187 Automations, 300 Devices: Josh’s Smart Home Assistant Journey

[Rohan]: Hello and welcome to Homelessness and Podcast. [Rohan]: Today we have our friend, Phil, as usual. [Rohan]: Hey, Phil, are you going? [Rohan]: Good. [Rohan]: And we've got Josh from Josh's smart home. [Rohan]: How you doing, man? [Rohan]: Hey, I'm good. [Rohan]: How are you guys doing? [Rohan]: Good. [Rohan]: Good. [Rohan]: And as usual, this podcast is sponsored by Homelessness and Cloud by Nabukasa.

[Rohan]: For a small monthly fee, you'll unlock powerful features like secure effortless access to your system from anywhere, the choice of voice assistants, off-site backups, and more. [Rohan]: All configurable from the UI with no YAM will need it. [Rohan]: It also supports this development of Home Assistant ESP Home and other Open Home Foundation projects. [Rohan]: Click on the link in the description to find out more.

[Rohan]: We also want to give a shout out to our Patreon members, including our executor producers, Benny, and Rob. [Rohan]: You can help support the show and get early access to episodes all in an ad free feed. [Rohan]: Support the show, check out homeassistant.fm, and click Patreon in the menu. [Rohan]: All right, Josh. [Rohan]: Again, once again, welcome. [Rohan]: Thanks for your thanks for making the time. [Rohan]: Thanks for being here. [Josh]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Rohan]: Yeah, of course. [Rohan]: I know we've met in real life, which we can only say for a few people. [Rohan]: I mean, I can barely say that for Phil. [Rohan]: Let alone another folk. [Rohan]: So this is cool. [Rohan]: I'll tell us a little bit about yourself, Josh, and tell us about your channel and what you do, and how you got started.

[Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, definitely. [Josh]: This is definitely not a full-time gig for me. [Josh]: I have a day job. [Josh]: So I do work as a project manager. [Josh]: I'm in an act of CPA as well. [Josh]: I'm so professional, you know, career outside of this, but I had a real passion over the years for technology and I'd like to get into all kinds of things in the past.

[Josh]: 25 years ago, I was doing some HTML on the side, because I like to run little like Madden football leagues and have a website. [Josh]: I got into, yeah, and I got into all kinds of things, like just VBA, or Luden custom ROMs on my Android devices back in the day.

[Josh]: So, uh, building computers, all kinds of things in the history, but it didn't, it was really about 10 years ago that I started with a smart home, and it was when we were building a new house, you know, in, uh, in hindsight, I went home back and put in all the devices as we were building, but some of the, some of the contractors maybe were not as, um,

[Josh]: open to some of the concepts and including some of these devices. [Josh]: So we just started with a couple of that time at that time and I don't think we could have started with the worse anything worse than what we did because we got the infamous my Q garage door openers. [Josh]: Yeah, same same here. [Rohan]: And I loved it at the time too. [Rohan]: And I was like, yes. [Josh]: And we had the, we had a Honeywell Wi-Fi thermostat that integrated with absolutely nothing.

[Josh]: So it was totally detrimental long term to our smart home, but hey, we got started. [Josh]: After that, one of my cousins was into smart home tech and he introduced me into smart things. [Josh]: So I got my real start in smart things. [Josh]: And [Josh]: utilizing a lot of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices. [Josh]: The one thing outside of those that I really fell in love with were Lutron devices. [Josh]: At this point, I do have those basically maxed out in my house for the hub.

[Josh]: It maxed out at 75 and we have 74. [Josh]: I just haven't pulled the trigger in 75 because I'm like, this is the last one and let's get another hub. [Josh]: It includes the remotes and everything else. [Josh]: So we have Lutron, Caceta switches all throughout the house. [Josh]: A lot of Zigbee's, Z-Wave. [Josh]: Zigbee include present sensors, motion sensors, open-close sensors, water leak sensors, watcher. [Josh]: certainly really useful in our house.

[Josh]: Z-way we have, and we have plugs obviously with Zigbee. [Josh]: Z-way we have plugs. [Josh]: The big one that I like there is we have a shut off robot for our water shut off valve. [Josh]: So it actually turns the valve there.

[Josh]: So that's pretty neat. [Josh]: So we have a lot of devices. [Josh]: Definitely, I think we're close to 100 devices on Zigbee. [Josh]: I know we have, [Josh]: I don't want to say two or 300, maybe 300 devices in home assistant at this point because we did move over to home assistant eventually.

[Josh]: Sam song smart things, the real frustrations there over the years were that I built these things out and then I always wanted a little bit more, so I don't know how familiar you guys are with smart things. [Josh]: But there's web core. [Josh]: So I wanted a webcourt, you know, the programming, and had everything working, but it's web-based. [Josh]: And Samsung decided that they weren't going to support it anymore.

[Josh]: Rumor has it, it was because of the utilization of some of the Amazon AWS servers for some of the webcourt stuff, but I'm not sure if that's the truth or not. [Josh]: So they stopped supporting that, and basically didn't give every whole lot of time or any alternatives to pull those in. [Josh]: So at that point, they burnt my system of the ground, and I was like, [Josh]: Yeah, super frustrating.

[Josh]: So that was stupid for me and I was like I need to have something that I can control and as I poked around all the Sam song of you know smart things for them I heard a lot about home assistant obviously [Josh]: In the past, I was more comfortable with doing a lot of that hands-on and troubleshooting and really technical things. [Josh]: But as I've matured in my life and have a lot less time, I've really moved over to a more simplistic lifestyle.

[Josh]: So, gone with the Android and that type of thing, and ever to the Apple ecosystem, and I just want things that work. [Josh]: So, homosistent. [Josh]: You know, at times when I looked at it, it was a little bit cumbersome potentially to move over to it.

[Josh]: But I will say a couple of years ago when I moved over almost everything was in the UI, which is a huge plus for me that I didn't have to go poking around everywhere, everything integrated really quickly, and you know, found tons of devices immediately. [Josh]: So the transition was way better than I expected from smart things. [Josh]: that is definitely a moral of that story.

[Josh]: But yeah, so I started to smart things maybe 10 years ago and moved over to home assistant a couple of years ago, maybe two years ago or so. [Phil]: That's interesting. [Phil]: Did you go through like a any other decision process trying to find another alternative to home assistant like I think you know home assistant hasn't always been known for being user friendly right it's sort of the the Android to you know the iOS in terms of [Josh]: Yeah, I did, homey purr wasn't too popular then.

[Josh]: Originally, when I looked at Samsung smart things, I actually included Iris, which is Lowe's, it's a home improvement store in the US, and they had their own brand at the time. [Josh]: The one positive I got out of that, I did not go with their hub or anything back then, but when they stopped making their hub, but they put all their Zigbee devices on clearance.

[Josh]: So a lot of my Zigbee devices are actually iris branded because that they just sold them for nothing and you could go to Lowe's and stock up autumn and they were just cheap generic, you know, open-close sensors or whatever or motion sensors and they worked really well back then. [Josh]: But when I was looking to make a switch, I did, I did analyze other options. [Josh]: The one thing that really pushed me to Home Assistant was the vast array of integrations that exist here.

[Josh]: and the user support and the community aspect because I didn't want to switch again. [Josh]: So that was my fear is if I go with another company like Samsung where they are just going to abandon it or change, you know, it's a moving target and they don't keep their word maybe on things that we expected or they don't live up to our expectations, maybe it's a better way to put that.

[Josh]: I think that, you know, that was some of the things I was trying to avoid and that's what really pushed me ever to home assistant. [Phil]: Yeah, I think that was my same theory too, right? [Phil]: Like the community around home assistant was like, this is it, right? [Phil]: Like everyone, it seemed to be becoming thing you standard for everything. [Phil]: And I think the openness to the community and everything was just like, yep, this is where we're going.

[Phil]: And I was like, I'm hoping I'm bored, right? [Rohan]: Yeah, it's moving from smart thing. [Rohan]: It's funny because I actually looked at Iris. [Rohan]: This is when Lowe's was still in Canada. [Rohan]: And I looked at Iris and it's like, oh, maybe this is something viable. [Rohan]: So the same deal right I was going from smart things and then looking at the forums and stuff. [Rohan]: And I was like, okay, it's a homelessness and looks cool.

[Rohan]: And that was kind of my number one contender anyways. [Rohan]: But I did look at and evaluate it. [Rohan]: And I was like, ah, I don't know. [Rohan]: I feel like this way, it's at least sitting [Rohan]: And I'll pay a cent for it. [Rohan]: Might as well give it a shot and see what happens, right? [Rohan]: And then I can go and then lo and behold, before that, I rose, took down the, that whole product line. [Josh]: So yeah, yeah.

[Josh]: And just to, you know, really exhibit my level of wanting things to just work or maybe even laziness in some instances, everything I have is running on the home system green because it's a plug-and-play. [Josh]: And didn't have anything further. [Phil]: Well, that's interesting. [Phil]: So you said before that you bought like over 100 devices on ZEKB alone and this is all running through a grain.

[Phil]: Have you found it to be too sluggish for those devices?

[Josh]: No, I haven't had any issue at all. [Josh]: Certainly have a pretty robust network. [Josh]: I've found that the biggest key to making ZEKB and everything work really well for me is utilizing the [Josh]: I know you guys have mentioned this in past. [Josh]: Zigme as a standard has not always been very consistent on which devices are going to communicate and work well together.

