Episode 234 - Taming the Wi-Fi in Your Smart Home

Hey, everyone, it's Richard. Today's smart homes introduce myriad devices onto your home WI fi and wireless spectrum at large. And the part of that spectrum your smart home switches and bulbs and speakers use is already pretty crowded and has been for decades. In this episode, Adam justice and I dive deep into WI fi and how to optimize it for your smart home needs. I have dozens and dozens of devices around my home, and Adam's company just so happens to manufacture these type of of WI fi devices. So we both have some experience with this from both sides of the counter. We hope you enjoy and hopefully learn some things about taming the WI fi in your smart home on this episode of the Smart Home Show. Hey, everyone, I'm Richard Guenther from the Digital Media Zone. Welcome to the Smart Home Show. I'm joined, as usual, by my co host, Adam justice from connexense. Hey, Adam. Hey, Richard. Nice to see you again. Likewise. We're both back to our respective lives and businesses and healthy. Yeah, yeah, mostly. All right, good. I know a ton of people fighting the flu and a bunch of other nasty stuff right now, so hopefully you've managed to avoid that. But today, going to be talking about WI fi in the smart home. Why WI fi? Well, oftentimes when you have complications with devices in a home, it can be attributed down to the WI fi itself. So how you set up your WI fi and how you set up your devices on that WI fi is really important. So we're going to spend some time going through some of the basics of WI fi and then talk a little bit about how to optimize your WI fi experience in a smart home. All right, so we're going to start by running through some of the basics of WI fi and you may already know most of this, but I want to make sure that we're kind of all on the same page. WI fi is generally known as a standard from the ieee, or I should say it follows a standard from ieee known as 802.11. And you often see things like this on boxes. You might get a WI FI device that's compatible with 802.11. A, B, G, N, X, AC. All these different letters that they add at the end of the 802.11 spec. And what those letters indicate is a generation or a version, if you will, of WI fi over time. This all started back in like the late 90s when the first spec came out and that was just plain old 802.11. It used the 2.4 GHz spectrum. And we'll talk about that a little bit, what that means. And then B came out and added some speed and then A came out and introduced the 5.0 GHz spectrum. So that kind of moved some WI fi off of a very crowded 2.4 gigahertz. And again, we'll address that in a little bit. All this is still in the 90s, so all of this stuff that's so common in WI fi and that many homes still use today is over 20 year old technology, right? Yeah. And kind of like you said, some of that crowdedness was worse in the 90s because we still were using cordless phones and baby monitors and all of that kind of stuff that was using that frequency. Now I would say WI fi dominates it, but there's still other things that cause interference and get into that frequency. For sure. Yeah, yeah, true. So in the early 2000s, then the spec continued to evolve and expand, add speed, add bandwidth, add capabilities and robustness. Channels. Channels. And this naming standard started to become a little bit gangly, as the best way to put it. So a new standard was devised and this is where you start seeing companies talking about Wi Fi 4, Wi Fi 5 or 6 and 6e, which are pretty common right now. And even Wi Fi 7 is now actually official and they're working on Wi Fi 8 already. And again, this is going to add more robustness, more throughput, more bandwidth, the ability to connect more devices. We're in an age now where Everybody expects their TVs if to the extent that they still use TVs, but their devices, they use to watch video, stream 4K video on demand at multiple points through a home. And that takes a little bit more than your old little router is capable of doing. Yep. I, I feel like personally for a while here, like anytime there was a new major standard and I had devices that would support it, I was on the upgrade train. It was like, okay, time to get new WI fi and let's stay on it. But I think my current Eros and everything are Wi Fi 6. I'm good for now. I do want to get to Wi Fi 7. But it started to get to a point where there were diminishing returns for most people. And also the new standards were coming out so quickly behind each other that it didn't seem to make sense to upgrade that often. Yeah, I would agree with that. And if you did, it would be a costly endeavor, particularly when we had six and then six E come out in the same year. You kind of feel like, geez, am I never going to be able to keep up? And how is 6e different? Well, technically it adds 6 GHz into the mix, but I don't know that any of us are worried about that right now. Let's go back and talk a little bit about this 2.4 GHz mess. So pretty much anything that runs in your home other than 5.0 devices. So that might be like TVs and video streaming boxes and computers and stuff like that, which do run on 5.0 or are usually 5.0 capable. Most stuff in your home, most RF signals in general, are on the 2.4 GHz band. And so that includes other smart home protocols. Even stuff like Bluetooth and zigbee