That Time We Talked About Home Automation

This is episode number 31 of The Homeowner Show. Whether you're DIY or looking to hire, we're here to help you find the best information and options for you and your home. My name is Kevin Hackett, and here with me is Craig Williams.

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to The Homeowner Show. We are excited that you could join us today. It is a good day to be on The Homeowner Show. How you doing, Kev?

Man, I'm doing good. How are you?

Man, I'm doing all right.

Just all right, huh? Nothing? That's what we're going to go with today?

No, I got something, but it's just making me angry.

Okay. Well—

Can I vent on the audience?

Well, you can. Yeah, sure. Why not?

Yeah. So if you go to our social media page, you'll be able to find a picture of my wife standing underneath the tree. I had one of my hives swarm the day before yesterday, which for those of you that don't know, when a hive swarms, that means that tons of bees exit the hive and form a ball around a new queen as they leave your property. These particular bees decided to taunt me by going 45 feet up a tree right next to my hive and just sitting there and staring at me.

Huh!

So I spent like a day and a half trying to figure out how to go up this stinking tree and get them.

Did you try to climb it?

I did.

Oh, how far did you get?

Not very far. Tarzan I am not. I'm not ashamed to admit that I got scared.

Somehow you're closer to Phil Collins than you are Tarzan. Yeah, definitely.

So anyway, so I finally figured out a way to get these bees down.

Okay.

And which required a trip to the big box hardware store.

Oh, you rented, you rented a cherry picker, right?

No. Um, so my, my ingenious plan— so I like, I, I called some bee professionals and I got all sorts of fun advice. Um, my favorite, by the way, was why don't you shoot them down?

Shoot them?

Yeah, shoot them. Like, shoot them down.

Like, like shoot the very top of the hive Let it fall.

Yes.

That sounds like a terrible idea.

And I— have fun with YouTube because you can go find this.

What?

People do this all the time. Like, they shoot hives down out of— like, when they're too high, people just shoot them down.

Well, then they're gonna fall and break.

Yeah.

And go everywhere. How are you gonna re— okay, I don't know much about bees, but I feel like this is a bad idea.

Could be a fun idea.

Maybe. Well, depending on what your idea of fun is.

It could be a dangerous idea. I mean, but sure, I didn't do it, so— but it was interesting.

So what did you do?

It was recommended to me as the redneck solution.

Well, so you're suggesting that what you did wasn't the redneck solution?

No, it was close. It was like a cousin of the redneck. No, I, I mean, where I ended up was I attached a 5-gallon bucket to some— a 10 feet— 10 feet piece of conduit.

Oh my.

And so I was like, well, it's thick enough conduit so I can stack the conduit. And so I had 30 feet of conduit.

Okay.

Because it was 40 feet up in the air.

Okay.

45 feet up in the air.

And it didn't like, like bend all the way over?

It wouldn't bend like spaghetti, basically.

Okay.

So that wasn't quite long enough, but I couldn't hold 40 feet of conduit.

So— You tried.

I admit nothing. So I needed to get up a little bit higher and I had a 12-foot ladder and the 12-foot ladder wasn't quite high enough. So I was going to put the 12-foot ladder in the back of my pickup truck and hold the 30-foot piece of conduit and then put the bucket over the swarm and then hit the branch and then knock the hive or the swarm into the 5-gallon bucket, bring it down piece by piece. and then put them back into a, into a hive box.

That, that sounds like a terrible idea. Let me hear your idea. My favorite part was the part where you're going to put the ladder, the 12-foot ladder, not just the, you know, the 12-foot ladder in the back of your pickup and then go up this thing.

Yes.

Was it an A-frame ladder?

Yeah.

Okay, well, that, the that's at least a little bit more stable.

I'm not saying it was like, like the best idea or like the safest idea.

I'll tell you what my idea is. My idea— yeah, that's all I got. I don't have an idea, but this sounds like— okay, so, so you, you, you got started, you did this, and it literally—

it took me like 20 hours to get to like this point. I mean, like, you've put a lot—

you've invested a lot here.

Yes. And, and so like, I finally get like— and let me tell you, like, honestly, the hardest part was getting the bucket attached to the Okay, that was the hardest.

Duct tape?

No.

Oh, um, that's not how I did it. I saw some other guys do it that way. I just— I, I was trying to move faster because I didn't have time to like wrap tape around all this stuff. Okay, so yeah, it— yeah, so anyway, by the time I got the bucket attached to the conduit, I got out there with all my materials, my bee suit and all this stuff, like they, they'd left.

So, so, so you're telling me they just left?

They were gone. They're gone?

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

There's nothing you can do. Sometimes they'll sit there for 4 days. Sometimes they'll sit there for an hour. There's no predicting it whatsoever.

But 20, 20 and a half hours was too long.

Yes. Yes. What happened was, it had been hanging out in the 40s and the 50 degrees. I don't know why they swarmed. They typically don't do it when it's that cool. But they got up there and they got cold. So they were just holding on, waiting for it to get warmer. Well, that afternoon it peaked up to like 65 degrees and they started feeling feeling good, I guess, and they just flew off.

Out.

Yeah.

I feel like Julie from our beekeeping episode is just laughing at you right now.

I called Julie and she did laugh at me.

Well, I guess live and learn.

She is, she is like a swarm gladiator.

Okay.

She will like— she gets aggressive with the swarm. She'll go, she'll go get one down and like— because it's free bees.

Sure.

I told, I told my wife, I mean, like, if there was a $500 bill up in the tree, wouldn't you climb up there and get it? And she's like, yeah, but that $500 bill wouldn't sting me.

Well, probably, but these were your bees that you paid $500. This isn't a free $500. This is a $500 that you're losing.

Let me be clear, I did not pay $500 for these bees.

But they're worth $500.

They're worth $500 because I reared them for like 2 years, and they're like your babies.

Yes, they're in their terrible twos right now.

No, they're like a freaking teenager that's disrespectful and not Listening to me, I'd punch them all in their collective face if they were here right now.

Oh man, that would be that would be fun to watch. Well, um, so that happened. So do we need to just cancel the episode for tonight and stop and just put you in the morning?

No, it's just gonna have a tinge of anger.

Okay, just fine. I'm fine with you angry. Angry Craig is better than. Other Craigs.

It's like a dash.

Just a dash?

Just a little spice.

Okay, a little spicy.

Yeah.

You're gonna be a little spicy tonight.

A little pepper on the pizza.

Okay.

It's fine.

That's fine. So lovable, man. I don't have anything to top that. My day's been peachy, apparently. Oh well, I will say the only thing that's made me angry is that we're still not getting our video out. Because, well, long story short, I'm going to have to get a new computer.

Kevin has literally had to poach his computer on the internet in order to get these videos out to you guys.

I'll do whatever for our listeners. I'll do just about anything. And apparently buy a new MacBook is the option.

That's what Kevin's— that's how much Kevin loves you guys. New MacBook.

Yeah. Those things are not cheap.

All of that just to bring you our ugly mugs.

That's right! It's worth every moment!

Because you da-mit!

All that being said, I will say thank you to our listeners! We are continuing to get a good bit of downloads. Share this episode, share other episodes with your friends. We just really appreciate it. We'd love for you to go on and give us a rating or a review. That would be really helpful for us.

Yeah, subscribe, hit the like button on Facebook, the, uh, follow— what is it on Instagram? What is that?