[Josh]: But in a carabde devices, the ones that are not hard-powered, you know, hard-wired devices, they seem to really be contrary in what they're going to talk to. [Josh]: So having these a car smart plugs has really made all those devices work and it actually seems work really well with all the other devices as well, so that's been one thing that's really helped my mesh network locally. [Josh]: As should, I should back up one other step before I got into the Lutronca Seta.

[Josh]: I had one of my main headache devices as well. [Josh]: I made all the wrong choices initially, and I installed the GE JASCO light switches that all will eventually fail apparently. [Josh]: And we had [Josh]: Oh, they had Z-Wave and Z-Wave and Z-Wave. [Josh]: So I made sure I had a great mesh network and I had half of each and I strategically placed them throughout my house. [Josh]: I had 40 some switches and most of them at this point failed.

[Josh]: The couple that didn't fail are pretty much in a box. [Josh]: I reinstalled two of them repushing the button to get her to re-sync hurt my thumb that day. [Josh]: That's about like three hours trying to get a couple switches back into my network because those switches are, [Josh]: patience testing switches. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. [Josh]: Yeah, but it's switching over to Lutron's solve that.

[Josh]: That also takes that load off of home assistant for the most part because it's just the it's own hub that's communicating only when you have an interaction there. [Josh]: So that's a lot probably less on our home assistant instance because like I said, we have 74 of those devices. [Josh]: we also have devices that don't actually work in home assistant, but I'm not counting those for any of these purposes. [Josh]: So yeah, we haven't had any issues at all with meeting anything.

[Josh]: I want to say we have about 200 automations as well, so I've been really impressed with the home assistant green and [Josh]: the stability. [Josh]: I typically am one of the monthly users basically on the upgrades. [Josh]: So I'll wait until a 0.3 or 0.4 of the the home assist operating system to upgrade. [Josh]: But other than that, that's the one thing I've really done. [Josh]: And that I talked to one of my cousin's friends that lives in the area.

[Josh]: And that was the advice he gave me because I found out he was using home assistant. [Josh]: He realized [Josh]: That's one I haven't gotten to work really well for me, but it's mostly probably because I try to use it in a really weird instance, which calls us challenges. [Josh]: I have a really weird device in my house, so we have a home theater who put in, and with that, I was like, we have popcorn machine and we need a fountain soda machine.

[Josh]: So this guy was on Facebook looking around and I found a subway restaurant that was going out of business and they were selling their sort of machine.

[Josh]: So we got like the full subway sort of machine, you know, the eight pounds with ice and all that and it has a light in it, but it's the fluorescent light. [Josh]: So, I don't know if it's a capacitor or what it is, but it basically has to get so much power before it can actually turn it on. [Josh]: And that's really difficult for the smart switches to handle that because they think that there's an issue and then they stop it is what happens.

[Josh]: So, that's the one that I've struggled with and I've tried to use the Shelly, but again, it's probably my instance of usage that's the issue and not the Shelly. [Josh]: Can you rip it out and put an LED strip or something again? [Josh]: Yeah, I think so. [Josh]: I haven't really prioritized this probably the problem. [Josh]: But plus I got to figure out the wiring and that a lot of the wiring and everything is probably beyond my normal abilities.

[Josh]: Yeah, I don't live in Australia where I'm restricted from doing any things as Americans. [Josh]: We just do whatever the heck we want to figure it out later. [Josh]: But that's probably why I need to do is put LEDs or something. [Phil]: So on that, like, you've done a theater room. [Phil]: We've got the Popcorn Machine and now that the show machine, are you automating the theater room then? [Phil]: Like, if you got some cool locations around that.

[Josh]: I don't have too many actually in the theater, a lot of it's because I am concerned about predicting what we want to do.

[Josh]: My biggest key when I'm putting all the donations together is that nobody ever complains about them because the wife acceptance factor and you know that every living my house, their acceptance factor, is the most important thing because if I burn that bridge, [Josh]: I'm not coming back you know we have we have four acres of property that's reality we're looking for me because I'm not coming back [Phil]: Oh, I guess that's also it, right?

[Phil]: Like you want to, you want the home, the smart home, to be in the background. [Phil]: You don't want it to be the focus of everything. [Phil]: And it should be making people's lives easier and not hearing or getting in their way. [Phil]: And I struggle with that all the time too, right?

[Phil]: Like, even from that amount of opening and closing blinds, if someone's open to blind and because they want to see outside, then the automation kicks in and closes it because for whatever rules I put in place, it's annoying, right? [Phil]: It annoys myself. [Phil]: When I'm opening and closing doors and the blinds are going up and down, right?

[Phil]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, the reason I know most of our automations are really good is the only time I realize that we have them is when I go to the hotel and I walk into the bathroom and I go to the sink and realize I'm standing in the dark and I have to turn around and find out where the lights which is. [Josh]: So in the theater, the one that I do have, we have like a theater sign that has our last name and like theater outside of theater.

[Josh]: So I utilize the lights in the theater, determine whether that should be owner not and some other things just whether or not they should be on. [Josh]: But don't have too many. [Josh]: I do plan on incorporating some of the present sensors. [Josh]: I figure if I have enough redundancy that I'll prevent any issues. [Josh]: because that's my issue is like if we have four hours of seeding.

[Josh]: So if we have four hours of seeding, how many do I need to make sure that there's no issues or maybe I also prolong the period of time. [Josh]: So no presence in for an hour or something like that and that starts shutting things off. [Josh]: I did have a mini split behind me and I did use a Lincoln link IR blaster to incorporate that. [Josh]: So if I finalize all the presence information in the theater, [Josh]: and also trigger it that way. [Phil]: Yeah, that's a good use case, actually.

[Phil]: Yeah, I remember like one of the, when I had before we got central heating, like Dr. and a new control system, I would have some Z-wave IR blasters for the climate controls, right? [Phil]: Left for the split system, and now we're just yet literally with the mean to hate, put into cool, I just send the IR blasters out there. [Phil]: I tried the Sancibo, but I think the cloud dependency was too annoying, right? [Phil]: Like we just added that latency.

[Phil]: So yeah, I suppose you haven't done things like, you know, when Plex turns on and starts playing the lights dim down in the theater and then the lights dim up, like that would be a lot by my first thing to do. [Josh]: Yeah, so one of the things, so where I'm sitting right now, we have like a bar height countertop. [Josh]: So it's like a bar that we tend to sit and eat at. [Josh]: So sometimes we'll get like take out or pizza or whatever.

[Josh]: We'll come in here, we'll set the lights to 1% in the back and turn them off in the front and we'll sit here and eat. [Josh]: And then as we're ready, what is moved down to the front and turn off the lights? [Josh]: So it's really hard to predict exactly what we're going to want to do because it depends on our situation. [Josh]: And I haven't figured out how to say if we went to, if we stopped by one of the pizza places, it's a broader home.

[Josh]: Yeah, and now it does this thing, but if not, then trigger this other thing. [Josh]: Yeah. [Rohan]: Yeah. [Josh]: So the machines are complex. [Rohan]: I was going to say, you could probably use multi-zone kind of presence, right, to say, okay, I'm in this area, or somebody is in this area, so based on that, do keep it up 1% and zero for the rest of it, or whatever, right? [Josh]: Yeah, and that works until and maybe I could just do it with, you know, the date of the occurrence as well.

[Josh]: I tend to host fancy football drafts in the theater. [Josh]: So we want all the lights to be on but dim in the whole area then. [Josh]: So it's like all these different situations. [Josh]: We have different use cases and then also the kids, if they come in to play like PS5 or something on the theater screen, they tend to want the lights on because they're kids and they could scare

[Josh]: Yeah, or the trip down the steps if there's friends over or something so yeah, it's just so complex is has been the problem and like I said I probably need to just bite the bullet and look at all the you know zoons with the present sensors and come up with the the main, you know Objective the other thing I've done in the past is if certain I'll use like a boian Like a

[Josh]: She would take a helper, a boy and helper, and then it's like, yeah, if this is on, then just ignore all these things. [Josh]: So we actually have that for some of the, some of the areas where we have motion lights and everything. [Josh]: Because what I tend to with motion lights is when you walk in the area, that area and the next hallway light up and as you walk through, you know, lights up and then I'll turn off behind you after so long.

[Josh]: Well, some of the areas kids are kids like to have like sleepovers. [Josh]: So it's like, well, we don't want that to light up in the middle of the night if somebody gets up. [Josh]: So I have it triggered where you've turned the bullion on, it won't do it. [Josh]: And then after 10 hours being on the bullion, it'll turn itself back off. [Josh]: So it's always monitoring that.

[Josh]: So I think that that's maybe a workaround that I could have or I could have, you know, in this instance, it's [Josh]: you know, for a fasty football draft. [Josh]: And in this instance, this is other thing. [Josh]: And then if it's in that category, because I've do that a lot for our time of use. [Josh]: So I have a different helper that I have labeled. [Josh]: This is our peak time or off peak time or super off peak time.

[Josh]: And then look at that particular helper and say, okay, is if it's this do that thing, but if it's other thing, you know, don't. [Josh]: So I think that's probably the route I need to go. [Josh]: I just need to figure out what are the different instances we have.

[Josh]: So, you know, eating dinner before the movie, we have the fancy football draft, we have just coming in for a movie, or we have like kids playing video games, and this one and one because they're afraid, you know, whatever it is. [Rohan]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Phil]: The user-wise scenes, like I'm thinking, even if you've found it's your football night, you can have a scene for that, right, that does the lights the right level, it impets the other pizza scene with using those at all.

