2022 had a jamb packed year of content and we know not everyone has heard every single episode. So we curated a special for the end of the year with our favorite segments for you.

We start out with Caroline discussing Smart Home Tech set up. We then dive into a great discussion on electrical with Dustin Selzer from Electrcian U! We finish up this first hour with Dom Rybek from Evolved Stone.

To listen to this collections full episodes they are in order here in this special collection: https://player.captivate.fm/collection/bd600545-530b-4ed6-821a-b4c4643d068b

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We love comments and we would love reviews on how this information has helped you on your house! Thanks for listening! For more information about the show head to https://aroundthehouseonline.com/

We have moved the Pro Insider Special on Thursday to its new feed. It will no longer be on this page. You can find it and subscribe right here: https://around-the-house-pro-insider.captivate.fm/

Information given on the Around the House Show should not be considered construction or design advice for your specific project, nor is it intended to replace consulting at your home or jobsite by a building professional. The views and opinions expressed by those interviewed on the podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Around the House Show.

Mentioned in this episode:

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[00:00:31] Eric Goranson: And the last segment here of this. Hour we will be talking with my buddy Tom from Evolved Stone and that stone you can mount in the inside and outside of your home. With just a finished glor and so much more, let's get back to the shop.

[00:00:49] Eric Goranson: there is a lot to know the We got you covered.

[00:00:54] Eric Goranson: around the house. Welcome back to Around the House with Eric G and Caroline B, where we've [00:01:00] been talking home improvement every single week. And you should be tune in every single week. And if you don't, just catch it on the podcast. Hit the subscribe button, and guess what? It'll show up and you can listen to us, including that midweek special.

[00:01:16] Intro: Hey.

[00:01:20] Intro: Yeah. And how I'm

[00:01:31] Intro: it.

[00:01:44] Eric Goranson: That is the one app that you can run. It's kinda like the master control for your. So you don't have to have all these different apps to run things. And so for my house, I went with Samsung Smart Things because it's probably the most [00:02:00] retail friendly, it has the most options for companies that play well with it.

[00:02:31] Eric Goranson: Maybe it's on wifi, maybe it's Bluetooth, maybe it's using a language called ZigBee or Z-Wave. Those are two different. Compatibilities of how things communicate. And that's what I like about the Samsung Smart Things, is it uses both, you know, all of those to work with that. So it has a lot of different things, including Nest and all those different things.

[00:02:57] Intro: So

[00:03:12] Eric Goranson: device?

[00:03:37] Eric Goranson: It's really cool, but once you load this hub up, get it going, then you could start adding all your smart home things into it. Hmm. And so that way you can create things. What I like about Smart Home Hubs, and we've talked about this in previous episodes, is I can program. All these different things to happen around my [00:04:00] house.

[00:04:23] Eric Goranson: Nice Sergeant. Oh, it's nighttime. I gotta do this, this, this, this, this. That's fabulous. That way I know the doors are always locked without having to go check 'em. Right? Mm-hmm. Your blinds can be closed. I know. The garage doors shut. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. And so you can set that up. You can also set the lights to be at whatever dimming you want.

[00:05:09] Eric Goranson: You can hit goodnight. Yeah, that's nice. And so there's a lot of little things that you can do that with. And so that's where that hub is really the key. Does thermostat also

[00:05:20] Eric Goranson: See, yes. Many of the, uh, the thermostats will work with that as well. But to be honest, I set my thermostat in my thermostat.

[00:05:50] Intro: So

[00:05:59] Eric Goranson: huge thing. [00:06:00] If you had door locks mm-hmm. , that could be a big thing. Garage door openers, that could be a big thing.

[00:06:23] Intro: I would love that.

[00:06:25] Caroline Blazovsky: got a Bat Spotlight. Bats love our house. So we have this huge mm-hmm. spotlight to prevent the bats from coming. And I like hate having to go outside. Unplug this huge spotlight. I have it on a timer right now, which, Doesn't do well with the conditions outside. So I could put this all on the timer.

