open. I had a scene for just accent lighting and then I have a scene for morning coffee. So I just augmented the scenes That I already had to include this outlet in the bars open scene, and voila, everything's set. So that ended up working out really well for me. I don't know if I would get this again for other uses in the house, because I think if I were to use another smart outlet, I'd want the flexibility of having two smart outlets. So for my purposes, this worked, But I don't know, it's something I'd necessarily recommend. If they don't eventually add another smart

Speaker B: outlet to it, we may still have a few laying around. So if you need a couple spares, you let me know.

Speaker A: Well, that's not fair because everybody else can't get one.

Speaker B: Well, I mean, if you really want an adventure, uh, you know, we have a whole box of return ones. I can find some that, uh, you can see if you can get them back to life or if there's even anything wrong with them, so.

Speaker A: Oh, that sounds like just a joyful afternoon. I might pass on that, but thank you for offering, Adam.

Speaker B: All right, so next up, uh, the nest Learning Thermostat 4. So you might have to tell me a little bit about that. I think I had kind of casually seen that they had finally released a new, like, high end nest. But tell me what this is all about.

Speaker A: Adam. Do you remember what my prediction was from our annual end of year show for Technology fm?

Speaker B: I don't think so. I don't think I was actually on that show last year.

Speaker A: What? All right, well, it was that nest was gonna finally come out with a new, uh, learning thermostat. Check that it would be matter compatible point for Richard. Yeah. So it was more of a hope and a wish than a prediction, but it came true. And nest, finally, it's been years, years since they've come out with a new version of the learning thermostat. They came out with that weird little compact mirror thing. That is not a learning thermostat. It's just a smart thermostat. I never liked the look of it. I didn't like the ergonomics of it because it looks like it's a ring, but it's not. It's just round. And so if you recognized it as a nest and went to go turn it, it didn't turn. And that was very frustrating to me. So I never bought one of those. And I was waiting, waiting to see if they'd come out with a new version. And I didn't want to get another smart thermostat until somebody came out with something that was matter compatible. Now, I think the Ecobee 4 is matter compatible, but I've done Ecobee, and I don't really like their software. I didn't really like the way that you programmed it. So I was waiting for Nest. Well, finally we have it. Remember when we joked about how Nest was the company that got Everybody to pay $250 for thermostat? All right, well, now they're charging $280 for their smart thermostat. The difference is that this one comes with a remote sensor. So out of the box, you have a sensor. And remember, Nest was late to the remote sensor game. They didn't come out with these until well into Gen 2, right before Gen 3. So the sensor is a big deal. If you have a home where in the same H vac zone, you have differences in temperature, and you want to be able to either optimize for one of those spaces or average your temperature across the rooms, that that's what this sensor is good for. So I have this in my office because I spend most of my days in my office. And while I don't need it now, during the summer, during the winter, I will, because as I'm aging, I find that I get colder easily. And so I want to make sure that my office is as warm as I want it to be during the time that we have our heat on. So all of this is good. I like all of this. Now, let's talk about the bad stuff. So I bought this as soon as they announced it. It arrived the day it was going to be available for retail, I was ready to install it. I don't think they were ready for me to install it. Because if you've ever installed a Nest thermostat. Adam, have you done this?

Speaker B: I mean, I've been on the ecobee train for a number of years. So, okay, yes, I've done it, but it's been a minute.

Speaker A: So NIST was fantastic at walking you through the installation. Like, here are your wires. Say what you have. We'll tell you if it's compatible and how you do the installation. Nest was so good at that. With the Nest app, you, uh, may remember that Google has been retiring the Nest app for the last five years and slowly, and I mean slowly moving that functionality over to the Google Home app. So now with this version 4 thermostat, you can't use the Nest app with it anymore. You have to set it up through Google Home. And let me tell you, that was not fun. The wiring stuff, I never found it. I couldn't find anything for it. So I just took a picture of what I had and I mapped the letters on my thermostat to what this NEST thermostat had. And I guessed right. I mean it wasn't that hard. I uh, only have a five wire thermostat set up, so it wasn't that big of a deal. I found out the hard way that when I turned off all of the power to my H vac system to both H vac systems in my house, I still had power coming through my wires for this thermostat. And I have no idea why that was. That was a little bit concerning to me.