[Josh]: that I've avoided scenes for the most part after Sam song burnt me with scenes, so maybe a little bitter one scenes, so I tended to do just straight automations for the most part. [Josh]: I have a couple scenes, but not too many, but maybe this is a good use case for the scenes where I could actually utilize those in this one off and have the right thing happen. [Josh]: With our fancy football, I used to like to utilize our Google home and have different reactions from that.

[Josh]: So I had different prompts there where I could say, you know, this team drafted this player. [Josh]: And it would respond back like, why the heck would this team draft that player? [Josh]: That player is garbage. [Josh]: So I had different process stuff I'd set up and had some like scenes associated with some of that where it would react to like, you've crafted them, like, what do you do? [Josh]: And you know, different different light sequences that type of thing.

[Josh]: So try to throw it off, sort of like, you know, emergency situation. [Rohan]: Yeah. [Rohan]: Yeah. [Rohan]: So I mean, I mean, I'm moving off from your, from the theater. [Rohan]: I mean, I know you mentioned time of use and so on. [Rohan]: So are you, are you doing anything from like [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, definitely. [Josh]: We have everything automated as much as possible.

[Josh]: The one thing that I've also embraced is not buying smart home devices for the sake of buying smart home devices because I am addicted sometimes to things like that. [Josh]: pretty cool. [Josh]: But ours have that delay a couple hours on it. [Josh]: So I have, you know, a piece of paper posted like here are the cheapest times. [Josh]: So if anybody needs to reference it, you can, you know, delay those, the smart, you know, why or the washer or dishwasher off me and smart.

[Josh]: But the other things, like we have dehumidifiers in our basement, and [Josh]: I have those automated, so they only run during the cheapest time and then turn off during the more expensive time. [Josh]: Incorporate with that as well, we have Tesla's solar and power walls, I actually keep a monitor of the grid as well, so our power walls will tell us if the grid goes down. [Josh]: So if the grid goes down, I utilize a lot of same automations to take the place of the peak pricing.

[Josh]: So we don't need de-metifiers if the grid goes down. [Josh]: The fish lights on the fish tanks, they all go, you know, all these things go off that are not essential so that we make sure we have power for lights and refrigerators and things that we really care about. [Josh]: Our pool. [Josh]: Our pool pump doesn't turn on things like that. [Josh]: Also, our pool pump is another one that's a big energy suck.

[Josh]: So what we do with that is we have that automated where we have a helper that's a counter. [Josh]: And we, I just use 15 minute increments to figure out how much it ran throughout the day. [Josh]: So every 15 minutes, home assistant checks it, is it running right now, if so, increment it one, because sometimes we'll go out and get in the pool and we'll turn on the filter while we're in the pool. [Josh]: And we get out, we'll turn it off.

[Josh]: And then when we get to the cheapest time, it figures out, did it run enough today. [Josh]: If not, kick it on. [Josh]: And then every 15 minutes check to see if it ran enough. [Josh]: And as soon as it did turn it off, so we don't run it more than we have to, because it does use up a lot of electricity. [Josh]: But we always use it over the cheapest period if possible. [Josh]: Unless, you know, somebody's in and they manually turned on that type of thing.

[Phil]: That's actually pretty smart because then you know, like, okay, we've already used it, you know, X amount of hours today. [Phil]: We don't need it to run for the full period of the cheap window today. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: And it's, it's really important actually for ours as well because we have a saltwater pool. [Josh]: So it's using the chlorination from the saltwater. [Josh]: So if you run too much, you're going to actually ever chlorinate your pool as well.

[Josh]: So it's not like you're just wasted electricity. [Josh]: You're actually [Rohan]: Yeah. [Rohan]: That's interesting. [Rohan]: I never thought of it that way too, right? [Rohan]: And I think, yeah, and it's cool to take those big items to say, okay, based on this, let's automate build on a mission. [Rohan]: Are you, I know, I know you said, [Rohan]: You have a power wall, so with that, you get a certain level of monitoring in there.

[Rohan]: Are you also doing any smart breakers or anything like that? [Rohan]: Or are you monitoring power, the energy consumption between each device and how we have granular? [Josh]: don't have any smart breakers. [Josh]: I have looked at those and considered those. [Josh]: I think maybe we'll get there at some point for the most part. [Josh]: I've used just the the individual plugs with the the energy monitoring on those.

[Josh]: If I do want to look granular at what level we're using, also I can to an extent figure it out based on our electricity bill. [Josh]: But before we put on solar or power walls, what I figured out was our electricity company provides us hourly information or usage. [Josh]: So we can go back for five years and look hourly at how much we used and you can do all kinds of analysis from that and make some inferences from that, basically.

[Phil]: That don't even look like an AI and seeing what it could tell you. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah. [Josh]: I'm a bit of a spreadsheet nerd. [Josh]: So I put it in there and played around with it. [Josh]: But yeah, I think that is a good AI use case to, you know, what can you tell from this? [Josh]: And that was before we had solar power walls. [Josh]: Now that we have that, we're sending energy back to the grid as well. [Josh]: So there's even more data points now because we have double basically.

[Josh]: Yeah. [Rohan]: Do you have you done the ROI on something like the power walls or any other kind of eco flow or whatever else? [Rohan]: Like how does that work out for you in terms of like how long would you need to recover how much ever you've spent on it? [Rohan]: Because they're not cheap.

[Josh]: No, no they're not cheap at all. [Josh]: We did do all the ROI on everything and figure out exactly what the payback period was. [Josh]: The one thing I would say though is we have a value of having electricity all the time that also we took into consideration. [Josh]: Because obviously you do have the actual payback, but then there's other other computations you can make as well.

[Josh]: So I just pulled it up and we, what we installed was about, I think it was about 24 kilowatt hours of solar panels on our house, which is 57. [Josh]: I think solar panels, we ended up with some of the house and we put four power walls and four power walls, a lot of power walls. [Josh]: And [Josh]: every time you had a power wall your payback period goes further out. [Josh]: So we looked at all the different options.

[Josh]: So the solar with power wall payback was 13 years and that assumed that we wouldn't energy arbitrage at all. [Josh]: If we [Josh]: If we do the maximum energy arbitrage, it's about 10 years of payback, and that means that every day during the daytime, we send all of our power back to the grid during that peak pricing, and then as soon as we hit the super off peak, we'd power those back up. [Josh]: So we basically discharge recharge those power walls every day.

[Josh]: we don't do it quite to that extreme. [Josh]: We usually do 20% and then it also utilizes the weather forecast determine if we'd override that or if I know of certain situation going on locally, I'll just override and say, you know, keep all the power or the power walls because we don't [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, all the Powerwall stuff connects directly in a home assistant. [Josh]: I also have, we have a Tesla Model Y that I've integrated into home assistant as well.

[Josh]: That one's obviously cloud-based, but the Powerwalls are a local integration. [Rohan]: What, what API are you using for the, for the model why are you using a native one or using like a third party one, you're asking really hard questions that I remember answer to right now. [SPEAKER_01]: That's okay. [Rohan]: That's I, again, I'm just wondering, I've got one too right now and I used to have it in here and then and then after Tesla kind of changed up how they do the API.

[Rohan]: Yeah, for what I was going to say, which we're going to charge it and charge you for it. [Josh]: Well, I got, I got something about Nerdist, but I've never been charged. [Josh]: It's the Tesla custom integration. [Josh]: That's the one I have. [Rohan]: Interesting. [Josh]: I think it's through. [Josh]: I think it's through hacks for right. [Josh]: Yeah, so I've heard this, I made a video about the, I don't know, a year or so ago.

[Josh]: And then I did get, you know, some feedback on the video that, hey, this isn't working for me now. [Josh]: And you know, I think that you may run into that situation. [Josh]: So maybe it's not, um, [Josh]: feasible at the current time to utilize that integration, but mine still works and doesn't have any issues. [Josh]: Every once in a while I have to restart it, but other than that, the main thing I use that one for is knowing who's coming home.

[Josh]: So we have three separate garage doors, and we use the geofencing and homeless system to determine who comes home and which garage door to open. [Josh]: So if I come home or our life comes home, sometimes will switch cars. [Josh]: So we'd know who's garage door to open. [Josh]: So I actually have a check to see if the Tesla's in drive. [Josh]: And if it's in drive, I make the assumption that that's the door you need to open because it's coming somewhere, you know, it's going somewhere.

[Josh]: So that's usually the methodology that I'll utilize to figure out which garage door to open. [Josh]: But I also, the other thing that I, that I started doing, I guess, I don't know, five, six months ago, is I started to monitor [Josh]: and then what I would do is start a counter basically and then 8 hours and 15 minutes later I would tell it to check to see if the Tesla is still sitting at work. [Josh]: If so, turn on, you know, the precondition it so it's ready to go.

[Josh]: It's warmer cold or whatever. [Rohan]: Heat it up, whatever, yeah. [Josh]: Yes, that's the other one that I tend to use it for. [Josh]: And also, I do it at my wife's work. [Josh]: So at a certain time every day, if it's sitting at her work, it also will be conditioned, because hers is a more consistent time where she comes in and leaves. [Phil]: Yeah, so how do you handle it?