[00:06:41] Eric Goranson: be awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And l Lutron makes, if it's just a regular one 10 outlet, Lutron makes an exterior plug that goes in line to that. So you could just plug it in all the time. Right. And then it would control that. That's what I, so you never have to go outside to do that. And so now you're just doing it goodnight.

[00:07:27] Eric Goranson: We'll talk about some of the new things that happen here in the next segment. But I wanted to really start getting across that there's a new trade in the organization out there for people that are building and remodeling. You know, we all know that you need to have the plumber out. We all know you need to have the electrician out, or even your H V A C tech, right?

[00:08:06] Eric Goranson: They're gonna make sure that the internet works and all corners of the house. They're gonna make sure that all of your new stuff that comes in your house plays well together. So when the Garage door company comes out to put the new garage doors in the garage door opener that that garage door is gonna work with your system.

[00:08:37] Intro: you,

[00:08:47] Caroline Blazovsky: And your answer was kind of interesting. You didn't gimme the answer that I thought you would say. No.

[00:09:06] Eric Goranson: They're gonna be coming out and doing it, and I'm gonna let them use their expertise. To make sure that my house is working perfectly, you are listening to my favorite episode segments of 2023. Now, when we come back, we have so much more. These are all my favorite things from 2023. My favorite guests, my favorite topics.

[00:09:38] Eric Goranson: Welcome to The Round the House Show. This is where we talk everything about your house every single weekend. Thanks for joining us today. We've got a special guest in the studio. Dustin Stelzer, master Electrician from Austin, Texas. And the guy that founded Electrician. You welcome to around the house, man.

[00:10:02] Dustin Selzer: Yeah, dude. It's happy to be here. I, uh, checked out your show and I like what you're about,

[00:10:14] Dustin Selzer: Roger. Roger and I have a great relationship. It's kind of one of those.

[00:10:29] Eric Goranson: man. He is, he is Just as solid as it Getz my favorite plumber out there. Well, I wanted to talk to you today, man, about so much that you've got going on.

[00:10:59] Dustin Selzer: Yeah, [00:11:00] I, um, I saw an opening a long time ago, so basically how I started was I got my master electrician's license and I figured like that my whole career, there was nothing visual for me to see for like, how does, how do you wire a switch and like, how does a capacitor work and all this stuff, you know, like I didn't understand it.

[00:11:38] Dustin Selzer: How to install stuff correctly, I guess to codes. But there's just, there was nothing instructive in like video or visual form. And I'm a creative person, I'm a very visual learner. So I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna make it. So about six years ago, I just started putting videos together and, you know, the, the cool thing is that as I'm instructing people, I'm having to have my head in books and actually like learning things even deeper [00:12:00] and more profound.

[00:12:10] Eric Goranson: it's so true because you can know that this is the right way to do it, but when you have to sit there and explain why it's the right way to do it, it's a different thing of, oh yeah, we just always do it that way.

[00:12:24] Dustin Selzer: Yeah, . Yeah, I had some people coming up that I worked under, you know, some journeymen that I would ask them. I was that annoying apprentice too, man. Like I would, like, how does this work and how does the, how do the waves do this? And how, where do the, and people are just like, dude, shut up.

[00:12:59] Eric Goranson: to be great.[00:13:00]

[00:13:24] Eric Goranson: Now we're going to be putting in so much more electricity into homes from car chargers to, you know, maybe taking things that are natural gas and flipping 'em over into electrical and, you know, how many 100 or 150 amp panels out there in the residential world that are gonna have to be swapped out in the next.

[00:14:03] Dustin Selzer: you know, like, I think there's gonna be a way LEDs, like everything's already low voltage. It's being converted from high voltage to low voltage, but I don't think there's a need. There's a lot of commercial lighting out there right now. Mm-hmm. , that's all just low voltage cable to each thing. And you have low voltage cables down to these little smart switches and occupancy sensors and stuff.

[00:14:42] Dustin Selzer: So I don't know, it'll be interesting.