Like, follow? Yeah, yeah, you follow.

Follow on Twitter.

Yes, follow.

Yeah, follow all the things.

Yes, like us on Facebook.

That would be great.

Yeah, yeah, subscribe even. Yeah, click the little subscribe button on iTunes or Google Podcast or Stitcher or whatever it is there so that automatically downloads. That way you'll never miss an episode. So you have—

you haven't been pushing the, uh, The non-GMO pocket whatever.

They stopped paying me.

The checks stopped rolling in?

Well, maybe I just realized they were never paying me.

So, it was delusion, just pure delusion.

And then I realized that their initials were PC, and I was done.

And that wasn't on accident.

No, apparently not.

They knew full well what they were doing.

Yes, they did. Man, I still use them, though. It's a freaking good app.

You have Stockholm syndrome with these guys.

I know. What am I going to do?

Oh, man. I don't know. We have a really cool episode for you guys tonight. Tonight's guest is my buddy, Jordan. We have been buddies for a long time.

OK.

Is that right?

Mm-hmm.

Yeah? He concedes the fact that we are mutually friends. Man, the fact that he admits that, that says a lot. That's a bold statement.

Yeah.

I wouldn't be associated with you in public.

In public.

Wow.

We're getting real.

Yeah, that's right. We've been friends for a long time. I actually haven't tallied the numbers, but you're more of a numbers guy, so you might be able to tell everybody how long it's been. It's been a long time. Jordan is a programmer for a rather large corporation that shall remain unnamed. At this time. But he comes into the studio tonight because he's been doing some cool experimentations with his home that we thought that you guys would really get a kick out of learning about. He has some really cool resources for homeowners that we're going to share with you guys later on. Let's just go ahead and bring Jordan on. Jordan, how are you doing, man? Doing good!

How are y'all?

Wonderful!

Well, that's not true. We just heard how you're doing, Craig.

I'm now— I've got show facade.

You don't have any bees at my house.

Craig's demeanor has just changed, y'all, and now he's ready for the podcast.

That's right.

Welcome. Glad to have you here, Craig.

I'm partly here.

Yeah, Jordan. So tell us a little bit about you and your background a little bit, because we're going to be talking about something tonight that, that I think, uh, a lot of people would be a little bit freaked out to get started in.

And you make it sound like Kevin's a little suspicious of you.

Well, I mean, it's funny.

Who are you? Where do you come from? Exactly.

I need to know.

Is this a PG audience? Apparently.

Yeah, so because I think at the end of the day, what we're going to talk about tonight is, uh, probably not rocket science. But for a lot of people who feel like they're not technologically savvy, this might feel like rocket science to them. Anyway, tell us a little bit about you and your background. That way, we have an understanding of you.

Sure! Like Craig said, we've been friends a long time. I moved down here initially in 2006. That's when we were first hanging out together. Been friends a long time. I went to Texas Tech University, got my computer science degree there. Go Tech!

Go Tech!

Are they still playing basketball right now?

They are going to continue playing basketball all the way through Monday because they're about to take Michigan State down. Wreck 'em, Tech! Let's go, Big Red! The Masked Marauder is coming through the basketball court!

I don't understand how they can play basketball when they don't have any trees taller than 3 feet.

You know what? All the haters, that's fine.

We have plenty of concrete.

That's fine. I heard that Texas was also playing in the championship. But, you know, Texas is the NIT. So congratulations, people.

What's the— I, I am, I'm completely—

The NIT, that's the Not in Tournament.

No, not in this. It's the Not in Tournament. Grand Champions, is that the—

Well, we really derailed. Thank you for starting out. Yeah, if you don't— people apparently probably didn't know that I'm a big tech fan, so, okay, that, that probably turns a lot of people off. for me, and that's fine. This is our one moment of glory right now, and we're going to ride it as long as we can.

Because you guys aren't celebrating the Kingsbury train anymore, right?

Well, no.

There was a dark cloud that just came through the studio, y'all.

Well, he will forever be in infamy at Texas Tech. Nobody has ever thrown more touchdown passes in the history of college football than Kliff Kingsbury. It's 98, by the way. 98 touchdown passes. But that's OK, Jordan. That isn't Jordan. Sorry, I just called you Justin. Jordan, that is not why you're here. Let's get back on track for a moment. Graduated from Texas Tech University.

Don't hold it against him. He's all thrown off by the Kingsbury comment.

Me, too! Sadly, he graduated the year before I got there.

Oh, OK.

So, I got to see everyone else. I didn't get to see him.

Man, he's so pretty.

Anyway, I got my computer science degree. degree, and I'm a professional programmer. So I write software in a whole lot of different languages with different technologies at work. I'm currently— the closest title would probably be cloud solution architect. My job is to help move applications and put them in the cloud. So I figure out how to redesign them and what should we do to modernize them.

Okay, cool.

But for fun at home, because I'm a nerd, I still like to do programming at home. And the programming at home is a lot lower pressure, and it's a lot easier. I can just piddle with it and play with it and work on it for a few hours, then ignore it for a week, and then come back and look at it.

OK. But you've decided to do something pretty unique with your home. Honestly, it's really interesting. In our podcast history, which is a little over 6 months at this point, we've talked a lot about smart devices. You've taken that to a whole new level. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sure. Obviously, Internet of Things devices and smart home devices are really hot right now. But the trick is, all the big companies want you to buy into their ecosystem. Apple has their ecosystem, HomeKit. Lowe's had their system, Iris. There's other companies that are trying to make up their own ecosystem of devices and get you to stay within their ecosystem and everything just works. The trouble is, as we've seen, If those companies decide it's not really profitable anymore, they give up on it and let it go. Case in point, Lowe's with Iris. They spent a lot of money marketing that, building a whole bunch of devices, getting all these partners, pushing it in their stores. Now, they shut it all down, and they're offering people $50

credits to reimburse them for all their devices that are no longer usable because they don't support it anymore. Oh, really? They offer credit?

Wow.

So you can bring those devices back in, they'll give you credit for it?

Something like that, yeah.

That's crazy. I remember those are like end cap things that were down at the front of the store.

Lowe's was crazy about it. They were really pushing it.

They set up a whole little mini home-looking thing, and all of a sudden, they're bricks.

Right. What I've tried to do with mine is choose devices and choose protocols and choose systems that are more or less vendor agnostic. That way, you can plug and play any device you want, but you're not so tied to any one vendor that if that vendor decides they don't want to do it anymore, your stuff still works and you can still keep going.

OK.

So, if they decided— the company that makes my smart lock doesn't want to do it anymore, OK. My smart lock will technically keep working even if their app stops working.

Oh, I see.

But even if it didn't, I could throw that lock away and put another one in, and the rest of my home automation stuff keeps working. I just get a different lock.

That's real interesting. One of the things we've talked a lot about, especially 4 or 5 episodes ago, we had our smart locks episode. We were talking about the Schlage Sense. They have a proprietary app that basically runs that. Then, it's also connected to HomeKit with Apple. You're saying that if support completely goes away from the Schlage Sense with their app, You could still make it work?

Schlage specifically, it depends on what kind of technology they've put in it.

OK.

What kind of protocols they're supporting.

OK. So, but so this is really important because, you know, um, there are options out there that whether you use the Schlage Sense or, um, you're using the August, you told me earlier, um, that It matters based on what you're specifically trying to do.