are on 2.4. As you mentioned, old cordless phones, old baby monitors. If you have wireless speakers, your Sonos speakers run on 2.4 GHz. Newer ones can run on 5, and you have to specifically set them up to do that. By default, they don't. Your garage door opener probably runs on 2.4. Your microwave emits 2.4 radiation. So there was a common joke that you couldn't talk on your cordless phone while the microwave was in use because there would be so much interference. It's crazy how much stuff in homes even still today is on this 2.4 GHz band. So it's a very crowded band. And I think the reason behind that was for a long time that was the band that the FCC allowed for these types of home devices. And that's why also the WI fi standard has been able to evolve over time as they've made other bands available as things change. And at least here in the US that has helped to be able to open some of these other bands to being used for these types of communications. Yeah, exactly. So that's kind of the basis for WI fi in general. But let's talk a little bit more about ways that WI fi can be set up in your house. Sometimes you might just have one router, one point where WI fi stuff connects, or you might have an extender. Extenders were very popular in the last decade where you could extend the range of your network by having another device that connected to your existing network, and then it either created another separate network or it created some sort of extension that allowed you to virtually see your original network. So all that's good, but really out of date these days. Nowadays, most networking systems available to homes anyway, and certainly in large enterprises are Mesh networks. This is stuff like in the consumer space, EERO or Orbi or nest, WI fi or Unifi from Ubiquiti. These systems are all designed to mesh. And what does that mean? Well, it means that you have multiple access points around your home that support each other with failover. And your devices can hop automatically from one access point to the next as you roam around your home. So it doesn't matter that you moved away from the access point that you were connected to. You don't have to do anything on your device. It's just automatically, automatically going to switch you over to the connection. That's a higher signal and easier signal for your device to use as you move closer to it. And I'll tell a little story that kind of sells the point on why this is important. Often when we first got bandwidth and broadband to a home, you would put your wifi router wherever that broadband came into the house. And you didn't always get to choose where that was. So sometimes they're really limited. Maybe that was in a basement or in a computer room or wherever that was wasn't necessarily the ideal place to put a single WI fi router. And so as that technology got better, I saw this in. My parents have a condo in, in the Tampa area. And it's not very big, maybe, I don't know, around 1800 square feet, something like that, but it's very thin and narrow. And the WI fi in their condo was atrocious. They had the old Apple TV and if you wanted to rent a movie, you would start it in the morning and it would download throughout the day and maybe you could watch the movie by 7pm it was just so bad. And it was because the broadband came in at the front of the condo. And this long, narrow, probably with a ton of interference and construction and the makeup of the condo, whatever, it did not work well when you got to the other side of the condo. So by the time I was able to put just a simple two hub erosystem into the mix, it was like night and day all of a sudden. I could now get wifi from the pool, not even just in the whole condo. In some cases you can do Ethernet backhaul for the separate access points, or they have their own secondary network that they talk between the access points to handle that failover and kind of the backhaul of the network. Yeah, so it works really well. Yeah, absolutely. That's a classic example. And so you mentioned backhaul. And what we're really talking about is how do these things communicate to each other? Right. How are they connected out to the world and then how do they communicate with each other? And that's kind of a perfect segue into the idea that some of them can actually do this wirelessly. So you may be thinking, oh, well, there's no way that I can do this because I have one access point to my home. And the example you gave is great. It's almost always at an extreme location. Right. Your network wiring from your provider comes in at some external point in your home, and your builder probably didn't draw cable from that location to a nice central point in your attic, which would be the best place to have your WI fi signal coming from. No, instead they probably have it right at the end at the edge of your basement. So you're already creating these great lengths that their signal has to get to in a home. The other thing that you mentioned was that there could be walls in the way and WI fi travels through walls, but every surface that it has to go through is going to degrade the signal a little bit. Right. Things like cement or metal or whatever are like non starters for maintaining a signal with WI fi. And what are condos often made with? Metal and concrete? Yep. Yeah, yeah. You don't have to have a