[00:14:59] Eric Goranson: [00:15:00] Not counting the rest of the house.

[00:15:14] Dustin Selzer: But, um, but you know, I will say too, a lot of people, Kind of misunderstand. When they look at a panel, they think, okay, I have to add up every single one of my breakers and that's how big my panel is. And it's like not . Most of what's in your panel, you're not using like even a 10th of, you know? Yeah. If you have a 200 amp panel, you might be using 20 amps maximum ever.

[00:15:45] Eric Goranson: Which is good for you. So true. So true. That's, and that's why you're gonna be so needed in, uh, in your people out there, cuz I dunno.

[00:16:15] Eric Goranson: Cuz you know, my old house here that I have built in 79, I had the old split main Cutler hammer, you know, like to catch on fire. And, uh, , ironically, I bought the house and, and I looked. Panel and I went, ah, that's a little smoked. Okay, that's, that's gonna go on the short list. And sure enough, we had to move the meter to get in, uh, to, to meet code where they'd put it versus where it is now.

[00:16:59] Dustin Selzer: strange things happen.

[00:17:06] Eric Goranson: Uh, 79.

[00:17:16] Dustin Selzer: They didn't have any, a lot of the breakers just weren't smart enough, or they weren't, you know, not, they weren't smart enough, but over time they aren't as effective as they used to be, so they wouldn't trip. Or you'll have like a bad bus connection. So the actual bus where the breaker snaps in, there's like a loose termination.

[00:17:41] Eric Goranson: That's one of the things that bugs me sometimes when I jump on Craig's List and Facebook marketplace. I see people selling those old breakers that came out of, you know, I don't know if it's some apprentice or somebody that's at the junk pile at the, uh, you know, when it's coming outta the van at the end of the day, but I'm seeing, you know, black market breakers out there of [00:18:00] stuff that they haven't made for 30 years.

[00:18:30] Eric Goranson: Welcome back to The Round the House Show. This is our Christmas Eve edition where I'm playing the best episodes on my favorite segments of 2023. Now let's get back to Steve Kerber from the UL Fire Safety Research Institute

[00:18:49] Eric Goranson: door, fire sheet rock in there, you've done a pretty good job at keeping it inside that structure, but you also have stopped yourself from knowing about it as well.

[00:18:59] Steve Kerber: So you, you could [00:19:00] be totally on top of a fully involved garage on fire, where the only way you would know about it is if the neighbor across the street saw it and came and knocked on your door and rang your doorbell. Yeah. Uh, we don't want that to happen. We want you to know as fast as possible.

[00:19:31] Steve Kerber: These are the alarms that came with your house when it was built in 1982. Um, you're way past, so great Christmas gift, by the way. Yeah. Um, give the gift of safety to your family. Uh, check how old the smoke alarms are and replace 'em all if, uh, if they're older than 10 years old. It's

[00:19:55] Eric Goranson: I'm not doing it anymore, but I walked into her house and we're walking through. This is about three years ago, and I look [00:20:00] up and it. That was a 1972 smoke alarm. It just was. And I looked at and I go, I go, that's like, that's like drinking six month old milk up there. Come on. And I knew that she used to work for the fire department and she's like, oh, it'll be fine.

[00:20:38] Eric Goranson: But I went a step further in my house. I went with that Google system out there. Sure. The Nest protect. So now what I love about that, I have it in my kitchen and you know, a common place for a fire and I'm adding it throughout the rest of the house. But what I like is it'll tell me when it detects a little bit of smoke.

[00:21:14] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Those are all important things, and I know it's a hundred bucks for a, for a smoke alarm, but a hundred. Is pretty cheap when it comes down to it.

[00:21:36] Steve Kerber: I mean, I can't think of a more helpless feeling in the world than. Knowing that something's going wrong in my house and my kids are in the house. Right. And even if you're not there, I mean, even if they're teenagers, that's, yeah. I mean, I, we know how that works. They're, they're blessed in their music or they're playing their video games or whatever, and I mean, you could have a fire next to 'em and they wouldn't even know what was going on.