[Phil]: Like, you know, like, you're stuck in a meeting like there and maybe you cause a significant hour, you know, conditioning itself, wasting energy. [Phil]: Like, how does it my wind to start that process? [Josh]: Yeah, it will automatically after a while. [Josh]: I try not to have those hour long meetings.

[Josh]: So I try to, that's one of the benefits I have of starting and stopping at different times is I look at my schedule ahead of the time and I try to model my schedule around the time that I'm going to actually show up and leave. [Josh]: If that's not the case, I can certainly, you know, pop up in the app or my phone that hey, it started pre-conditioning. [Josh]: or finish pre-conditioning because it doesn't take too long usually. [Josh]: I can just stop it there if I need to.

[Josh]: But sometimes I'll also have coworkers that don't just come by and say, your car is out there making some funny noise. [Josh]: Yeah, it's getting ready for me and then don't worry about it. [Phil]: Yeah, don't worry about it. [Phil]: Yeah. [Phil]: I guess you're gonna say, like, have home assistant look at your calendar too, right? [Phil]: Like you've got a like mating schedule, you know, don't wait until the end of that, right? [Josh]: Right.

[Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: That'd be another another good way to utilize it. [Josh]: Um, the only probably issue with that is I can't interact with any of my, uh, my work calendars, um, with homelessness during the pandemic, because, uh, it's a, yeah, it's a privacy issue. [Phil]: Oh, look down. [Phil]: Yeah. [Phil]: I get you. [Phil]: Yep. [Rohan]: Yeah. [Phil]: It sucks.

[Rohan]: It's, uh, honestly, even just for planning stuff for like family between me and my wife and whatever, and it's like, it's, uh, that itself is a huge pain, but not being able to share even just availability, right? [Rohan]: And it's, uh, 100%. [Rohan]: Yeah, that sucks. [Rohan]: That's cool. [Rohan]: Now, I mean, from a tablet and all those kind of things, how do you drive a lot of this stuff?

[Rohan]: Is it mostly just again, I know you mentioned a lot of your automations are pretty transparent. [Rohan]: So, do you use voice to augment anything, do you use tablets or wall panels or something?

[Josh]: Yeah, we have an old iPad that had a crack in the screen. [Josh]: That is mounted on the kitchen wall. [Josh]: And we do have homelessness on that.

[Josh]: my wife asked me to put that there and I will say I would say it's underused barely used probably yeah she's like I want to be able to see this stuff okay so I made a dashboard which I will say it's probably not the best dashboard I probably need to revisit it but with the lack of use it doesn't give me any real reason to go do it so I will say we have that it's available [Josh]: you can do things like arm the alarm, disarm the alarm, turn everything on, open garage doors closed.

[Josh]: It's all there if you wanted to do it, but nobody hardly ever does it. [Josh]: We do utilize the Google voice assistance a lot with creating content. [Josh]: I have Google and the Amazon Assistant as well as some of the Apple, you know, four keys and we have Apple, iPhones, iPads, that type of thing. [Josh]: So we have all three of the major assistance.

[Josh]: We utilize Google the most by far, and a couple of reasons that we do that is we bought them When they were on sale for like $19 each for the small ones. [Josh]: We have a couple of we have a couple of the hubs and Everybody's familiar with that and I my opinion is the Google works the best when we're asking it's really really random stuff [Josh]: So it's the most, it's most intuitive for, you know, my eight-year-old to just say, hey, you know, gee, what, what does this mean?

[Josh]: Or how does this work? [Josh]: Or how do I get this thing in my video game or whatever it is? [Josh]: Like, that's the one most likely to give the correct answer. [Josh]: or it might even pull up YouTube video or whatever else. [Josh]: So we have those throughout the house. [Josh]: We do utilize those for certain things.

[Josh]: We have a good night routine, so it'll kick in, you know, we sell like a night and it'll turn off the lights in the master bedroom and turn on the fan and lock certain doors and that type of thing and different alarm setups that we have. [Josh]: So we do utilize this a lot, especially for turning on and off the more unpredictable things, because the bedroom's one of them that I've struggled with is, you know, what I want to do exactly.

[Josh]: I think I'm going to try one of those pads for underneath the mattress to see if it's you know occupied or not. [Josh]: So that's one of the things, because I will say a blind spot for me in the [Josh]: Um, headway there. [Josh]: So I think that's an area that I want to grow in in the future. [Josh]: Um, I've been reluctant because again, I feel like that's maybe a little more techy than what I was going to do.

[Phil]: It's just at the top of the hour you said, hey, I don't want to, you know, I'm not, I don't, I don't, I don't do this customer. [Phil]: Right. [Phil]: And now you're like, well, maybe I want to go down. [Phil]: It's behind me. [Phil]: Get up somewhere. [Phil]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, I'm a little bit addicted sometimes to things that I make bad choices. [Rohan]: Yeah, yes, we homes great, man.

[Rohan]: It is absolutely start playing with it and you get, you know, again, even just small things, right? [Rohan]: Like, and then just grow from there. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, but we definitely utilize the the voice systems more than what we do the dashboards or anything. [Josh]: We have our eye fairings. [Josh]: We all have homelessness in the one I'm including my kids, you know, they have homelessness during their devices.

[Josh]: Just if even if they don't want to use it, just for tracking of who's home, who's not that type of thing. [Josh]: works out really well. [Josh]: I do know in the past I've seen a lot of people complain about iPhones and reliability of the G.A. [Josh]: Vencing, but I'll save since I came over. [Josh]: I haven't ever had an issue.

[Josh]: I, you know, speaking of making bad decisions about what the heck I'm using, started out with life 360 because Samsung actually haven't get to work right? [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: And then as soon as I come, I think it was great when I came over to home assistant. [Josh]: Like 360 was there, and immediately just stopped working and I was like, of course. [Josh]: So that was one of, because I, but I read all the, all the issues the people had.

[Josh]: And I was like, I don't know, I guess I'll try it because I didn't have another option at the time, other than foreign to own tracks or something like that. [Josh]: And I was, I don't want a simple solution if I can. [Josh]: And they worked out great. [Josh]: So haven't had any problems. [Josh]: Also, we utilize the Google homes for announcements as well. [Josh]: So when certain things happen in our house, we'll also broadcast. [Josh]: So even though our washer is sort of smart.

[Josh]: It's a little bit smart. [Josh]: It does have an app and there is a hacks integration, but it doesn't work reliably. [Josh]: It's to the point where I have to have it check to see if it's connected every hour and try to refresh it because it doesn't stay connected. [Josh]: I think they try to block it. [Josh]: It's what happens.

[Josh]: But I have a smart plug on there as well, so I can monitor the energy usage, and I can figure out when it's actually finished and then throughout our house, we have an announcement, you know, the washers done and then if the dryer actually is connected, it'll tell us the dryer entered cool down and the dryer is done when it does that as well. [Josh]: So that's pretty neat. [Josh]: Also, we have the real-length doorbell.

[Josh]: So when anybody hits the doorbell, homelessness actually pushes the doorbell feed out to our Google home hubs, so you can see immediately who's at the doorbell using the cast that it uses. [Josh]: And then we flash in the basement, we flashed in lights, because we have a bar area in the basement too. [Josh]: So if we're sitting down there watching a game or something, it flashes the lights a couple times. [Josh]: And usually people were like, what is going on?

[Josh]: Like, there's your electric going out? [Josh]: It's just bomb at the door, you know? [Josh]: It's bad. [Josh]: Yep. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: So I think lots of fun there and things that work really well, everybody seems to be really happy with it at our house. [Josh]: Because that's one thing. [Josh]: Our washer and dryer don't have like a loud beep or anything. [Josh]: So unless you're right there, you don't even notice it.

[Josh]: So having those announced throughout the house, it has really helped, you know, push the laundry to completion. [Phil]: Yeah, lots and you want to, like, the clothes are sitting in the laundry and then forgetting it, like, hours later, like, Oh, no, but a roof. [Phil]: Yeah. [Phil]: Exactly. [Phil]: Well, if you're looking to upgrade your smart home, you can't go past the suits.

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[Phil]: Then you send 78 high power relay allows you to control and monitor high load appliances up to 40 amps, which is perfect for pool pumps, air compressors, and other high power outlets. [Phil]: For the best prices on all zoos products head over to thesmartestouse.com, that's thesmartestouse.com. [Rohan]: All right. [Rohan]: Josh, you mentioned you've got a lot of different automations. [Rohan]: You said you got a couple hundred I think.

[Rohan]: Curious like a hundred or something like that. [Rohan]: Significant amount, right? [Rohan]: Whatever whatever that is. [Phil]: Yeah. [Rohan]: Oh, no, this is not all in all. [Rohan]: This is pretty impressive for the little bucks. [Rohan]: How do you quantify how much time you're saved? [Rohan]: Like what is all of this actually netted you? [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, so I just pulled it up. [Josh]: I have 187 automations in homelessness degree that are running.

[Josh]: There's probably a couple that are disabled right now, but for the most part, they're running pretty frequently. [Josh]: And some of it's more straightforward. [Josh]: You leave the house and something happens when everybody's gone. [Josh]: That type of thing.

[Josh]: but I've utilized some of these to really save us a lot of time and I recently did calculations on how much time we're really saving and it really blew me away with the amount of time because I just never thought that our smart home would save us, you know, the level that it has and some of them are probably a little more straightforward like you have the robot vacuum and

[Josh]: And I'm looking at other options to try to address some of that, because that's one thing I really would like to see that it, you know, would integrate with home assistant. [Josh]: But just the fact that evacuees and mobs, I've realized that that seems a significant amount of time. [Josh]: We have about twenty hundred square feet per level of our house, and then we have, you know, two levels that are pretty much all finished. [Josh]: So we had to run the vacuum all the time.

