Mostly HVAC with Dan Myers, CEO of Flair

Aaron

Alright. Welcome to a very special episode of, Mostly HVAC. We're renaming we're renaming the podcast to Mostly HVAC. So if you didn't listen, a few days ago, Ian and I got into one of our spirited debates where I was telling him I'd come up with this great plan to make my new house nice and evenly cooled, evenly heated. And Ian said, I'm insane.

And so my plan hinges on a company called Flare. And after after needing to call in some backup, I looked up the Flare company, found the CEO, reached out to him on Twitter, and boom, here he is to take my side, hopefully. So welcome to the show. Yeah.

Dan

Thank you. Glad to be here. Yeah.

Aaron

So you wanna give us a little bit a little bit of background, and then we can dive into the debate?

Dan

Absolutely. So my name is Dan, Dan Myers. I'm one of the cofounders at Flare. I know your audience is somewhat technical, so I guess, what I my sort of overplayed joke is that I'm a recovering engineer. So, you know, I

Ian

can feel that.

Dan

But have done many things at this point. And we've been we've been building products for the HVAC space for about 10 years now. We kind of approached it from the tech side and then moved into the almost mechanical engineering world of HVAC, if you will. And we do a variety of things. I think some of the ones really relevant to what you guys, were talking about the other day and what we can get into as well as, dock you know, things of things for the central forced air market.

Right? But also ductless heat pumps. We support a lot of electrification programs across the country and, load flexibility. So integrating HVAC systems with the grid. So a pretty broad, set of focuses for the business.

Aaron

I don't know, Ian. Sounds like a pretty serious professional company to me.

Ian

No. No. That's fine. I mean, is that is that Flare, or is that other companies you have? Because the Flare website doesn't, you know, talk about any of that stuff as far as I saw.

Dan

Yeah. Yeah. No. So so Flare actually does all of it. We what you see on our website is primarily directed at a consumer funnel realistically.

Right? But we sell actually both through the consumer world. That was our sort of origins back when Kickstarter was all the rage. We didn't actually do a Kickstarter, but it was sort of the just bootstrap yourself world. Right?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Dan

And then as we've grown, we've moved into the professional HVAC channel. You know, when it comes to grid integration, things like that, I mean, usually, it's just an email conversation and having a consumer funnel makes the most sense for our sort of main home. Okay.

Ian

Alright.

Aaron

So alright. Yeah. Do you wanna do you wanna start or should I

Ian

jump in. Yeah. Let's jump in because we're we we want to keep this episode pretty focused on Aaron's house. Okay. I think this is, like, kind of the core the core thing.

So we're gonna go with a very specific use case. So, I think you watched, we we yeah. I don't wanna rehash the whole thing, but basically, Aaron has in you know, not level heating and cooling throughout his new home. How big is your house, Aaron? How many square feet?

35100? Oh, 4,000.

Aaron

I want to say 33,035 100, something like that. 2 stories, 3 bedrooms upstairs, 2 bedrooms downstairs. Plus associated

Ian

rooms and all that stuff. Right. So pretty good size house. So, you know, I guess there's a couple ways I feel like you could handle this. How I've handled this in my life is to have the HVAC guy install a damper system in the ductwork, and there's a second nest thermostat in another room and great.

Like, it goes to 2 directions. So, like, in our case where we have 2 zones, it's just upstairs. Like, the kids' room get their own stuff going on, and our bedroom gets our stuff going on and the damper turns on and off. How I don't know the exact even technical details of how it works. All I know is it dampens airflow at some way flaps presumably and closes things off.

It baffles things.

Aaron

Yeah.

Ian

I think they're actually called dampers. I was calling them baffles, but shoot, That's fine. But you install it once. It's hardwired in. I haven't thought about it in 15 years since we built our house.

Aaron has this idea of using the flare products, which are on the end of each output of every air duct in every room you put on this damper system, and they're individually Internet of things devices, and they have a you need a thermostat in the room, and you need they're back in power. Don't forget. A plug and play network adapter to run it all and all this stuff. So I guess

Aaron

Let let me let me let me let me recap the on the other side. So you got this big complicated system that requires probably installation while building or while remodeling. It doesn't sound like you can just No.