Speaker B: How'd you find that out, Richard?

Speaker A: I did get a little zap. Yeah. Luckily it's only 24 volts, so not that big of a deal. But uh, yeah, I'm sure that wasn't good for anything, probably including me. The thermostat, once it was on, took its good old time to pair properly. I had a, uh, bit of problems trying to actually get the Google Home app to recognize it and bring it on board and then set up to control it. Uh, it took a couple times to get that to work properly and then once I did I could set up the various options for it and program it and they've changed it all. It's all different in the Google Home app from how it was in the Nest app. And one of the things that they've done with scheduling is that like Ecobee where you have named time windows, you need to do the same thing. Now instead of just having a weeks by hours schedule like you used to be able to configure with Nest, now you have to create, okay, it's daytime or it's sleep time or it's working time and then associate those with times each day and then those get mapped to specific temperatures. So I found that a little bit confusing. And unlike with Nest, there aren't heating only and cooling only schedules. Your schedule is for both. And that doesn't work for me because almost every thermostat wants you to cool at a higher temperature than you heat. They expect that there's going to be some variance in there. So for example, maybe you cool at 74, but you heat at 70. Well, this is not an ecologically responsible thing for me to say, but dammit, I want my home to be 73 degrees year round. I don't care whether the heat's on or the air conditioning is on, I want it to be 73 degrees and you can't actually do that. With their schedules. Unless you set up separate day times. Like I was saying, you have these, you have working time, you have sleeping time. So I actually had it set up a winter daytime and a summer daytime.

Speaker B: Weird.

Speaker A: So that I could set the schedules so that they. It would always be 73 degrees during the time when I'm up during the day. It's nuts.

Speaker B: In ecobee they have. So they have like normal heat only, cold only. And then they have this like hybrid one. I don't even remember what they call it. But like especially living here in Chicago, this time of year is a great example to have this mode on. Because sometimes you need heat and sometimes you need cool. Like even today it's going to be like uh, up in the 80s, but it was in the 60s this morning. So you know, you have these days with these wide. Sometimes we have all four seasons in one day. Richard, this is Chicago for you. But yeah, so it's weird to me that they don't have that kind of mode or that they don't make it as easy as ecobee does.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I mean I can have the thermostat itself just running without a schedule at a set temperature as always cold or always warm. But it's when you get into the scheduling that it, it doesn't let you do that anymore. So I found that kind of weird then as far as the overall design of the thing, we're all used to the big roundy glass thing. It's more glassy, it's more roundy. It looks like a squashed mushroom on its side pushed up against the wall. So unlike the design of the others, which were very intentionally created to mimic old timey traditional round thermostats. Honeywell, then what this instead does is it creates this glass ring effect of floating in front of your wall. It still turns. So you can adjust it like you would expect it to. It's not as obvious that it would do that because there's not any sort of different material on the edges that you would grip. It's just glass. And one of the disadvantages of big curvy glass, and this is one of the reasons that I thought curved TVs were a terrible idea, is that the reflections are just all over the place.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: It reflects light like crazy and it's very glossy. They're assuming that this isn't going to be in direct sunlight very often and that you're going to be able to read the screen which is big and bright. That's a good thing. But it's impossible. Not to notice the weird reflections on this all of the time. Huh? I would say that if I didn't care about matter, I would probably just go with the third generation, because the third generation Nest was a really good thermostat. It has a lot of flexibility in terms of which app you can set it up in and where it works. But that is not going to work with HomeKit. And ultimately I wanted to use this with HomeKit. And I know that Jenny and that, um, Stacy and a number of other people who have previously reviewed matter devices have said that connecting a matter device to multiple ecosystems can be problematic. They were right. Getting this onto HomeKit after I had already set it up with Google Home, which you have to do, was a little bit challenging. It didn't want to do it a number of times. Now, maybe that had to do with the fact that I'm running the beta of iOS on my phone, I don't know. But eventually I got it on and now I have a thermostat that shows up in my Apple ecosystem, even though it's a Nest for the first time without having to use Homebridge or something like that. And I'm very happy about that. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep. Finally, finally.