[Josh]: So I figure that we use it three times a week approximately twice upstairs and then once in the basement. [Josh]: And it would take us a couple of hours until we would actually do the vacuuming and mopping every time during these periods. [Josh]: And I will say upstairs we actually vacuum and mop with the narwhal every day. [Josh]: Every day we'll set it and it'll run and it always has it all caring, everything else. [Josh]: But it does a good job.

[Josh]: I would say that we'd save about 300 hours a year just on that one particular, you know, automated home product. [Josh]: And that one isn't in, isn't in home assistant, but we have several others that are the other big one where we save a lot of time isn't home assistant. [Josh]: And that's automating these smart plugs and smart switches. [Josh]: A lot of these I have them integrated within [Josh]: Motion sensors or present sensors.

[Josh]: So what I'll have it do is basically a triangulation of where people actually at and then if you're in an area That area lights up plus an adjacent area particularly in the basement area where we have the soda machine If you walk into that area, we have a pool table there and then it'll light up like the bar area.

[Josh]: It'll light up a hallway and everything adjacent [Josh]: The one that actually pushed me to do this originally was we have a stairway there, and there's a door at the top of the stairway, and what I found myself doing consistently was going up and down the stairs in the dark, and it's in the basement, so there's no, you know, natural light or anything, and I realized my kids were doing it as well. [Josh]: I'm like, one of us is going to fall down these darn steps for no reason at all.

[Josh]: So I was like, how do I? [Josh]: Yeah, well, what do I need to do here? [Josh]: So what I did was install Lutron, a set of switches, and then I actually, I think it might even be, and it's either a car or some old iris, you know, motion and open closed sensor.

[Josh]: So that door, if it's open, or the motion was detected, if either there's a herd in, I don't know, the last five or ten minutes, whatever it is, it keeps those lights on because I would find myself trying to carry something up the stairs. [Josh]: So my hands would be full and I'm like, I can't turn off the light at the top of the steps, and I'm not coming back.

[Josh]: I walk up in the dark, which is stupid, so now you open the door, you walk in that area, it automatically lights up, it handles it, it turns it back off when you need it to, and I've realized that when I look across all of the automations that I have that do this for either smart switches, basements, hallways, that type of thing, our master bathroom, we have smart switches in there that are motion sensor,

[Josh]: including the master shower we have like a walk in shower and we have a light and a fan in that area and we have a motion sensor that also detects humidity. [Josh]: So it monitors humidity and as long as the humidity's above a certain level or had motion within a certain amount of time it stays on and then once it gets outside of those requirements it actually turns self off.

[Josh]: because in the past we would just turn off the fan when we left the room, but humidity could still be high. [Josh]: So it just monitors it. [Josh]: We don't have to touch it and it knows what to do. [Josh]: We also have the fish lights that we turn on and off and the dehumidifiers that we turn on and off at different times. [Josh]: And I realized over the course of a week, we had over 3,500 instances of on or off from one of these automations that we have set up on

[Josh]: For these devices, you know, give me owner off that occurred and these devices we only have automated because we don't actually like go into those areas otherwise or if we do, we don't need to ever turn them on or off because it is just automated and some of the things like ge humidifiers, it's a smart plug behind it, nobody's ever touching that thing.

[Josh]: So it does the same thing so I was just blown away by the fact that we had 3500 of these instances a week once we pulled down the data and I was just estimating that we have, you know, five seconds a time because some of the switches maybe you're walking by and you can hit them. [Josh]: But in other instances, you might have to walk across the room to hit it or I told you initially our electrician maybe wasn't always bought into smart home ideas and that type of thing.

[Josh]: I told him what I wanted for our switches when we built our house, but he didn't exactly do that. [Josh]: So in our kitchen area, we have some like ceiling lights and to turn all those owner off, you have to go to four different locations in our kitchen. [Josh]: So we have a lot of instances where the wiring just doesn't make a lot of sense, even that the house isn't that old, just maybe didn't follow directions.

[Josh]: So in that instance, you're not hitting more than one at a time, you're going across the [Josh]: So these, those aren't me in counting, but you know, that's another example where you're going out outside of your normal, you know, walk way to even get to those.

[Josh]: So if five seconds, an instance, and 3500 times a week, that came out to almost 250 hours a year that I've been saving with my smart home from smart switches and smart plugs, which I couldn't believe once I ran all the [Phil]: How, okay, so this is interesting.

[Phil]: So I want to know how you then getting that data out of home isn't like, are you using the recorder entity with like a seven day retention period, like are you offsetting like a whole bunch of your data to like my school database somewhere else? [Phil]: Like how are you leveraging all these data? [Josh]: Yeah, yeah. [Josh]: So I was curious. [Josh]: So I actually just went into the homocystic UI and pulled the data myself from the, is it activity or history.

[Josh]: I think it's, I forgot what it is. [Josh]: It's activity. [Josh]: Um, that I went into and actually, you know, create a CSV basically of the, yeah, the data and then ran it through a spreadsheet and then did data checks on it for validation purposes because garbage data is not ever useful. [Josh]: So it does this all make sense to spot check it.

[Josh]: Look at what it's actually saying, look at the dates and the times, you know, do these things make sense and I was, you know, there were a couple things that I looked at and figured out that maybe that this wasn't the way I wanted to calculate it. [Josh]: So that's why I did go down to just looking at the smart switches and smart plugs because I initially actually included some other things like blinds in this.

[Josh]: And then when I did the data checks, what I get from the blinds in the log there. [Josh]: is I get opening, opening, opening, opening, opening, opening, opening and it's like, well this isn't really useful because these were 10 instances in, you know, two seconds or you know, some ridiculous. [Josh]: So I actually pulled all those out. [Josh]: So I did do data validation on everything and pulled all those out and did more simple math on some of those that I couldn't validate.

[Josh]: accurately, I would say, and homelessness. [Josh]: And so, for example, the smart blinds, we have nine smart blinds throughout our house. [Josh]: And I figure, my wife is a little bit obsessive about opening, closing the blinds sometimes. [Josh]: So I figured that we open and close them an average of twice a day.

[Josh]: the cycle. [Josh]: So I'd be four times a day of open or close and then over the course of seven days times the nine instances that we have, that we 250, two times that hers a blind opened or closed. [Josh]: So instead of walking around to each of the blinds and doing that, that was a situation where it's all automated there, you know, to whatever our standards are.

[Josh]: So for example, if we leave the house, we have certain blinds that automatically close so that the sun's not being in heating up our living room [Josh]: or letting in drafts or whatever that may be because they're insulated blinds as well. [Josh]: So having those be automated is really cool. [Josh]: I was estimating about 10 seconds per blind because I don't know if you guys have the string blinds, which is what we had, they get stuck all the time.

[Josh]: And 10 seconds is probably not near what it actually took me. [Josh]: Get them all to go down and go to the next one. [Josh]: But just 10 seconds of time, that's another 35 hours a year, just from our smart blinds, which I was like, you know, it doesn't ever sound like much, but once you add it up over the course of the year, I did that across all the different smart home devices that we utilize.

[Josh]: So not only the automations, but things like we have the Yarbeau, [Josh]: So that one was another one where once I went through, what does that actually take? [Josh]: Mowing example we have about four acres of property so I said it takes us about three hours to mow a week and we mow once a week.

[Josh]: So that's about half a year we need a mow here. [Josh]: So it's about 70 hours a year of mowing that we don't do and the arborger's out and does and it does it in the rain. [Josh]: It does it every night. [Josh]: It has rain sensor and we can stop it from doing that. [Josh]: But I [Josh]: found it to cut really well even if it's raining or overnight. [Josh]: So I just let it go out and do its thing. [Josh]: It can mo, you know, every two days or so, it can make our whole property.

[Josh]: So we can have it mo about three times a week and we would never do that. [Josh]: But then you're cutting off, you know, the smaller amounts versus I would tend to cut off. [Josh]: You know, I caught up with this bunch and then the grass dies. [Josh]: So it's a much better situation all the way around. [Josh]: Also looking at the snow blowing, I estimated we have about four events a year because Burm Pencilvania in the States.

[Josh]: So we don't have time [Josh]: of snow here, but we have, you know, some. [Josh]: And I said at each event, we had, you know, about five hours, five times where we'd go out and shovel or, or take care of it with snowblower or whatever. [Josh]: So, it doing that is another 20 hours a year. [Josh]: I know when, when we had met face to face, you know, I had to actually run the Yarbeau for when we were

[Josh]: I was removing it and I ran into my house in the morning and monitored it on my real-en cameras and you know, we were good to go because everything worked just fine My wife was very happy again the white the waf is a super important the wife acceptance factor So she had her cup of hot tea looking out the door and seeing it do it and she was inside and warm and I didn't have to be there was great [Rohan]: Oh, that is, that is a dream.

[Rohan]: It is, I failed to know because I've rented about this enough times about how much I hate showing the sky. [Rohan]: I was like, if it's a little bit of snow, whatever, sure, whatever. [Rohan]: But when it's almost knee high, and I'm like, nah, I do not want to do that, right? [Rohan]: And it's, I don't know, master drive way or anything. [Rohan]: It's, you know, two cars and then the bottom part which is probably one across.