wire to connect these mesh systems together because they do have other wireless ways of communicating with each other that is surprisingly reliable. And sometimes it's because it's specifically designed as a point to point solution between these access points so it doesn't have the complication of worrying about having to be a traffic cop for the communication back and forth between the two devices. So that's really cool because it means that you can use these pretty much anywhere. The other thing that's important is that, okay, so you might have this WI fi point in your home on one extreme wall of your house. Do they generally run your network and WI fi stuff in your house near your front door or near the back of your house? It's usually near the back of the house. The back of the side of the house. So what if you have a doorbell or security cameras or blinds on windows around your home? These are all kind of periphery devices. They're on the perimeter of your home. And if they're on the opposite side of where your WI FI access point is, it's even harder for your WI fi to get to them. So the other thing that an extender or that mesh networking can do is get that WI fi closer to the edges of your home where you might have other devices. Right. And I think you raise a good point too. Most people's homes are not designed unless you have a super, super tech forward home with this in mind. So they may not have Ethernet everywhere, they may not have everything you need. And in our case, we put an EERO specifically by the doorbell near the front of the house because it was falling off the network. So it's a good way to augment an existing home that wasn't necessarily built with these technologies in mind and give it the capabilities it needs to run your smart home the way you want to. For sure. All right, so that's kind of the state of WI fi and things that we need to know going into this before we even start talking about smart home stuff. So let's go there. We don't have a sponsor right now, so we're just going to dive right into our next segment and start talking about how we can optimize homes for smart home devices on your WI fi. So most of the smart home devices that you have that you buy through Amazon, Best Buy, wherever you get it, are going to be 2.4 GHz WI FI. So if you think about that, these are newer devices than the WI fi standards. Almost all of them are. So why, why would we be adding to the already overcrowded 2.4 band? Well, a couple reasons, but usually with all things in the world followed, the money, for the most part, affordable 5 GHz or dual band WI fi has not been super readily available. And we've talked about the business smart home before. To be competitive, you got to have a product that's in a certain price range and so every penny counts and it's gotten better and there are more options. But let's just say when you're talking about $1 for adding 2.4 GHz Wi Fi or $5 to $10 to add dual band, then as a manufacturer you say, well, do we really need dual band? Right. I mean, that seems like a no brainer right there. It almost seems like that puts 5.0 dead on arrival unless you're making a premium product. Right. I think that's also a good point. So there are certain products that have a use case for it, like you said, security cameras, something where you're streaming video, something where you need that level of data. This actually came up with one of our clients that make shades. And for controlling shades, you don't really need the bandwidth of a 5 GHz radio. They wanted it for radio reasons. We're going to get into later around tech support and issues and some of the problems that come up. But at the end of the day, it comes down to cost and you want a competitive product that you can get to market, and it's hard to justify that. I do think there are more options coming to market and more and more radios coming where you're going to start to probably see this more. But this is why the world is the way it is right now. Makes me wonder if in the pro space, where there are more premium products at higher prices, if we're seeing more adoption of 5o yet, and I don't know the answer to that. That would be interesting to ask some of our pro buddies that we know. Yeah, I'm sure it's getting there. We use Espressif for our WI Fi and they're just this year releasing their 5 GHz offering, and they're probably one of the most common used chipsets for smart home manufacturers. So if there hasn't been a wave yet, there definitely will be once their offering comes to market. But that's why you haven't seen it as much, is because some of those big players have not even had an offering in the market. Oh, that's interesting. All right, so if everybody's putting all their devices on this crowded space, then what can we do to still make it all work? Okay. Yes. So there's some things you can do here. I think you and I would both advocate that whoever you get Internet from, whatever they try to give you, don't take it. I do things for, you know, regular people or whatever. If they want their Xfinity or whoever your home provider is, it might be an okay option. And even some of those folks do have mesh options. But I'm certainly an advocate of being able to control your WI FI network and kind of owning all of your network gear. I don't even take the cable modem. So we use