Speaker B: All right, well, I think last on our list, which I'm most intrigued by, is the mill food dehydrator. But I guess tell everybody a little bit about this thing. A food recycler. It's meant for your. Your kind of food scraps.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So this I intend to be a full on, um, review for this product and full disclosure. Mill provided me with this device to review, so I want everybody to know that going in, I don't get to keep it, but we're going to have some discussion about that too. So when you get rid of food waste in your home, most people throw it down at disposal, which is incredibly convenient and terrible for our water system. That's one way. You might just throw it in your trash, which means that it ends up in a landfill and smells while it's in your house. Historically, food trash, what didn't go down the drain like meat and stuff like that, we would throw in the freezer so that it would kind of solidify, wouldn't have any odor, and then throw that in the trash can the night before, but it's still going out in the trash, ending up in landfill. Some people compost. Some people have a bucket in their house or outside their door where they put compost. Those come with their own challenges. They can be smelly, they Attract flies. Composting itself can be messy, and people don't really want to have to do all of that. Food waste is a big, huge problem in not just this country, but around the world. And it's a problem for a number of reasons. Like I said, it does end up in some ways polluting the water system, and that has to be cleaned out. And then you end up with all this waste that then does end up in landfill. In landfill, it produces methane as it decomposes. So it's just more. It's just adding to all of the problems that we have. So this company, Mill, created an alternative solution. And instead of creating like an, uh, electric or smart or automatic composting solution, they created a system that dehydrates your food scraps and basically turns them into grounds. And by grounds, I mean it looks like coffee grounds. Doesn't smell.

Speaker B: Yeah, don't brew it, though.

Speaker A: Don't brew it. Don't brew it. It's a bunch of old food that you probably don't want to eat yourself. But it makes really good fertilizer, so you can use it to supplement your soil. You can use it to fertilize your lawn. Mill is actually working with some farms and has certification, uh, in the state of Washington now, to use what comes out of this as an ingredient in chicken feed. It's basically like, I think you use the term recycling. It is in many ways recycling your food waste and turning it into something that can be used for good, either for your lawn or your yard, or being used then as food for animals. So that's a great thing. Now, where did this thing come from? So this company started in 2023. Uh, no, sorry. The company started in 20. Uh, 20. And it was, uh, launched by two former Nest employees, Matt Rogers, Harry Tannenbaum. I've heard them both speak. They are passionate about food waste, but they also come with this usability ethos from working at Nest. And they wanted to make getting rid of your food waste, dealing with your food waste, as easy and straightforward as changing the temperature in your thermostat. And the way that Nest made a smart thermostat, which was previously just an awful thing, entirely approachable. They've done that with this foodway system. So what is it? It's essentially something that looks like a trash can, looks like a typical external kitchen trash can that you would have. It is plugged in and has a bin in it, a very heavy bin that you toss your food waste into. It has a flip top that you operate with a uh, foot pedal, just like any other kitchen trash can. And then at the end of each day, or when it senses through its sensing system based on weight that there's enough in there to grind up, then that night it will automatically run based on a schedule that it defaults, or you can adjust based on when you want it to run. Now when it runs, it has these big grinders that look kind of like a dough kneading machine built into this bin that turn as it heats up everything that's in there. And through some magic and science and physics that I don't understand, the next morning it looks like coffee grounds. And you can throw pretty much any kind of food in there. You're not supposed to put liquid in there. The app that they have is fantastic. It identifies. I haven't been able to find something. I was wondering, could I put this in here and not be able to find it in the app? It's a comprehensive list of what you can put in and what you can't. And the bottom line is basically don't put liquids in and don't put stuff that's not food in and you're going to be okay. Now they tell you avoid stuff that's heavy in sugar because that can gum things up as it heats up. That makes sense. They also tell you to avoid a whole lot of liquidy things like condiments and stuff like that. But unless you're dumping an entire jar,

Speaker B: like a half juice, lemon or something, that'll work.