Right. When you want to come up with your home automation system and try to figure out what you want to do, you have to decide what protocols and what ecosystem you want to live in. If you want to do all HomeKit stuff, that's great. If you want to do all Alexa stuff, that's great, too. But you've got to pick one and standardize around that. You want to make sure you pick one that has broad support for a lot of different devices. The problem with HomeKit stuff is, it's very expensive to get licensed by Apple. That's why there's not a lot of them, because you have to go through their licensing process and so on. That's why nobody supports Lightning connectors except Apple. You don't see a Lightning connector on any Android phone,

because it costs a lot of money to get the license from Apple to use Lightning.

That's interesting. I have noticed that, because I have bought into the Apple ecosystem, I've noticed that the available items in the Apple ecosystem, it's just a lot smaller. Now, I will say this, I've also found that those those are good items.

Oh, yeah, no doubt. Apple has extremely high standards and has very tight limits on what you can do, because they want to build a walled garden that you're happy in. That's what Apple has always sold. If you buy into their ecosystem, everything just works. It's more work if you don't, but there's benefits to it. At the same time, it used to be a bigger risk to gamble on Apple. Now, it's not such a big risk. They're kind of important now.

Yeah, they are kind of important now. Getting away from HomeKit, because what you're talking about is not HomeKit-specific, talk to us a little bit about what you have done to your home. Then, we'll get into the backdoor of how you've made that happen.

Sure. Again, you have to pick which ecosystem you want to live in. Since I wanted one that would support a lot of different protocols, a lot of different devices, and wasn't tied to any one vendor, There is an open-source project called Home Assistant. This is a controller that can control all of your different devices and lets you set up automations. It can control any device, no matter who makes it, theoretically. Now, obviously, somebody has to build the integration between whatever device you want and Home Assistant. But there's lots of people that like to do it, and there is a little bit of industry support for doing it. People just do it on the side for fun, or because they want a certain

device to work. They will help build a system that can do it.

Now, you said open source. Home Assistant is a piece of software?

Home Assistant is a piece of software. You have to have a device to run it on. Typically, it runs on what's called a Raspberry Pi, which is a very simple, small, low-power server that you can run in your house. It uses a couple of dimes of electricity a year, but it can run very simple pieces of software forever and not use a lot of power or cost much. A Raspberry Pi costs $35.

I was going to say, I think I've seen like where they're selling these Raspberry Pis as like kits for like kids in elementary school to put together.

And that's why I originally got one. My wife got me one just to play with, and it had LEDs and diodes and resistors and little wires. And I was building like a little thing. You could push a button and it would send an email. It would flash a little LED if you'd gotten an email, you know, nothing terribly exciting. But when I found Home Assistant and found that typically people run it on Raspberry Pis, that's when I got excited about it and decided to make that run my Okay.

And just so people out there know, if you've ever seen people build mini arcade systems at their home, maybe even an old-school Nintendo Entertainment System, most of those things are running off of a Raspberry Pi, correct?

Yep, absolutely. Because they're really simple, they're low-power, you can run anything you want to on them. They have lots of pins, so it's easy to solder stuff to them or just use little wires that you can plug in.

Sounds good! What have you done to your house?

I've definitely been going piecemeal, just a little bit at a time. It's kind of hard to get my wife to let me spend a whole lot of money on this stuff. She wants me to buy diapers and things. It's one of those things. Pay the taxes, whatever.

Come on! You have a kid, though, right?

Yeah, I have 3.

OK. Making sure it wasn't for you.

Fair question. What actually happened is, my wife's It's her fault we got started on all this.

Oh, here we go. Throwing the gauntlet down.

My 2 daughters sleep in the same room because they're inseparable and they want to play with each other. So what would happen is we would shut the door and make them go to bed at 7:30, but then they would not want to go to sleep. So they'd turn on the light and play for a while, and then they'd go to sleep, but they weren't smart enough to go turn the light off. So then they sleep terribly and they're grumpy the next day.

Because the lights have been on all night.

Yeah, and sleep well. So my wife was having to get up at 11:00 or 12:00 and go see if the babies turned the light off, and if so, she'd go turn it off. She was complaining, saying, I hate having to walk up the stairs every night and go check this. Well, you know, sweetie, if you let me spend a little bit of money— that's only being slightly facetious. But if you let me spend a little money on it—

It went down a little bit. Maybe I can fix that for you.

Exactly.

If you let me spend a little money on this, I can make that work. That was my first automation. What I did was, I got Home Assistant, and I got 2 Z-Wave switches. I'll talk about those in a second, but 2 light switches. I turned the breaker off and replaced the switches in their room with these Z-Wave switches and hooked those into Home Assistant. I made a little automation that says, if it's after 10:30 and the lights are still on, send an alert to my phone and my wife's phone. It'll say, do you want to turn them off, or do you just want to ignore it? It's kind of this cool, simple automation.

Sure.

It only works inside my house, and nobody else would ever care. It worked for us, and it was really interesting, and I had a lot of fun getting to play with it and learn how to make it work.

And your wife didn't have to walk up the stairs anymore.

Ding, ding, ding! That's right.

Okay.

So she was very excited about it. So I've gotten her excitedness more and more over time. So I've done other ones, like I've got it set up so that 1 hour before sunset, all the lights outside turn on. And then 1 hour after sunrise, all the lights turn themselves back off again.

Okay.

You could do the same thing with just light sensors, but you got to keep the thing on all the time. And depending on the weather, it may or may not turn on, or it may be on all the time. So this lets me kind of control that.

And it's possible that you're even using more electricity on some of those sensors than what the Raspberry Pi is utilizing. So you're saving money here, too.

That's the idea. And then I've got other ones like I replaced the outlets in my downstairs that are plugged into all the lamps. The lamps are plugged into the outlets. I replaced all those with Z-Wave outlets. Now, I can push one button on my phone to turn them all off. But the more fun automation was, when I pull up in the driveway, the door unlocks, and all the downstairs lights turn on. That way, when I come home and the kids are screaming and yelling, and the dogs are barking, and I have to get everyone in the house because the mosquitoes are flying into the house, I don't have to fool with the lights. I just walk in, and all the lights are turned on.

It's great!

OK!

Cool. So there's some fun, simple automations you can do that I found very helpful.

So, so that does that automatically? You don't even have to press a button?

That's right. Now I have the buttons to do all of those things, but those are kind of the fun automations you can do, which is take advantage of exterior knowledge like a web service that says it's sunrise or it's sunset, or the lock that detected that my phone had gotten close enough to the house.

Okay. So you're using other things to make it smarter?

Definitely.

OK.

So what are the different applications that you're using to integrate all this stuff?

Sure. So Home Assistant more or less is a totally self-contained platform. So it has extensions and it has modules for every common home automation thing that's out there and every common device. And it also has things that let you easily build those automations I was talking about. And it already has links to a bunch of different web services that people commonly want to use, like what is the weather? Or, when is it sunrise or sunset or whatever. The only other ones that I've specifically installed is actually a really fun one called Pi-Hole that blocks all the ads in my house. That thing is awesome. Y'all haven't heard of this?

No.

This is awesome.

I've heard of shut your piehole. I've heard that more than once in my life.

He's told that quite often.