[00:21:59] Eric Goranson: they're [00:22:00] just headphones are on or whatever.

[00:22:21] Steve Kerber: Um, you brought up the closed door. I mean, so here, here's the next component. We got the smoke alarms. Yep. The closed door doesn't cost a thing absolutely free. Just a simple behavior. And we've done experiment after experiment, and what continues to stand out is the difference between surviving a fire and not surviving at that fire could likely be a cheap hollow core door.

[00:23:06] Steve Kerber: And they, and they were beautiful. And now, now you'd probably pay a ton of money to get one of these things in some reclaim store or something like that, but they would hold up tremendously to whatever exposure you'd put on them. And then it was like, well, that costs too much. We don't have that wood. So then we.

[00:23:41] Steve Kerber: Yeah. Uh, but what that means from a fire safety perspective is that, I mean, you, you want that barrier between you and where that fire could be or where that fire is. And it can cut off that source of smoke, that source of heat, and buy you very valuable time to figure out how do I get out of this place.

[00:24:26] Steve Kerber: Wow. One day we were we're most of the way through November. Exactly. And I think we're somewhere up to 2000 people dying in their homes. Yeah. And, uh, these are all prevent.

[00:24:45] Eric Goranson: But I've got one of those escape platters that I can throw over the deck outside or out the window in the bedroom cuz I've got a slider out the, you know, out the bedroom, right out into the deck. And I can pop out that way if we had to. I don't have to worry about

[00:25:08] Steve Kerber: The wife and I. What the heck is that noise? And you investigate and try and figure it out that your exit out of the front door, the way you would want to go, is likely gonna be cut off by smoke. Mm-hmm. . So if it's gonna be cut off by smoke, what's the plan B? Well, plan B is out the window. All right. Well, I don't want to hang and drop out the window.

[00:25:54] Steve Kerber: But I mean, our research has showed that you can take a living room [00:26:00] fire from a small flaming ignition to the living room, completely involved in fire in about three minutes. The average response time of the fire department in the United States is about six minutes. So you do the math? Yeah. I mean, you need to be able to get yourself out.

[00:26:36] Eric Goranson: So I, I literally have a quarter mile away. I have a fire department right there, but who says they're not on another call when my call comes in and now the next one is two miles that way. So now I just tripled my response time.

[00:26:58] Steve Kerber: That's not common for [00:27:00] most of the country. Uh, but you're absolutely right. They could be out helping Mrs. Smith with a heart attack. And, uh, they're not available when your house fire comes in. We don't plan these things. Yeah.

[00:27:18] Eric Goranson: So it's one of those things that, that I've always done is have a nice big fire extinguishers in certain places around the house. Sure. And you know, I've got three in the garage by every door, one by every. You know, I, I, I was like one in the kitchen, one in the master bedroom, just because if you need that as an option, you have an option right there.

[00:28:06] Steve Kerber: Mm-hmm. , and two, like you said, you've got 'em by your exit points, which is

[00:28:14] Intro: anywhere.

[00:28:40] Eric Goranson: Just search out the Around the House Show and if you're over on Facebook and you see that page, we also have a close group called Around the House. Now this is really fun group where we get to share stuff up and uh, it's a very safe place to be able to talk about all those projects you're working on.

[00:29:06] Dom Rybak: easily, pretty quickly get them a, a cl a custom climbing wall to their parameters. I've built, I've built custom climbing walls and I, I'm not an avid climber, but I, you know, I know how to get around on a climbing wall.

[00:29:31] Eric Goranson: you're that person versus me getting up there and who's boy certified. But I get up there and I'm like, all right, this is kicking my butt.

[00:30:03] Dom Rybak: And , and I was not in climbing shape at that point. And I mean, Uh, parts of your shoulders, you know, are just burning muscles that you didn't know you had,

[00:30:17] Dom Rybak: Ah, this is the worst . It was the worst. And it's after hours and it's dim and you're behind a, you know, climbing wall and brutal everything.