Speaker A: You can do that, you can do that. But let's say you had an expired bottle of ketchup or something probably shouldn't put. I've done it, I put it in there. It's fine. It just takes longer because it's wet and it has to dry, all that. So it takes a little bit longer to run, but it worked fine. And again, miraculously, it's all gone and it's grounds the next morning. It's just, uh, magic. I don't understand any. Sufficient technology people don't understand is magic. And there it is. So every couple of weeks this thing fills up and it lets you know, hey, I'm full. It sends you a notification. And so then you have a choice. You either take out the bin and dump it out in your lawn somewhere or in your garden, or add to topsoil, or you can send the grounds back to them. They have a service where you can just fill a box with the liner that they provide for you and it's self addressed and you just take it to the Post office or have your post men pick it up and uh, it goes back to them and then they can process it and include it in chicken feed and stuff like that. So, uh, pretty cool comprehensive system there. My particular device has converted about 40 pounds a month of food waste to fertilizer. I named mine Scrappy, by the way.

Speaker B: I like it.

Speaker A: Yeah, I figure if Seth Johnson over at home tech show can have a lawnmower named Clippy, I can have a food scraps dehydrator called Scrappy. So Scrappy's been converting about £40amonth. That's a lot of food. And we're two people. So if you extrapolate that over all of the folks that use something like this. So this company launched this product in the beginning of 2023 and they show you stats in the app on everything that it has been able to keep out of landfills. It's processed over 2 million pounds of food waste from all of their customers, or about 900 kilos, keeping that out of landfills, which is just fantastic. I love that. And then you wonder, all right, well, but it's using electricity isn't that bad? Well, I mean, everything is using some power. In your home, you have a dishwasher that runs maybe once every few days or every day. Uh, this uses about half of what a dishwasher would use in terms of energy. So it's about, it's less than a kilowatt hour a day and it's probably about maybe $4 a month in terms of what it's costing you to run and operate this. So all of this is really awesome. Right, I mentioned that. It sounds like a dishwasher costs about what a dishwasher costs to run. It's also priced like a dishwasher.

Speaker B: Yeah, I was wondering when we were going to get to that.

Speaker A: So what does all of this cost? The purchase price of this device is $1,000. And one's first reaction might be, and I'll back up $1,000 for a trash can. But obviously it's more than that. It's doing a lot more than that. And they've created some finance options that make this a lot more palatable, I think. So if you want to think of this as a service where you're basically paying them to provide you with this capability, you can rent the product for men for $30 a month and they bill annually for that. So it would be $360 a year, $30 a month for being able to save that much of, uh, food waste. I'm okay with that. I could live with that. I have a problem just laying out $1,000 for this. I don't know if it's just a brain threshold or something, but I have a hard time with that thousand dollar figure. But I can, I can justify $30 a month. But then you're thinking, well, but if you do that for three years, you've already paid more than this thing costs.

Speaker B: Uh, do they have a rent to own option?

Speaker A: In fact they do. So the rent to own option breaks even at about the two year mark. So you could rent it for two years and then pay roughly the same amount that would be remaining. I think it ends up being $20 or $30 more at that two year mark. And then it's yours. You have it then and you don't owe anything else on it. There are two other costs that maybe play into this. One is a charcoal filter. When you buy it, you get an additional filter. They say your supply, but they last a year. So you get an additional filter. When you rent it, you get a new filter as you need them, as it asks to be replaced. And then if you want the return package option where you're sending it back to them, that's another $10 a month. Now if you live in an apartment, maybe you need to do that. If you don't actually participate in a community garden or something like that. But if you don't, that's purely optional. Like if you have your own yard and you have a place that you can do something and use this as fertilizer somewhere, maybe even in a window garden, who knows? But you don't have to do this. But you could do that at $10 a month. And they bill that annually at uh,

Speaker B: uh, I don't think I get that. I mean they're, they're probably making money off of it if they're selling it for chicken feed or whatever. Like why don't you then just turn around and throw the grounds away if you're not going to use them? Like you're still doing better for the

Speaker A: environment or yeah, uh, it is still better. Or you could, you can also put the grounds in your. If you compost, right, you, uh, know, you might still actually compost. And if you do that, you could put the grounds in your compost there. There are many options for getting rid of this, but this just creates a close closed system in case you don't have a way of getting rid of it M and reusing it. Um, because their real intent is a full circle of use and if you're just ultimately throwing it in the trash, you've helped, but not as much as you possibly could.

Speaker B: Right, right, yeah, makes sense.