The Pi-Hole will change your life at home. Everyone hates ads on the internet, and we install things like Adblocker Plus as a plugin to our browser. But obviously, the companies can detect when you do that, and they'll either not load the site, or they'll pop up a little window saying, hey, we're ad-supported. You need to disable your pop-up blocker. Well, nobody's going to do that. I know the internet is supported by ads, but I'm not going to support that. I'm going to let dumb people support that. Or ignorant people, whatever. What you can do is—

ignorant in the ways of blocking ads.

He insulted the entire audience.

You can cut that part out.

I'm sorry.

Oh, we're leaving it in.

I need a show title. It's got to stay. I know, yeah.

It's all about education.

That's right.

I don't want to see any ads inside my home, on my phone, or on my wife's MacBook, or on the TV, or anywhere else. I don't want to see the ads. So, I pay for Hulu's version that doesn't have commercials. I pay for Netflix so I don't have to watch ads. I don't pay for cable so I don't have to see ads. But my internet browsing, I don't want to see any ads, either. But I can't install Adblocker Plus on everything. It doesn't block everything, and websites don't like when you do that. So instead, what you can do is, you can install what's piece of software called the Pi-hole. The way it works is, when you go to a website like foxnews.com or MSNBC, whichever of your political affiliations you happen to believe in,

the content for that site will come up. But it will also issue these other, what are called DNS queries, out to the internet. It'll send along information about you, like your cookie information or what sites you've been at before, or demographic information, or all this other stuff, to these ad companies like Google and others. They will serve back an ad that they think is relevant to you based on the demographic information they received. Well, I don't like the privacy violation associated with that, and I don't like the tracking associated with that. I hate that I go on Amazon and look at something and then I see an ad for it on every website I go to for a week afterwards.

Sure, yeah.

Well, if I didn't buy it then, I'm not going to buy it now. So, what it does is, when you get that content back from the website, the ads come along with it, but they're separate because they came from a separate company, a separate URL. They didn't come from foxnews.com. They didn't come from MSNBC. They came from doubleclick.com, which is Google's ad platform. Or actually 185,000 other ones. There's a huge number of these things. So what the Pi-hole does is, every time you issue a query inside your network for a certain website, it will let that query go out. But as soon as it sees all those other queries that match a blacklist of all the bad ad sites,

it just kills the query. It prevents it from going out of your network.

Oh!

It's like your browser failed and the query never gets issued. The ad company never sees the request. But all the content from the site goes ahead and pops up. So you can see the whole thing, but you just see a little blank white rectangle where the ad was supposed to be.

Interesting.

And it doesn't matter which device you're on inside your house. They all work the same way because they all go through your router, which is connected to the Raspberry Pi. It prevents all those queries from ever leaving your home network. So when I look at the stats on the Raspberry Pi, 25% of every single query in my house was supposed to have been an ad. And not a single one ever showed up. So it cut my internet usage way down. So I stay under my data cap limits from Comcast. And I never see an ad. My kids will never know what an ad is. They will not be prepared for the real world. They will go to college and be like, oh my gosh, I can get a free iPad if I just give out my Social

Security number? This is great!

I never knew this was available!

Exactly! Wow, they're so nice! So my kids have no chance.

Wow. I had no idea that was an option.

That's a cool thing you can do on the Raspberry Pi. But you can also do it inside Home Assistant.

Huh.

That's cool.

Yeah.

So that was my favorite of the things I've done with the Raspberry Pi is knock all the ads out of my house.

Are there other things internet-related that you can block like that? Are there other things like, for instance, let's say you want to limit certain sites or whatever because you've got kids in the home. Can you do that? Are there other options?

Oh yeah. The blacklist and the whitelist are totally user-configurable. You can totally put in your own, or there's other sites that have an approved list of things they trust. The only thing this won't do, it won't block ads that come from the site itself. They can't block YouTube ads because YouTube itself serves the ads, so the content comes from the same URL as the ad. There's no way for it to tell, this is an ad, this is the actual thing you wanted to see.

OK.

But if it comes from these other random sites on the internet that host ads, 185,000 of them, Yeah, then it causes all those to go into the piehole and never come out.

But you can get rid of those for like, what is it, $12.99 a month now or something like that?

With the— for YouTube?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's possible.

So, which has some other benefits too. I mean, like, if you pay for that, you can listen without actually watching the video and all kinds of fun stuff.

Well, you can listen— yeah, you can, you can turn the screen off, right, and still listen on your phone, right? Exactly.

And you can watch the new Karate Kid series, which is awesome.

Who doesn't want to do that?

It's fantastic. Season 2 is fixing to come out, y'all.

That's funny. Well, this is really, this is really interesting stuff. I mean, you're, you're talking about taking basically any smart device, um, and connecting it differently than what the, you know, these companies have told us. This, you have to connect through HomeKit or through Alexa or, you know, whatever it is that you're using. Iris, for example, and then, you know, they stop supporting it. Or maybe they just drop that, that thing, you know. For example, let's say that all of a sudden, uh, you know, HomeKit just decides, uh, Schlage Sense, I'm done, and they just drop support for it for whatever reason. It's not that Schlage did anything wrong, um, they just decided I'm done with it.

Right.

So You're saying that your system, what you have set up here, bypasses all of that?

That's right. It also, like we said before, lets you integrate other data together. My automation that turns on all lights when it unlocks the door and turns the downstairs lights on when I come home, that works because when my phone gets close enough to my home network, the MAC address of my phone registers with my router. My router My router is listening to all the devices on the network. My Raspberry Pi is listening to the router. It sees, hey, my MAC address has showed up, so it knows I came home. That also works through my August Smart Lock. But if August decides to drop that GPS support, or they don't want to do it anymore, or they

stop making that data available, they keep it internal to themselves, I can still make it work.

Wow! That's pretty impressive. That's really impressive. What other things do you have automated at your house, then?

The best one I ever did was my pool.

I was going to ask about that. That was a big game-changer for you.

Oh, yeah, no doubt. This was the best.

Your pool? It started filling up whenever you—

No, not yet. I haven't got that far. I'll get there.

I was joking!

I'll get there. What happened is, my pool was installed in 2001. The best technology was available in 2001, but none of that smart home. There was no such thing then, except for super, super expensive custom stuff from Crestron. You were not going to be able to do that yourself. That's thousands of dollars. I was getting frustrated that I had to constantly go out there and fool with the pool. The controller was up on a wall right next to my back door, so if I ever wanted to turn the heat on for the spa or turn the pump off or something, I always had to go downstairs and fool with it.

Hmm.

I was looking at it, and the company that made my pool controller, they sell a brand-new PCB board that lets you control it all from your phone. It's Wi-Fi-enabled, and it's really slick and snazzy. But it costs $800 to replace, and they will not sell it to you as a consumer. You must call an approved pool installer who has a license agreement with that company, can buy the part, and then charge another $800 to install it. So, it would have been $1,600 to automate my pool. I said, no to that. There's no way I'm spending that kind of money.

No!

Not a chance! What I found was, people on the internet were really frustrated by this, too. Some guy did figure out how to reverse-engineer the protocol that the pool uses to communicate with the its own controller. What he found was that he could write a little piece of software that would send out the same signals and receive the same signals that the pool controller did. It would understand it. What I had to do was take that software, run it on my Raspberry Pi, and then run a wire from my pool controller up into the ceiling and over to the Raspberry Pi, and then buy a little device that converts from that RS-485 twisted pair wire to USB.