Xfinity, Comcast, and so I even use my own provided cable modem and don't rent theirs. I mean that even just from an economic standpoint, I think it's gotten better. But they used to really just charge you an arm and a leg for renting those devices, and they weren't ever very reliable or good. Anyways. So do your research and find out what you can and can't do with your provider. But I would certainly advocate for getting your own equipment. Yeah, I would agree with that 100%. And you mentioned Verizon. I have Verizon as my provider, and my option was to either rent or to purchase or to buy my own. When we moved in, I didn't have the time to deal with buying my own and figuring that all out because I'd never done that before. So I just purchased theirs even with that option. And this is something to look into. If you still want to use your provider's modem that they're going to charge you to use, it is usually more economical to just purchase it from them than to rent it. The only difference is they'll tell you that, well, but if anything goes wrong with it after, say a year or two, then it's your responsibility and we won't fix it and yada yada, yada, just like anything else that you buy. Right? So, yes, I mean, that's no big surprise. You're not likely going to need that maintenance support service that you're paying for until years and years and years down the road. And then even then, if they have to roll a truck to get a new modem out to you, you're going to have to pay an additional fee. Right? And then you're on their dime. But also important lesson, if you use cable, it sounds like you're fiber, but in the cable world, Lightning Arresters are a good one. I had just that problem happen where lightning came over my cable line and thankfully it stopped at, I think it fried the cable modem and the eero that were attached, but it didn't fry anything downstream from there. But yeah, then it was out of my pocket and I had to pay for a new cable modem. But I could run to Best Buy and I could have a new one up quickly. And I was in control of that situation. Right. And so that's a good point too. You just mentioned you got yours at Best Buy. Someone may be thinking, well, I don't know how to get a cable. I don't know what I need. You can buy them at Best Buy, literally, or on Amazon. I mean, these are not hard to come by. And most technical forums or discussion groups having to do with home networking. You'll be able to find something, just Google it on what devices work with my provider and be able to find your own replacement for that. But you don't have to replace their modem. You could just say, all right, thank you for the box. That will be my bridge to the outside world. But I'm not using your WI Fi. Right. And my parents had that situation where it is then important to make sure you shut off the wifi functionality on that side. So usually it's in the settings where you can say I just want this to be a modem, I don't want the wifi because otherwise you're creating your own interference. Right. And there are usually options there too. You can say I want this to be my router but not my WI fi. Meaning that maybe it has some ethernet plugs on it and you're going to use them. Or it can just be a complete pass through. You can just have it be nothing but an endpoint that gets you out to the Internet. Yep. So then from there what you pick I think depends on your home or where you're setting up your WI fi. So a smaller home or apartment or condo, you might be able to get away with a good multi antenna switch or router, something like a Netgear Nighthawk. But when you start to get above 2,000 square feet or like I said, even though my parents condo was a smaller place, depending on the size and the building materials and whatever, you can't go wrong with a mesh WI fi system. I think you mentioned some of them earlier, but I'll mention them again. I think eero, orbi, Nest, wifi, Unifi, all good options depending on your level of technical ability. You know, most people should be able to tackle out of the box the standard systems like an EERO or an ORBI probably need a little bit more tech and nerd skills to tackle the unifi side of things. Yeah, they are trying to make it easier. I have experience with EERO and with unifi. I don't have experience with ORBI or Nest. I do know that on the EERO and UNIFI side, one of the nice things about those systems is that they can also be your router. They can function not just as your wifi but as a router that you can then plug switches into and stuff like that. So again, thinking of that capability of just turning off your routing capability from your modem from your provider and I don't know about eero, but I know that unifi can also act as my modem. So I just took my Verizon box completely out of the mix. Oh, nice. I don't think you can do that in cable land, but that's nice. Yeah, and I guess you triggered something in my brain too. This is why you have to be careful with those settings for whatever device is downstream is because if you have your provider's device set up to be a router and then you put another device in that is also being a router, you're not going to Have a good time. It's not going to be fun. No. They're both going to be trying to farm out IP addresses to your devices and they're going to conflict and it's just not going to