Ian

You can be it's just

Aaron

not complicated. It's one thing. It's literally

Ian

one thing.

Aaron

It's somewhere it's somewhere in that, in between floors or something like that.

Ian

That's true.

Aaron

And then you gotta get some second thermostat. So now you're running, like, you're running dual zones, but, like, some rooms are on certain zones, and maybe those are hot and cold rooms, but they're on the same zone because of the way that the HVAC is branched. And he's on about this battery thing, and I'm telling him I'm telling him the batteries I read on the website, Ian, and everything you read on websites is true that the batteries last for at least 3 years. And so

Ian

But you're gonna have 200 of them. See, that's the problem. You're gonna have

Aaron

200 of your batteries. Alright. Alright. He's caught up. Let let the unbiased arbitrage rule and tell me why.

A little bit of a unbiased. But not the highly biased. But

Ian

knowledgeable. So, you know, the company is going to tell us what's going on.

Dan

Yeah. Yeah. Sir certainly have biases here. Happy to acknowledge that.

Ian

Right? Yeah.

Dan

Yeah. So I think there's, like, a lot of different things there. We could, maybe I'll start with a couple of them, that seem like the most straightforward and obvious. The first thing would be, the ease of putting in traditional zoning, which is sort of what Ian you've been describing. Right?

Mhmm. Varies a lot. Right? If you are in, say, the northeast and you've got a basement in an attic that's easily available or accessible, you can climb into the attic, put in dampers, run your 24 volt control lines back to a zone control board and figure all that out, without too much pain, great. Right?

Like, that is certainly an option that exists. When you talk to most HVAC professionals, what you'll find out is that they don't do a lot of zoning. They do some, you know, but they don't do a ton. And there's a couple of reasons. Right?

One is it tends to be pretty expensive. Satisfaction tends to be kind of modest. Right? And part of that is because it's not very granular. Right?

Which I think Aaron kind of alluded to a little bit. And then the other thing is it's pretty expensive. Right? I think, you know, you're splicing into ductwork if that's rigid, if that's flex, that really changes things. But one of the big ones in a retrofit context is actually that the, oftentimes the ducts are not particularly accessible.

So if you've got to go deal with drywall and finished spaces or hardwood floors or something to try and make a modification to how the ductwork performs, It's just really hard and really expensive, disruptive, that kind of thing. Right. So, you know, I will say this, like, I think there's a place for traditional zoning. Right? Like, I wouldn't rag on that.

I think that's super reasonable. When you're in a context where that's really hard, that's certainly one of the places where flare is a slam dunk. So, you know, I don't see us necessarily as saying traditional zoning is a is a bad thing or a bad concept in any way. In fact, on our product road map later this year, we'll probably release some damper controls. Right?

Because we're There

Aaron

we go.

Dan

You know, to give some

Aaron

context Gotcha. We won you over, Ian. You're a fan now.

Ian

There we go.

Dan

Yeah. I mean, so for context, right, the business is called Flare, but the platform behind all of it is called HVACOS. Right? And so our worldview is kind of like, we're really interested in just gluing together all the disparate pieces. Right?

And some homes are really simple. They just have one system. It's centralized, stat, and you're done. Other homes, particularly in places like the northeast with a lot of retrofit activity right now promoted or or sort of pushed along by electrification efforts are really varied. You've got a mix of ductless and boilers and some central on one floor and all these different things and and, you know, dampers and zoning and and you kind of add it all up and you're like, yeah.

Something needs to coordinate these in a way that's not, you know, a zone control board from 1980 and a bunch of relays that, like, you know, you can't really control any logic on, that kind of thing. So we we are definitely sort of, sometimes we like to say we're software wrapped in plastic in that way, which I think was another point you had pointed out, previously, maybe not today, but which is sort of, okay. Well, this is a connected product. Right? Mhmm.

Ian

Right.

Dan

And and I don't think that's a you know, the risk I think you highlighted was, alright. Well, if it relies on servers, you know, you run the risk of that, like, okay. Well, you know, what happens if a company disappears? And we've been around for a decade, but IoT companies have certainly failed. Right?

So I think it's a fair point. It's not unique to us per se, but it is a broad connected product concern. I I mean, I have a Internet connected robot lawnmower, a cat litter box, you know, all these crazy things that I'm like, yeah, it would suck if they just turned off their web services. Right? What I would say there is, along those lines, we we sort of understand and anticipate that.