[Rohan]: And it's like, I just, yeah, it's something I'd really rather not do.

[Josh]: Yeah, yeah, I had I had done a test we had snow event a lot of times our snow come during the day, but we had one that came every night And I was like okay, what am I gonna do about this so I when I do is I stuck the plow on the front because it you can do a snow plow or snowblower And based on the type of snow they're predicting I'm like the snow plow will do pretty good with this so what I do is I set it up to run over night

[Josh]: So from like, I don't know, whenever we went to bed and he was 11 and got up at 7 or something like that, it hit run like six times every night and cleared our driveway. [Josh]: We got up and there's nothing on the driveway and everybody else has to still everywhere. [Josh]: But because it keeps up one at the whole time. [Josh]: So we just keep going out and running.

[Josh]: So when you're talking about these really big events, the Yarb is really cool because it can run continuously throughout. [Josh]: So it's never hit in those, you know, really high amounts. [Josh]: It's hitting a couple inches at a time, [Rohan]: Yeah, which is, which is perfect. [Rohan]: That's all I needed to do, right? [Rohan]: And it's even if it's like, I don't know, six inches, whatever, great. [Rohan]: Go do that and then come back home.

[Rohan]: I know there's just, I saw on Facebook, there is another, I guess it kind of a competitor of year ago now. [Rohan]: The first one I've seen, maybe there's a couple more out there, but it's the first one I've seen. [Rohan]: But they were like, I asked some questions to them, so if I got up with the K, you know, what's your plans to open up an API and things like that. [Rohan]: I never really got any direct answers. [Rohan]: Maybe maybe I asked a wrong questions. [Rohan]: I'm not sure.

[Rohan]: Again, it could be entirely me. [Rohan]: And then how I wrote it, whatever, but, you know, because I would love to see, because the article today doesn't integrate.

[Rohan]: But when Phil and I spoke to the president, CEO, whatever, at that, [Rohan]: see yes he's like I love the home assistant communities like I want to be able to get to the point where I can just open up the API as in people can he's like I just want to sell my machines right and it's like and and I don't really care how you use it use the app don't use the app whatever is like I don't want to see app right and it's uh so there's it's interesting there's

[Rohan]: that have that philosophy that we are all about, right? [Rohan]: And hopefully that comes. [Rohan]: But this other company, they kind of were just like, hey, yeah, like we might do something. [Rohan]: And it's like, okay, well, what is your roadmap? [Rohan]: Like, does that? [Rohan]: And there's like, and kind of nothing, right? [Rohan]: Kind of a fun fact. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, I think your bill, it's definitely, you know, I get on the forums there and everything.

[Josh]: Definitely it's been mentioned a lot there and I've beat that drum. [Josh]: Hey, home assistant is what we want You know, because some people are like, well, what about this integration or that integration or, you know, connecting it to Google, Amazon, Apple, whatever And it's like no home assistant is the answer for something like this because this is a community of tinkers with the R-Bow A lot of people, you know, see the R-Bow and they're like, this is a brand new product.

[Josh]: You know, how does it work?

[Josh]: But really this is I want to say it's the [Josh]: fourth version basically of this thing because originally my my recollection is it was a snowbot so it was like a just a snow snow snowblower type thing and then they had the core a couple of years ago and then they came out the new core last year that they said they were going to support for a few years with all new modules um that's the one that I have so really it's not the first iteration but we've had a lot of reactions and

[Josh]: I mean, I made a video once of, you know, that I pulled one of our real and camera feeds from, because we had, you know, we're in a bit of rural areas.

[Josh]: So we had this guy driving down the road in a truck, and you see him like fly by the house, and then you see him back up in front of the house, because this thing's out there blowing snow, and I picked up his audio, and he's like talking to somebody on self-in, saying, it's like this robot, snowblower, snowplow, I'm not sure what it is, [Josh]: So it's funny. [Josh]: I don't know what it is, but I want one. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, so that thing's awesome.

[Josh]: You know what it is? [Josh]: Yeah, yeah. [Josh]: So yeah, that's definitely one of the turns heads. [Rohan]: Yeah, and I mean, it is a, to me, that is one of those machines. [Rohan]: That's actually very useful, right? [Rohan]: It's, I don't know, the price point still very high for me, like I, I really do hope that it becomes more mainstream, like the these kind of devices become more mainstream. [Rohan]: And then I don't want, [Rohan]: a point product.

[Rohan]: I would love a single product that does everything. [Rohan]: And, and all honestly, that would kind of lock me into the ecosystem too, right? [Rohan]: It's like, listen, if I have the snowblower module and I have a lawnmower module and the edging module, whatever, [Rohan]: even if my core thing, like the actual core robot dies, probably by another one because I have all this other investments around there, right?

[Rohan]: And that that is not encouragement to make crappy hardware, please. [Rohan]: But it's very, very useless.

[Rohan]: But on the other side of it, it's also like, you know, I don't want to have four or five different machines that do, I don't want to [Rohan]: lawn maintenance, right, or yard maintenance, let's call it, that can be a machine and I think you are voted that pretty well, but and this other company, you have to see what it looks like, but, uh, [Rohan]: it, uh, hopefully it hopefully doesn't become a little more mainstream. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: I've looked at a lot of them over the years.

[Josh]: Um, the reason that I went with your bill, um, initially and considered it seriously is because we have almost four acres and most of the time, if you look at a robot mower, um, they're maxing out and maybe an acre give or take. [Phil]: And they're really small, like this gluttony factory capacity, right? [Phil]: Like the other has some size to it. [Phil]: Oh, yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, that thing. [Phil]: Yeah, that thing is solid. [SPEAKER_03]: Heavy. [Rohan]: Yeah, I asked him.

[Rohan]: I was like, listen, like, this is, this is a pretty nice piece of machine. [Rohan]: Are you worried about people stealing? [Rohan]: It's like, oh, yeah, they've got theft in tech shade and blah, blah, blah. [Rohan]: And he's like, but also trying to lift it. [Rohan]: And I was like, and I did. [Rohan]: And he was like, it's your knees because it is, it is not, it is not like.

[Josh]: no it's not light and it's very awkward it has special screws to secure the battery area as well because the batteries you know a decent size so it has some weight as well my my one neighbor has like 14 acres and it's a lot of fields in that type of thing

[Josh]: but we have a neighbor that lives on the other side of them that sometimes walk over to our house. [Josh]: So this neighbor said something to me, he's like, hey, I always move this path between your houses. [Josh]: Do you want to use your fur butt and you can send it over my yard and just move this path, you know, a couple, you know, five feet wide or whatever it is. [Josh]: Like, yeah, sure.

[Josh]: So I went to map it and I pulled it out over there and that was the first time I accidentally tested our geo-fensing because it wouldn't be on. [Josh]: my area. [Josh]: It is the alarm star screen, whatever is triggered in my fair. [Josh]: I'm like, oh, it works. [Josh]: That's good. [Josh]: You know, because it's like deep in and making the siren or whatever did, you know, that type of thing. [Josh]: So like that works. [Josh]: And it also has, you know, cellular.

[Josh]: So if somebody does take it off the property, you can track it and everything. [Josh]: And I believe even if they remove the battery, there's some type of like battery backup on that particular aspect. [Josh]: So you can track it for a longer period of time. [Josh]: So I think that's, and furthermore, they'd have to do it for parts because the way everything set up, the serial number is actually secured to your account so they wouldn't be able to activate it or anything else.

[Josh]: So it would be a whole lot of work for them to do anything with it and make anybody off of it. [Josh]: Yeah. [Rohan]: Yeah, that makes sense. [Rohan]: It's, uh, I don't know, it is, it is that that is on the top of my list of stuff that. [Rohan]: Yeah, I would like, or I want just some kind of thing to do all the stuff for me. [Rohan]: I know Phil, we talked about doing getting lawnmowers too, right? [Rohan]: Like robotic lawnmowers, those kind of things.

[Rohan]: I would just love to have one that just does it all. [Josh]: Yeah, this thing definitely has done a lot for me. [Josh]: I don't have the leaf blower. [Josh]: I did purchase the edge or I just got an email like two days ago saying that that's shipped and it's on, you know, a cargo transport to the states. [Josh]: That's the trimmer for you.

[Josh]: I actually I did not get it till the spring so if I get it before that Yeah, because they gave us an option at one point because it did get delayed because one thing You know, you said don't put up crappy hardware.

[Josh]: That is the one thing I will say about your bill They seem to be adverse to doing that whenever possible because there was a spreader their two different spreaders actually [Josh]: Both of them got canceled because in some initial testing, they weren't found to be good enough, as well as, um, there was, uh, believe it was a vertical edger, also canceled because in initial testing, it proved to not be a feasible solution that worked well enough.

[Josh]: And then the trimmer, the reason it was delayed was they actually modified it. [Josh]: and changed several things about it. [Josh]: So initially, it was supposed to be a front mounted trimmer on the lawnmower. [Josh]: They moved it to a rear mounted, added extra support there. [Josh]: And then even after they did that and sent it out to, they have a PPP. [Josh]: It's, uh, [Josh]: forget what it pioneers. [Josh]: It's something pioneers that they utilize.

[Josh]: It's certain people in the environment that, you know, in their ecosystem that test everything for them. [Josh]: Once they got out to them, they still found there were a couple things that weren't quite right. [Josh]: So they went back and redesigned it again. [Josh]: And that's why there was the delay because they don't want to release that crappy product.