be fun at all. Yes. So, yeah, So I think that's some of the basics there. And for those more advanced systems, you get a lot of different options. So one of the options and a recommendation is to set up a 2.4 GHz only network. These different systems will have different ways of doing this. I use EERO in our house and we just have the blended network. We can talk about why that can sometimes create problems. But if you create a distinct 2.4 only network, then you can be very careful and clear about when you're setting up a device, what network you're putting it on. Yeah. And this I think is probably one of the best things that you can do. Even if your provider of your cable Service and its WiFi offers this capability and you decide you're not going to replace their equipment, set this up, because this will help tremendously and we will dive into that a bit more. You know, the terminology here is a little bit confusing because technically, while it says create a new network, oftentimes that's the language that's being used, it doesn't necessarily actually have to be a different network. It's the same network. All these devices can see each other. There's just two different doors to it, two different ways of accessing it. One way when you go in will allow you to use, maybe it's blended like yours is. So it's 2.4 or 5 gigahertz depending on what your device needs. The other way though, you limit so that it's just 2.4. So example, you might have my home network as one of your networks and then you might have my home network 2, 4, and there's no dot in there because for some stupid reason, most of these things don't let you actually put a dot in an ssid. So you could set those both up and they're both getting you to the same place. They're both getting you to the network, they're both getting you to the Internet. And devices accessing one way can talk with devices accessing the other way. So you're not really limiting anything except when you're connecting your devices. So in that blended scenario, I want to talk about one of the potential issues and why our customer wanted a device that could go on 5 gigahertz. One of those potential issues where you have two networks. Let's say Justice Home wi fi. I go to connect to Justice Home wi fi to put a device on the network and my phone is connected to the 5 GHz. If I'm trying to connect then a device that I want to put on 2.4, you can get to a place where you just don't see it or you know the device is having trouble connecting. So one of the features I know Eero has, because that's the system we have, is they actually have a setting in the app where you can temporarily shut off the 5 gigahertz while you're getting a device like that set up. This primarily was an issue with what I would say, an older way of commissioning WI FI devices. So often how you would commission a WI FI device is you would actually join that device's WI FI network or some way of communicating over WI Fi. What we've moved to for a lot of our devices, that works a lot better. Like I mentioned earlier, we use Espressif. They have a combo of both Bluetooth and WI Fi. And so what they do is they use the Bluetooth to communicate during the setup process. That way your phone can still stay connected to the wifi and be communicating, but you're talking to your device over Bluetooth to be able to set up and get it provisioned on the WI FI network. So that's one way that manufacturers have worked around that. But it's a very common issue. I would say, hands down, getting devices connected to the network is the biggest issue in smart home devices. Yeah. And that mechanism using the Bluetooth that you spoke with is what HomeKit and newer Google Home and Matter and all of those specifications use now for devices that you're connecting through them. So newer things are going to use that mechanism. But I always wonder, let's say I connected to my blended network and it connects to the right thing there. But then what happens if I lose power and it comes back on and this thing has to reconnect to that blended network? Is that all going to work okay? It should. I, I really, I, I firmly believe a better way of doing this is just connect your devices to the 2.4 network. If you have and have that be distinct and have that be dist. Yeah, yeah. And so if you have an IoT device and you're selecting a network when you add it to your smart home app, Then select the 2,4 network. If you're using Matter or HomeKit or one of these other ecosystems that basically negotiates for you based on what your phone's already logged into or connected to, then one of the things that I've tried to do, and I don't know if this actually works or not, but it seems to, is that when I set up my homekit home and when I add devices to it, I make sure my phone is connected to the 2, 4 network. So that is the connection that my phone sees when it's trying to establish a connection for devices that I'm connecting through that phone. So I don't know. But stick with the 2.4 stuff. If it's a 2.4 smart home device, and it almost always is, stick with the 2.4stuff. So having this dedicated 2.4 only network also helps your other connected devices work better. Obviously some things have options, some don't, but having everything on this network helps with your printers, your, your engraver or 3D printers, your Sonos