We also have a lot of customers demanding offline support because they're in some cabin in the middle of nowhere or just their Internet connectivity is not great. So, actually, we released a product, I guess it was about a month ago, called the Bridge. Right? It's just this little, it's literally like a the least exciting product ever probably. Right?

Aaron

It's a box

Dan

for networking. And while it does not yet support an offline mode, that is essentially one of the things that we hope to release go on to it as an an over the over the air upgrade. So I think we we see that concern. We think it's a fair concern. We don't have the answer today, but it's one that we're planning for, which I just think is fair.

So, you know, I I think that you were right in pointing out that risk to a product that's connected. And then the other one oh, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah.

Aaron

Oh, I was just gonna pause there for a second and say, I think one thing that Ian and I didn't highlight yesterday or the day before, whenever it was, was the retrofit versus the do it from the beginning. Because, Ian, is this house you're in with the with the dampers, did y'all build this house?

Ian

We did build the house, but it was actually done retrofit. Like, after we lived there for, like, for 3 months or something, we were like, this this ain't working. And then they went in and retrofitted it. So it was a retrofit. And, yeah, we are in the northeast in our case, and it's like a house, and it wasn't whatever.

It wasn't too big a deal. I don't remember the exact details, but it was not crazy to get done. The guy went up in the attic and added the thing and whatever. It was no huge deal. So I think that is a good point of like, to me, it's like, sure.

If I live in an apartment building, right, and it's like, I can't get to anything. I'm not allowed to cut into anything. I can't get to anything. It's just this air comes out in crazy way. It's like, yeah, this product makes total sense.

Or even I have my own use case for it. I was like, you know what? This would be cool. Like, in our master bedroom, there's big lofted ceilings, and then there's the vents up there. But sometimes I'd like them to face different directions than they do or maybe even close one off or whatever.

But it's like, am I gonna get out 14 foot ladder to, like, go do that? Well, yeah, that would be cool. Right? To have this one room has a special need that maybe a product like this works even for a situation where you could, handle it other ways or whatever. Or even the traditional thing with the little slide, yeah, like, that works if I can get up there, but I can't get up there.

So let me have a way to automate it automate that. But, yeah, I guess that's just when you're doing every single event in your house, I guess that's the thing. And so would you say that Aaron should first go? So let's keep it on Aaron. Right?

Yep. Should Aaron first go?

Aaron

Alright. Let me explain what where the vents are and stuff, and then you can ask the question.

Ian

So I mean, they're

Aaron

they're all I'm focused I'm focused on the first floor. Most of the vents on the first floor are in the floor, and so they come out from from, you know, either very low in the wall or some are actually on the same plane as the floor. Weirdly, in the, kitchen living, I have 2 vents that are overhead. And so where are these ducks? I don't know.

I'm not an HVAC scientist, but it seems like they're everywhere. Right? And so I've got these these rooms downstairs with maybe I think I counted maybe 10 vents, across the 2 bedrooms and, like, the dining living area. And then upstairs is an entirely different question. I think there is the vents upstairs are more accessible because, you know, above it is is some attic space.

So that's kind of the system I've got. And so Ian's question is is what?

Ian

Well, yeah. Should does it make sense? And if you're in a big house and there's presumably, like, he's got the attic, he's got space, like, does it make sense to just go to HVAC guy first and do the traditional way if that's gonna be the most straightforward? And then, yes, if there's, like, a problem that makes sense for a product like this, or obviously, we can come up with other scenarios where this product makes total sense. So, you know, I'm not I'm not against the product.

I'm against maybe in Aaron's case, it just being the default first choice solution until there is much cooler. That, you know, there's not an easier, simpler way to do it. So I guess what what would you say about that?

Aaron

This is the simple way. Sorry. No. That you that question wasn't to me. That question wasn't to me.

Alright. Dan.

Ian

The regular HVAC guy is going to be cheaper than this.

Aaron

No way. I think

Ian

it just they have

Dan

some assumptions there that I

Ian

Okay. We

Dan

could sort of jump on.

Ian

That's so cold.