Mm-hmm.

And then plug it into the USB port on my Raspberry Pi. Then, all those signals start showing up.

Huh!

Then, in Home Assistant, I was able to link that little program that guy wrote with Home Assistant. So now, I see my pool filter, and I see the water temperature, and the waterfall, and all that stuff. I can turn them all on and off, and I see them change. I can see how hot or cold the water is, and all that stuff that I should have spent $1,600 to do. But instead, I did it for $15.

$15?

Yeah, on Amazon. They don't let you buy a small spool of wire. I only needed 100 feet, but I had to buy a huge spool. I only needed like 35 feet, but I had to buy 100 feet of wire.

Wow!

So, I've got all this extra twisted pair wire I can't do anything with. I'll come up with something.

Wow!

And then this little doohickey that converts from the twisted pair wire to USB.

A doohickey? Is that like a cousin to the Schnoozen Bowser? I'm just wondering.

Exactly.

Schnoozen Bowser is a totally different category.

It's a whatchamacallit.

Oh, OK. We can sell those, too.

Yeah, they're in the widget family.

That was actually my proudest accomplishment, was that pool control. Not that it's the thing I need more than life itself, but because I did it so cheap.

Wow!

Yeah, it's like sticking it to the man.

Oh, yeah!

The man happens to be—

Luckily, my pool is so far out of warranty that I can't void the warranty.

So, there is that!

You may want to be careful with this if your stuff is under warranty. I'm 100% certain that company doesn't like what I did.

OK. But, yeah. At the same time, you're going, feels really good!

It's the same with all DIY stuff. You can always pay a professional. Sometimes, you absolutely should. There is some stuff you should not do yourself or can't do yourself. You're not going to have the right parts. You're not going to have the years of expertise it takes to do it. But for simple stuff, you can do it yourself. I can replace an outlet in my house. I don't have to call an electrician to do that. Now, if it's some weird thing, like in my bathroom, where the GFCI switch kept tripping, I'm not going to fool with that. No way. The electrician had to do all kinds of stuff to deal with whatever the guy before him had done. I wasn't going to touch that. That guy! But

simple— replace a switch, replace an outlet, replace a toilet, replace the backsplash— that's stuff that I'm comfortable doing.

Yeah, but you— I, I hear you saying all of those things, and I, and I don't disagree with all of the things you just said, but you're talking about some spool of wire that you randomly bought on Amazon that connected to some USL thing that plugged into the, the pie in the hole. And all of a sudden I'm wondering who's on first, and I'm completely confused.

That's the trick. No one's on first but me. That's the problem with a lot of— that's why a lot of companies haven't done more than they've done, because it has to be very custom to your house, and either they have to support it or you're gonna have to support it.

So, so you're just telling me that this works for your house It's going to be a little bit more difficult for me, only because my house is different than yours.

Absolutely. For instance, the smart switches, almost all of them require a neutral wire. The reason for that is, the wire that's coming from your breaker, one of them is hot all the time, and the other one's not. I can't remember if it's the line or the lead. One of those two is always hot, the other one's not. But, in order for the Z-Wave antenna to be broadcasting a signal inside that switch, it needs a complete circuit of electricity. The one hot black wire and the neutral wire provide that circuit, but it doesn't provide enough power to actually turn on your light. They do now sell switches that don't require a neutral, and so a lot of old houses don't have a neutral.

But if you don't have a neutral, you have to know that you need to get a special kind of switch. You can't just not plug it in. You can't jimmy this. At this point, you better call an electrician and have him do it.

Are the newer ones like that, that don't require the neutral, significantly more expensive? I don't know.

I've never looked. So far, everything Everything in my house has had a neutral.

Your house is fancy with all the neutral wires!

Everything built since probably 1990 has it. My house was built in 1991, so it has those. But if your house is older than that, it might not.

I had a house at one point that only had 2-prong outlets throughout the entire thing. It had no ground. The cable company would not install cable unless I had a grounded outlet. I was like, well, what if I just— I mean, you can just jumper that thing, right? It's possible. But they were like, yeah, not a good idea.

When your house burns down, your insurance won't pay for it.

Exactly. Anyway, all of that to be said, it does matter the way you do this.

Absolutely. You have to customize all of it to your situation, what you're comfortable doing, the situation inside your house, and the other devices you want to connect to it.

How do I do that? How do I— I mean, you're— I mean, this is—

Well, that's why you'd want to do it piecemeal. You don't want to go out and buy 1,000 things based on my recommendation and then none of it works in your house.

OK.

You want to buy one thing. Like, the first thing I did was buy one Z-Wave switch and then see, well, can I figure that out and make it work? I mean, I had replaced switches before that went out, but this was different because of the neutral. Most normal switches, like the little thin ones, don't ever use a neutral.

Hmm. So why Z-Wave? We haven't talked about Z-Wave.

When you see advertisements for them, they always talk about how easy it is to get started. They all support WiFi. Yay, woohoo! We all have WiFi in our house, right?

Yeah.

That's great. The problem is WiFi is a very heavy-duty protocol that's really meant for large amounts of data, like streaming Netflix or using your web browsing or whatever. Your router is really designed to have tons and tons and tons of devices on them. You're really not supposed to have more than usually 50 devices on your router, depending on which one you buy and how much it supports. If you keep buying all these little IoT devices that all have to be on the WiFi, you overwhelm your WiFi network, you slow down your browsing and everything else. Plus, you're exposing yourself to those things being really chatty with the internet and talking and sharing data with Alibaba that maybe you didn't want to share.

And all of a sudden, your data is going up and up and up and up.

Oh, yeah, because they're using your internet. I don't know, 10 or 15 years ago, there were 2 competing protocols for low-power, low-data-transmission home automation stuff. One was called Z-Wave, and one is called Zigbee. There's nothing wrong with either protocol. Both work really well. There's a lot of support for both styles. I personally decided to standardize on Z-Wave just because the standards body for it is a little stricter, so I had a higher confidence that the devices would always work. Yes, that means there's probably fewer devices than Zigbee supports, but It's more than if it was some random individual vendor.

OK.

What you have to do is, you have to have what's called a Z-Wave antenna that can send and receive this, just like your router does. Your router sends out the Wi-Fi signal. You need something that can send out that Z-Wave signal. You can buy them online. It's like $20. There's a little USB stick that you stick in your computer that does this. Each of the individual devices knows how to talk Z-Wave. Z-Wave. And so they will send and receive signals based on that Z-Wave protocol, and then Home Assistant can pick up those signals based on the antenna you got and then tell it what to do.

So just real quick to clarify, you don't have to have a Raspberry Pi in order to operate Z-Wave? You could plug it into a regular computer?

Absolutely. Okay, definitely. But the problem is you probably don't keep your computer on all the time. Like, I've got a big PC at home that burns electricity like there's no tomorrow. It's got fans and all kinds of stuff, right?

I don't keep that thing on except when It's just more cost efficient to have a Raspberry Pi because it's low power.

Well, you want a server that's running all the time. I don't want to have to remember, oh yeah, I got to turn my computer on so that my automations will run. That would defeat the whole purpose of having automations.

I'm not inside yet.

However, speaking of that, that was the other automation I did that made my wife really happy. So my PC is upstairs and it's got a lot of power to it so she can do her photography. It's crystalbeanphotography.com.