speakers. It just makes it simpler that those are all on the same network. Yeah, and I have a term story here. If you're a contributor to HomeTech FM, you have access to their Slack network. And one of the long drawn out stories that we are all dealing with is fighting with our printers, that printers just do not want to work well on networks and are constantly causing problems. And the thing that solved my problem with my printers was ensuring that they too were on my IoT network. I mentioned maybe I have a 2.4 network. I call mine my network name with IoT at the end. And by doing that, suddenly no problems with the printer ever. It always works now. It's crazy nice. Yeah. So this is something that is not just an IoT issue. Although you might argue that printers now are part of the Internet of things. I think this can help lots of other stuff in your home network. Yeah. And we can also mention some people also go so far as firewalling off their IoT devices. I would say if you're buying devices from a reputable manufacturer that you trust, you shouldn't need to do this. And in this case, it's going to cause issues as well, because if you're trying to access those devices and you're not on the firewall network, you may be creating problems. So I would say only go down that route if you have the technical skills and knowledge and need to. But it's not necessarily something I've ever done. Yeah, this does seem like overkill to me too. I know there are people who are concerned about their connected devices maybe being able to get stuff off of their network or off of their nas or being able to get into their computers somehow. I think it really does come down to are you buying from good, reputable brands that have good security practices and protectionary measures in place on their devices? It doesn't mean that they too couldn't get hacked. But are their devices necessarily opening immediate vectors into your secure network? That's far less likely with something like a Philips Hue than it is from some random overseas manufacturer that sells a similar product for 20% of the price on Amazon. Right. I think the other thing I would advise, too, is there may be things that you can do at the router level to maybe solve some of these concerns. One situation I heard about was that TV manufacturers, if you connected the TV to the network, were actually sending viewing data up to the cloud to spy on people. So for me, I do connect those to WI Fi, but for the most part, I use Apple tv and, you know, I'm not using the streaming through the tv, so I'll turn that off so that unless I'm doing a firmware update or something like that, there's no reason for that TV to be connected to the network. Yep. No, that makes absolute sense. Before we get off this topic, there's one more thing that I wanted to mention that I didn't put in our notes. And I don't know how prevalent this is. And this is another thing that I only found a couple months ago. I noticed on the ubiquiti unifi settings for my networks, meaning I have my regular network and then I have my IoT network. At that level, there's an option that is optimize this network for IoT devices. And if you select that option, then one of the things it does is it handles all of the other settings for that network for you kind of automatically. It automatically adjusts everything else that needs to be considered for your IoT devices and helps things work a little bit better. And it did make improvements to. To the connectivity of devices in my home. Nice. All right, so the next thing that we would suggest is, obviously you don't always have a choice in what technology some of your devices may use, but as we're getting more and more modern standards and more options in the market, more things are coming to the table. So one of the ways that you can reduce some of that crowded traffic on your 2.4 GHz network would be to get devices that can live on other radio technologies. So these might be something like zigbee via a hub or a bridge, or increasingly More and More thread, which works with Thread border routers. And you would be surprised now how many devices support Thread. I think in my case, I recently saw I have more Thread border routers than I thought I did. But, you know, some of the recent home pods all have them in them. My Eeros have one in it. And I think even my nanoleaf stuff acts as a border router as well. So I was surprised that there are devices that I didn't realize can do that. So especially with where Matter is going to, I think that is becoming more and more important and something that you can just get through some of those other devices that have another use. Yep. And then increasingly we're also seeing devices that are supporting multiple radios and protocols. What this comes down to is, you know, we talked about chipsets earlier. These chipsets are being able to offer manufacturers options to support WI FI and Matter over Thread. I think we've seen that coming from some of the chipsets we use where they're giving these a protocol option. So that's great because that gives customers choices. So maybe you don't have a lot of stuff on Thread right now, so you can stick with the WI Fi option, but it gives you flexibility later. So it's certainly something I'm looking at in most of the things I'm buying these days to make sure they have a