Dan

So let me let me frame it a little bit. So zoom out, and then we can zoom in. Right? So first thing is it sounds like you don't have a multi zone system from the get go. Because ironically, we also sometimes get installed in a system that's already zoned because Interesting.

You know, your your zoning maybe east west or north south or

Aaron

Mhmm.

Dan

You know, upstairs downstairs. Right? And then you still have temperature issues.

Ian

It sounds like you have 2 zones, don't you, Aaron?

Aaron

You have an upstairs

Ian

and a downstairs zone.

Aaron

Yeah. I don't know if it's multizone. We have 2 outdoor units and 2 indoor thermostats, but I the 2 thermostats don't talk to each other. They're not aware of each other at all. It's just upstairs downstairs.

Dan

2 separate systems. Right. Yeah. So that makes a ton of sense. And then, you know, I guess let's just take your one floor, right, to start.

Right? Yep. So what is the unevenness there? Right? You have one side that gets hotter than the other during a certain time of day.

What is the thing that actually happens?

Aaron

Yep. So both bedrooms are on one side. So it's our master bedroom and then the bedroom for the youngest set of twins, and those rooms get quite warm. And then the living room so, like, living, dining, den, or entertainment or whatever you call it, that is that is all kind of open. It's not totally open floor plan, but it's kind of open, and that stays pretty comfortable, but the back two rooms get quite warm.

Ian

Gotcha.

Dan

So your choice and, I got in trouble with one of our integration partners, for making it this clear. Right? So you have, if you will, your sort of main living space. Mhmm. And I maybe I'll I'll flip it the other way.

You have your main living space because you're in Texas. Mhmm. And, it stays nice and cool. And then you've got these bedrooms that kind of run a little bit warmer the whole time. Right?

Aaron

Correct.

Dan

Yep. And your option to solve this would, of course, be just level shift that problem. Right? Like, without any mechanical intervention. Right?

Just run the system. Right? Yes. Now, what we would suggest is, okay, we're gonna go in and we're just gonna levelize that if you want, or even maybe bias it slightly the other way. Right?

Aaron

K.

Dan

And and that is fundamentally sort of what you get with mechanical actuation here. Right? As opposed to purely, just a remote sensor type strategy that you could buy with your ecobee or your Honeywell or something. Right?

Aaron

Okay. So remote sensor strategy just tells the main thermostat, hey. It's hot in there. Keep going. And a mechanical actuation says, hey.

It's hot in there. Let's shut off some cold spots to direct some flow to the cold to the hot area.

Dan

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, the remote sensor strategy for some people is actually maybe a better first step than any of the things that we've talked about. Right? To to Ian's point.

Right? Like, I I might even suggest starting there. In fact, most of our customers have already started there. Right? So rather than oftentimes rather than buying our little, like, you know, puck wireless thermostat, which is cool, but is admittedly pricey, right, compared to, like, a $40 ecobee remote sensor.

Right. You can at least see, am I satisfied enough with a remote sensor in this other room? Right? And maybe the amount of additional run time is incremental enough where you're just like, you know what? Great.

I don't actually need to do much more here. Right? So before I'd even call an HVAC guy, I think that would be my first DIY move, personally.

Aaron

Cool. That ever came up. Okay. That's a good strategy. Alright.

Ian

And that so I'll presumably make it even colder in the main areas. Right? But, like, maybe that's the the trade off that's worth it or whatever.

Dan

Yeah. Yeah. And so you're just gonna level shift and you might decide, Oh, actually it's good enough. And then if you decide, actually, I really hate the amount of cooling I'm sort of additionally putting into this other space.

Aaron

Yeah.

Dan

Well, that's where, you know, an actuator all of a sudden becomes a reasonable move. You know, because I wanna be

Aaron

eco friend or at least pretend on the Internet to be eco friendly. And so I need to not cool the other room and cool my room only.

Ian

So do you think though there's a education issue here in that, like, Aaron's plan, which is to go in and replace all the vents on the 1st floor? But maybe you don't need to replace all the vents on the 1st floor. Maybe you only need to replace certain vents

Aaron

on the

Dan

1st floor. Yes. And and so, I mean, this is actually, as a business, one of our biggest challenges is, like, I think we have a really neat little offering for a lot of people, but educating people on what we make is like pretty non trivial.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Dan

Yeah. So I will I will, you know, certainly admit to that, you know, any day. It's it's just not an easy thing to sell on some level because you really have to think about things. The other I'll add to that. Another thing is, you know, let's say you consistently don't get enough air in your twins room or rooms.