Speaker A: So that's the cost. And like I said, the two year point is probably when it makes the most sense. If you decide that you like this enough, you want to keep using it, then at the end of that two years you pay the payoff, which is at the end of the three years, I think you've spent $1,030 or something,

Speaker B: which actually, if they're giving you an extra filter, you might actually be, I don't know about the break even or even less then.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's a really good point. Because the filters themselves, once you own it, then after you're out of warranty and past their support window for filters and stuff, then you have to buy the filter yourself. They cost about $60 to replace that if you were to buy them now. So, yeah, um, I mean, I think the finances of it make sense. It's just that thousand dollar price tag is a hard pill to swallow just looking at that alone. Now I have just one complaint with this thing, only one, and that's that, man. This bin that you remove is heavy. I assume it's made of iron or something. It's just unbelievably heavy. And you remove the thing with these grinders in it. They're not really sharp, but you know, that's part of the weight as well because you have the mechanism. Kind of like when you take a blender apart, you still have the, the blending part inside that container that you remove. So you then can just empty that out. I usually take like a wooden spoon or something and empty out the contents of that. You can rinse it out, put it back in. But wow, that thing is really heavy. I hope one of these days they figure out how to make it out of, I don't know, carbon fiber or something equally strong, but less, less, less heavy.

Speaker B: If I had to guess, it's probably part of the heating element.

Speaker A: It probably is too. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the material itself, uh, needs to conduct the heat probably for it to efficiently break the food down. Yeah.

Speaker B: Interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah. So do I recommend it? I absolutely recommend it. I recommend it enough that I'm going to buy mine. I am coming out of this test period thinking that I don't want to get rid of it. And it's become such a commonplace thing in my home now. And this is one of those things where I thought, I'm never going to get my partner to go in on this. He's not going to like this. And he's totally all in on it. Like, I come down in the morning and his breakfast waste is already in there. Eggshells and whatever he cleaned out of the refrigerator is in there. That's a great thing. Like, that's your family acceptance factor right there. So I don't want to waste that. I want to take advantage of this opportunity. I'm going to end up buying mine. And we'll put a link on our notes page about this because I can also share a dollar, uh, 200 discount referral code, so anyone interested in this can also purchase one. Applying a $200 discount. I'm getting that same discount myself when I buy this. So you're basically paying the same thing I'd be paying for this. And then of course, that helps me out because it's a referral code, so I get a little bit of a kickback from that. But if you're interested, that'll be out on our show Notes.

Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah, I'm intrigued. I think my probably biggest problem is I don't know where I would put something like this.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a standalone. And like your kitchen, we have an island in the center of the kitchen. I don't recall if your island has extra power on it, but, uh, we just have ours kind of like hugged up against the side of the. The island where the power is.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's cabinets there. I don't know, we'd have to do some thinking about it there. There really isn't like a good easy place for it, unfortunately.

Speaker A: I wonder. It's funny, this made me think a little bit of. Do you remember the old trash compactors? And I think you can probably still buy them, but trash compactors were built into your cabinetry system. And I wonder if there's a future where they could create like a standard 18 inch wide cabinet size version of this that could go under your counter, maybe even with a panel on it to look like it's just another cabinet in your home. I know, you know, something like this is a little bit easier to move around, but it might not work in everybody's kitchen if they have a custom designed kitchen with not a lot of extra floor space.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: I don't know. Interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah. All right, well, that's going to wrap it for the stuff that I've been working on and, uh, for my review there. So we'll take a quick break for sponsors and then we'll be back. Everyone says that starting a podcast is easy, but Let me tell you, making a podcast is hard work hard. That's where today's sponsor, Lightning Pod, comes in. If you have a podcast or you want to start one, then you should check them out. They can help you with every step of the podcast production process. We've been working with Lightning Pod founder Eric Johnson for more than a year, and he's really helped us take the Smart Home show to the next level. Eric currently helps us with editing and copywriting, but he's also available to help your podcast with recording, monetization, website design, and more. Learn more at LightningPod FM. All experience levels are welcome, so whether you're a veteran podcaster or a total newbie, you should check them out. That's LightningPod FM. All right, Adam. So I've been doing all the talking. Well, not all the talking, but I've been talking about what's been going on in my home. It's been about a year since we worked on your home theater. You've been living with your home theater now for about a year. I remember coming out of that, that there were some, like, unfinished things, like the. The smart remote that you had from Nice wasn't yet fully programmed.