path to that or some way to upgrade it in the future. Yeah. And not only are we seeing devices that are coming out supporting multiple communications protocols and radios, like, for example, we talked about some of the stuff from Shelley supporting zigbee and WI Fi and Thread. That's amazing. That gives you options right out of the box. But we're also starting to see that existing devices have secretly been including Thread radios in their devices for months and months. And in the case of companies, for example, like lifx, they plan on lighting that up on making that capability available later this year, not just for their new devices, but for some of their older devices too. We've seen this from other manufacturers as well, like Eve. So I think this is going to maybe surprise a lot of consumers that they may actually have devices that they'll be able to move off of WI Fi and they didn't know it. Yeah. And I think certainly there's other options out there too. So you can look into other hub or bridge ecosystems where possible. Or consider things like Z Wave devices, which are very popular with home assistant users too. You do need a bridge to talk with that. But certainly as you're looking to load stuff off of your WI Fi, consider that as you're looking into to new things. And you know, sometimes when you're buying a device, you still have options in terms of actual different versions of the product. For example, I know Leviton still makes Z Wave versions of their switches in addition to the decora smart WI Fi line that they have. So you may just make a decision that. Okay, well, I'm. I'm going to go with Z Wave because I already have, say, a SmartThings Hub or some other way of communicating with those. Just so that from the start, if you don't have to use WI Fi, as long as the device has the features you want, then maybe it can connect some other way. Now that may add a bridge or a hub that you don't already have. So that's something to consider. And certainly we've talked long and at length about the differences between working with and without a hub. I think we have a whole episode about it, actually. Yep. All right, and then last but not least, shameless plug. You know, Richard, when things are funky in your network, what's one of the best ways to troubleshoot it? Like, What's Tech Support 101? Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again? Yeah, so it'd be awesome if there was a device that would just do that for you. And we just so happen to make a device like that. As a matter of fact. You do. Yeah. And fun fact, Richard also consults with us on some of the stuff related to the Connect Sense router rebooter. So you can actually support both of us in buying one of those. So I think one of the first questions that people might ask about a device like that. This is going to sound like a commercial, and I really don't mean it to be. I have, with my own money, purchase multiples of these that I use for various purposes around the home. And the rebooter solves a problem that initially you might think, oh, well, I could just solve that with my smart plug. Right. Maybe. I mean, maybe you could put a smart plug between your network and its power connection. But then is the mechanism that you have to then tell that smart plug to turn back on going to require your network? Because if so, it's not going to work. Yep, that's why we built it. The whole basic idea is it looks for a disruption in Internet connection and then automatically performs that reboot. You know, turn it off, turn it on again. I have one of these on my WI Fi main router and on my cable modem too, because there's some advanced options where you can kind of do them in series and also in some cases sometimes just rebooting the router in the middle of the night every week or two does wonders. I don't know what it is about turning a router back off and on again, that it clears the memory or what it does to make everything right with the world again, but there is a function in the device as well where you can schedule a reboot just to keep your network healthy. So yeah, and more things to come. If Richard and I were even on a meeting earlier today talking about some new product and some new features and things we're doing in this space, so stay tuned. But I guess I'll also say we've had some good success with this little device, but something we want to do more with too. So we'd love feedback and love your support if you're interested, but also want to hear from you if they're things you don't like about it or suggestions you have to make it better because always room for improvement there. All right, so this essentially wraps our thoughts on Wi Fi. If you have any suggestions for things that you're doing in your smart home that we didn't talk about and that you think others could learn from, let us know. Feedbackarthome. All right. And while we don't always have a question, this week we do so. The question came from listener Travis, who said, hello, Smart Home podcast. I just started listening to the podcast. It's great. Thanks, Travis. Thank you. We appreciate it. Quick question. Going back to 2023, is Adam still happy with his home theater equipment selection? If he were to do it again, would he do anything different, screen size, projector selection, et cetera? Great show. Good question, Travis. So I