There you go.

For all your newborn and maternity photography needs. So she does her photo editing on my computer because it's got a lot of power because I play games on it and stuff. But when she wants to share these pictures on Instagram, the photos are stored on my computer. There's no way to get to them from her phone or her MacBook that she can walk around the house with. So the computer has to be on to make that possible because you share a file system. You share the file system across your whole network, then all the devices can see it. But the PC has to be on for that to happen.

Okay.

So she was having to trudge upstairs and push the button to turn the computer on, and then My 2-year-old daughter would think it'd be really funny to push the button on the computer where the light is flashing and shut it all down.

Yeah.

In addition, it was on because my daughter touched it or something, and I might be downstairs and we want to go to bed. Well, we got to turn that computer off, so we got to walk back up there and turn it off.

OK, it sounds like I'm really lazy because I don't want to climb the stairs.

All my automations are around getting away from the stupid staircase. Anyway, I set up Home Assistant so that it will send a signal to turn my PC on or turn it off. If my wife's itching and she's got 10 minutes to upload to Instagram, she can turn the PC on, upload her photos, and that's it. Then, the kids start screaming and she doesn't have time to work on it anymore. Then, when we go to bed, we can push one button, turns all the lights in the house off, the PC off, locks the doors, and that's it. Wow!

That's pretty amazing! Again, It sounds like everything you're talking about is fantastic. I would love to be able to do that. So, you have started a process to help us figure out how to do this.

Definitely. I've started a blog, diy-smarthome.com. There, I'm going to chronicle all the things I've done, the decisions I've made, why I made those decisions, and all the code required to actually make it work. Theoretically, you can just copy-paste from mine, and you'd be able to do the exact same things I've done.

Oh, perfect.

Theoretically. Now, again, with all caveats, I can't— I'm not going to support anything you do, and it has to be customized to your house. If you buy something different from me, I can't promise it'll work. Sure, theoretically it ought to.

Yeah, you— we, we were just looking at it before we started the show, and you even list some of the products that you use.

Definitely. I've got links to Amazon for everything I bought because I bought all my stuff from them. Yeah, so you can buy everything I bought. There's nothing secret.

Yeah, so you can get it in 2 days.

So the trick is just figuring out what you want to buy, figuring out what you want to do with it, and then linking it up.

Yeah.

So what would be like a good, like, jumping-off spot? What are you talking about, like a light switch or like an outlet or something like that?

Those are really easy, assuming you are comfortable turning the breaker off and unscrewing the wires and figuring out which one's the load and the line and then the neutral. And right, not unscrewing the wires from the breaker, but unscrewing the wires in the outlet, right? In the outlet box. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your 1-gang or your 2-gang box. Okay. Take the old ones out and put new ones in. Like, the Z-Wave ones are almost always the big paddle ones, and I have the old thin switches. So slowly I'm replacing those as I go along.

And honestly, that's just— on, on some level, we don't want to get too simplistic. We don't, we don't want to be responsible for you doing necessarily anything at home.

However— Absolutely, call an electrician. Yeah, I'm gonna say that a million times. Don't— I am not liable for any of this. Call an electrician.

It's almost as easy as looking at the switch that you're taking out and repeating that.

That is exactly right. With the switch that you're putting in.

Definitely.

Definitely.

Unscrew this and screw it in the other one, right?

Definitely. So you will find if you do those little thin switches, they usually don't have the neutral or the ground attached. Okay, they have the load and the line, the 2 black wires plugged directly into it, and they don't have anything else. So you'll find a pigtail with the white neutral and the copper ground. This is pretty easy, assuming that your electrician did a good job and did it that way when the house was built.

And there's already some ecosystems that support Z-Wave, right?

Absolutely. So you totally can do Z-Wave with other things like ADT ADT, for instance, they're trying to push their home automation stuff. They support Z-Wave. If you buy most Z-Wave products, you can hook it into your ADT system and it'll work.

ADT, that's like a home security system?

Home security, right. But since they're already in your home, they're expanding their market and trying to get in and get you to use them as the hub for all your stuff.

Sounds like the mafia.

And then, of course, they can upsell you on stuff. What they do is, they send their installer to your house. Yeah, it's like, yeah, I can put your alarm in and hey, I can update your lights and I can do lock and all that stuff. Huh.

Interesting.

That's not, it's not a bad idea on their part.

I mean, why not?

The problem though is they've locked it down. So even though it supports Z-Wave, I have not been able to figure out how to automate it from the app. So even though it supports Z-Wave, they have locked it down to where I cannot issue a command to arm my security or disarm my security yet.

So they have like their own proprietary stuff.

They've done something to it to lock it down and no one's been able— no one has posted a way to reverse engineer it yet.

Challenge accepted!

There is a device that theoretically you can hardwire into your alarm box that will do it, and it's all low power, so you won't kill yourself if you try to plug it in. I don't know if that voids your warranty with ADT. I'm sure it does.

Most things do.

Yeah, so I haven't gone that far yet. I'm thinking about it, I'm looking into it, but I haven't got that far yet. Don't tell ADT. I want to keep my contract with them for a little bit longer.

I do think I think that the, the thing, the thing that makes me feel a little bit better is that, um, while this sounds very complicated—

Oh yeah.

I realize that it's not, um, because you're, you're telling me how easy it is to do. That being said, um, I, I really appreciate the fact that you're willing to kind of just put it all out there and say, this is exactly what I did, this is exactly what happened. Sure, absolutely.

I mean, I learned all the stuff from other people on the internet. I found random blogs that would cover one little piece of what I wanted to do, and I'd glue that to something else that I already knew how to do. Yeah, the programming community in general is very free with information. I try to post as much as possible because that's how programmers learn from each other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

Cool.

Well, what else have we not covered that you're interested in mentioning?

I'd actually be interested to know, and like, what, what you're excited about that maybe you haven't been able to do yet. I mean, like, what are you— what kind of things would you be interested in automating that maybe you haven't been able to yet?

Definitely the alarm system. What I want is, when I leave the house, when I drive away and the GPS detects that I have gotten more than 200 feet from my house, I want the door to lock, which it currently does because August supports that. I want all the lights in the house to turn off, and I want that ADT security to arm. That's the only thing automated. I use their app, their proprietary app, to click stay home or stay away or whatever. I don't like that. I want to fix that.

How about this? One of the things that I know that's really big right now is Ring systems.

What's the other one, Kevin?

There's another one.

Nest.

Nest. Ring, I've got. I got that with ADT, and it already plugs into Home Assistant.

Oh, really?

I can see a live camera feed in the Home Assistant screen that shows me what's on my Ring doorbell.

OK.

In addition to, of course, using their app, which does the same thing.

Sure.

But I haven't got to a smart thermostat yet. I thought Nest would be the right choice, but they've kind of cut off their developer program. They've cut their APIs off, at least temporarily. We don't know if they'll put them back. I'm kind of leery of investing in their ecosystem. ecosystem for fear they will cut off my access. So, the other choices are Ecobee and the Honeywell Lyric, which both support Z-Wave and are more open.

Right. Well, that Ecobee 3 Lite, you can go back to episode 2, I believe it is.

Is that what that is, episode 2?

2 or 3. It's way, way back there.

I bought one.

Yeah. We've got 2 in my house. We love it.