Aaron

Mhmm.

Dan

Well, why would you ever close a vent in that room?

Aaron

Correct. Great question. You just saved me a $119.

Dan

Or. Yeah. Or maybe more. Right. So now you might want a temperature sensor in that room to make sure it's running.

Aaron

You just saved me 90. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan

Shoot. But but, you know, the the point being that, like, typically the way that it makes the most sense for homeowners is the rooms that relatively speaking get more air are the candidate rooms for a smart mat. And the rooms that you care about a temperature in are the rooms where you want a sensor.

Aaron

Love that.

Ian

That's a

Aaron

great idea.

Dan

So that so, you know, to kind of address the way you're gonna have, you know, a semi truck's worth of batteries and you're gonna have a far exceed an HVAC contractor's cost. You know, more typically what we see is is people who buy just a small number of units that go into a key sort of strategic a couple of strategic rooms or places. And you can usually make a pretty big dent in the problem there. Right? And and people, admittedly, also have different motivations for our product.

Right? Some people buy it because they're like, I'm trying to solve the comfort problem. That's probably like the pain killer application. The vitamin application is I actually just want to kind of control rooms more independently on a central system, or I wanna run things a little bit less. Right?

Aaron

Mhmm.

Dan

The the hot room, cold room problem was honestly what got me started on the business. I grew up in South Florida. I lived in Chicago. You know, went to school in Chicago and lived there for a while. Experienced extremes on either end.

Yeah. I saw the stupidity of the sort of existing ductwork problems in American homes and said, okay. Somebody's gonna be dumb enough to try and fix this. Right? Mhmm.

Why not me? Yeah. Why literally. Right? So that was kind of the origins, and I think that problem is still around today.

Right? And that's what we go after. Yep.

Aaron

Alright, Ian. What's your ruling? I feel like that's pretty balanced. That's pretty measured response.

Ian

No. No. I think it's all been good. I actually think my 2¢ is, like, I I think you guys should totally change your website around that. Like, I feel like a lot of the stuff on the website I saw it didn't go through every page, but it was like, the example is vents in every room.

Right? And then I think you go and do that math and you're like, well, it's a puck in every room and 2 vents and blah blah and a 100 batteries and $3,000 and whatever. And you're like, I mean, this is just my take. Like, this is why I said to him. Right?

He's like, that seems crazy. But if it's like, oh, like, solve your hot room problem or whatever, it's our solve your cold room problem. And it's like, oh, yeah. Buy this for 2 rooms, and you can redirect the existing airflow correctly just by by doing this. That seems great.

It's like, oh, $500. Yeah. I could do that. And it's it's only 4 batteries instead of 25 or whatever. Like, that seems more reasonable for most people's application.

Like, obviously, we could come up with, like, yeah, you should do every event and all that stuff. But, yeah. And the other the other

Aaron

thing is

Ian

we got

Dan

a lot of

Ian

this feedback online was, like, if you use these everywhere, you existing system don't like back pressure.

Aaron

So once you have back pressure so much. Like, be careful about back pressure. And I'm like, yeah.

Ian

Your house could literally explode from the back pressure.

Dan

So Somewhere deep in Reddit is this hilarious post about, like, I think it was a must have been a customer, of ours who just wrote this, like, incredibly sarcastic, but very creative, article. It's Reddit. Yeah. You know, smart meds might destabilize the universe. Right?

Ian

And and it

Dan

was sort of a it was a great write up. I'll have to find it in here if

Aaron

I can.

Dan

That's great. The the back for sure concern, I think, is fair, but nuanced. Right? So the first thing is, and I'll try and spare you, like, the deep dive on HVAC, but, the world of HVAC lives on on what they call call logic. Right?

Call logic, meaning, do I need cooling? I'm calling. Do I need not need cooling? I'm not calling. Right?

And so your traditional zoning system will, in fact, kind of reduce down to as few of zones as calling as needed and close off other, you know, branches or whatever. Right? In

Aaron

the dark. We

Dan

don't work on traditional call logic. Right? And so there was this Lawrence Berkeley National Labs paper that said you know, that researched smart beds. Right? And this was Oh,

Aaron

hell yeah.

