Millennial homeowners Christopher Matos-Rogers, Brett Little, Jack Tiebout and Connor Dillon compare notes on living with smart home technology, from geofenced door locks and solar-plus-battery load shifting to water and air quality monitors, and where today's systems still fall short.
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Christopher Matos-Rogers: We had a smart home before, and so when we bought this house seven years ago, we recreated it. And most of our smart home stuff started with security, automation, lighting, door locks. So, you know, it's all geofence. And my house unlocks when I, you know, I get to it. So that's real convenience, right? And that's something that is sellable and that people desire.
00:00:28:29 - 00:00:57:15
Brett Little: It's fun. And how to translate it to other people to get them excited about it is difficult because it's like if you're not wanting to do this, you know, you don't want to do the things the way I did them, you know? So, for example, we were slammed with the heat wave the last two days trying to navigate my Tesla Powerwall with my solar to manage that heat wave.
00:00:57:19 - 00:01:19:00
Brett Little: I'm on critical peak pricing, so we get charged a dollar a kilowatt from like 2 to 7 when the alerts go off. You know, technically, my battery is designed to from our peak load time from 2 to 7 to go to feed solar to the grid and then run our house off the battery. Right. And it's just set up, you know, set it and go right.
00:01:19:01 - 00:01:40:10
Brett Little: But when there are weather events, cloudy days, hot, hot days where we know we need more energy to get us through, I have to be ready at two and 7:00 to switch the system over to use all the solar and battery at once, so that we don't run out of power later and then get charged lots of money.
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Brett Little: So I've been sort of navigating that a little bit like this has got to be a little smarter, right? It's got to be more intuitive. So that's, you know, one thing and then another thing on smart ventilation. You know, we've got the, you know, the old cosmos system set up. And I know Panasonic's updating to the new one.
00:02:01:20 - 00:02:22:11
Brett Little: So again there you're still kind of, you know, messing around with things where you'd hope it'd be a little more smarter. So, for example, you know, my, you know, my range hood will kick on if it selects, you know, but an extra 2.5 from cooking. But it takes a while to turn on, you know, five minute intervals.
00:02:22:11 - 00:02:44:20
Brett Little: So I have to turn it on myself, and then I have to kind of, you know, go in and kind of mess around with it a little bit. Everything is a bit disconnected, and it's just because I'm a bit of a nerd here and enjoy doing this. I'm sort of doing it, but it is certainly not something that I don't think, at least the way I have it set up is replicable for everybody.
00:02:44:21 - 00:03:06:14
Christopher Matos-Rogers: I have an in-house integrator because my husband is a database architect, so this is what he does for fun. This is not something that an average person would do, you know? But it's amazing to live in that experience. And now the next stages we went through, you know, we've got smart water monitors. Alana had some serious issues with water building errors for a while.
00:03:06:18 - 00:03:17:06
Christopher Matos-Rogers: So we got into that, which opened up a whole other possibility and we got into ventilation during Covid. So air quality monitors, we do have the Brown Overture system.
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Brett Little: We really just.
00:03:18:08 - 00:03:51:09
Jack Tiebout: Try to keep it simple and all integrated. So we do Google Home smart lock, smart doorbell. We the house did not have a AC system, so we we got ourselves in electronic heat pump and got rid of the gas furnace. And then that can be operated by our whole Google Home system, Excel. The energy provider here is just transitioning folks to to variable pricing.
00:03:51:09 - 00:04:00:17
Jack Tiebout: So we're going to start using that to to wait to kick the AC on until 7 p.m. and things like that.
00:04:00:19 - 00:04:26:06
Connor Dillon: They are really good when they get set up. When you have nerds like us that take a little bit more of an interest and fine tuning the system. They can really do wonderful things. But for the lay person who buys a home, it's smart, but it doesn't get set up correctly and they don't care. We're not really going to see the benefits that we need.
00:04:26:07 - 00:04:37:14
Connor Dillon: Frankly, my biggest issue with smart homes is the failure of it. Should a grid down kind of situation happen for me to actually want a smart home.
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Christopher Matos-Rogers: It would have to be.
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Brett Little: If I lose internet completely.
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Christopher Matos-Rogers: A solid power.
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Brett Little: I should be able to operate everything.
00:04:42:22 - 00:04:59:25
Christopher Matos-Rogers: Because everything still connected to the router. I know I wouldn't be able to control remotely without the internet, but if I'm home, I should go to control that stuff still from my phone because it's still connected to the same Wi-Fi network and internet goes out pretty often. So tower not so much with the internet. It just happens all the time.
00:04:59:25 - 00:05:35:16
Christopher Matos-Rogers: I get really excited about the energy management side of things. We do use a sense monitor, which tries to use AI learning to identify different devices, but it's not perfect. But I think it's given us a lot of information about what our resting load is in the house, what our overall usage is. We can see our peaks, but I think there's obviously a lot of future interest for resiliency, for understanding, for saving money with that, that peak load, like what Brett was talking about with using a battery, using solar and being able to go to a time of use plans.
00:05:35:16 - 00:05:55:28
Christopher Matos-Rogers: And Georgia, they're still purely elective, so we're not forced to be on one, although I've been told that, you know, that's going to be a future thing where we will no longer have, you know, a standard flat rate energy. So it's going to become even more important. So that's sort of the next level I'm kind of interested to get into and do some of that energy arbitrage, if you will.