Speaker B: Well, uh, initially, I didn't even have the ones we were waiting for. The ones.

Speaker A: Oh, that's right.

Speaker B: To be delivered. So that took a little bit of time.

Speaker A: Yeah. And then you have smart lighting throughout that room. And I think you wanted to live with it a while before you set up any scenes for watching stuff and cleaning and whatever else you might want scenes for. So. Have you done any of that yet?

Speaker B: Only a little bit. I mean, I think in general. Yeah, there's still some things to be done. The remote is, uh. We did get the final remote. It is very nice. I need to do some tweaking of it, um, which probably means spending some time with our buddy tj. Probably one of the reasons I didn't do it was he was going to come visit, and then he didn't end up coming to visit, so I was kind of waiting on him. And then it's just been a busy summer, so not a lot that has changed or going on in there. Um, still, you know, very much enjoying it, and when there are big things to watch or, you know, kind of highly cinematic content. You know, we watched all of the new season of Game, uh, of Thrones down there, which was. Was fantastic.

Speaker A: And you need a dark room for that.

Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, for sure. So, yeah. And, uh, you know, I think the kids still enjoy it and spend, um, some time down There too. But yeah, no, no major changes there in the theater or even like anything other than kind of some of those finishing touches. Anything major that I'm like feeling like I need to do down there. Um, it's in a pretty good state.

Speaker A: So let me ask you this. Then. You went for this integrated remote solution that would allow you to control everything, but you're living fine without it. Do you wonder if you really need that integrated remote and you're just fine using, I don't know, maybe you use your Apple TV remote and whatever for the basics?

Speaker B: Nah. I think now that Logitech has gotten out of that business, I needed something with kind of the complexity of that system. I needed something that could control all the different pieces and having an integrated experience. So I'm definitely not using it to its fullest. And one of the reasons you mentioned the lighting, so one of the reasons why I still haven't done anything with the lighting was to properly integrate the lighting. I had to get a Lutron Pro Bridge for that. And so then I'm kind of left with the choice of do I repair all of my Lutron lights in the entire house to a new bridge, or do I just fork the system and put just the downstairs lights on the Pro Bridge? So I generally just messing with stuff like that is a pain in the butt, and it's not high on my list. And usually after, you know, a busy week or a lot of work or whatever, I don't know, I just kind of have to be in the right mood to do that. So keep pushing me. Keep, uh, bugging me. I should do that. And I think the lighting particularly would be nice to get integrated, but haven't really gone there yet.

Speaker A: So I want to highlight what you just said there because I don't know that everybody's aware of this. And I wasn't aware of it when you told me about this. You have the Lutron bridge, and the Lutron Bridge can't really be controlled by third party systems. You need their Probe bridge to do that. There's not an upgrade path between the Lutron Bridge and the Probe Bridge, which means that you have to redo everything. If you have scenes set up there, if you have all of your devices paired in there, you have to redo all of that in the Lutron app for the new bridge. That's a pain. My answer to you would be, just add it for the theater and don't worry about the rest of the house. Keep the rest of the house untouched.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's probably what I'll do either just the theater or maybe all of the downstairs because that wouldn't be. It's a couple extra switches, but it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So. Yeah.

Speaker A: So another thing that I know you and I both have in our homes is the Oro switch.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: I don't know if you still have yours installed, do you?

Speaker B: It's time may be dwindling. So we had some major oven issues. Actually it turned out like after our home's 18 years old. After 18 years we're having all these interesting home fun. Uh, like we had a nail that rusted and mold that showed up in the pantry. So literally somebody had put a m nail through a pipe and it rusted over 18 years and then finally started leaking and there was mold. Thankfully that was not as, uh, expensive of a problem as it could have been. But then also, uh, the wires in the oven fused together because they weren't like prop wasn't properly installed on insulated or something. So we were like two weeks without an oven, which was super fun. But um, thankfully that also didn't end up being as terribly expensive as it could have been. But in having to reset the power for the house, everything is upside down. And I think it really messed with Philips Hue and it may have also messed with the Oro. So currently you cannot turn off the lights in my wife's office. So, uh, which is where the, where the Oro is. So I think I'm kind of maybe done with it at this point. I might try toggling the power and see if we can get it back to just like all I want is to be able to turn the lights on and off again. I don't even need any fancy stuff here. Um, but it may be time to just pull it out and put something else in. I don't think there's any. Maybe you know of something or maybe listeners can send a suggestion. But the use case I wanted this for was a good way in wall to control hue switches, turn them on and off, you know, set a certain scene or something like that. But even just like intelligent control of hue switches would be nice. I know they have their thing that can go behind the wall, something like that. You know, we've used that little, uh, knob thing in other places that goes on top of a normal toggle. I don't know what the right answer is.