Dan

The mid 2000. And, they found, like, okay. If you close 60% of registers, and this was in California homes, so it can vary, certainly regionally. But in this case, in California homes, that's when you would start to see equipment complaining, Right? Mhmm.

And the equipment has what they call, like, high limit trips. You know, it has, all sorts of different features to make sure that it, you know, doesn't get too stressed. Right?

Aaron

So what we do is

Dan

we just let's apply a 100% safety margin on that, and we'll never close essentially more than a 3rd. We do have some, like, pressure sensors on board, but we've just found the 1 third rule is is both effective. Like, we've we're in tens of thousands of homes now, right, with no issues. It's also just easy to communicate to a user, which is a big deal. Right?

Like, we're offering a connected experience. Like, why is this event doing the thing it is? Well, actually, that's the thing that matters to a lot of users. And if you can articulate that cleanly, it's a big deal. So I would just say, like, I think most of the back pressure concerns comes from the I've got 9 rooms that have enough cooling.

I've got one room that doesn't. You're gonna close 90% of the airflow and, you know, choke

Aaron

the windows in the other room. Yeah.

Dan

Yeah. And we're like, no. You know, we did think about this for at least a hot second before we built the system. Right? And, like, did some homework.

There's a lot.

Ian

So if

Aaron

I read your fact correctly, that also you for that one third calculation, you take into account non smart vents because those are presumably left open all the time. Is that right?

Dan

Yes. Yeah, exactly. And and I will say the sort of exciting future of our business there too is

Aaron

You heard it here first.

Dan

Yeah. Yeah. The way that the industry is moving is not on and off type systems. Right? Where I'm just pushing, you know, however many CFM through the system or I'm not.

It's moving towards modulating systems. And so for us, actually, that's awesome because what it means is soon, you'll be able to say, I care about 20% of my square footage for these hours. Mhmm. And I'm gonna run the equipment 20%. And, actually, now you've really reengineered what your ductwork is able to deliver.

Right? On a on a granular level. So that's that's one. Like, we're working with some OEMs, things like that to kind of build that future right now, and that's becoming more of a reality in the market. In the meantime, when you're working with what they call fixed tonnage, you know, or sing single speed or maybe 2 stage or something, we just operate with conservative rules.

And generally speaking, that it's pretty effective. I I like that.

Aaron

That's a good answer to the back pressure question.

Ian

Yeah, that's good.

Dan

We've been working on. Yeah.

Aaron

I'm shocked that a bunch of HVAC they've actually thought it through. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me.

Ian

Alright. I think it's good. Maybe, Aaron, we could stick around for another minute just to wrap up. But Well, I have one more question.

Aaron

I have one more question before we do the post show. Do you have plans or is it already integrated into that, like, that open source home assistant thing that that, are you familiar with that, and is it integrated into that?

Dan

Yeah. We have, there's a guy, I think I'm gonna, like, totally butcher his name. Robert Dranovic, I think is his name.

Ian

Let's just

Dan

give him a shout out. He has been building diligently for years now this really excellent integration with Home Assistant. So and we have an open API. Oh, great. And

Aaron

so Individually addressable events?

Dan

Uh-huh. You can you can slap the system into manual and do what you could run your own algorithm. You get whatever you wanna do. Right? I mean, we See, well,

Aaron

this is what I'm talking about.

Ian

Wow. We could do a course on this.

Dan

Yeah. I'm hooked. So, yeah, that Home Assistant, plug in is is solid. I think in some ways, sometimes it makes me jealous because I think their UI like, what he's built is almost nicer than some of ours. Right?

Ian

Yeah. So one one guy pushing the boundaries like that.

Aaron

Yep. That's exactly right. Okay. That was my that was my final question. Dan, thank you.

Dan

Yeah, absolutely.

Aaron

Thank you for doing this. I know this was maybe the most random thing you've done this week, but this is this has been a delight. And tell tell the people where they can find you, where they can find Flair. Give give us your last pitch here.

Dan

Sure. You can learn more about our offerings, whether for smart vents on central systems and solving hot and cold rooms or ductless heat pump or mini split controls on flare.coflair.c0.

