The Home Monitoring Revolution | Hour 1

But some of that technology is actually of a great benefit to us homeowners, those of us who are concerned about, you know, when we're away, making sure there are no fires or floods or break ins or what have you.

And what has happened over the last few years, along with all the rollout of new technology, is that the home has become a very very easy to monitor place and multiple multiple categories everything from your electrical panel and your energy usage to basic home security all the way to senior care and options for caring for an aging or infirmed a member of the family who you don't want to end up in a home, a nursing home, or maybe can't afford full time in home nursing care.

These technologies are viable options for those as well. So we're all over the board today because the categories of connectivity have gone long and deep, and that's where we're going today. Plus, of course, your calls and when it comes to your calls, anything you want to talk about, I'm talking about the monitored home today. You can talk to me about whatever is on your mind, whatever you're scratching your head about your home construction design DIY, whatever

the case may be. Let me give you the number now because a producer, Lindsey is standing by. The phone lines are open. She is ready to take your call. Popy into the queue. The number to reach me eight three three two. Ask Dean eight three three the numeral two ask Dean A three three two ask Dean. It's just that easy. Phone lines are open now. We'll be going to the phones just a bit as we do. If we do this all right today, we're going to bring some light into your morning and we're going to

make you feel glad that you were here. We are happy that you're here. The team is here for you. Tony Sarantino is on the board this morning, good morning, tone morning talk. It if Tony him around here, that's what he's known as. He and I just here's the funny thing. He and I just talk and talk and talk. During the break we have these long conversation. We don't have time to have the conversations we want to have

during the breaks and before and after the show. But you know, once we get rolling, Tony is famously very worthy, are you not, sir? Oh yeah, but I'm paid to be invisible. That is my job. Well not with me, not with us. Everybody needs to know you. Everybody needs to know you, the great Tony Sorrentino on the board, Producer Lindsay, like I said, standing by nowhere near Mike because she's oh look, she's on the phone right now. Heather Brooker at the news A twofer for you this weekend.

I know this is wild. It's a double header almost well, it's two days. It's a series. It is a series. It is a Brooker series.

But glad that you're here, buddy. Thanks. Uh. Sitting across the table from me, there she is. Oh my gosh, look at that face. It's amazing. You're so sweet. My better half, my design partner, the co owner, co founder of House Whisper, my best friend in the world, Tina is here. Welcome home. Hmm. I have some a little bit of a bourbon cream in my coffee this morning. Oh, I wondered if what that was. Yeah, not too much, I mean not like yeah, not like yeah, you saw

the cream, You're like, what is in that coffee? Little bourbon cream. It's warm, it's refreshing in your Vermont cup, in my Vermont mug. Not enough that I'll be slurring words later. I'll just start luring them right now, all right, I'll be watching you. Okay, thanks, I appreciate that so much. To cover let's dive in, shall we. We need to talk about monitoring your home and how simple it is becoming.

Let's start with security and along those notes, I've got some fascinating stats on home burglary that I'm going to share for you.

home remodeling. Design matters most. Along those lines today, one of the things that has changed the way that we design homes and the whole design kind of motif of homes is the fact that we can now monitor homes remotely via our smartphones and tablets and what have you. Let's just stick with the phone. That's the easiest way to uh, the most univerversal way to have this conversation because of all the cool tech that's out there now. Before the break, I said we were going to start

with home security. It's a good place to start because it's something that is of concern to every homeowner. That's something I get asked about a lot. And so let me first of all, I'm going to say this, having built a lot of ultra custom homes on both mid range and high end, the state level homes, the kind of homes where there are guard gates and security measures and high walls and cameras and everything everywhere. I will

tell you this in all honesty. Let's just face the fact if somebody, if a professional, a professional burglar, has targeted your home, they are going to get in. Okay, I'm sorry to say it, but it's just the reality. Unless you live in a prison scenario or Fort Knox and nobody wants to do that. The high end professional is going to be able to get in. But here's the great news. How many homes in America are targeted

by high end professional burglars. Virtually none of them. I mean, the percentage is so so incredibly small that it's not even worth mentioning. Okay, that is not the concern for your home. The concern for your home and your home security system should not be Fort Knox. It should be, in fact, the denial and or the discouragement of the opportunistic burglar. Okay. And by that so all right, we're gonna get to it in a second. It's just I talked to Conway about this on Thursday night on our

little bit that we do every Thursday. And by the way, do you know I'm on with Conway every Thursday night round about six twenty or so. We spend a segment or two together talking about stuff and talking about you know, kind of foreshadowing where I'm going with the show that weekend. So Tim did this great job of building me all up. He's like, and now you know home security and bisiting. You know, we've all got questions about it. Dean, give us the wisdom. What's the thing we need to know?

And I just started out by saying, you know, lock the front door. And it was funny because it's true. Here's the thing, thirty four percent of homes that are burglarized, the burglars walked up to the front door, twisted the doorknob and walked right in. Thirty four percent. It's over a third just walked in through the front door. But boom, So yeah, you know you want to cut the chances of your home being burglarized by a third, lock the

front door. And you know what, good idea to lock the back door too, because twenty two percent of homes that are burglarized are the results of somebody just walking through the back door. All right, So that's that's fifty six percent of the homes that are burglarized right there. And yes, we can add another twenty three percent of burglars that just coming through an open window or an unlocked window. So uh, thirty four twenty two what is that?

That's fifty six sixty six, seventy six. That's eighty one percent of all burglaries that occur in homes across the United States took place as a result of somebody just walking through an open portal, an unlocked window, an unlocked door, front back or otherwise. There you go. Best piece of advice I can give you today. But otherwise, we're going to do some things to protect the home. Okay, of course we are burglary rates. Now, this is good news. Some of you are very much against the good news

when it comes to, you know, our society. I don't know if it just messes with your worldview or not. It doesn't really matter to me. But these are, in fact the facts. Burglary rates have been steadily decreasing for over the past decade. For certain, there's been a sixty five percent drop in burglary rates from twenty fourteen to current day twenty twenty four. The burglary rate in the United States is currently less than one fifth of what

it was in nineteen eighty. Now, one of the reasons for that, I mean a big reason for that is because we live in a connected, transparent world. It's just not that easy anymore. It's not that easy. Just well, it's easy enough to walk into somebody's home, but it's not that easy to do it anymore in our connected world without being detected, without being videoed, monitored, and so on and so forth. So this is the kind of stuff that has been dropping, dropping, dropping dropping the burglary rate.

Now again, this is not going to prevent the professional cat do they still call them cat burglars? Cat burglar from from burgling burgling, burg burgling your home, But the vast majority of crimes committed against your home are going to be done by more opportunistic individuals, and a little bit of deterrent goes a long, long way, long long way. Most burglaries occur during daylight hours when most people aren't homes,

so monitoring is something important. Homes with security systems three hundred percent more like, I'm sorry, I just said that wrong. Homes without security systems three hundred percent more likely to be robbed, and only fourteen percent of property crime are actually solved each year. Average cost to the homeowner twenty eight hundred dollars. That's average average cost if you get robbed, somebody breaks into your home. You know, that's nationwide average cost.

All right, So what do we do about it? What do we do? Well, we have a whole arsenal of now kind of pay to play di wiable security devices that plug in and speak to your smartphone, that you yourself in relatively quick order could set up all around your home. We'll talk about those.

into the cue. You can listen to the show while you wait, and then who knows you and I we can put our heads together figure out what's going on with your home. All right, we're talking about the connected home today, the home monitoring revolution. Now. I've talked about smart homes before, you know, and this kind of falls under that category, the larger umbrella of smart home connectivity. But specifically today our focus is your ability to monitor

your home while you are not there. We're not just talking about fancy lights where you can just walk into a room and say hey, I want to have the lights this way or that way. This is all good

and awesome. I love that stuff, love it. But today this is really talking about safety and security issues not only of your house from others, but your house from from goofs and plumbing and electrical defects, natural disasters, and also not just your house, but those people you care about who live in your house that may need a little assistance being monitored for their own safety as well. So we're going to get to all of that. So right now we're on the security side of things. What

are the tools that you can use? And these are just about everywhere you turn and look these days, multiple different systems. You've got to choose how it is that you're going to kind of combine them all together into your personal network. This is going to be the biggest decision for you, is how to combine them all together.

The day is coming very very soon. Well, it won't matter, won't matter what you buy, where you get, you're going to bring it home and your AI based personal assistant, whether it's the Apple one that starts with S or the Amazon one that starts with an A, or you know, I'm not going to say their words because their names, because then they start talking back to us right now.

