Kaplan Family Joins 21st Century with Smart Home Upgrades
While I have often been early to leverage technologies to help grow my business, I have not been what you would call an early adopter in my personal life. I generally figure “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. This mindset began in my childhood as my parents refused to buy a VCR or a microwave until the early ‘90’s, about five years after almost everyone else had these. We instead valued experiences over things; going to the movies a lot and figured spending an extra few minutes cooking our food wouldn’t hurt anybody.
Well, things do break and discovering the hard way last winter that we needed a new roof, we thought it would be a good opportunity to explore adding solar panels as well. I can be easily convinced spend money on things that are tax deductible and/or that result in passive income, which is also the case with investment real estate, so this idea was very appealing to me. Six months after signing the contract, the new roof, solar system, and electrical panel were all installed and are now operational. I quite enjoy checking the solar app to see how much energy was generated and, even if we make the equivalent of $4/day towards our electric bill from solar, it feels satisfying.
Living in an older home that is not open concept, we have always had spots where we were unable to get internet signal or more than one bar of wireless service. Resisting the purchase of a new, unnecessary appliance, I selected unblocked locations to use the internet and make phone calls, but this was becoming inconvenient and I was hearing about this from my wife and the kids, so it became time to get a Wi-Fi extender. I purchased a Google extender system, but it refused to connect. The Spectrum technician could not get it to work and neither could an IT specialist I found on TaskRabbit. I was almost ready to give up, but we ended up exchanging it for an Eero system, which I easily set up myself. Now we can get Wi-Fi signal anywhere in our house. I wish I hadn’t waited so long.
With the high cost of gas at the pump, we thought it would be a good idea to explore owning an electric vehicle. The Rivian R1S looked cool so, in 2022, we signed up on the waitlist on a whim and forgot about it. About a year later, we got the call that we had the opportunity to purchase one. Now that we had the solar panels, it would almost be free to power the vehicle! While we were at the dealership, I got a call from our next-door neighbor who said that our sprinkler system had been running for over an hour and was flooding onto the street. Oh no! I had been tinkering with it that morning since it was not watering properly and I must have improperly set the timer on the very difficult to use control panel. He was able to shut it off, but that was the last straw, so we updated the control panel to a Rachio smart sprinkler controller. Now I can easily control our sprinklers, set schedules, and most importantly, shut it off from anywhere, which the neighbors appreciate. It was also good that we already had the Wi-Fi extender since the control panel would not have received signal without it.
2023 was a big year for the Kaplan family for adopting technologies that many people adopted a decade ago. The person who said we turn out a lot like our parents had a point. It does feel good to be doing something for the environment, albeit small, and is definitely nice to reduce our bills and taxes. Having learned about all of these systems, I can not only be your full-service real estate expert, but also your smart home consultant. Maybe 2024 will be the year we stop using our barking dog as the doorbell.