Speaker A: Maybe. And innovelli White series.

Speaker B: I was kind of thinking that. I was kind of thinking that when you were talking about it.

Speaker A: Yeah. So one of the Modes that they have is a smart bulb mode where, like the Oro, it can be set up to just control the smart light through your matter system. So that might be a solution to consider. But yeah. So the reason I bring up Oro is because I have mine in my workshop and I noticed a while ago that the, uh, I check on it every once in a while in the app and I noticed that the app doesn't come up anymore. I mean, it launches, but it just spins forever. So the ORO services are finally down. We knew when Oro stopped selling the devices that they were going to stay alive for as long as they could keep them alive. And they did. But now the services aren't there anymore. So the switches should still work in whatever configuration they were last in, but you can't change anything on them now. So this is one of the advantages of those complicated tap codes that I was talking about with an innovelli switch that doesn't need a cloud to be able to configure it. So that might be a good follow up solution for you. But before you do that, I would recommend that you take the plate off of the switch where you're using this and there is an air gap lever that you can pull out at the bottom of the Oro. And I would do that. That'll cut power physically to the switch for like leave it out for 10 seconds and then try and restart it again and see if when it starts up this time it'll operate at least normally like a regular old switch.

Speaker B: Right. That's all I really want.

Speaker A: Yeah. Because I still use mine as a switch that last I had configured will turn off on its own and also it will control my Sonos in that room. And somehow that still works because they designed that to be a direct network connection to your Sonos system. So that's uh, surprisingly a nice advantage there. So the only other things going on in my smart home that I wanted to mention is like so many of my geek friends and I mean, I take my geek cred pretty seriously and I think that I can play with the big boys there, but I'm just not. I'm not into this wave of everybody getting on, um, the home assistant bus. I'm just, I'm not there, Adam. It's just too much.

Speaker B: Yeah. I think kind of see my earlier, like, I don't want to spend my free time troubleshooting things and like having to be tech support for my own home too much. I feel very capable in this stuff. But all of that seems like it's going to Be breaking and delicate and enough things. I have two teenagers, uh, well, I guess not quite a teenager, an 11 year old and a 14 year old that are uh, very passionate about 3D printing right now. And so just supporting their 3D printers and uh, all the things that break and have issues with that and tech issues with that, like that's enough for me. So I don't need another part time job being the home assistant troubleshooting person, um, that doesn't bring me joy. So I'm there with you.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I've avoided that. It's funny you mentioned 3D printing because occupying my time these days is a combination of 3D printing and laser engraving. So the other tie back to my smart home is that I've started laser engraving wall plates so that throughout my home, wherever I have more than one switch, I can clearly identify what each switch does. And I have, I've actually purchased two different lasers. One's in infrared and the other is a diode laser. The diode is great for engraving on metal, but then for plastics you can't use that. That's it just melts it, which is toxic to breathe. But an infrared laser can mark on plastic plates. So I have the ability to do both now. And in addition to my own, I've also started working with TJ as we know and some other installers and realtors to try and actually do this as a side gig to be able to engrave plates for custom uh, installs and stuff. Nice.

Speaker B: Yeah, very cool.

Speaker A: Yeah, so that's pretty much it. Is there anything else that you wanted to touch on as far as our homes?