Ian

Perfect. Thanks so

Dan

much. Thank you. Alright.

Aaron

Thank you so much, Dan. It was nice to meet you, and thanks for doing this.

Dan

Likewise. Great to meet you guys. Have a good one.

Aaron

Alright. See you.

Ian

Thanks. Bye. Alright.

Aaron

Look at the How about that?

Ian

What a great guy. Yeah. Yeah. Again, Aaron Francis comes through with you could just do stuff and stuff happen. Just ask the CEO of the company to come on your podcast, and maybe they'll come on.

Aaron

What? I tweeted at him, and he didn't respond. And so I went to flare.co and looked up their media email and sent an email to media at flare.co you go. And gave him a little pitch that was like, listen. We're cool.

We're funny. People are gonna love it. And then he responded and was like, sure. Let's do it.

Ian

Yeah. He didn't seem like a big Twitter guy. He only has, you know, a couple of 100 followers there.

Aaron

So surprised you with great audio,

Ian

but you you went you went the next layer. I went back to you.

Aaron

I also sent him a DM on LinkedIn, man.

Ian

Yeah.

Aaron

There's no there's no stopping me.

Ian

People, get out there and just do stuff. Okay? How many times do we have to tell you? Just do stuff.

Aaron

And and how delightful was it? What a

Ian

what a

Aaron

great segment. Great segment.

Ian

So he was great. I think, I think he was very fair too. I think he made some points about, like, you shouldn't just buy our solution and deck your whole house out with this because that would be ridiculous, he said. And nicer so many

Aaron

other places. Ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. You said ridiculous.

Ian

But, yeah, it would be ridiculous. But, and in your case, you probably have access to the stuff. So HVAC guy could probably just come in and make zones, and you'd be fine.

Aaron

I am gonna have an HVAC guy come look to make sure that nothing is, like, mechanically broken or just

Ian

Could just be broken. That's true too. Yeah.

Aaron

The, you know, the whatever. The ducts to my room is is loose or whatever.

Ian

Right. So once you know that, you could get an estimate for what it would be to do it their way, and then you could compare. But the idea of maybe doing a couple of rooms and seeing if you can just yourself push it over.

Aaron

That was a great idea. That was very obvious when he said it. Like, you don't need to close off the hot rooms to Wi Fi Web. Like, I don't okay. That's a good point.

Ian

I like it. And it

Aaron

seems it seems like he's one of us. He's talking about he's talking about bootstrapping. He's talking about Reddit. Like, he's the man of the people.

Ian

I did have a little bit of a sour post that I deleted, but, because they are they're just they're not actually, like, their background that they claim on their website is that they're from Skype and, you know, Internet startup y companies. Right? Not necessarily HVAC people. But it seems like they've been around like they we didn't get into this. They raised like a series a, like, 2 years ago, so I don't know.

But he said they've been around longer.

Aaron

Yeah. We should've dug into the business a

Ian

little bit. We could dug into the business a little bit. That's right. He can come in.

Aaron

Although, being around for 10 years, pretty good sign.

Ian

That is. It's a little weird. They don't talk about their other stuff. I don't know. I I have questions.

Don't get me wrong. I have questions.

Aaron

Ian, you're looking for stuff now. You're looking.

Ian

But it seems fine. I mean, obviously, if you address the main thing, which is, like, we might be gone tomorrow, and you should factor that in. He was very honest with you. Control these things without us. Right?

Aaron

Which also is

Ian

a little weird to me. Yeah. Right now.

Aaron

They've got the bridge and they're going to do an OTA update at some point.

Ian

Right. It's not there yet. So that would be nice. I do think, like, to be totally you know, it's a little different than your vacuum or something like that, which, a, is just less critical, but also, b, I think probably still works. Like, it's not gonna get updates and things like that, but, like, it kinda sound like this system doesn't even work, if they were to go away.

So So that would be probably a problem.

Aaron

Like, going to

Ian

lock, closed, for open

Aaron

I think I read

Ian

on a

Aaron

on a power failure, like the batteries got, I think they lock open. I think that's their fail safe.

Ian

Now I don't know if that's the same as the code being like this Yeah. Connection with the server or whatever. But Yeah. Yes. But it sounds like they're gonna be around long enough at the very least to build their plug and play network bridge that runs in offline mode.