I've been looking at them. I just haven't pulled the trigger on any of them yet. I know it'd be something we'd like, especially for upstairs, because our kids' bedrooms are above the garage, and the garage isn't insulated. So, their rooms get super hot or super cold all the time. It's so hard to control the temperature in their rooms. If we could see the temperature in their rooms, which I can get a little temperature sensor and put in their rooms, and then over Z-Wave, it would tell Home Assistant, hey, it's 75 degrees in the kids' rooms, and then I could have it turn the AC on.

Ecobee has those options, as well. They have their own sensors. You know, it's great to think that maybe there's another option if you don't— if you're going with a system that doesn't have a sensor, you've figured out a way to route it.

The other thing is that would give me a chance to actually solder some things together to build a temperature sensor. I know normal humans would not do such a thing. I haven't got to solder since college, so I want to try that again and see if I can actually solder something.

And we're back to Texas Tech.

Computer science is part of the College of Engineering at Texas Tech, not the College of Arts and Sciences. Sorry, Texas Tech.

I can't write program, but I can solder like none other.

I'll tell you what. Hey, soldering's fun.

It's fun. Well, cool.

Well, hey, listen, that— there's, there's a lot of information here, and I feel like there's maybe even just the tip of the iceberg. Oh yeah, in a lot of ways.

Um, on my blog, I've got— I'm documenting everything I've got. If you go out there now, you'll see the Getting Started Guide that gives you 6 articles that walks you through everything required to set up Home Assistant and a Raspberry Pi. It's got links to all the stuff you'd want to buy on Amazon to kind of get started if you want to buy same stuff I did. Affiliate link warning, they are affiliate links, so, you know, I will get a cut if you click on my stuff. Perfect.

Why not?

Smart. If you don't want to, that's okay. You can just, uh, search for it on Google and get that. I don't care either way.

Awesome. Yeah, cool. Well, um, man, I, I— Craig started to say it a minute ago, I, I feel like there's going to be an episode here in the future where we're going to bring you back in after you've done some more stuff.

Sure, definitely.

Especially after you've blogged a little bit more and put some more out there.

Definitely.

where people can actually learn a little bit more about this. Because I think one of the most difficult things, one of the things that you're good at, is being able to go out and figure out where all of these things are on the internet and figure out what's trustworthy, what's not, who actually knows what they're doing, who doesn't. But I feel like for you, you've done it and you're putting it out there. It's like this one-stop shop to be able to have an idea of everything that's working. Definitely.

I tell this to people all the time, the old joke that I'm not better at IT than you, I'm just better at Google than you. I use Google all day long, so I know what to search for. I tell my wife that all the time. She's like, how do you know how to do this on the website? You just Google it. But she didn't even know what to Google. She didn't even know what to do to get started.

If you're not good at Google, just call the Chamber of Commerce. The number is—

They'll Google it for you.

They'll Google it for you.

Apparently, our last deputy loves Googling for people. That's what my computer teacher in high school called it. Do the googly.

What did she call it?

She called it, do the googly.

Do the googly! That sounds like a good hashtag right there.

It also reminds me of the old— remember that commercial back in the day? It was an old football commercial. The guy was responsible for putting the name out on the end zone. Instead of Chiefs, he wrote Chefs. Great googly moogly! That's great! I'm going to link that up in the show notes.

It also reminds me of my favorite Parks and Rec bit. Hey, I looked you up on Alta Vista.

Alta Vista!

That's good stuff.

I'm sure that still exists. Somebody bought the domain.

Somebody did. Listen, man, it's been really good. I appreciate you coming on and giving us all this information. It's really good. It's something that I think, if you're interested in just having a little fun— honestly, these smart devices have become a fad. But beyond a fad, they really do make your life a little bit easier. It's kind of fun, to be honest.

Yeah, I like tinkering with it a lot.

Sure, absolutely!

It's kind of like why I like doing home improvement stuff myself. I enjoy doing it. Yeah, maybe it's not the absolute best thing that could possibly be done, but I get some satisfaction out of it. I like seeing it. I like making my wife happy when she says, hey, can you do this? Yes!

Yes, I can!

Yes, I can!

I am the best man you know!

That's awesome!

I think it's time for us to move into our next segment, and that is the Final Four.

The Final Four!

Yeah, so, uh, 4 questions we ask each, each of our guests. And, uh, so, uh, we know that you're a regular listener, so maybe you've already thought of these well in advance, but, uh, here we go. First one, what's the must-have tool that you won't leave your house without?

Definitely a Leatherman.

A Leatherman? Oh, so you have multiple?

I've got 5 or 6 of them. I just keep one in my truck, one in my car, one on my desk at the office. I've got one on my keychain that the TSA tried to steal a couple of times.

But I got it back!

I had to send that one back. Yeah, it cost me a lot of money.

Stupid me.

I keep one in my wife's car, even though she doesn't use it. I use it when I have to drive her car. I've got a version of almost everything they've sold.

Wow!

That way, I've got them. I've always got them available. I try not to be without them. I don't do the thing where you put them on your belt. I'm not willing to go that far. I won't put a cell phone on my belt. Either, but I do have one somewhere near me regularly. Okay, so it's just so useful.

What was like the most unique instance where you needed one? You think of it?

No, I guess I can't think of one just right off the bat. I'd have to think about it.

He uses them so often, so often.

There's so many, so many options.

I can't think of one that's just been pressing recently. That's okay.

Never had to like stab a squirrel or something? No.

I cleaned a fish with one once.

There you go. There, there it is.

We had forgotten the, um, I don't know, we had forgotten the fillet knife and we caught the catfish. We had to clean him.

Absolutely.

Leatherman it was. It wasn't a super clean cut because the blade was kind of dull, but you know, the fish was dead, so he didn't care.

That's not Leatherman's fault. They don't have feelings.

That's totally my fault. I used it to like cut roofing tile or something. I had dulled the crap out of the blade. It was my own stupidity.

Oh, that's funny.

All right, well, I gotta resharpen the blade. It looks terrible.

I love it.

My own fault.

I love it. All right, well, number 2, what's a job you've walked away from?

Oh lordy, I got a good one for this one.

Okay.

All right, so this was over the Christmas vacation, like this past Christmas. Oh yeah, okay, definitely. Yeah, so, um, my house was built in 1991, so all the stuff in it is from 1991, including the toilets. Now, I have replaced a lot of toilets in my life because my dad owned rent houses in Lubbock, and my dad was a do-it-yourselfer. So, we have replaced 20 toilets over time. It is trivial, or it should be.

Sure.

I'm sick and tired of the toilet upstairs. It won't flush right. I've replaced the hardware in it like 5 times. The toilet is just screwed up. I don't know what to do with it. I can't deal with it anymore, so I'm getting rid of that thing. I take the old toilet I pull it off, and I take it downstairs and I get rid of it. But I look at the flange bolt. The flange is what attaches the toilet to the flooring. There's those 2 big bolts that stick out of the flange, called the flange bolts. The flange itself is made out of cast iron. It was so rusted that the flange bolts just flopped over. The groove was gone. It just completely rusted to pieces.

Oh, no!

I'm not even going to try to replace the flange bolt in the upstairs bathroom. There is no way I would do a good job of it, and it would leak. And it would destroy the home. Not going to happen.

Not going to happen.