Speaker B: I'll give a micro. A minor aside, I was uh, in touch with our friend TJ this week. In a moment of excitement I found that my Internet connection we use Comcast, strangely for a city of our size and kind of where we live, like not a lot of Internet options. And uh, so I'm basically stuck with Comcast for anything of any sort of reliability or speed. And uh, I have never met an Internet connection that's fast enough for me. I'll always take more speed. I was actually helping my grandfather out and doing some stuff with his and then kind of made my normal pass of like, is there any faster options available for me? And sure enough, um, Comcast actually had one and it really wasn't. I don't think it cost me really anything more. Maybe 10 bucks more a month to double my speed from one to two gig Internet. And I think I also doubled my upload speed so I'M like, woo, yes, let's do this. And I'm like, okay, I do definitely have, I'm uh, you know, bring my, bring my own cable modem to the party person. I don't want any Comcast equipment in my house. That sounds awful. So I, okay, I need to get a new cable modem to get this double speed. And then like it kind of set into me of like, oh wait, I only have gigabit switches, I only have gigabit WI fi, I only have you know, gigabit everything. And then so TJ and I started to go down the rabbit hole of uh, what, what is this project going to entail? To get 2 gig Internet to anything in the house. And it was starting to sound very expensive. Only for me then to find that my hardwire in my house is only Cat 5e, so hardwired I'm capped at gig. I can't go any faster. So still more to be done here. I was, you know, I use Eero now for my wifi. I've been pretty happy with that. TJ was trying to talk me into getting some big boy WI fi and some ubiquity stuff which I did put the question out to our IT company that services the company to see if um, our contract also includes doing installations in the CEO's home. Um, so we'll see what the answer is there. Or maybe TJ needs to come for his visit and uh, we'll do some WI fi stuff. So I think my only option at this point is going to be wireless backhaul of Wi Fi 7 non wired, which is kind of backwards to me. But that's probably the only way I'm going to get use of this 2 gig Internet if I want it, which of course I want it.

Speaker A: Of course you do.

Speaker B: Yeah. So uh, yeah, we'll see. But it became a much more complicated and expensive uh, upgrade than I originally thought it was going to be.

Speaker A: That's a riot.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. And I think I mentioned to you when you were upgrading your service to your home. I think I'm still at like 300 or 400, something like that.

Speaker B: Yeah, well you don't have five people and you know kids with multiple devices and streaming 4K and all those things. So. Yeah, yeah, so we'll see where that whole thing ends up. You know, TJ's answer when I showed him the Cat 5e is it's time to rip out the walls. I'm like, no way, no, no, that ain't happening. Yeah, um, yeah, that's A next house problem. But yeah, I think even, uh, I know the new iPhone supports Wi Fi 7, so I think if we do the WiFi thing, that'll get me most of the way there. And most of my end devices probably can't handle 2 gig wifi anyways. I didn't even look at my MacBook Pro, if that could even do anything more than, um, gigabit.

Speaker A: But it's not a matter of any particular device needing more than that. As you said, it's a matter of multiple things going on at once and having sufficient bandwidth for all of those things.

Speaker B: Yes, yeah, yeah. So we'll see. We'll see where we go with this. But, um, yeah, I'm in the market for some WI fi systems.

Speaker A: Cool, cool. Always good to have good wifi. That is critical.

Speaker B: Yes. All right, so, uh, no question for this week to end the show, but if you have a Smart Home question for us, um, you can send that at feedbackmarthome fm.

Speaker A: All right, well, Adam, if people want to find out more about what you're up to, where can people find you?

Speaker B: You can find everything my company's up to@gridconnect.com I am still reluctantly on Twitter. Although, I mean, I'm on the verge, man. I unfollowed Elon Musk in the last few weeks. I'm like, there are moments where I think about it, but I'm still holding on for dear life there. But, uh, I don't know, it may go away at some point through this election season. So that's where you can find me. How about you?

Speaker A: I'm just a Mastodon, but I'm also on. So I guess not just on Mastodon. I'm also on Instagram as Richard W. Guenther. And of course the Smart Home show is part of Technology FM M. And that's a, uh, collection of great tech focused podcasts that includes the home tech podcast, the Spoon podcast, the new food tech show from the Spoon, and my other show when I get it out home on. And, um, SmartHome FM is where you're going to find our show. Notes, details about each episode, and feedback is where you can reach us or send to us feedback or questions. Find our show anywhere you find your podcasts. Do us a favor. Ratings and reviews are great, but more importantly, tell a friend about the show. Thanks a lot.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening.