Upgrading an Older Home: Heat Pumps, Air Sealing and Smart Energy with Paul Braren – HGG674

This is the Average Guy Network and you have found Home GadgetGeek's show number 674

with a guest Paul Brarran, recorded on March 12th, 2026.

Here at Home GadgetGeek's, we cover all the figures, tech and gadgets that find the way

to your home news reviews, product updates and conversation all for the Average Tech Guy.

I'm your host Jim Colson, broadcasting live from the AverageGuy.tv Studios here in a beautiful

Bellevue, Nebraska. Although, wind warnings tonight, Paul, you're out on the East Coast,

Connecticut. You've had some snow. You think you've had quite a bit of snow this year? I know

up in Boston, but is Connecticut gotten all the snow? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. In New York City, it was an amazing winter. Yeah, and the cold.

Oh, yeah. I know you like to talk about it. It was an exceptional one. In 30 years, I don't

remember anything like this living in this area. So really? Yeah. That kind of historic

Oh, yeah, for you guys on the east coast. That's as much as snow. We'll see just the

sustained cold for like seven days of hitting five degrees zero Fahrenheit over and over

night after night and day, looking low teens. That's really unusual around here.

You've been a champion of heat pumps. We're going to see how well they get dark.

Don't give it away. Don't give it away. Just yet. But anyways, well, it's beautiful. It's beautiful

to date. We have wind warnings. So they were expecting like 60 and 70 degree or 70 mile an hour

winds tonight. Wow. So whatever's coming in is heading out your way. But anyways, we'll post a

show with some real class show notes and there will be some links out there that you're going to

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But check it out today. The average guy dot TV slash coin base. Okay, you heard from him earlier

one of my favorite guests of all time. I always love having Paul on. Paul, I don't know why I don't

have you on sooner. It's been a couple of years, but welcome back. Thank you, Jim. It's always

an honor to be here and you send extra perky tonight with your no more back pain. Yes. Yeah.

It's amazing. I've said this on the show before, but I'll say it again, chronic pain is horrible.

Yeah. It's just horrible. I don't, you know, I have a new appreciation for now. I don't,

let's say chronic, the definition of that is it never ends in it ended for me. So I feel very,

very fortunate. But for folks that struggle with pain all the time, I have said this before,

but I am sorry. It's horrible. And I only suffered, you know, six months, but yes, it is gone.

And yes, it does feel better. So, but for those of you out there suffering from some kind of

chronic pain, I am sorry. And that's just a terrible thing. But Paul, great to have you back.

Hey, congratulations. You, so I don't know how many folks watch Matt Farrell undecided, right?

It's his podcast or it's his podcast or YouTube channel, whatever you want to call it. He's a

big deal. The other day, I asked you, I don't know, three or four weeks ago, hey, Paul, would you

come on the show? It's time to catch up with you. The next day, or maybe two days later.

Here I'm watching Matt Farrell. Boom. There is your face. I was like, that's Paul. I know that guy.

I mean, Matt Farrell's a big deal in this space. And you're, he calls you friend, my good friend,

Paul Brennan was doing this. How did that all happen?

Well, let's see. Evie Club of Connecticut, meeting him at hotel Marcel, the world, the country's

first passive house certified hotel. Those kind of projects where we bumped into each other. But

also Matt Reisinger and in heat pumps. That's where it actually started. Getting heat pumps for

heat pump water heaters. That was six, seven years now ago now. Oh, you're showing a clip there.

That's cool. But yeah, it's your heat pumps, right? That we're on that. Yeah, yeah.

By the way, it was 75 degrees three days ago. And then, and we still snow in the front on the

lot of it. It's a weird winter. It's finishing out the winter topic. But you just saw a little

clip there, which shows the heat pumps and a lot of snow. And yeah, we'll get into that. But yeah,

it was a torture test and nerding out with him about the tech. Like he's so good at weaving a

store and making it interesting and showing B roll. It makes sense. That goes to the theme. So

he does all the work. I just show up and record a little bit. So it's just really cool, really

honored that he asked me to do that. Yeah, it was fun to see you on there talking. We're showing,

if you're watching the video, you can see that on there. If you're catching the audio,

I'll put the link in the show notes if you want to. And I encourage you to go out and watch it.

Paul, you've always been in the time I've known you've always been the champion of heat pumps.

And we talked about heat pumps on hot water or water heaters, so to speak. And of course,

there's always the the HVAC version of that. You guys spent some time in this video talking

about, did it pay off? Matt did a big retro. I shouldn't say retro. You did the retro. Matt

did a brand new build from the, you know, he put in geothermal all the way, you know, the full

service of that, all the insulation. You've been spending some time fixing maybe an old house

with insulation and such and putting kind of putting some new HVAC equipment in. What did you,

what you learned to that process? Yeah, so 1990 house, two by four exterior walls,

pretty typical. And actually, listening to Matt Ferrell's following podcast about

cross-guide solar, and he went back and talked about heat pumps a little bit with his brother

referring to houses like mine, built like 50, 60, 70s, where fuel energy prices were g.

So that's how he built a house, you know, my builder actually said,

when it's moving in, talking about how a house needs to breathe because you have a gas furnace

in the basement and it needs some oxygen and they intentionally some things, you know, leaky.

So when you put all that together, it's just reality and I'm laughing, but it's kind of painful

to think of how much, how huge a housing stock there is with the same kind of issue. So

that's what was fun about the comparing contrasting video. He's got, I think 10 or 12 inch thick

walls known with no thermal bridging, incredible triple-pane windows that are European style with

really good seals, but that's not what a lot of people are able to do or are able to have.

And that was true for my wife and I to try to build new in early COVID with supply chain

problems, or even finding land suitable. Well, mine's probably a little more typical and that is,

how do you get a house of just enough energy efficiency wise so that you can even go possibly

dream of going on electric? And that's what the video is about. So yeah, um, wasn't easy,

but I learned a whole lot. And that's kind of the way it goes with things, right? The hard way.

It sounded like in the video, and I'm having some issues with your video. Speaking of that,

um, maybe to start and stop your video. Did it get better after streaming when you're showing

B-roll there or no? Uh, no, it did. I thought maybe the B-roll had thrown it off a little bit,

but I don't think it, I think we're for whatever, whatever reason we're struggling with a little bit.

Try that. Um, it's okay. Most folks listen to this on the audio. So if you're watching the video,

just, you'll be fine. Just put them in the video. Yeah, it does. It looks like on the stream. YouTube,

it's smooth. I think it's only us in Restream. Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. Let's turn it on.

We'll just, yeah, what does it let it go? It's fine. I got you to ignore. Um, so the, uh, in the video,

it talks a little bit about, you know, I'm in a 1959 house here in Omaha, Nebraska. And it's also,

you know, sometimes they'll want a really cold night. The walls get cold, right? We have blown

in insulation in the, in the attic. Is it, you know, the question is it isn't enough? You know,

and then the real question is I have windows from the 80s. So I have all the vinyl windows from

the 80s. They do okay, but certainly new windows would be better. Paul, as you think about these

investments, right? I mean, I could rip all the siding off, put house wrap and new insulation

in the walls and do that with, with new siding, right? I could look at the attic and spend a whole

bunch of time, you know, trying to make sure the attic, and it seems like the attic's the first place

start for most people, right? Um, I could replace all the windows. It may be 20 or 30 thousand

dollars, you know, for replacement for all the windows. Yep. And never seeing the payoff or,

I think I would never see the payoff. I don't know. You've gone through this thought experiment.

If you're in an older home, is it worth it to go through all the gyrations to make it as,

well, you see a payoff? I don't talk a little bit about your thought process, but because I think

about that all the time, anytime I'm doing an improvement. Yeah, yeah. I think the biggest thing

that jumps mine is you're saying that is how long you're going to live there, right? So we're trying,

Matt and I had in common, we're trying to build forever homes. He's a bit younger than us. You and I

are at the same age. And um, what's your going to be there 15, 20 years? It's not really just about

payback, though. It's about health and comfort, humidity control, temperature control, that. So

in my way, if now we had objectives that were not like looking for a five year return on investment

for the solar battery, it's, it's not just that. But yeah, Jim, if you're going to put that kind

of money and you're actually moving in three or five years, well, then no, you're not going to get

that back, even on the windows. And by the way, window quotes in 2022, we're looking at houses in

223. Oh, anywhere from 24 windows in the house, anywhere from 30 grand to 130 grand for Anderson

windows, you know, upsellers, just crazy. That's just the windows. It was daunting.

Everything was way more expensive than we had hoped. And then something Matt and I had in common.

He was building around the same time. And it was not a great time doing it. Um, but yeah. So

you're on the right track. Think about windows. And then there's the exterior walls. We added, um,

polystyrene foam to the outside of the house before reciting it that had, um,

it's like aluminum foil on one side, right? So that's too important to keep your trying to

keep out and keep in. And then you put a little thicker vinyl. So all that added to the R value,

the external walls. So yeah, you had to look at how much fun do we have after downsizing and

how much we can have solar batteries, all of it. But where do you want to put your money? Well,

it does make sense to try to make the house all that more energy efficient. And it was about,

I think, 2,800 or 3 grand to do aerosyll. That was a big one. That might sound like a fair amount.

What the heck is that? Your aerosol, um, I think I might have talked about in the previous time. I

we talked in September 2023 and moved in that much earlier. I moved in 2022. So one year before,

now I'm here almost 4th winter. That was um aerosolized like a vapor. They put it in an entire

house with no furniture in it. And they cover all the horizontal services like flooring. And think

of your house like a stop leak when it's tired. You shove that stuff in and it goes out the hole

and it clasps up the hole. It's doing every house. Every little nook and cranny, every little hole

in the floorboards and baseboards and around heater your holes to the base. But all this stuff

just gets plugged up if it's less than about half an inch. It's stuff that's bigger than that.

They go around with a little expanding foam and fix. That moved the house from eight air

exchanges per hour to point eight. So think about what I just said. You're heating that. See here,

yeah, you're using Hetzel gas in the winter to just heat the world outside and your attic

or seal it. But that means you need CO2 control. You need a fresh air system as well. And that's how

building codes are going to be. Less 10, 15 years of houses going to be tightly sealed. It's a

whole different world than when they built houses before that. These are all the considerations

we get into. Beyond just seat pumps. Yeah. Yeah. The guys in Chad are still saying you're locked

up a little bit. You can try to do that. I'll say, you know, so that's interesting. A couple

thousand bucks you're saying for that kind of seal up job right to kind of get somebody in there.

Now that's super convenient when you're moving in because you don't have any furniture in there

yet, right? So, but for the average person who's already in a house, that might be a little less

convenient, right? Because you got to move everything out. Is that right to do something like that?

Yeah. It's 1,800 square feet. So in theory, you could just plug plastic

over all your furniture. Everything. Very hard service. But you know, if you got a TV and stuff,

you really don't want it. It's a little bit of a sticky residue. It's like white latex paint.

If you had a spray paint can with white latex, putting a mist on it will make a surface a little

gummy. It can be wiped off with some soap and water, a little bit of elbow grease. So not ideal.

Yeah. Generally, they recommend it right after the thing is built or before you move in when

there's no furniture. But we still have to cover all the flooring with plastic. So a couple thousand

for the service for them to plug up all the holes, which seems pretty reasonable to me. If you

can't get to the outside of your house, something like that seems pretty reasonable, right?

Sealing up kind of the inside cracks, so to speak, right? But you mentioned you've got now to get

new air handlers, right? You have to get fresh air in there now that that house is sealed up.

Is that included in that three or four thousand or is that an additional charge?

No, I'm glad you asked. So it was about three grand. A lot of its labor preparing,

always taping windows too. So if you have any leaks around windows, which were old,

they hadn't been replaced with triple painter house yet. So you've got a taper on those,

tape over the fireplace. You know, that's a giant hole, right? Through your flow.

It's a lot of labor prep. The actual spring is about an hour. And I think it was about two days

of work. So yeah, three grand, one person, expensive machinery in the garage, and a blower door

based on your house under pressure and all the holes at our ice feed. As far as ERV,

no, that's part of our HVAC system. So HVAC, meaning heating ventilation and air conditioning,

that V. And yeah, when your house is tightly sealed, humans, like the room in, is only 10 by 11,

it fills the CO2 pretty quick when the door is closed and nothing's moving.

That's why you get kind of groggy and you need fresh air blowing. And I've been using

home assistant to try to automate some of that and go on beyond what the ECBs can do.

Yeah. The point of the video that Matt did was was all this work worth it. Like,

and he's, listen, nobody's, well, maybe you are, but nobody's more thorough than Matt Farrell.

Like, Matt gives you all the details. He rolls through all the numbers. He's very meticulous

about what he does. That's what I've always appreciated about his videos. As you think about

the work that you've done and the length of time that you're going to be in that home,

worth it. Do you want it? To me, absolutely. To my wife, given the expense, how much I went over,

there was some serious concerns. And also, it's taken us years to get the HFNH,

right? Because our contractor was not great. Matt even talked about that in his most recent

back. That's a little more super common. People certified for geothermal that he has. Super rare.

I have a colleague at work who's looking for a geothermal contractor. He found one in Connecticut.

Those are big barriers. So you've got dirt in your backyard at the 65 degrees. You can go 10 feet

down, but no one knows how to install that and make it work for you. It's crazy. There's so much

opportunity there. It's just fuel prices didn't cost so much. So the world changes to catch up

it eventually. Yeah. And we may see with current events that are happening. As we court this March 12th,

you know, we've seen probably a 50 or 60 or in some cases a dollar increase just in gasoline

prices over the last two weeks as we're dealing with current crisis. Of course, that's going to

bleed into the economy and other places. All of a sudden, you start thinking about, you know,

fuel prices have been pretty cheap. And when you start doing the comparisons against that,

now you're on the East Coast. I'm in the Midwest. We like to burn air, you know, burn things into

the air because, you know, gas prices and electricity are pretty reasonable here in the Midwest.

Not so much for you on the East Coast. Your improvements make a lot more sense as you do them.

I try to have them make dollars and cents for me. And I always come up against the like,

like it never pays for itself. You know, you do all these improvements. And even over 10 or 12 or 15

years, you know, we're like you said, we're the same age. I'm thinking I'll be in this house.

Maybe 15 more. So maybe they pay off. Maybe they don't. I don't know. It that certainly that's

something to think about, right? As you're thinking about spending, I may spend 3000 to do what you

don't, but I'd love to have that for three grand. I'd do that tomorrow to have them come in and seal

up those cracks of now. Let me, let me reframe the payback thing. And this didn't really get covered.

Virtual power plants. So selling back to the grid, that's what made my house.

Net zero energy costs per year. The net zero is kind of a vague term, like net zero costs energy

environmentally. What are you doing there? Well, dollars and cents. So how much are we paying to

heat and cool and transportation? Because our cars are generally charged off a solar.

That's it. So we've electrified all that. But the math doesn't work when electricity is about

30 cents a kilowatt hour here in Connecticut. I think that was a double of triple U. So,

yeah, I'm not claiming in ours, Matt, that this is easy. Him getting energy out of the dirt in his

backyard is a better way to go because it's only 56 degrees. That's only a 30 degree temperature

difference of heat pump needs to work. Mine needs to try to get the house up when it's five degrees

Fahrenheit all the way to 70. That's 65 degree difference. So it costs more. And in the winter,

the sun's low enough. You're not really going to have enough solar to know about how big your roof.

You know one story house like mine has a large roof way bigger than a two story typically.

Still, those are tough barriers. So virtual power plant gets me over three grand a year. That

basically gets me through the winter. So three grand we earn in the summer selling back to our grid.

That's the game changer. That's what made this math out where I could say to my wife,

hey, on what if we got no gas mowers, no snow blowers and the whole new house doesn't burn

anything. It's just all electric. If the math comes out to about $0 per year for living and driving

our cars, that's how she nodded her head like, okay, maybe because we're going to spend over

a hundred thousand to our utility over living the next 12, 15 years living in Connecticut anyway.

And the car. So if you look at all that, like over a hundred thousand to utility and for gas

or do we just put it in a roof and batteries? We went with that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that. Yeah.

Well, in that case, so here in Nebraska, this is where we're a little bit behind,

we can't sell back to the utility. And in your case, the utility is actually a battery for you

in some regards because you're able to sell back to them, right? You get credit for that

solar that you're making. And it's while it's you've got battery, but if you're able to sell

extra back to them, then that kind of makes sense from an energy standpoint because you're right.

You're going to go negative in the winter. And that's going to make up for itself. Do I have that

right? Is that is that basically right? Yep. So the utility, we only have a bill. I was at

eight or nine months of the year, the rest of the time it's negative bill, right? We're just

accroing. And then in winter, we start owing some money in December. I think January, February,

March of the three months we're paying bills. And those can be pretty large. Here's where the

tuning comes in. If we can avoid resistive heat pumps like ours are 2022 models, older refrigerant,

the world has changed a lot. There's now new ones that operate. Mine's only seven percent

efficient at about five degree Fahrenheit. No ones can be 100 percent efficient at five fair.

So that can make a huge difference. And that's part of what we say in the video is get the latest

tech in that thing because then you can avoid the resistive heat, the toaster oven, the red coils

of electricity, they're terribly inefficient. You don't really want those going on. So if you can

get your attic and your house insulated enough where you're only using heat pump, let's say,

four or five hundred watts versus 10,000 watts versus to heat to keep going and cold weather.

Now your bill is hundreds per month instead of over a thousand in the winter. So the math,

yeah, it's very important. Your install needs to know what they're doing. You need to make sure

they put something that's intended for cold weather because even if it's only a few hours in the

winter, which is what I was thinking until this winter, it only goes below 15 degrees for like four

hours less to winters. Well, this winter, no, tell usons of hours below 10 degrees Fahrenheit. It was

crazy. And that's where we gobbled a lot of energy. It did the math. It looks like we came out

of similar last winter because of all the major improvements that did the ductwork at all. So despite

that incredible cold, did all right. And I haven't finished insulating. It was our 40. I'd be doing

so much construction in the attic. A lot of it's probably only like R12 right now. Yeah, you might

actually finish the attic. It's going to be a lot better. How about you? You said you did your

attic. Do you remember like how deep rough? Oh, no, I need to go up and look. It's pretty thick

up there. And I'd love to go up and I probably should measure it some more. And I should probably

do some inspection around the edges and some of those pieces right just to make sure it's doing what

it should. Paul, I got a question for you. So my garage uninsulated. It's I got one

concrete. You know, it's got a wall along the west side that's just a concrete, a concrete brick wall

right? One brick thick. So it's it's not insulated right. In that garage gets pretty cold. Right.

I thought about, you know, there's a whole new generation of of heat pump. Yeah. Right. Like

units that I could, you know, the what do they call them split? I mean, split. There we go.

Some of them even have solar power connectors where you could power them on solar. And then they'll

when they don't have an solar power, they'll kick it over to the grid, which would be that the

west side of the house gets the most sun for us. If it, I mean, the southern exposures the best,

but west for us is the second best. You think, I mean, if I can get that, if I could and maybe

throw a little insulation against the wall that's facing the, you know, that's uninsulated,

maybe put up some styrofoam, some, you know, some thick styrofoam on it. I think that'd be,

you know, it's probably a $4,000 investment to do something like that. I think it's worth it.

Might be. Is the inside of that wall insulator? It's brick and then just, it's brick and then the

garage and then brick to the house. And the problem is the cold air coming in that garage gets so

cold, it works its way into the house. And if I can keep that, the concrete mass in the garage

just a few degrees warmer, it'll have an effect on the basement, which has an effect on that

upstairs of the house. I don't know. Two thoughts? Yeah, it depends. Let's see, if there's a wall

cavity that can be filled by companies that do that, right? They'll make a bunch of like holes

in your sheet rock bottom at top and then shove in the insulation and then patch up the hole and

then you repaint the wall, whatever that kind of thing. That could be a fairly cheap waiter immediate.

Another thing to look at would be if the wind kind of pushes your garage door in. It's pretty

leaky in those garage door seals, which is actually true in my house. They make little springy

rollers that kind of push the door out and keep air from blowing right in because I noticed that

in my house, it'll rarely go below freezing even when it's five Fahrenheit. But if the wind's

hitting the door right and slamming it, now it's thinking below freezing in the garage. That means,

you know, ice on the floor. Those are little things. The bigger one though is probably the wall

to the house. You can just add another two by four wall on top of there, right? And insulate that

and that'll probably help a lot. But yeah, every house is different in this situation, right?

For sure. Yeah. And that garage is not necessarily, it's insulated, but it's really crappy insulation.

And I thought about pulling down all the drywall and putting up new insulation to keep the upstairs

kind of isolated from that cold. But then I thought, yeah, that's a lot of work. And I'm going to

probably spend a couple thousand bucks on materials for both insulation and then I got to

re-sheet rocket. Why don't I just actually heat the garage with a heat pump that's pulling a little

bit of, you know, it's pulling a little bit of solar power. And that may actually be a smarter

decision than trying to insulate the whole thing. So to speak. Well, it depends how I'm thinking,

you need a lot of panels. And then winter months is when you're trying to heat. That's when there's

lists. It's a little tough. You're probably using a fair amount of good power. I don't know. I think,

you'd probably want to look at what happens. The most effect, if like, if you're a flea

thermal camera, look at the walls. Yeah. You'd experiment, put in some foam board two-inch with

metalized side and just show that against the wall. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, I certainly,

it's, I've, I've got a lot of different options to both put rigid insulation against the outside

wall. The, to your point, the garage door is a absolute entry point, right? You have to, I've

done everything I can to seal that up. Fortunately, it forces, it faces south. And so that we,

the north winds usually are what get us, right? We get these really, really cold north winds that

come in. So actually, I don't lose a lot of heat through the garage door, which so I'm,

I'm really, really fortunate because it's kind of in a part of it's buried, right? Part of it's

against the house. And we get some dirt insulation from the outside to support it. But I have this,

I have two options. One is rip down the ceiling and there and throw up insulation and redrywall,

which is just a fricking mess. Or, you know, like, I'm looking for a cheaper, I'm using quotes,

a cheaper source of heat. If I could get some solar power in the afternoons and then pull some

grit in the evenings to keep that garage, 50 degrees instead of 30 degrees, that might help with

those floors above it get fairly cold, you know? Okay, so you're living space above too. So

at least your energy will be going towards some humans, not just a subtle difference to one wall

that adjoins a kitchen or something. It's substantially your garage about your site. Okay,

yeah, it's a different, that might make it help a little. That, let's see, big picture.

We're talking about like heat pump water here. Why did that thing, why did that spark something

in me like 78 years ago? The same thing that's new right now. We started to measure the lots of

everything. Yeah. It's because a couple of things. It deem itify my basement. So let me unplug a

demitifier that is spending about a hundred bucks per summer to keep the basement from getting

musty. Well, a heat pump water heater was basically working out great. It cooled the basement a little

in the summer. So instead of 74 and a little muggy, it was drier in the 60s. Now, the waiter,

that's not ideal. Your basement has a cooler. And in this house, that's the case. My basement gets

down to 54 degrees. It's a one-story house and the basement's not insulated. The floor below me.

That means the entire house, 1800 square feet, are fighting a cold floor. So every house is different

and cooling off my basement with a heat pump water heater. Not ideal always, but it's a large

basement area. We're not living down there. It's not that big deal. But these are all little things

to think about. And they're not so little. They're way more than the computers and stuff you and I

buy, right? We talk about NASes and Synology arrays. And you realize, oh, yeah, the other part of my

house and living and driving cars is way more expensive as other stuff we nerd out on. And that's

part of why I've been tackling that is we, my wife and I are thinking, okay, where do we live next?

And how do we make it somewhat affordable to live there for hopefully decades, right?

Yeah. And that's what kind of got me thinking this whole thing like, how do we want to do it?

I think a lot of people are thinking the same kind of thing. Especially, you know,

the, well, things change. Some stays in a build natural gas. You can't build new construction

wind natural gas. So they're going heat pump and induction stoves anyway. The world is changing

that way. For sure. I replaced my, my water heater in 24, I think. No, maybe it was 25. It was

last year. And I seriously contemplated going the heat pump model where there's a heat pump on

top of it. Like what you said, at the end of the day, I did the math. And I was kind of like,

I based on my situation. It just made more sense to put in a standard water heater in our

basement. Really wanted to go that route. I had a hard time justifying it. But I'm glad you

continue to talk about it because I think like in your case, we don't, I actually don't suffer

from a humidity problem down here. Like it's super dry, which is weird, which is kind of weird,

right? But we don't have that. I don't, it's in a spot where, we're in a spot where natural gas

is very, very reasonable. And so right, it's natural gas heater responds quickly. It's, you know,

some of those kinds of things. But now that I did it, I was like, oh, I got to tell Paul I didn't do

it. I mean, every state's different, like home people and lows here, it's going to be two grand

for a hyper electric water heater and about one grand for an electric one. Yeah. But you can get

that money off of the cash register. You can pull a tab or you can do it online. The main

thing's easier in some states where, because that's it, you know, when that thing goes, you're not

taking a shower next morning, right? You're trying to replace it in our area and it's a snap decision.

The thing that makes a huge difference is if they cost about the same and you're going to own it

for 15, 20 years, that's when you can make a dent and help people behave because this stuff,

you can't install spontaneous, like keep like going all electric with our house. That wasn't an

over, you know, that's not something quick. The furnace dies at 30 year old in a basement and it's

12 degrees out. You're probably not converting to a heat pump at that point because you're probably

looking at a new ductwork. The house that's built 10, 20 years ago, the only ductwork in New England

is meant for air conditioning. That's not going to be enough for a 70 degree difference between

indoors and outdoors, so if they're all new ductwork, it's expensive and you got to think I had it.

I don't mean to be daunting in the video, but it helps because I didn't know anything about any of

this and I was researching it in 2022. So just best to go into the eyes open and have an idea that

you're talking some serious labor for these kind of projects. It's not just the heat pumps themselves.

Yeah, and you mentioned contractors a few minutes ago when we had our air conditioner replaced

just two years ago. So since the last time I talked to you, the contractor who I really like

our HVAC service, I really like these guys. They're fair and they're reasonable and they're friends.

I've got to know them over the years. They service our equipment twice a year, like

and so I'm talking to the guy and I'm like, what do you think about a heat pump? He's like,

yeah, I don't like them. And at that point, I was like, I'm not going to get this past this guy.

I'm going to have to break up with them to get my fit, you know, to, and I chose the relationship.

I was like, okay, I'll take it. That's three-series air conditioner. That's out there.

Again, electricity is $0.12 a kilowatt hour. So like, you know, mine's 30.

Right. I'm kind of fortunate. You mentioned this a little bit earlier. As soon as I started messing

around with solar last year and then put panels on the front of the house, they're on the porch.

I don't have them on the roof yet. I don't know if I'll do that. But I started thinking about every

kilowatt that I use at this, like that exercise all by itself made me super conscious of all the

stuff that I'm using. And what, like, it's certainly for you too, what, at what rate are it?

What, what do you use to measure your experience with that? I mean, are you checking it every day?

What are you using to kind of check your usage of it? Is it working right? I know you've had some

problems with your air handler and air exchange and some of those kinds of things. I've been checking

all the time. What's been working for you? All right. Well, in the previous house, it was

since whole-home energy monitoring. It's clamps that go around your means that come into your house

and it's just guessing at, oh, that looks like a fridge. It has got a quick spike and then it goes

at 300 watts for a few hours and turns off. Like, it guesses what your appliances are and tries to

give you a sense of, yes, your fridge uses this and your, like, your car uses that. But it was not

very accurate. It's only like 250 bucks. I think 200 bucks, something like that. So moving to this

house, getting a span smart panel, lets you see every circuit. Okay, sounds good. As you see,

240 volt circuits, like oven or heat pumps, heating and cooling out. That's heating and cooling

out. Having visibility, it's exactly what's going on and how long the resistive heat we're talking

about is. The heat strips, like all of them, was key. How else? You can't just wait for a 1,500

hour bill from your utility to come into January to say, oh, that tuning I did and the ECB thermostat

was wrong. You kind of need to know, wait before that and I learned at the first winter and I,

yeah, the first month, the ECB thermostat consumer product. It ships at 40 degrees saying,

oh, turn off the heat pump at 40 and just go with resistive heat below 40 Fahrenheit. Well,

my first bill was over 1,000 bucks. My wife and I were not pleased. I realized, okay,

can't trust what the HVAC people did. Now it's time for me to dig in and learn it.

So yeah, that's that's that. Hold on, before you go on, the span panel, like I think,

you know, we, I've seen these. These are, they're fairly new on the scene, right? You talked about

the sense measurement of that. This span panel kind of takes over your whole, I mean, it is your

panel. Yeah. How expensive is, I mean, you're replacing your panel with this thing, right? Yeah,

they were like four grand, I think we got it. Now they're down to three grand. Mine was 32

circuit breaker spots. So they'd use a lot of double poles. And Jim, you sound like you have

electrical background, 32 spots for 1800 square feet. Sounds fine. But when you put in heat pumps

and the heat pump water heater and two EVs charging, 40 amp, it's, you're using up the circuit

breaker. Yeah, for sure. So why is that interesting? Well, the span is not just about turning on

enough breakers remotely with your phone. That'll work over cellular for your Wi-Fi croaks. That's

important, right? You have to think about disaster when things are wrong. It's also about how do you

manage energy? Let's say you're on vacation in February. Power goes out in your house for a day or

two. You don't want your pipes to freeze. How do you manage that? Well, you want it to immediately

turn off circuits for things that doesn't need oven, dryer, microwave, stuff that just is no use

in a house when you lost power and winter. You just want to limp along and make sure your fridge

food stays okay and you don't burst your pipes. Now, in a house that has solar with batteries,

the next day when the sun comes up and they're solar, okay, you're trying to survive to the next

day that the heat gets some energy back in. It's the power still out in the house. So that's kind

of how I had to think about the design of the house and we end up with two heat pumps for resilience

and redundancy. But also, the spam panel is the smarts. It's a $3,000 200 amp panel that

has a full control over. You can see everything that's going on in every circuit. Now,

TP-Link is a little modular EP25. I have no other Wi-Fi. I wish they were mad or thread now. But

got a lot of those around the house for smaller things. You got a kitchen circuit breaker. It's

going to have 10, 15 things on there. So you kind of want to get a little more grain out. But you

go for the heavy hitters first and even something like leaving a home server on that's only 110 watts

or something or 80 watts, whatever it is with a couple spinning 3.5 drives in there.

It doesn't, it isn't that much. But then you have to do the math. Oh, but it's on 24-7,

right? And then you realize, oh, actually, that's crazy. Listen, I did not think about my home server

usage that way until I started measuring it. And I'm like, 100 watts continuously. Like,

that's actually a lot when you think about the usage that it is there. It's made me reconsider

everything. So, you know, I'm to the point now, like, I have an un-rate box. I only run it when I

need it to be honest. Now, some folks in the last show we were talking about that and some folks

were like, I don't want to turn those drives off because I'm afraid they won't come back on. Well,

then maybe you need better grass. But I am literally running that thing. I use it. I spin it up when

I need it. I'm not backing up stuff to it enough in my situation that it needs to be on all the time.

So I'm shutting off. So, Jim, do you remember 10 years ago, we went in need of Apple,

so I brought my little home server, a little super micro cube. That's 10 years ago, 10 giga

ethernet, m.2 NVMe. That was pretty darn leading edge then. And it burned about 60 watts with

nothing in it. You added a bunch of drives. You could get up to maybe 110. But as I've always done

my wife's site, which is now 14 years old, some of the earliest videos I'd always get a watt meter out

and get an idea of what is it cost to run it and connect it. Because a lot of my colleagues

living elsewhere in the United States, they would buy a hand-me-down Dell server for $300 off of

eBay. But if you did the math, they were spending $600 a year in electricity for that thing. So they

never worked for me. I can't stay to my wife. I can only leave this thing on. And I needed to access it.

So, leading a device at 100 watts all year, where I was constantly pulling files, doing the

ms, all that stuff, seemed reasonable. So, I've always thought that way, but most people don't.

Kind of like a cell phone plan or whatever. What's it going to cost to own this thing for the next

five years? Most people just don't think about that. I get it. But I've learned like you say,

kind of need to because you see your bill go up and you buy something and then you want to know

what it is. When you measure, you know, there's a saying in management, you have to inspect what

you expect. And it's as I started getting into this management of these pieces, all of a sudden,

you're like, do I really need that on? For, you know, I've been running through the pandemic,

I was running, I never thought about the power I was using. I just turned stuff on. I have 11

monitors down here that I use, right? And I never thought they're 25 watts each, right? And

do I need them on all the time? I need to find some smarter ways to do that with your span panel.

And you were talking about power outages. Now, I always think to that we have more power outages

than we actually do, I maybe suffer a long-term power outage, maybe once every four years,

like just to be transparent on that. But it sounds like for you, Paul, that maybe you guys,

they're in Connecticut, have a few, when the weather gets bad, you have a few more outages.

Have you thought about the, you know, a generator? So when you are gone, you can fire that up,

feed it into the panel. And, and because you're in a perfect situation for that, or, or are you

already doing that? Well, remember when I said the Kyver system my wife in 2022 was, how about

no more oil changes, no more? Well, we left the generator behind and sold it with the house,

we went to batteries. And you got into eco-flow. Yeah, I do. Yeah, we kind of segue to that too.

Look at it, 15 minutes of heat pumps and energy. That's great. There's all these related topics,

so they'll trust, make this work, and it's more about, as you get older, you really don't want

a disaster affecting your life profoundly, like a leaking fireplace or stuff. We went through stuff

in the old house that it's kind of miserable. We got a, we finally got an OLED TV, and Chris was

the day before, there was a roof leak, leaked right in the, you know, four millimeter thin TV,

and it happened to rip right on it, like one day old. You stupid little things, and you're like,

they just, yeah, you just don't want that kind of drama, and that got fixed. And, you know,

so when you think about this house, you're trying to get it, right? And like, okay, 30 years,

there was one power outage, like five or six days, and eight days from my parents living across

town, that's bad. But it was October. So it wasn't life changing. People's pipes were in

first, but it was a good eye opener that, oh, the utility is a lot of trees to cut down. There's a

lot of vulnerability in the state for above brown wiring. And it just kind of had my wife thinking,

yeah, whatever you designed, it needs to not burst the pipes. And I could not assure that,

oh, we're going to live company and just fine without any backup system. No, I couldn't say that.

All I could say is we'd live along with one out of the two heat pumps running for the bedroom,

keep the house from pipe bursting and limp along until the next day of sun, which is generally the

day after a heavy snowstorm. Yeah. So that's the best thing to do. We lived here 30 years. We didn't

have anything but more than a few hours and then one time five days. So I think it'll be okay.

You know, you're taking a risk in anything. That's how it went. Yep, you got it. It depends

on where you live. Yeah, we get four or five days every three to five years. Those three to,

because it's always a, it's usually a tornado, right? That's here in Nebraska. Like,

if you're going to go down, we're going to have a tornado that's going to wipe out a bunch of

power lines that they're going to take three to four days to bring them back up. And maybe it's

not every three, maybe it's every six or seven, but still those moments drive me insane.

I'm like, I'll do anything to not have the food in my fridge spoil or because it's always,

for us, it's always in the summer. You're always winter. You've said a dozen times already.

You're worried about your pipes freezing. We don't struggle with that here. What we struggle with

is the heat in the summer. You know, you have a tornado come through or whatever, right?

severe weather, rips out the power lines, takes stuff down, takes three, four days to get it back.

It's hot. And then you can't sleep and imagine not sleeping for three or four days, right?

Because it's so hot. I'm glad you brought that up. So October storm is unique and that is heavy

snow would leave still in the trees. So it brought down everything. It was a good wake-up call for

the utility like, oh boy, this is dangerous. And here's the fair. The gas trucks couldn't get in

from New Jersey to refill the gas stations for the ones that had power. So I had to drive far to

refill the generator every eight hours. So I have a gas generator. It was no joy to keep the

food alive for my parents' house in five days. So that was a high opening. Summer when it happened,

we had a power outage. Yeah, I slept in my electric car in the garage. It was comfortable.

I mean, the air conditioning. Because like you just said, the house is steam and hot.

And yeah, you know, it's pulled down the seats when your eyes are closed. It's not as, you know,

anything else. Yeah, everywhere. It depends where you live. Yep, your tolerance. It's kind of

I think, but usually just a few hours where I live. So not that big of a deal. We can make it

without a generator. Most people would want natural gas or a generator so they don't have to fill it.

But you're looking at, you know, five grand minimum plus install. We're just like, no, I want to do it.

Yes. Yeah. I bought a gas generator at the beginning of the pandemic, right? And I was like,

well, it's maybe it's time to get one of these. Yeah. Who knows where the world is going at this

point? It's six years old. I've run it maybe a hundred or two hundred hours just on various

startups and run it for various things to keep it running. I bought a big gas tank that I could

for disasters like this where I could get, I could fill up a 15 gallon tank once it'll run for

24 or 40 hours. But it's still one of those things that now I'm kind of thinking like I should have

bought the natural gas one that I could plummet out. Not have to worry about, you know, because

you're with those gas ones you want to run from time to time, right? You know, yeah, I mean, the

other thing too with the local gas stations electricity was needed for the pumps. I had to drive

quite far to find the gas station actually open, but even hospitals had like two days of diesel fuel

to run their generators. They were in trouble. They got patients there and the trucks couldn't

get from New Jersey to refill them. Like, it was really really interesting. Okay. It's a good

segue. You yeses. I spent a lot of money on cyber power and then before that APC brand all

this years. I just tossed them all. I got rid of 11 of them and went to the dump and cut off the

cords. It felt so good. So I went to like you, let's go with LFP cells and a little thing that's

meant for camping. And there's only one that had a quick enough turnover where my framework desktop

you see that I bought just before AI took over ram prices and ate terabyte at BME drive a body

year ago that they doubled in price a lot too much. So I bought a framework desktop to replace

the 10 year old super microwave ride a good run with it. And what happened? The power wall batteries

do not kick in quite enough to keep that going. So the whole house, the oven will blink the clock,

all the lights stay on. Nothing else notices the TV. Everything's fine. But a computer is a little

more sensitive and the power supply that power wall wouldn't quite kick on quick kick on fast enough.

So I'm like, you know what? I should probably condition and just get one for just the stuff that

matters. My ubiquity networking stuff, the fiber optic connection, the internet, and the framework

desktop PC. That's it. And that's what's on there. So now I've gone with that. And it was from Costco.

I think it was $200 something dollars. It's not for length. It's just going to shut down the computer

soon. All I need to do is ride out that little cut over period where the lights flicker. And I'm

really happy with that. And the house is a lot simpler and no more lead acid batteries replace every

two, three hours. It's getting ridiculous. Yeah, I do. I agree with you. I think the, you know,

the, the new battery, the camping batteries, the solar generators, as they're saying. They're twice

as expensive, right? I mean, this is a thing. If you get an APC, they're 200 bucks. You're going to

spend 400 or 500 to get a similar, although I shouldn't say similar. It's going to last you four

times longer. But yes, Paul, I've been saying this for a long time. I think the new world for a backup

is these new lithium batteries, not necessarily the, you know, continuing to buy these lead acid,

you know, APC batteries. And I've, I've loved it. I mean, I won't go back. I, I too have gotten rid

of all my, all my APCs, they're gone. And I took them to batteries plus, you know, we have a

batteries plus store here. They'll just take them for you. Like, you know, just no questions asked.

Just drop them off. Will you recycle this? They're like, absolute, you don't have to buy anything.

They don't charge anything for them. Just take them in. They don't test them. They just like,

get rid of these things. So I was called the EcoFlow River 3. I used three different AI engines

to find this. Like, hey, here's the framework desktop of popular AI AMD Ryzen machine. My work

laptop, my desktop, they're all AMD now. That's today's world. And um, who can, the power supply

comes with? What is it? Who makes it? Who owns it for framework? And what can it handle as far

as a cut over time? What camping style battery will actually handle it? Well, this EcoFlow

flow from Costco for 200 bucks. Yeah. Did the job. And it comes with a little ported detachable

portable battery pack for extra power during a power outage. And um, you know, that that was a,

a win. Um, not perfect. I can't put my Dell 42 inch monitor. That's in front of me now. That's

a 5K monitor, which I love took 12 years of my old monitor, 2560, 1440 to finally move to 5K

last year. And um, yeah, can't protect that. If I put that on there, um, if the see, if the things

do in a little AI computer in a local LLM or something, making, meaning it's not burning idle,

20, 30 watts, but now it's cranked out to 100 something and the monitor's on, well, guess what,

now it abruptly shuts off if I test it with a power cut over. So these little things, you got

to test to make sure you get it right. But the common theme here is less complexity, less things

to fiddle with. And this thing should last eight or 10 years with that battery in there. And it's

all up the, uh, the safer one that's way less likely to cause fires or problems. And that was

another project. First layer of fire detectors had 12 of them in this house. Oh my gosh, Jim,

they're all going to like nest-style smart ones and they want 150 bucks. So first alert is

discontinuing the stuff that you can buy affordably at home, deep one lows and the interconnected ones.

And they're going to new expensive smart ones. But, um, so that was another project. How do you

have protection in the garage, which you can get down to about 25 Fahrenheit? Local codes want

fire detection in your garage that's interconnected with the rest of your house when you have batteries

in there. In my case, four power walls. And the inspector did want to see a fire detector? Well,

none of them are ready for outdoor use or that's too cold. They're not supposed to be in a, uh,

uh, uh, environment. Well, there's one networks that way. So I bought one of the few left in America

before it went out of business, out of sale and it interconnects in my existing first alert one

link system. So it announced it's at the old house. Man, that was just another one of those projects.

Should be simple. Turned into another three or four hour AI investigation. Yeah.

Through I try and three or four AIs to see if they all agreed. Yep. This is a product.

By the battery, the problem at that point because it gets so cold or is the inspector?

So it's looking for smoldering. It has to use different tech than stuff that in your room,

room temperature house. Yeah. So it's another rabbit hole. So this is in my article, um,

2025 home tech refresh where I just covered what I do in 2025 that just replace all the old

junk. I had a bunch of old networking from a net gear and others and it was starting to get

in trouble. The network switch would just go offline. The whole house is off the internet.

And I look at the date and it's like a home man. I wrote about that in my own blog 12 years ago.

It's time. So I went 10 gig for the whole house and ripped it out and went with you big for the

day now. You've talked about that too, Jim. Yeah. We did. You like it? Is that my next move, Paul?

Is that like went to replace my fit to fender box? Do I? I've all listened. I've already put the

the router in my Amazon, you know, buy later thing because I'm watching the prices on it. But

is that my next move? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people in IT, you know, day jobs like mine,

very common, right? And in Europe, there's a rupus as a brand, right? Every country,

a little different, different pockets of the world. But you big what it's nice to have other people

I know that also use it. Was it hard to learn? A little, but I'm a, you're a more of a person

that you're not your average guy on your networking gym. You play with a firewall and you've

actually, you know, clicking various stuff, you install it and all that. So you'd be absolutely

comfortable. For Wi-Fi seven, I'd say that's, we're blazing new trails there. The world is not

really ready. But I'm much happier there than with ERO because now it's a power rethink at the

vice. This little frisbee that I installed, I'd have two in my house. They hand off very smoothly

between each other. I never got that work in very well with an ERO because ERO was never ready

for a wired backhaul. It was so nutmeg for it when ERO first year came out with those. They're

like, oh, no, just plug one into the router. That's your main ERO. That becomes your DCP server.

The other ones you don't want to ethernet on there. And I discovered that the hard way because my

e could be thermostat's little house. They'd have the duplicate IP. There'd be two DCP servers

given out and it would give out the same IP. I'm like, what's going on? The ERO was that like a lot

of those consumer ones just, they don't expect you to wire backhaul. They just want you to do a mesh.

I'm like, well, no, but I've got ethernet in that room. I don't want that. So I'm very happy with

for Netgear, just I'm sorry for ubiquity in Unify and to have a very lovely interface to manage

it all, to show all the devices, update the firmware. And then finally, here's the kicker.

Just when I was getting finally fiber optic, might come to my neighborhood. It looked like

go-nitspeed might come and it ended up being frontier fiber. That beat them to it. But as I was

getting ready for that, I'm like, I'm replacing all the networking and I'm getting a fiber

capable switch just in case we can go well beyond a doxxus cable monitor. It was capped at one gig.

And sure enough, it was out of stock for months, waiting and waiting for ubiquity to come out of this

cloud gateway fiber. Got the price, but it was pretty reasonable. And it can handle five gig

even with packet inspection on it. And what do you know now? Five gig connection. Frontier

movement in my street. And I was like the second one installing at the two-by-side restaurant,

straight in fiber on the along the street. So yeah, it was a big year for tech where I just

it felt really good to just replace the old stuff that needed to go because it really was

starting to fail. It wasn't just like it would be nice. We kind of moved all that gear over in

a hurry in 2022, but it didn't replace anyway. And then it felt really good to just get all the

all the everything. And I already had 10 gig people while at wire. So it was really a matter of

replacing the switch. And in a one-story house, pretty easy to just home run everything.

It's simple. I don't have little switches over the house and break out. No, just one device

in the basement. Get in your attic for that? Mostly basement. So it's a full basement where I can

just go up a wall and yeah, so it's been a so basement with just a single story above it.

But I could get in the attic too if I need to. Like, um, well, I want to dunk ring. I am not

happy with Jamie Seminoff and ring. So you and I have talked to them. You've been

in the early days. Actually, he answered me when I said, hey, I'm hearing someone else's audio.

There's a little cross channel leakage there. It wasn't like I was seeing someone else's video,

but I reported to ring. And he was a little guy then. He talked to you. He answered me at an

article I had. But now seeing the way he's going, oh boy, I think I'm getting a big one. That's

going to be about a thousand bucks to replace four or five cameras. Not fun because I do like

the ring. The flood like turns out when you come in the driveway, they're connected to

Lutron cassette system, which means it turns on my driveway lights from dim accent lighting to,

oh, someone's walking up into the house or driving in the driveway. Let's put it in a full

right for 50 minutes. Super easy. You don't need home assistant or anything. Just Lutron has a

little deal with ring. Make it super easy to turn on a little thing and it works flawless. They

move the house. You know, we're three and a half years ago and it's just every time you come

home, garage lights pop on, driveway lights pop on. You can see how they all go back to where they

were. Love that. So yeah, maybe I shouldn't get into it. It's just good. I'm not happy. It's

it's the in crappification of everything. It's going to get everyone else. They got busted for

opening up. You know, they were trying to be helpful. Hey, if you dogs lost, we'll turn on all

the cameras, define them. And it sounds great on this, right? But then you start thinking about

the security ramifications of that of like, so what we really want, they rolled out, ring rolled

out their AI bit, right? So now when my alert notifications come on, it says, a person in a

blue shirt is doing something in your garage or whatever, right? It tries to do this AI

application to it. And it's kind of cool. I'm not going to continue. It's on a trial basis

and then anything for it. I'm not going to pay for that. Like that doesn't get me there. But

they're it's too bad because they're trying to be helpful. I mean, it seems like on the surface

that would be helpful. But boy, did that get a backlash from the tech community, right? Yep.

And speaking of camera quality, it's interesting segue. Navimo. Remember that name?

Moor. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you've had a guest talking about it.

Similar model. I haven't talked about this in any articles or anything anywhere.

Um, I had a Navimo to test had. It was fun. Um, it was good. But you know, sometimes things go

horribly wrong at the worst possible time and place. Well, no, no, no, just little tiny. It's

basically a single age blades around a plastic disk underneath, right? It was doing a good job

and doing a perfect pattern. It's like, wow, a centimeter precision GPS is impressive to see the

tech, right? Not a unit I spent my own money on is is cold to try. But here's what happened, Jim.

And the cameras are going to play into it. You know, wait for that. Um, all right. I activated the

system where it's going to be a brick if it goes outside the perimeter of your house. Okay, fine.

So I wasn't, you know, you're deploying the thing and you're thinking, yeah, okay, maybe daytime

only I start building conferences. This thing works. All right. Maybe let it run at night. It

seems to be doing great. All I did was draw the perimeter driving around with my phone to draw

the perimeter and let it deal with the hole inside the house. It's only like a quarter acre. Um,

and my wife's especially a little bit of unease when she sees it diagonally going across the

backyard at night. She's like, really, you know, right at night, little risk or whatever. But what does

it decide to do? It goes and charges itself and then reruns at night, goes to the front yard at

night, which I should have programmed and said, no, let's not do this at night. So she was right,

of course. Then you can see it on the ring camera. It's lights blinking. Where does it die? It dies

early at like two a.m. in a Sunday morning right at the curb. So you can guess where this story is

going. You see it then sitting there stuck. The app doesn't alert me or anything. It's light

slowly dims until it stops flashing. Is it croaks? Yeah. So now it has no GPS, no anti theft.

So what happens on a Sunday morning when someone sees this bright orange beautiful $3,000

thing? It's God. It's still in the ring camera captured it, but it's so blurry you can't tell.

And it's not really a theft. It's more like a donation. People see stuff at your curb in a

Sunday in a weekend. Oh, right. And that's the end of that story. They're getting rid of it.

Oh, correct. So, so I had so much product feedback, Jim. I hadn't been spending like,

oh, my God, the second you pick it up and he's got a backup battery and he needs to announce

this thing does not work as soon as you're moved from the property. Like there's no display in it

that tells you there's no Apple air tag, which I should have put in there, right? Yeah. But what would

it do? What do you want to do? Have the police knock on some dad who thought he was just getting a

cool thing that he could play with? It's not really theft. It's just it was the worst possible

way for it to die. So it's an epic fail, but I tell you the story because someone listening

might be like, yeah, is my neighborhood good with the $3,000 if I said don't run it at night?

And do you probably want to be home? And that's loses some of the community? You have to watch him.

Like, no, no, no. I trust him much. Okay. Let's do it in great without watching it.

Sorry. You were asking. No, I would that you answered it. I was like, be boring when

yeah, it's first, it's fun for the first 50 minutes. It's amazing to watch it. But then you start

trusting it. And I obviously trusted too much. So yeah, I'm naive me. Confessing, I feel pretty dumb

and thoughtful. And of course, but, you know, I'm sorry. No, but it imagine it was $3,000, whatever.

The other thing is too. The battery can't be used like proprietary. Someone could crack it open.

They're really not going to be able to do much with it. It's just such a shame. It's three grand

basically flushed in lots and recycled. Yeah, it's just yeah. So that's a hurdle. And now they got

$7,000 winter was on Yarbo. For me, I know Tom O'Logney who does a bunch of EV charging

that video. He's millions of hits with that thing showing in his New Jersey home in that 300

years ago. I think I've tried to handle it. Yeah, it's impressive. Matt Ferrell's tried one of

those by the way too. Yarbo wasn't so great three, four years ago. So, anyway, I share that

because I know you've talked about mowers for years, Jim. You want to like design one, whatever.

There's the societal like social aspect that is the harder part. It's not the tech necessarily.

Mike, I'm on my lawn. Oh, that'll be honest. I talk a big game of mowers. And then I think about

it. I'm like, no, I could just keep mowing my lawn. You know, and Sammy, my daughter said to me,

Dad, it's like this is one of the things that you get exercise with. You know, she's kind of

right. You know, she kind of don't have a huge yard. And so I did think about the Yarbo's. This

winter when I was like, you know, boy, that'd be nice to have the snowball or attachment and to

put it in winter mode and have it clear my driveway. You know what happened this? We've had one

one big storm this year. And my neighbor came and cleared it. I was like, who needs a Yarbo

in your neighbors? I have great neighbors. And so they just, you know, they he came over and

cleared it before I could even get out of the house. And I was like, oh, okay, maybe I'm maybe I

don't need. But I do think they're, you know, there's a situation. Listen, not everybody has the

neighbors I have. I think those could be really, really helpful for people who need that snow blowing

as a serious business. You can shoveling snow can kill you. Yeah, a lot of people have

architects, I guess, you know, all right. It's a, because it's very cold. Hey, speaking of which,

I'm five degree Fahrenheit, 30 mile an hour winds. I was at Costco with my wife. We bought electric

gloves because I'm out there. It was quite a winter. Like now it's an ego snow blower. So electric

finally, uh, here it loads. It's taken over. It's huge. Actually, it's a lot of electric.

And that's enough for you. You get enough time on it. You don't. Yeah, it's now the fourth winter.

Finally got to use it. It was winter. Yeah. And here's the answer. Those batteries expensive.

Good thing I bought four batteries with the mower. Two of them go in the snow blower. When those are

depleted, the second two go in and the others go in a charger. But you're not going to be charging

for another four or five hours. I don't have a dual charger charges one at a time. I literally

had to go out at 8 p.m. 2 a.m. And again, at 8 a.m. the next morning to get this 17 inch storm done.

It was light and powdery. So the end of the driveway, by the way, with the street plows on to your

driveway. It's very thick. Not that bad. Five degrees. It was more just to your hands going to make

it. They are everything else. It was rough. But um, so that was taxing. So then you're thinking about

well, okay. As you get older, is this what I'm doing? 20, you know, yes. That was a challenge. But

the other three winners were pretty much nothing. Three four inches. I barely used it. Do you need

another charger? Would you buy it? Yeah, at least part. They're not cheap either. So everything

would go there. They're not let acid, though. These batteries should last about six or eight years.

Yeah. They're not expensive. So yes, it was a success story. Um, but it's different. You're not

just filling it with a gas tank and continuing two or three hours to know blowing. No, you're going

to delete the batteries. But that's why I went out several times. Notice if I went out once,

I would have spent the whole Saturday, Clea or Sunday. Actually, it was a Monday work and stuff,

right? Yeah. I had to get a car. Yeah. So Sunday night trying to get ready for work shift at 8 a.m.

Monday. It was a challenge. Yeah. Um, yeah. I thought we'd put that out. Hey, Jim, your storm,

it's that, that storm came through. That was the set, we, you know, it came through here first.

And we got, that was the seven inches of snow that was on a Friday. And I was thinking like,

I was stayed home from work. And I'm like, okay, I'll clear it at noon. It'll be just fine. And

before we get out there, my neighbors, we've got a bunch of, you know, everybody's got a gas

smaller here. It's Nebraska, right? And the guys, uh, literally race to see who can get out.

Oh, she's literally the neighbor's driveway. It's a, it's a, it's a great place to live. Sorry,

I interrupted you. No, no, it's not good. I'll leave you with this thought, stalling at the end of

the driveway when you hit slash the next door, another 14 incher, but much heavier. Yeah.

Around 30 degrees this time. Hold different challenge. I'm like, well, this is the ultimate winter

torture test of heat pumps and snowblowers. Well, I can, you, you want to shake out the

kinks. And this was good for me, right? We lived here four years. Finally, something's

finding out where my shortcomings are and how everything's designed. I see that as a good thing,

just like with a IT and computer testing, you, you torture tester for the first month to make

sure it doesn't croak, probably good for five to 10 years. Well, same deal. And, um, the torque

is incredible on electric mower. You, uh, electric snowblower and electric mower, uh, you're not

stalling. You're not pulling a rip cord or replacing a lead acid battery to hit the starter over and over.

I love all that part. And, you know, that feels quite happy with his ego as well. So,

success story, but it's not a tractor. It doesn't have tractor tank wheels. It would be better.

If you're older, you want to have your one with like tractor wheels, that'll just do the work for you.

For now, it's pretty lightweight. So it kind of tends to ride up on top of the snow at the

end of the drive when you're digging in and shoving your whole torso in. So snowblowers have

you work for people listening. I've never done it. The machine's not doing all the work. Yeah.

Unless you have like a $3,000 one that's built like a tank and it's very heavy.

Well, and I'm in that situation right now. I broke my snowblower housing this year, right?

And so I've been talking about this. I could go, you know, the EV route or I could go the errands,

heavy tank wheels. You know, they're about the same price to be honest, like from from that standpoint

here. So I don't know. I don't want to do. I may not buy anything to be honest with you. I've got

neighbors baking cookies or something. Yeah. Just send them by them cigars. I mean,

that's like they'd six cigars over to them and they're like, thanks. Or you know,

bottle whiskey or six pack of beer. And they're they're they're pretty fine with that. So,

you know, do you do you have minnards by you? Oh, yeah, for sure. So what do they, do they go

big electric with the ego or some other brand? Oh, no, no, they have those. They have those.

Okay. They have the errands brand as well. I've been thinking about getting the errands,

you know, the orange errands brand. They're they're the tank. That's the tank that will move

you snow. Ed Sullivan, who I talked to all the time, that's his favorite brand. So you're mic,

you remind me, I'm 15 years ago, roughly, I was in UK for work,

Hersley England outside of London. And when I do a work trip like that, finally one night,

after getting the work work done, I go to the local store that's like Home Depot, just see

how different it is. The electric, I was fascinated like I don't get to go to your very often,

only a few times, a handful of times. And it was just amazing. And you go to the Moorile,

where they're like eighth of an acre lots in the UK. They had hover mose gym, hover mowers that

had no wheels. So you just kind of, oh, yeah, yeah, hover your mower over the front lawn to get it

done to hurry. And I'm just like, oh, my God, feet, cats, dogs, I'm thinking all the worst.

But I had no idea that exists in the world. And to me, that's actually the fun part of a wacky

trip. Like I just, I tried to visit were hover motors in the States in the 80s? That was good.

I had no idea. Yeah, it was kind of a thing for a while. It didn't last very long for all the same

reasons. You say like cats, dogs, feet, all those, all those same reasons. Paul, before you wrap this

up, I got one question for you. We'll bring this in for landing here. Ram prices. Like, I mean,

in the last six months, right, ram memory with all the AI stuff's gotten out of control.

You're a PC builder. You mentioned it a couple times on this show. You've built your own stuff.

You how you feeling right now about where everything is? If you were, if I were wanting to build a

PC, what kind of advice would you give me at this point? Do I, they're just weights or what's your advice?

All right. Alan Movantano, he was a PC perspective for years. Like the number one preeminent

world's expert on an NVMe drive. I got to know him. He lives in Kentucky. He's an awesome guy.

Went off to work at Intel and now solidine and, you know, does the controller for SSDs.

Brilliant guy. The people at PC perspective, I still listen to him on many weeks. It's pretty

sombre over there for any kind of person trying to build a gaming PC or anything. It's just a

terrible year for it. There's a lot of resentment. The prices are skyrocketing. You don't know

the crash will come back. I don't know. During trying to predict that future, scary. I just

so relieved that I made a pitch to my wife about my computer's 10 years old. This thing can't run

the latest version of Windows, which I work computers way newer. Ten years is a long run. That

was a good run. It's still running 24 hours a day for 10 years. That's great. That was $2800

well spent, but it's time. My God, if I didn't do that, literally double price, especially the

8TB SSD as well in there, I would have been doomed. So I don't know what to say. I don't have

any good to say. It's just a terrible time to try to buy that stuff right now. And I don't know

how long this will go on either. I feel really bad if someone's trying to shop in a hurry or

grow a small business. If you got to do it right now, it's just terrible. It's unfortunate.

But my son, Tim, my number four son, he's a VR guy. He spends a lot of time in VR. He does a lot

of VR work. He's in a lot of groups doing VR. Of course, the GPU or the GPU is everything for him.

He just spent a couple thousand dollars on a $5090. He's like, Dad, I needed it. I'm like,

couldn't you wait? And he's like, no, I needed it right now. I just had to do it. And so he pulled

the trigger and paid current, whatever prices for a $5090 hard to find. He had to do it,

jumped through a bunch of hoops to even get the thing. And he's like, but that's what I do.

I mean, I need to, I got to have this for what I'm doing. So I feel bad for those folks that are

doing that, that have to do that kind of stuff. For me, Paul, I'm kind of like, I built a machine

a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago now. It's a, it's a Ryzen 5. It's got 128 giga

ram, which I'm really glad that I just jammed it full with as much ramp. All of a sudden, I'm like,

I feel like a genius. I'm like, just use that thing as much as I can, right? I mean, this may be a

situation where used hardware may be the way to go for a while, right? Just until we get through

do you see the bubble bursting, the AI bubble bursting on the backside and there may be a moment

where this stuff gets cheap again and maybe like ridiculously cheap. I don't know. Do you see

anything like that happening? They're very smart people and DC perspective feel that way strongly.

For me, I don't know how it'll burst, but I do feel like I'm getting way more than my

money's worth out of there right now. I'll give an example. That's a great way of saying.

Correct. So my, my, my HVAC system, right? You're talking well over $10,000. Each heat pump

alone is five grand. There's two of them. Never mind the labor of the duck work.

Well, they never hooked up a wire so that the air conditioning would turn out in the winter for

a few minutes. My wife's like, what the heck? We mentioned this in the Matt Ferrell video, but it's,

it's the defrost mode. They never hooked up a wire. Well, you can't just hook it up. You have

two 24 volt transformers fighting each other. I'm like, well, how do I do the relay? Well, I feed

it to cloud here and it's new Opus 4.6. It's saved my bacon this winter. The model comes out in

to set, or December was it? I'm using the heck out of it. Figure out, how do I wire this? What part

do I buy? It's flyhouse.com. Wet and did it. Fixed it. And it enabled me to be smarter than I am on

this stuff. This is low voltage stuff. You're not going to hurt me. It's anybody, right? 24 volt,

no big deal. But it was beyond me to figure out this wiring. If you know where your connectors are

or just simple thermostat wire, this was a plan to go up and just execute on the plan and explain

to you the logical why, how it works. Another example is last winter, I'm up there and doing gut work,

shortening, optimizing. Looks like this. Paul's crappy handy handwork. I'm like, you know what?

I don't feel like drawing that in a surface pop that I have behind me, because I'm still my

great with the stylus on a surface. Let me just feed it to the eye and see what it comes up with.

And you know, in 30 seconds, it spits this out great. And it's like, oh man, so it's just these eye

opening moments where, and I don't know, I've so many more stories. And it's going to sound crazy,

but this could be thing. I guess we'll shoot it. Yeah, so many topics we didn't cover. But I know it's

good. I'll be back on in a couple of months. Oh, it's up to you. But the could be thing,

six could be thermostats. Each room, zone controller, zone tapers. We can have me with the door

closed. Have this room independently handled because there's more load. And I got monitors around me

like you. And it gets warmer if the door is closed. Getting that right, Jim, the equities don't

talk to each other nor would nest. And of course, Google and nest at the whole other story.

They're independent devices. Well, just sharing an air handler in the attic. They can't be independent.

So home assistant, 120 dollar raspberry pie, home assistant green is what the smarts in. I'm

progaming the thing. It's like I'm doing the software that I wish you could be or someone else would

do. But who's helping me? Claude Opus 4.6 extended, say my bacon. The previous model,

the last winner didn't cut it. I got to this winner. I'm like, oh, I think I can do this. I can

handle the fresh air system. The humidifier, the demitifier, and I'm close. My wife and I have that

conversation today when it hit 55 degrees humidity last night. This was pouring rain. And the ERV was

sucking in outside air to try to do CO2 mitigation. But it kept sucking in outside air, which is

incredibly humid during a heavy down core. And I had the demitifier, whatever. All these,

I'm telling you, there's pods of negative mixed feelings, burning a lot of electricity.

There's no way they're going to keep it at 20 bucks a month. And I exceeded that wildly.

I actually went for 200 bucks a month for one month. And I'm going nuts. I've 18 different

products and clog right now. All I just ping them, hit it, go back five minutes when it's

figured something out, hit it with another thing, looking for so much of product, shopping for

something, finding it on a bunch of sources where they'll ship quickly to my address in two days.

Are you good at that stuff, too? No, no, no, no. So like you, you have mixed feelings. But I'll

end with that. The impact is great. Listen, it's a great way to say it. I love that you're like,

you're the first person that I've talked to who says, you know, we always talk about Canada,

the oversell of it. Like it, we're all using it. And most of us are using it for free or some

form of free or we're paying 20 bucks. And we're just pounding it. Yeah. And you're like,

I'm getting great value out of this for the price that I'm paying to be saying that on the air,

right? Is it? No, no, no, right. Right on. Right. And that's what they want. Right. I mean,

listen, this isn't the first time we've done this. We've done a lot of things. You and I and all

the folks in this community have done a lot of things where we've been early adopters. It's

freemium-type stuff. We've come in and used all that's available. And then they change it to a

pay model or whatever. And then or the bubble, the bubble bursts. And we're like, yeah,

no, I'm not going to pay for that at this point or whatever, right? From that standpoint,

something changes. So no, I think that's, I think that's a good hand thought of it from that

perspective. I've been kind of thinking about like how many people are going to pay the $20

to make this thing worth it. I hadn't thought about all of us super users who are just, I mean,

I got friends at work who are just crushing this thing, getting code out of it.

And I have access to chat GBT now and quad. We just opened up quad at work. And they're like,

where I work, they're like, use it as much as you can. Like, you know, it's not, they're not saying

whole back. They're like, oh, I don't know about this. They're like, everything you do should

be thought through the process of AI. And so we're just, I mean, I hammer the thing. I have some

processes where I need to, you know, I'm looking up our customers on LinkedIn because I want to

connect to them. And I just drop, you know, 50 names and email addresses and say, find those people

on LinkedIn. And it goes out, just starts, just burning through, right? That kind of stuff.

Yep. Is he worried? Yeah. And it feels good. I mean, it's the most exciting thing, Jim,

in 30 years of compute stuff, like some of these moments I have, we're just like, oh my gosh,

we just got that done so quickly. There's really nothing that big, like the internet was big,

getting it online in the mid 90s and seeing the T1 connection at work. But this feels pretty

big to me. I was like, you can feel it. Jim, I had a thought. You gave a good hint coming

in for landing. Got you. I'm looking at the clock. Oh, my goodness. I wrote down some things.

I used to, I had to put it together because basically I had a bunch of little notes. I'd listen

to your podcast and caught up lately. And oh, man, your topics. An ear opening one. Jay

friends in music. Oh, my God, Jim. Like, I still hear a whole theme song when you used to

me at the beginning. Yeah, like, oh, that's the wrong song. But that was amazing, right? Just

eye opening, like what is happening in Tennessee, there in the music industry and what you guys

hold off. That was a really special episode there. You interviewing AI was pretty cool.

Another one, some other topics here. Blue at blue, blue, you idea, logging, server monitoring,

we kind of into that today. Soft start. These new inverter based Bosch IDSE pumps that I have,

a lot of them are soft start. So the newer tech and heat pumps, they don't make your lights turn

brown in your whole house when they turn on like the old impressioners did right now. So you don't

need to buy a soft start anymore. That's what I was thinking of you. That soft start, by the way,

I just had or each fact folks out, they called us, we're having some nice weather and they were like,

hey, we'd love to come out and do your air conditioner service early. Is that okay? Again,

they're friends, right? So they were like, hey, I'm like, yeah, come on out early. So the tech who

came out said, hey, I saw you install the soft start. Nice job. I did not expect that from

kind of the old school HFAC folks. I kind of expected like, you know, you just voided your warranty

kind of thing, right? That's a brand new air conditioner that I put out there. And to get that

seal of approval from my HFAC guys felt pretty good, right? To be like, and a soft start, you don't

need to be on solar, you don't need to, I mean, that is actually something that you could install,

that helps just kind of start your conditioner a little bit easier than you know. And it does

tell me a system. The first summer head powerwalls, I charge both cars, turn on the oven, turn on

the dryer, and abuse that and turn on both heat bonds for AC, I kept them just fine. The soft

starts key there, right? That probably could be a problem. All right. And then finishing the

little rapid fire for topics here, there was self driving cars. When that struck me,

Waymo, right, the kicking butt, and it's women, women traveling, whether it's business or

it's a hit, they're getting in a car without another human involved, without relieving

that anxiety, getting from point to point safely. I think that's been underplayed in like the press

or whatever. That's a big deal for sure. And then Waymo spreading to other cities and so forth.

We'll Tesla keep up. They just made that announcement. So my car is a 2018, right? I didn't know,

you know, what the world would change into, but it does not have cameras that clean themselves,

like the new cyber cabs do. I saw that comment. One of my son's works in tech and I'm at stuff.

We talked about this seven, eight years ago. How could this ever work in poor weather? It's the

cameras can't get clean. Seeing this took this long, but man, it's getting pretty good for hardware

four owners. Line's hardware three, and it's still pretty good around town and all. It's impressive,

but yes, you still have to pay attention and so forth. So mixed feelings there too, because there's

a whole thing about that car was delivered without even cruise control. So basically I needed to buy

self-driving. cruise control wasn't even adaptive. All it could do is go one space. So they basically

upsold you, but it also wasn't a grant. It was much cheaper than two. The seven years later,

am I supposed to feel bad about it? Not really, but people that bought it just now,

well, hardware four even. That heads all down there next thing. So now they're doing a pretty

sleazy way to do it. Wayne was a lot smarter. The stuff that Tesla's doing is just PR stunts and

stock pumping, which I never own stock in any of these companies. All right. And then Slate could

be interesting PC right now. Yeah. I'm still thinking about Slate and Kevin's good on

argument. You mentioned that. I'm thinking about Slate. You've got a guest talking about EVs.

So your topics, my point is they're great. And then of course Christian, the stuff he talks about,

just so much fun is I'm listening to the stuff working on stuff around the house or whatever,

or mowing or snow blowing. You just keep nailing it with the topics, the stuff. Appreciate that.

I love doing I love doing this. Like I almost quit. December, I was going to call it quits.

I was like, we'll have Christian on and then all I know is that I'm going to wrap this up.

But I just love doing this so much. I love this conversation you and I that are having tonight.

I don't want to quit. I don't want to quit. So I'm not going to. And Paul, let me ask you,

you know, I ask you the question about the, you know, about, you know, ram prices. But you will

also mentioned just a little bit earlier, you know, your site, trinkertinkertry.com, right? You,

you're the most thorough blogger, so to speak, right? You post, you do a post, you update the post,

you get more information, you put more, more information in there, like there's no better site

that I've ever seen that gets the level of moderation and updates that you give. But you kind of said,

I mean, are the days of blogging over? Like she said, I don't have a podcast. I'm not doing YouTube.

Like, how's the site doing? And like, is a traditional website over? Are those days over? Do you think

from having that out there? I mean, is it, are the heyday? Are we out of the golden age?

Giving us shorty answers, toffoot. I'm on a, I'm searching something about

smoke detectors and I come across my own article. There's that moment, like, oh, there we go. I link,

I, I'm, I'm, I'm going to look at people and actually looks for the source. I'm like,

they would ever click on it. Most people just look and it was a weird feeling. It's like, well,

what's the point? I mean, I shared it with the world so that it helps other people.

It's just more like a hobby. You're not going to make money in the ads to keep the bites on. So,

it's, I have to admit to my wife, it's a cost now per month to keep it going. I just landed my

first advertiser a long time, but I used to be had almost two million readers a year. You know,

those days are long gone. For everybody I talk to, Matt Ferrell, everybody. It's all algorithmic and

it's moving more and more towards visual and shorts along the opposite. It's long form articles that

very few people enjoy reading. They want the short version. There's a few people though that do

want the details, right? They're my quarter niche. Again, mixed feelings about it. I mean,

it's like if AI can scour it and someone will actually find it, wouldn't find me otherwise. They

help brighten their day and make something all easier. That's okay. And AI was trusting me. I

have to be a decent source, I guess. So, but again, it reminds me of newspapers. Craigslist goes

away. How does a newspaper stay in business? How do you have an impartial plate at a newspaper

when all the, all the garks are buying them? It's bad. So for a little guy, like me, I can see

the writings on the wall. How long do the bills get paid? It's at least some month to just keep

it running. Yeah, the code I know you have, you know, Christian, too. The code was another thing.

So my son devised all this 14 years ago, graduating from high school. Now he's in his 13th, right?

And like, how do I manage this code? Well, yeah, I helped me there. I just revamped my website

recently. Sped it up, brought the cost down CDN and all that. So, sorry, it's a long,

convoluted answer, Jim. It's, I say blogging, yeah, it's pretty much toast. And Twitter really,

23,000 posts, I'm done with it. I left it to you. I'm mad about that, too. But what are you going to do?

You can't download it and you can't publish it. So I've got Twitter download. Everything I did

there, but I can't just publish it and let people find it because that's a no-no. It's the same

ugly feeling. I used the word in crappification, but look it up. So many companies, just VMware,

I worked there. Yeah. Hmm, revered. Everyone loved it. Now reviled. Yeah. Sorry. I know that's maybe

maybe a little rough, but it's just squeezing shareholder value until the exchange and give it a little

guys. Thanks, change. Hey, listen, the same is true of long form podcast content like you and I

are doing right now. Like this, for a while, this is super popular. We're down to, you know, I'm down

to a few loyal few, you know, in this case, a couple hundred, maybe four, five hundred, right?

That, you know, it's just a different day. It's a different day. And listen, the thought process I

went through of stopping was like, does anybody really care? And then I was kind of like, yeah, I care.

So that's I'm just going to keep doing it because I like doing it, you know, and I like having

these conversations. Listen, how often do we get to have these structured conversations around

this kind of technology that makes a difference. We can ask each other questions. We get opinions.

People can kind of listen, get great feedback from the listeners. It's not giant, but I didn't

depend on the advertising. You know, you, you, you may have depended a little bit more on the advertising.

Oh, I did. Yeah. I didn't, you know, I was like, come good. We're just doing this. Yeah. I bought

with my own money, the things I reviewed general. They're very few on or so. Right. No need it.

Sure. So yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, for sure. So well, tinkertry.com, just like it's spelled T-I-N-K-E-R-T-R-Y.com.

Just like it's spelled tinkertry.com. On the link in the show notes, you should check that out.

Maybe the best written tech blog I've ever seen. Paul, you've done your meticulous with it. You've

done it great. I've always, I was always envious. I was like, man, I wish I could do the level of

detail that Paul does, but I'm not built that way. And you are. So I'm glad. I'm glad you did that.

I appreciate it, Jim. For me, the learning experience is partly by writing it down or typing

whatever. It's just, it helps me. So when I learn something deeply, it's just like a tool for me.

But the fun part too, the opportunities to my jobs and managers, it helped my career. So you

could call it a hobby, but it also changed my life for the better. And in many ways, like going to

Vancouver for an electrification show where they had an electric sea plane there. And I got to

speak with the engineer, a woman who was just incredible. I recorded that video my first one in years

and I had 17,000 views in a week. I'm like, oh, that feels good. A bunch of nerds who

fly planes in the bush of Canada watching my video talking about, oh, that's cool, an electric

sea plane. And hey, you did a decent, decent job with the interview. I'm not an engineer, Jim.

I'm just nerding out about the tech. Well, you can't. Well, you're an engineer is a sort of

certificate. It's appreciating. Yeah. So those are the fun moments where it's like you said,

it's the past. It's frightening people's day having a little fun. It wasn't really fun.

That video, by the way, made a couple hundred bucks to help the air for that whole trip.

And they're all dying. But yeah, that's three out of you. So we're not boohoo us though.

We had like good stuff at art. No, for sure. Yeah, no, for sure. It'll come around.

There'll be a different thing. It's okay. You know, the podcasting days are changing a little

bit. It's okay. There'll be another thing that comes. They always does. We've seen this cycle

before. Well, let me close with that thought. Yeah, yeah. At hotel Marcel, that passive hotel I

told you in New Haven, Connecticut, basically a world show piece of all-electric hotel inductance

cooking, no gas stoves, the cooks in the kitchen have to know how to cook with induction,

all of it. Meaning Matt Farrell there to film one video with him where we got a tour of the place.

And a lobby, this is like a film crew for local news. And you can imagine what I'm thinking. I

had the stick mounted 360 camera. I'm the camera man for Matt. Yeah. His video gets seen by over a

million humans on the planet. The local news with a crew of five people in a big camera.

2000, that's the world changing, right? So one in honor for Matt to have such a reach in people's

respect that his word is good. And it's awesome. His word is everything. It's reputation. And that's

that's okay. I'm an honor to have even a slice of that or a moment of that to do something fun

that makes people stay a little brighter. And that's very different than what I'm used to, which

is writing long articles of words, right? But the whole lot more people are going to see it.

Okay. The world changes. It's got to roll with it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you made my day a little brighter

when I was watching Matt Farrell. And I saw Paul Bryan's face. I was like, this is awesome. And I know

he's mentioned you before. So it's not the first time, you know, it's not the first time you were

mentioned there. But to see you pop up on his video. And I really respect what he does. I love his

I love his approach to it. And I'm just a big fan of what Matt does. He's kind of grown into that

space. And he's made some huge risks, you know, building the new home and going 100% trying to do

net zero and all the work that he does. And he tries to hold livelihood is YouTube. Yeah. He

pulls no punches. He says it exactly like the way it is. You know, I think I get the feeling

that is exactly like the, you know, the way it is. And so thanks for partnering with him. I'll

I'll look forward to the, you know, to the future stuff that you get to do with him. Hopefully,

you'll, you'll show up, you know, you continue to show up with him. But appreciate you being in

the community. Listen, Paul, we've known each other for a long time. And appreciate you saying,

yes, when I ask you to come on. So thanks for, thanks for joining me tonight.

Thank you, Joe. You brighten my day too. It's always fun. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it. Can you

hang tight for one second while I close this up? Is that okay? Okay. Okay. A couple things.

Reminder on the way out. The average guy to TV platform, both web and media hosting powered by

Maple Grove Partners. Yeah. They're still doing that. And I think Christian's still selling plans

for tech bucks. Like, listen, I went to buy gas the other day. It's got a little expensive.

So if you need hosting, check it out. Maple Grove Partners dot com. And he's got a plan.

Probably he can set something up for you doing doing a bang up job there as well. If you want to

join the discord group, one of the things I've kind of quit posting. If you're listening to this,

if you made it this far in the listening to it on the podcast, you're probably one of the one

percent in most engaged listeners. So give yourself, you know, give yourself some credit for doing

that. Appreciate you listening this far at this late. But, um, you know, when we think about the,

the discord group, I've moved a lot of our interaction into the discord group. So if you want to

join us there, the average guy dot TV slash discord, private, I'm kind of keeping things.

I'm not blasting stuff out on Twitter. I'm not blasting stuff out on LinkedIn, at least as far

as this goes for the most part. But we have a great group in discord. So if you want to join the

conversation, if you want a little more curated experience, join us in discord, the average guy

dot TV slash discord. Just jump in just last week. A couple of you did and I appreciate you guys

joining that and just a great place to have these conversations and just kind of keep it among us.

I don't know. The world got a little weird on me, Paul. And I was like, you know what? Let's just

keep the conversations between us. And so you can join that discord group and do it as well.

We are live every Thursday, APM Central 90s turn out here at the average guy dot TV slash live.

And next week Gavin Campbell is jumping in here. And so we'll get a chance to catch up with

Gavin. And then Christian, two weeks later, to take a week off, I have a giant work week

of podcasting. Paul, we have an event we're doing. We already have 5,000 people registered for

this event, this virtual event. So I thought I'd take the week off. It's going to be a little bit

crazy. I didn't have to, but I thought I'm doing 11 sessions over four days. I thought, you know,

probably by Thursday night, I'm going to be a little tired of talking. So we're going to take the

26th off. And then Christians joining me on the second of April. And you want to join us too.

And then you remember Dwayne Robinson? Do you remember that name? Do you know Dwayne from Microsoft?

I remember him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dwayne's coming back on the 16th. And then Mark

Robbins. Oh, he did all kinds of stuff and cars. Yeah. He's got stories. Yeah. And now he's doing

co-pilot. So I'm super proud to catch up with him. Like, hey, what's going on? He's been doing a lot

of co-pilot stuff. So that may be a good, a good AI show. And then Mark Robbins is coming back on

the 23rd to talk about barbecue. Right. Right. That never gets old. And so come back and join us.

If you want to join us live on Thursday nights, we start at 8 p.m. Central. And if you join the

discord group, you get a notification. Me, definitely. Paul, thanks again for joining me.

Always great to be with you. Hang out. Hang tight for a second. We'll do a smidge and a post show.

But that was a good bite.