So the idea, though, is you bring something home, you say, hey, I just bought this, here's the model number, and they detect it on your Wi Fi network and they just do all the setup and until you go plug it in and you're good to go. Right now, that's not quite there, but it is getting lots and lots easier every single day. I mean super super easy these days

compared to what it used to be. So the point is you're going to have to decide what brands and how you're going to go when it comes to security products. For instance, simply Safe probably leads the market right now in what we would call do it yourself security systems. Now there's also live monitoring from others, not just you, available in systems like this. ADT is as I think,

the nation's largest home security company. They also have equipment that they can either install or that you can install, and that they can monitor for you or with you, okay, with you, meaning that there's an app. And there are also you know, eyes on your home twenty four to seven. These are all options that you've got, and now there are also all sorts of automation. Brands like Ring like your ring doorbell. Ring makes a lot more than just

a doorbell. Nest, which is now a Google company, Nest makes a lot more than just the thermostat that they so famously started with. We use a Nest system here at our home. We've got Nest cams, Nest motion detectors, Nest thermostat, and it all feeds into one app on my phone, which is really really nice. So that's the kind of stuff that you're going to have to figure out.

But what's available cameras? Of course cameras and by the way, way, all of this equipment that I'm about to mention can be either hardwired, meaning that you're actually supplying power to it from a source, or they can be battery powered, and a lot of people, you know, kind of shirk away from that because they're like, well, what if the

battery runs up? Well, the nice thing about a connected system is that you get notification before the battery goes out on your app that you know, a sensor or one of the accessories is, in fact, you know, suffering from a low battery. Time to change it, time to recharge it, whatever the case may be. Some of these are rechargeable. Some of them you actually have a battery, physical battery that you insert into them. Again, you've got

to decide how that works best for you. What I really like myself and what we've got here are I opt for like, especially when it comes to the cameras, even though by the way, all of these accessories take an amazingly low amount of power and the batteries last a long time. But when it comes to like our camera system, they are hardwired, but not like specialty wire. They're like USBC. They're like charging cables these days. They're hardwired into power so that they're always up and running.

I never have to worry about batteries if we have a power outage. They have a built in backup battery in them and they keep going. So it's not as simple as you know, finding my electrical panel, hitting the power and thinking, oh, well, now I've got full access to his house because he'll never see me. That's not the way most of these work these days. So ideally you want a powered situation so you don't have to

worry about the batteries. If you can do that and then have it built in integral battery, which of course, because it's powered, it always stays charged and it's ready to rock and roll anytime the power goes down, seamlessly still operating. That's cameras. Cameras are wide angle, They can be placed in any number of locations. They can be all by themselves. They can be combined with motion activated

or camera activated floodlights. The cameras go in for red so that they see in the dark, they see with the light's on. They're very, very high resolution these days. They've come so so far. I mean, the average consumer security camera today is fifty times better than the most high tech security camera that we used to put in commercial buildings or banks, you know, thirty years ago. I mean, that's how far we've come. And that shouldn't surprise anybody, right. Cameras,

that's one thing. You position them at major points of egress to your home. And I like the camera that is connected to floodlights, not because the camera needs the floodlights to see, but because that is the single biggest alert to somebody approaching the house that they've been detected. Motion activated floodlights are fantastic because as you approach boom, suddenly you're in the spotlight and you know what, at the end of the day, At the end of the

day again, accountability, non transparency. These are the things that stop the vast majority of home burglary. Of home crime is simply the awareness that, hey, you know, you're on candid camera. You are you know, my in laws have a little sign over the garage. I personally don't go this far, but it's that one of those signs that say, smile, you are being videotaped. You know what. It's just an awareness that people are like, Okay, I don't like this idea.

I don't like I don't want to be seen. And it even goes so far as like the camera in the front of our home. I have I make sure one of them covers the street, so if you pull up to my curb, we see you, we see your make, model, color, license plate, the whole thing. And we're not crazy security conscious over here, but it's enough. It's enough. It's enough

to know that we've got control. And the cool thing is whether we're home, whether we're shopping, or whether we're you know, on vacation on the other side of the country or the other side of the planet. Suddenly my phone buzzes I get an alert. I can look at it and everything from somebody standing at my front door delivering a package to our cat coming home in the middle of the night, walking down the side driveway, and

the camera knows knows the difference between people. It tells me animal detected in the driveway, and there it is. There's Domino making his way from wherever that guy has been. Wherever he's been is pretty sus I'm pretty sure. Anyway, that's where we're going. Uh, let's talk when we come back.