So, I call a plumber. He comes out there and he's like, oh, my gosh! He looks at it and he's just trying to figure out what to do with the thing.

It's always fun when a plumber says that.

He knew what to do. He was just like, this isn't going to be easy. He had to cut pieces of the flooring out and he had to jackhammer the thing to pieces to break it up. He said, I'm probably going to damage the PVC pipe that it connects to just because there's no way to get the thing off. It's glued on. I'm like, all right, fine, whatever. So of course he did. Okay, that doesn't hurt my feelings. I mean, you have to fix it. So he fixes that thing, but the problem is, to get to it, he had to cut a hole in the downstairs ceiling.

Oh my goodness.

A huge hole, big enough for a man to get in so he could reach up there and replace the thing. He could, or his buddy could, and then he'd be upstairs fixing the other one. So he finally gets all that fixed, takes hours, and then he says, you got to go to the store and get some quick-set cement and put around the thing to kind of anchor it and secure it after I leave. Okay. All right. So I go do that.

Then I'm finally ready.

I can finally replace the toilet.

We're ready to go!

I get the toilet out of the box. It's cracked.

Oh, no!

Some fool at Lowe's over Black Friday, when I bought the toilet because I was trying to get a deal, stupid me, cracked the stupid toilet when it fell off the truck. I had to take it back. Of course, Lowe's doesn't sell that toilet anymore.

No. They sold all of them at Black Friday.

I take it back, I get my money back. They don't sell anymore, so I have to go to Home Depot to get it. I go over there. They don't have the toilet I— or they have the toilet I want, but— no, no, no. I'm sorry. I forgot a step. I forgot a whole step. The toilet I originally bought from Lowe's had these smooth sides on it so that my kids wouldn't try to screw around with the bolts.

OK.

Because that's really gross and nasty, but they're kids. They don't know what they're doing. They're 5 years old. They don't know any better. It wouldn't fit. The water pipe that comes out of my house was right in line with that smooth side. So, the toilet I bought wouldn't fit. So, I take that back to Lowe's. Then, I get one from Home Depot. It's cracked. Finally, I get a third toilet. Finally, I get that one. I get it home. I get it installed. Everything's great. But then, I have this ginormous hole in the drywall. I said, there's not a chance. There's no way I can fix a ceiling and make it look good. It's never going to happen. So, I pay a guy to do that.

Yeah.

So, I walked away from fixing the flange. Not going to happen. And I walked away from fixing the drywall because there's no way I'd do it. It was a disaster.

So, you walked away twice?

Oh, yeah. Total disaster. Cost me a fortune. But both the contractors did a great job. It's not their fault. That's just what happens. Home improvement sometimes goes over your head.

Sure, it turns into a honey hole. So far, you win No.

2.

And it's funny that that is about a toilet. That's even funnier.

Again, a toilet, you should be able to do in 30 minutes. It is trivial. Except when it's not.

Except when it's not. No.

No. No. No.

Alright, No.

3.

The award goes to crap.

That's right.

No pun intended.

Pun intended.

No pun intended.

No pun intended. No pun intended. No pun intended. No pun intended. No pun intended. No pun intended. No pun intended. Number 3, how do you wind down at the end of a long day?

Definitely, the first part is, I come home and my wife's got a fantastic gourmet meal ready. She never fails at it. In 7 years, every meal has just been fantastic. She's never failed. Really great stuff. I'm super lucky to have her. Then, after that, I get the kids down. Sometimes, I'll play a video game on the computer or on the Xbox, or sometimes, I'll just sit with her and Not too exciting.

Hey, you know what? Not too exciting can be absolutely fantastic sometimes.

Definitely.

I'm not going to wind down in a Shark Tank.

No. That is one of our favorite shows. We do that a lot. An exciting wind-down is like an oxymoron, right?

Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Last question. What's one of the best pieces of wisdom or advice you've ever received?

This one was from a book. It was Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence It was back in the '30s and it's just got so much great advice and funny stories. Really liked it a lot. But one of his things was, a man's name is the sweetest sound in the world to him. So if you remember a man's name, you'll be friends with him forever. But if you forget it, it's to your own peril.

OK.

So I've really tried to make a concerted effort to always remember people's names. Someone— I get introduced to someone, I say their name in my head like 50 times.

Wow!

Which means I'm kind of tuning them out a little bit, which is not ideal. But, you know, but I make sure and bring their name up in conversation over and over again So that I don't forget it.

OK.

And of course, everyone likes to hear the sound of their own name.

Oh, yeah.

So I think that that's been very effective and has helped me kind of maintain friendships and get along well with people.

Well, those first few words that you say to the other person you've just met, they don't matter anyway. They're like, hey, what's up?

Kevin's real big into first impressions.

What's up with you? Not much. And by that time, you've said it 50 times. Yeah, it's good. I actually, uh, I did a, I did a thing one time where I was, um, telling people, um, that I was working with, I was, I was giving them, um, information on, on what their names meant. Okay. And because everybody, you're right, everybody loves the fact that their name— like, don't mess up my name. Yeah, right.

Absolutely.

Especially like if you have some like bizarre weird spelling of your name, you're like, no, my name's spelled with 4 L's in it.

Even common names people screw up. People spell my name with an O all the time. I'm like, what? There's not one Jordawn on Earth that I know of. I'm sure there probably are some. There's probably some listeners that have that, but I've never met one. But every freaking email I get at work, somebody misspells my name. I'm like, are you insane? It's in Outlook. It's at the top.

It's right there.

You couldn't have taken 5 seconds to make sure the name was spelled right?

This is my point.

I absolutely do that. I will go and check people's names 3 or 4 times before I send an email, just to make sure I didn't misspell someone's name.

It is important. That's the point. Your name is important.

Definitely.

Absolutely. My favorite one was that— I had someone whose name was Tyler. I was going through, I was like, man, the name Tyler, it's really special. The name Tyler means one who lays tile. That is the actual meaning! If your name is Tyler, now you know, you're a professional one who lays tile. I thought that was the best meaning of a name I've ever come across in my entire life.

Very good.

Well, thanks for joining us. I think it's probably about time for us to wind down. Craig, you got anything else?

Yeah, if you haven't yet, go ahead and hit the subscribe button there in iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, whatever it is you're using. YouTube, when Kevin gets a new computer.

Eventually.

And all of our woes are over with the video. We're still capturing video, we just haven't been able to put it out yet.

Exactly, it's coming.

You'll see our ugly mugs soon enough.

Yeah, we ugly.

Jordan's glorious chin. But, uh, but yeah, if you haven't yet, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all the places where you can find us. And we just really appreciate you guys listening to The Homeowner Show. You can always find us on homeowners— what is it?

What is it?

homeownershow.com.

.org?

.org.

homeownershow.com.

Yeah, that's right.

And at info@homeownershow.com. There you go.

You can reach us there. Send us a— send us a little love note.

That's right.

We'd love to hear from you.

And leave a review you for the show.

We've been, we've been getting some of those coming through now, so we're happy to hear from you guys. If you have any suggestions for the show, we want to, want to hear from you guys as well. We've been getting some of those coming in, and we've got some really great ideas that we're gonna run down for you guys. So anything else, Kev?

Man, I think that's it. Just thanks, thanks for downloading our episode, and we're available every Tuesday. So until next time, we'll see you later. See ya.

Thanks, y'all.