[Josh]: So I will say, I did, I did speak with, [Josh]: you know, the same gentleman you did, and I've had really, you know, positive interactions. [Josh]: I've emailed and talked to him different times, and definitely seems to, they want to pay out quality product, which makes me feel good because I'm going to be totally honest. [Josh]: When I initially looked at the urbo, they had a special coupon sign-up thing that you could do, and I did that in maybe May of 2024.

[Josh]: A month later, I canceled it. [Josh]: And I was like, I don't know if I trust this. [Josh]: I'm not sure if it's ready enough for mainstream. [Josh]: And then I hung out until a couple people started getting them in October and November of last year. [Josh]: And once I started seeing the real results for real people, I was like, okay, I'm in. [Josh]: And then I bought it immediately. [Josh]: Got it in December of last year. [Josh]: Immediately started using it, you know, on the snow.

[Josh]: And then this year, I used, [Josh]: I think we used the zero turn lawn miller once to mill our property this year because we did have a couple of problems here there, we're working with support and the grass needed mode.

[Josh]: But every time we've had an issue, you know, your bio has backed it up or, you know, a lot of times it's remote, they can remote in and fix certain things or look at the diagnostics and update something and it'll work just fine, you know, it may firmware whatever it is. [Josh]: So it's really me product, definitely one that I'm happy that I have saved me a lot of time in the cold and in the heat. [Josh]: And that's what we get.

[Josh]: We can get four seasons and a day here is what we say. [Josh]: So we have all the extremes. [Josh]: I did look at some other ones and I did see some other ones right now that are coming out. [Josh]: I might be the same one for hand that you had seen that does like snow blowing and lawn milling, but most of them don't do all that. [Josh]: So I want to keep [Josh]: new ones. [Rohan]: Yeah, it's a cool, it's a cool space, right? [Rohan]: Like the multi thing.

[Rohan]: I think there's one that called it the Apollo something. [Rohan]: Turf, Turf, Turf, Storm, all the Turf, Storm, some of that. [Rohan]: But yeah, again, I don't know. [Rohan]: They, I, all of them are very pricey for what they are, right? [Rohan]: So, but again, how much does it save you, right?

[UNKNOWN]: And [Josh]: Yeah, and the what what actually had me justify it and the where how I got to a yes was I looked at what am I replacing with this and that was my John gears your turn lawn mower and those are pretty expensive to start with and then our snowblower as well. [Josh]: So as soon as I price those two things together, it's pretty close to the price of the arbyl and then I'm not doing the work.

[Josh]: And I was like, OK, if I'm at the same price point, I'm not doing the work that's definitely worth it. [Josh]: The other thing that we've done with the RVL outside of mowing and snow blowing and snow plowing is we've utilized it for some of the towing tasks. [Josh]: So in the states, we like to blow things up and have big fourth July and that type of thing. [Josh]: So I put my John Deere trailer on it and it holes around like all of our firework stuff that we do. [Josh]: I hooked it up.

[Josh]: We had we transplanted some trees that were probably too large to transplant but you know we do whatever whatever we're going to try we're going to do a big you know so we had the one tree was probably about 25 feet and we were transplanting it from from my father in Los House we brought it over to our house and we were trying to hold it up and you know back filled the hole and everything well I realized I could just took it up the arbor with a toe strap

[Josh]: and it stood right up and it was stood there and held it and then we could backfill it and everything there's no person having to hold this thing up. [Josh]: Because we translated half dozen or dozen of these trees, we had a big one that died. [Josh]: And once we did, I took the toe strap and hooked it up to your bill and I yanked it out with your bill and I drugged it to the back of our property and then chopped it up and put it on the wood pile.

[Josh]: So your bill moved everything for me. [SPEAKER_01]: So that was pretty neat. [Josh]: That's awesome. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, it has like a patrol mode and some other things. [Josh]: It has a follow me made so you can just put it and put it on the like blank front like a flat front and put a trailer something behind if you're picking up sticks or something and these work pretty good.

[Josh]: They maybe are a little bit slow like I need to walk slow or else it loses me because it doesn't move that fast. [Josh]: I think it's a safety thing where it's like it doesn't want to go fast and I tend to walk fast because time is of the essence here all the time. [Josh]: I have a say for acre. [Rohan]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah, yeah, um, patience is the virtual I'll have time for is my saying so nice. [Josh]: I don't have any. [Josh]: That's funny.

[Phil]: Yeah, so we talked at your smartphone. [Phil]: I do want to talk about Josh's smartphone. [Phil]: How did you sort of get down the YouTube rabbit hole? [Phil]: What made you create a YouTube channel that's my home?

[Josh]: Yeah, so I've been watching smart home YouTube videos for quite some time, probably the whole time building out my smart home, so that includes different times where I was looking up things on smart things, or homelessness that, or just trying to get ideas, and there were a few different creators that have really peaked my interest over the years, and I had, you know,

[Josh]: Yeah, you know, in particular, that really have driven me to be like, you know, I think I have an interest in doing this, interest in sharing what I'm doing. [Josh]: A little bit different style maybe than some of these folks. [Josh]: So that's what really pushed me to start that. [Josh]: I have. [Josh]: an addiction to just trying to do different things sometimes. [Josh]: I've never recorded anything really. [Josh]: I never did any video editing or anything.

[Josh]: So it was all a huge challenge. [Josh]: And like usual, I failed miserably several times initially. [Josh]: In a lot of things. [Josh]: But you live and learn and you move on. [Josh]: So I had a few particular products or different type of videos that really, [Josh]: Thank you. [Josh]: to pop for the viewers. [Josh]: So one of the things is the groovy, permanent smart, or smart, permanent outdoor lights. [Josh]: And that's one of them that I put on my house.

[Josh]: And it was like when you're putting those nickels in the slot machine and it's the first time you ever do it and you hit something like big, you know, a big $100 off of nickels, you know, something like that. [Josh]: It was like my fourth video and like I got a whole bunch of views compared to what I probably should have gotten. [Josh]: And I go back and look at it. [Josh]: I'm like this thing's garbage. [Josh]: Yeah, but what are we doing here?

[Josh]: Yeah, so I had a lot of those instances and I realized I need to utilize some of the unique aspects. [Josh]: So I have installed probably five, four, five different smart or permanent outdoor lights because different companies will contact me. [Josh]: And if I think they're reputable and that type of thing, I'll contact family members or friends or whatever. [Josh]: Hey, you want some smart lights? [Josh]: I just need to hide a video, but other than that, we'll put these things up.

[Josh]: And so I've focused on smart lights and different automations. [Josh]: I want to lean more into automations. [Josh]: I've tried to avoid some of the products that I think are more questionable, you know, the lower quality products, but I did do a couple of videos about our home theater, not as much about

[Josh]: too much smart home or that type of thing but just the uniqueness here where we have maybe some things that are not normally seen in the house so that's you know that creativity and pushing the boundaries there has really um probably elevated it maybe a little bit quicker and making sure that I stick to the right right niche too I think is really important as as I move forward so like I said I just got the inspiration from a few other creators um you know they're

[Josh]: and read from Smart Home Solver and Brian from Automate Your Life and Paul Hibbert, you know, he's from the UK. [Josh]: He has certainly a different style than the rest of them. [Josh]: But yeah, those are the big ones that I've looked up to in the past. [Josh]: And I've met, you know, a few of them now at this point at CES and that type of thing. [Josh]: So it's really cool, you know, being in that group.

[Josh]: Just [Josh]: I want to share with everybody else what I've learned along the way on my smart home journey try to help them to achieve some of the same home automations and the same efficiencies and same level of happiness and the wife acceptance factor that we have in my house because that's definitely a huge one.

[Phil]: Yeah, what would you think like what was your plan so I can be with like you've got some content here, itching to get out like what do you want to get out for those like 2026 but what's your goals?

[Josh]: Yeah, I want to focus more on automation. [Josh]: It's been a while since I've done too many automation videos, purely automation, where I go into the nuts and bolts of, you know, I want to do this thing, and this is how we do it.

[Josh]: And here's like the actual UI of home assistant, because that's a lot of times that's what I was doing in the past, is I would say, okay, here's what I'm trying to do, here's how it's done, and actually pull up, you know, the screenshots from my smartphone or iPad or whatever, and say, okay, this is what it actually looks like.

[Josh]: Here are the triggers, the conditions, and you know, how we're going to execute everything and make sure that it flows properly and it's never a hindrance to anything else because that's I guess that that's always the conditions are key to me. [Phil]: exactly. [Josh]: And figuring that out ahead of time is really important. [Josh]: So I'm a pretty deep thinker on things. [Josh]: So like we designed our own house.

[Josh]: We sat down with somebody we knew the drew cad and we designed the whole house, that type of thing. [Josh]: So I'm a pretty deep thinker on, I'm going to think about this nonstop, which is a blessing and a curse, because that means sometimes I just don't sleep.

[Josh]: I'm just thinking about whatever it is on my mind, that type of [Josh]: Well, what if, you know, it's one of the things that's helped me along the way using, you know, VBA and some other things is what are all these conditions? [Josh]: What are the, you know, the triggers? [Josh]: What are the conditions? [Josh]: You know, the, the instances where we don't want it to happen.