So that would be cool. Another thing to buy. Yeah. So yeah. But

Aaron

I'm confused.

Ian

I felt that there's a lot of thinking with it, which the other solution has no thing. I literally haven't thought about it in 15 years, and that's that's a lot to be said for that versus this thing. Like, I have an app and I got a thing and then I don't know. But, yes, it's a more reasonable solution, especially if it's a small number of rooms. I think they should change their name to HVACOS.

I think it's way better Cool. Name than flair. Like, yeah, I think that's just a way cooler, more interesting, more direct. Like

Aaron

It's not very consumer. HVAC OS is not very consumer.

Ian

I don't know, isn't it? I feel like people know what HVAC is. Feel like they know what HVAC is.

Aaron

I don't they

Ian

don't know what flare is. If I They don't know that. Flare to you, what is that?

Aaron

Why would I want an HVAC OS? I'm like, no. I got an ecobee. Yeah. I don't need an HVAC OS.

Ian

I don't know what an ecobee is.

Aaron

I I got a Nest, let's say. I got a Nest thermostat. I'm a consumer. I got a Nest thermostat. What's an HVAC OS?

Ian

No. But I think people are okay. It's like you got your macOS, your iPhone OS. People will hear these terms. Like, my HVAC OS.

This is the OS for my home HVAC.

Aaron

Like, that's cool.

Ian

Yeah. It's cool. I think they should do that. Hopefully, they're listening to this. Change change your name.

Aaron

Oh, you know he's listening because he now we were like, hey. Great. Okay. You can leave. We're gonna talk about you now.

So, of course, he's listening.

Ian

Listen. Gonna bash you. No. We're not bashing.

Aaron

You're gonna bash you. I'm not gonna bash you. She's the hero. Yeah.

Ian

I didn't even bash. I think I think it was all all very good. So we're gonna release this as a special episode, so but it'll be a little treat in the feed. We'd love to give treats in the feed. That'll be fun.

Aaron

Love to give treats in the feed. If there's if there's one thing Ian and I love, it's giving treats in the feed.

Ian

Such a good show title. I don't think we can actually use it. It would be so off point, but treats in the feed is a great show.

Aaron

Treats in the feed is so deranged.

Ian

Maybe that's what we build. When we build our own podcast, like, somehow connected the podcast plat our little podcast ad network or something, treats in the feed. Yeah. I'll be our

Aaron

Justin Jackson, if you're listening, I need a checkbox on transistor that just says add treats in the feed. Yeah. Yeah. You can decide you can decide what it does. I just want treats in the feed.

Ian

Man. It's a damn good idea. I think we just came up with a business idea right here. No. Treats in the feed.

Aaron

Because, you know, you want the seed. It's nothing. No. It's a great

Ian

idea because, like, this thing about it. You hate when, like, people you listen to a podcast every week and you get the podcast and you listen to it right away. And then you have nothing to week. It's like, I gotta wait till next week. Yeah.

I do hate that. Don't you love it when 3 days in, there's a treat in the feed? There's, like, oh in the feed. There's a treat in the feed. Yeah.

The random show. Yeah.

Dan

Off

Aaron

schedule. You're right. You're right. Yeah. It's so good.

Ian

It can't be all fun. Then it's not a treat because then it's part of your schedule. Exactly. Once every month or 2. Boom.

Treating the feed.

Aaron

Is there any problem we can't solve? Is there any business we can't start? This is crazy.

Ian

Treats in

Aaron

the feed.

Ian

I wish we had the money. This is why I along with movie producer. Right. Investing would be fun too. Because just like, you know, we're just out there sprinkling money, solving problems, just some ideas.

Fun. Yeah. Just like then we go off and do whatever. We're not building solution. We're not talking to customers.

We're just

Aaron

get to get, like, claim credit for it whenever it works. I just want

Ian

the credit and the money. All I want. And without the Credit

Aaron

and the money. I'm a simple man. I just want the credit and the money, not the work for goodness sakes.

Ian

The work is terrible.

Aaron

Forget the work. Man. Alright. Mostly HVAC. What a good show.

That was a great show.

Ian

It was a good one. Alright. See you all later. See you. Bye.