would say in general, I am still very, very happy with everything we did. I would say I flip flopped a lot while we were making those decisions and I expanded my budget to pick a different projector. I expanded my budget to get a little bigger screen. So I, I flip flopped on some of those things while we were in the process of making those selections with my great friends that were helping spend my money. So I would say because of that, I don't have any major regrets or changes. So yeah, I would say in general, very happy. Probably the, the only thing I not happy with is that I had to send back my demo unit of my great Kaleidoscape. Kaleidoscape. You know, that was nice while it lasted, but yeah, overall, still enjoying it, not using it as much as I would love to. Sometimes it's Just easier to pop on TV in the main room or whatnot. But certainly anytime we do go down there and use it, it's fantastic. So, yeah, appreciate it. Adam, I think one of the things that's interesting about your comment there is that while you were waffling, I would say that with each of those waffling things, you ended up making the right decision. Now, unfortunately, the right decision almost always meant more money. Right. But ultimately it got you a not future proof, but future ready home theater that you can do so much in and still so much with. You know, we've talked before about how you haven't even really hooked your smart lighting that you also invested in up to the whole system so you could incorporate that as well. A lot of what you ended up doing inspired me to think that, wow, if I ever built a home theater, I know what screen I want for sure. And oh, by the way, I also know how to build and install it now. Right. And I know which friends I'm going to call to come do with this. Yeah. So it's great to hear that you don't have any buyer's remorse on that. Yeah. And I think my suggestion there would be wait until you can do it. Right. I think that's one thing I did well. And then really think through things as you go, like what do I really want this to be? What are the decisions that are harder? You know, obviously you can change anything at any point, but some decisions are more expensive than others to replace later. So really make sure you're sure on those core things that are harder or more expensive to replace and get those right and you too will have no regrets. One more thing I wanted to add there. When you say build it right, it has to do with the visual design of the place. It has to do with the equipment, it has to do with the acoustics, it has to do with the optics. There are many, many components that go into that. And you had enlisted the support of a colleague of ours, Owen Maddox, who was on some of the episodes where we discussed building that theater. He is a home theater builder and installer specialist. That is what he does. I highly, highly, highly suggest that if you're doing this to enlist the support of a professional who can help you do those things because the end result is going to be significantly superior in so many different dimensions. Yeah. And you may not be so lucky as to have such awesome and expert friends as I do. So I would provide such service at no cost. Right, Exactly. Which I am still ever grateful for. But I would second, that that's a reason. Even if you have some of the skills to do it, find the right professional to help you along the way. And if you can find the right one too, you can still be a part of the process of getting stuff put together and configuring it. I think sometimes somebody like us who's more technical doesn't want a solution where they're locked out from changing things or tweaking or messing with things. I think that's just a matter of finding the right providers that can give you the keys to do what you want to do and finding the right devices and things that you still have access to do the nerdy stuff on the low level that you want to do and you're not locked out of it. Some people want that. Some people want a system that they can't screw up and that they can't mess with and how the provider leaves it. That wasn't me, but that's fun. Yeah, what fun is that? So if you have a Smart Home question, we'll pick one each show. If we have one. Best way is to send that to feedbackmarthomefm. Well, as always, fun talking to you. I hope our listeners enjoy the conversation and learn some things. In the meantime, where can they find you? Adam Yep, you can find everything my company is up to@gridconnect.com you can still find me on Twitter occasionally, Adam justice and Adam justice on all the other social media places. How about you Richard? You can find me at the Digital Media Zone. You can also find me on Mastodon as Richard Guenther or Bluesky as Richard Gunther.com and this show, the Smart Home show, is part of Technology fm, which is a collection of great tech podcasts, including the Home Tech podcast that I mentioned earlier and the home on podcast. SmartHome FM is where you can go to find our show. Notes and details about each episode, links to stuff that we've Talked about and FeedbackMarthome FM is how you can reach us. Find the show everywhere you find podcasts and if you like it, do us a favor, rate a review. But more importantly, tell a friend so they can subscribe. Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening, Sam.