[Josh]: That type of things and just narrowing that down and then putting that into, you know, true conditions within homelessness. [Rohan]: That's cool. [Rohan]: So, let me, let me give you something to kind of finish off on here is [Rohan]: If somebody was to build a brand new house from scratch, whatever, the whole house, basement, whatever the works. [Rohan]: What are your top three kind of home automation tips for starting from scratch for that?

[Josh]: The top three tips would be, [Josh]: decide what you want to use for light switches because I'm a big advocate of automating the light switches not the light bulbs because light bulbs burn out and the cost tends to add up on on those. [Josh]: I know a lot of people like all the different colors and that type of thing but I find that to be [Josh]: a short term thing in a lot of instances and there's a certain place for that, but I think the light switches are much more important.

[Josh]: So having those all, you know, decided up front and thought through and implemented is really useful. [Josh]: The cool thing with Lutronca set up is when I realized that there's certain areas that [Josh]: we needed a light switch and didn't have one. [Josh]: The little remotes, you can put the edge trim on them and put a 3M on the back of them and stick them to a wall. [Josh]: And if you place them properly, nobody knows it's not a switch. [Josh]: It looks exactly same.

[Josh]: I actually have certain instances where we had maybe a 3 gang is what we call it, where there's three different switch spots. [Josh]: And I realized I wanted another one there. [Josh]: So I made a 4 gang and the remotes sent them front of the wall. [Josh]: but then everything else actually does sit into the wall, but it's a foregang, you know, cover on it. [Josh]: So it just looks nice and it looks like it was always there and works out really well.

[Josh]: So I think definitely light switches. [Josh]: I'm big into having local executable items. [Josh]: So [Josh]: I think at this point, if I was building fresh, it didn't have anything. [Josh]: I would be seriously looking at matter devices, particularly threader or matter. [Josh]: The thing that always makes me reluctant for those at this point is the price point. [Josh]: So if you have the budget for it, threader or matter will be number two.

[Josh]: If you don't have the budget for it, then Zigbee's Z-Wave with a very strong mesh network is key. [Josh]: You know, putting these outlets strategically placed locations. [Josh]: Hopefully, you can actually make them, you know, function. [Josh]: I do some of us end up with outlets in a weird position because it's like we need a mesh, you know, support from here, but we don't actually have a need for a smart switch.

[Josh]: So it gets a little bit weird, but so if you can plan this out, you know, some of the things that I find this useful for, I mentioned the dehumidifiers and the fish tanks for the fish lights, that type of thing and the filters, but I also utilize those, we have some of those UV lights that attract the bugs with the sticky stuff.

[Josh]: So I have a couple of like the bigger ones that are usually more in like restaurants that I got on Amazon on about 30 bucks or something so I have [Josh]: with a pool and everything, we get a lot of flies if people were walking in a house. [Josh]: So I have this automated because they don't do much during the day, but once it gets dark and the bugs are attracted to it. [Josh]: So I have those turned on and off. [Josh]: That's good advice.

[Rohan]: How did you find the whole process of [Rohan]: building your own house and like kind of understanding what you wanted and stuff like this. [Rohan]: I'm not not even specifically from a smart home kind of thing. [Rohan]: Yeah. [Rohan]: Just in general. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: Yeah. [Josh]: So we tried to weigh out, you know, the return on investment on things and so.

[Josh]: one of the positives that we had was my father-in-law, it was a foreman at a local builder. [Josh]: So between my father-in-law and my wife and I, we act as the general contractors for the whole build as well. [Josh]: So it was a lot of hands on, I'm not handy at all. [Josh]: I can pick things up and put them down, and that's where that ends. [Josh]: So my father-in-law will tell me this is what needs done. [Josh]: If I can do it myself, I'll do it.

[Josh]: If not, you know, I'll carry things and he can help me do it. [Josh]: and we did that kind of thing, but we did before we even got to that point, my wife is a much more visual person. [Josh]: So we decided we were going to build a house as say, well, we have floor plan. [Josh]: So we went out and just like looked on the web and you know, here are all the different floor plans. [Josh]: You know, what are the things that we do or don't like? [Josh]: So let's look at these 10.

[Josh]: Tell me what you do or don't like about these things. [Josh]: And we narrowed it down to this is the style of different things we want. [Josh]: This is the location of different things we want. [Josh]: That type of thing. [Josh]: And also [Josh]: you know, do we want on-suite bathrooms? [Josh]: If so, what is the price point to do it up front? [Josh]: And we found out there's a really cheap.

[Josh]: So like we made the kids' bedrooms like on-suite bathrooms, because the upfront for us doing a lot of the stuff it was not very expensive, and then adds value to the house. [Josh]: So we did a lot of that, and with my wife being very visual, the one thing I did, we lived at a townhouse at the time. [Josh]: So for all the rooms, once we had the CAD drawn up, I said, okay, well, this dimension is, I don't know, 10 by 20.

[Josh]: So I would go into a room that we have, and I'd lay down the tape measure and say, okay, here's the start of that room, here's the end of that room, and then going the other way, it's this big. [Josh]: So immediately, like this is the actual size. [Josh]: So if this is a living room, you know, [Josh]: And the other thing I did was we did a two-scale printout from the CAD, and then I measured our furniture.

[Josh]: I did a little cutouts to scale of, here's our bed, here's our kitchen table, here's our sofa. [Josh]: Let's play dollhouse kind of thing, and we actually put them out on the thing, how do they fit in here, where we put our furniture, doesn't this make sense? [Josh]: Something you just did, you know, that type of thing is the bed in front of a window. [Josh]: I don't know, whatever it is, like, well, what's stupid about what we're doing?

[Josh]: And I would say that worked out really well. [Josh]: There's a couple of things. [Josh]: I wish our garage was a little bit wider. [Josh]: We don't have enough room in between the cars as much as I'd like. [Josh]: And didn't really realize that we should have put laundry like we have a laundry in a hallway. [Josh]: We should have put the washer dryer in the center and put cabinets on both sides.

[Josh]: Instead we have cabinets on one side and the washer dryer like right in the door, which gets a little awkward. [Josh]: But there's pretty small things. [Josh]: You know, the grand scheme of things are not that big, but it's like in hindsight, you know, 2020. [Rohan]: Yeah, that's cool. [Rohan]: It's, uh, it's, I mean, I, I love watching a lot of stuff on like, you know, build their own house and blah, blah, like a lot of stuff, right?

[Rohan]: And it's like, I know a couple of people that have done it. [Rohan]: And some people, you know, one or two folks that I spoke into, they're like, oh, man, it's never good enough, right? [Rohan]: And it's like, you, you do all this stuff and go through like [Rohan]: Yeah, and you're like, oh, man, I wish I did a blah, blah, blah, and then eventually turns into like, yeah, I completely hate this, right?

[Rohan]: I want to do this all again from scratch, and it's like, and then you kind of get into that same mechanic, right? [Josh]: Yeah, it's funny, when we finished my father-in-law said, okay, let's start on the next one. [Josh]: Because in the States, we have different tax advantages, where if you live in a house for so long, you can sell it and have a certain amount of profit that's not actually taxable.

[Josh]: So theoretically, if you build your own house several times, you can end up living in a house that you get for free. [Josh]: You know, who, quote, unquote, for free at the end? [Josh]: After we built the house at about four months at the end of that four months, I said, I could not do this again. [Josh]: This was too much. [Josh]: It was way too intense. [Josh]: I was here all the time doing everything. [Josh]: I like it was too much. [Josh]: I'm good. [Josh]: We have the weirdest thing.

[Josh]: The thing that everyone always finds really weird is we struggled to really find a piece of property. [Josh]: A piece of land in the area that we could build on.

[Josh]: And I don't know what it's like in the areas that you guys live in, but we utilize Craigslist at the time And we actually we had a real editor and everything and our real leaders like it's got to be a scam And I said, you know, we're gonna give you the commission you make sure it's legit But we found some Craigslist and the guy had bought it from a share sale It went through for closures stuff before that and he lived a half hour away and never even saw the property and we got it at a much more affordable price than Typical, you know, land would be in our area

[Josh]: So that really helped us out too, and the whole process is thinking outside the box. [Rohan]: I didn't just think, I would have never thought to look at Craigslist, but I don't know. [Josh]: No, my father-in-law told me to look, and I was really skeptical at first, but it turned out to be work out really well for us. [Josh]: There you go. [Josh]: Not the awesome.

[Phil]: Well, Josh, we have a big 10-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper-paper. [Josh]: Yeah, on YouTube, you can find it at Josh's smarthome or Josh's smarthome.com. [Josh]: I have a website. [Josh]: I also have a couple other YouTube channels that I play around with. [Josh]: I have a Josh wallet travels and just a couple are smaller channels.

[Josh]: If I, you know, do some traveling, Disney, Universal, Cruises, that type of thing.

[Josh]: I just put some stuff on there that has like 100 subscribers. [Josh]: So, very tiny and more of just a fun thing that I do. [Phil]: All right, well, thank you so much for talking to us today. [Phil]: We really appreciate it. [Josh]: Yeah, thanks for having us with a really great conversation. [Josh]: Yeah, please don't hesitate to think. [Josh]: Thanks, cheers. [Phil]: If you want to share your home assistant journey or come on as a guest, reach out to us at feedback at haspodcast.io.

[Phil]: That's HASSpodcast.io. [SPEAKER_01]: The home assistant podcast is hosted by Phil Hardiron and myself, Rohan Keremandi. [SPEAKER_01]: For links to topics we discussed today, check out our show notes on haspodcast.io.