Let's talk more about the other accessories beyond the camera and the flo blood lights that we can install in your home that all feedback to your smartphone app to let you know, to give you that peace of mind that you know what's going on.

out there. And I hope wherever you are listening to us from, be it southern California or elsewhere across this great land of ours, that your day is as beautiful as ours today, and that you've got plans to get out and enjoy it. I hope you do until five o'clock Pacific Standard time, at which point you should be seated watching the Los Angeles Dodgers win the pennant and start their journey to the World Series. That's all I'm saying, Go Dodgers. All right, home security, what are the things

available to you? What are the accessories available to you. We've talked to cameras and such. Let's talk a little bit more about what's available. Point of entry accessories. Point of entry accessories simply means this window and door opening detectors. And these are very very simple they I'm sure you've seen them. If you haven't, or if you're not aware of the magic with which they work, it's very very simple. They're magnetic. The vast majority of them are magnetic. You've

got two a sensor and a magnet. The magnet mounts on one side, of the unit like the door, the other on the jam, same with the window jam and the window sash. When they are together, they complete the circuit and everything is fine and good. When they've been activated and you separate them to by opening the door and or the window, then boom, the alarm goes off. The alerts go out, and this is how you protect one of those major vulnerable you know, openings in your

home and you get alerts. Sirens, by the way, when you're not home are a good idea. Maybe sirens when you are home are a good idea as long as you're prepared to, you know, have a heart attack when they go off in the house. You should definitely get a siren that can be heard, and that's you know, somewhat clearly sending the message you've been detected without necessarily being a defibrillator for your own heart system. Okay, so you don't need to blast somebody with a siren. That

just needs to be a point of awareness. Now, some people are like, well, I'm not going to open this window because of the risk of sensors. I'm just going to break the glass to get into the house. And that's why in a room with a window to the outside. You can put a glass brake detector. Now that goes

nowhere on the window. It can just simply be mounted in the room because a glass break detector is sitting there monitoring the frequency, the unique frequency of shattering glass, and when it hears it boom, it goes off and lets you know what's going on. Garage doors a major point of kind of overlooked entry into a home an attached garage. So here's my advice there. Smart tech garage door openers. Okay, they are the kind that lets you know when the door has been opened and or closed.

They also and this goes to another kind of category of remote access, you granting remote access. A smart tech garage door opener not only alerts you when a garage door is open opened and you didn't open it, but it allows you to open the garage door remotely. So you're not home and you know your spouse forgot their key or something, something, a family member needs something. You're like, okay, are you buy the door good, I'm going to open the garage door for you and in they go and

easy access into the house. But you don't want easy access for strangers into the house. Obviously. Also you should check. A lot of people have very very old garage door openers. One of the strong arguments for updating them is that modern contemporary, cutting edge garage door openers have what's called a rolling code. You've probably heard stories of thieves like sitting with scanners out in the street and sending out

signals and decoding people's garage doors. Well, a rolling code garage door is a door that changes the code every single time it's used. Okay, so they are not the easy garage doors to hack from the street. Also, remember to lock the garage door from the garage to the house. It should have the same kind of security that your front door has on it. As well, it's not a bad idea to put a camera inside the garage facing

the garage door so you've got full access there. And finally, if you don't have a late model car with an integrated garage door technology into the electronics of the car, then please don't clip the garage door opener to your sun visor or have it sitting there on your dashboard because basically you're out of shopping center and you're basically telling a criminal, Hey, if you happen to know where I live. Here's the keys to my house right here

on the dashboard or on the sun visor. So they smash and grab your garage door opener from your car while you're at the mall, and off they go to open up your house. You can solve that problem even you have even if you have an old garage, there are companies online that will take your garage door, brand, the code, all of that kind of stuff and give you a keyfob opener for your garage door that you can just keep with you on your keychain. All right, so much more to come. But when we come back,

it's top of the hour. It's time to go to the phones. We're going to take some calls and then we'll return to our conversation about the monitoring revolution for your home. You're listening to Dean Sharp the House Whisper on KFI. This has been Home with Dean Sharp, the House Whisper. Tune into the live broadcast on KFI AM six forty every Saturday morning from six to eight Pacific time, and every Sunday morning from nine to noon Pacific time, or anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app