[00:30:49] Dom Rybak: We we're not trying to do stuff in house that we're not good at or don't have room for.

[00:30:56] Dom Rybak: Oh yeah. You know, we're not, we're not a, we can fabricate a little [00:31:00] something here or there, but it's easier for someone who's set up for it. Yeah. And I'll, I'll send my couple of trucks. You know, if this climbing wall takes two or three trucks, we cut it down and this mountain down into a couple of trucks and, you know, ship it out across the country.

[00:31:24] Eric Goranson: that's fun. But that tells you about the, the durability and the realism of this product that you can turn around and build a, a high-end climbing wall out of it.

[00:31:37] Dom Rybak: Yeah. I, there's nothing that looks, uh, quite like it. And, and you think too, I mean, we've been featured at places like SeaWorld. , uh, Cabela's. Mm-hmm. , Dick's field and stream stuff where they go. Uh, you know, we do, we do some work on, uh, in St.

[00:32:16] Dom Rybak: Um, it's easy to maintain. You know, I, I saw somebody, uh, uh, did the first cleaning of their evolv stone, cuz it's in the, you know, shady side of the house, and they called me up about it. You just take some dawn. Mix it up with some water, spray it on, wipe it off simple. No, you could, you could lightly, lightly para wash it if you wanted to.

[00:32:59] Dom Rybak: We [00:33:00] did a negative pressure test. Part of what the I CCC required was they wanted to know the failure point. Like Sure, how, how much hurricane can this wall assembly take is basically the test. Mm-hmm. , that's the A S T M E three 30. And what they do is they take four by wall assemblies that you make and.

[00:33:37] Dom Rybak: I got a two by four wall, uh, with seven sixteens osb, and then there's a big poly bag on it where this, all my stones have been nailed over and they're trying to pull the bag off of the wall and take the stones with it. Wow. And uh, the, the first time we ran that test without a single stone coming off, we bent the o s.

[00:34:12] Eric Goranson: stones real quick. You're, you're like gluing and screwing and you're just trying to make it all hold together.

[00:34:19] Dom Rybak: put a three quarter gusset plate at the top of plywood, three quarter gusset plate at the bottom, uh, two by six studs, 16 inch centers. Glu gorilla glued and screwed the entire thing off every eight inches, . Uh, and this was the last test I think that we did. And then they, they draw a vacuum on that wall and we snapped the two by six stud and half lengthwise on the outer side.

[00:34:46] Eric Goranson: on there. Yeah. You know, there's no mess around with that's, that's there. I mean, that's, yeah.

[00:35:06] Eric Goranson: you got it's way other bigger problems than the neighborhood when that's happening.

[00:35:10] Dom Rybak: your shear panels are flying off the framing, then I can't, I can't help .

[00:35:20] Intro: the stone. The stone will still be on it. You just,

[00:35:27] Eric Goranson: Found your wall two and a half miles away. It's still got your stone on it. .

[00:35:33] Eric Goranson: breakaway wall. Exactly, exactly. Tom, thanks for coming on today, brother. What did we not cover today that we should probably touch? Did we get it all?

[00:35:48] Dom Rybak: The color is infused all the way throughout, so when you cut it, you know, a lot of times when you cut. Certain siding products, you know, anything that's pre-finished, you've got the [00:36:00] decor of that product. Mm-hmm. , and it's a different color or a different material than the outer. Our color is impregnated all the way throughout it.

[00:36:24] Dom Rybak: No one, it'll be any of the wiser, you could texture it up. I always keep a waffle faced, drywall hammer on me. Yep. And I kind of touch, touch up the edge of that stone and I'll put it in place. Um, you know, we, we talked about no, you know, specialty tools. Uh, I, you, you saw my setup. I mean, I had everything.

[00:37:02] Dom Rybak: I don't claim to be. Um, and my skillset is, uh, particular because. I've been doing this for such a long time, that my skillset is turned into an installer of a ball stone. Yeah, but you know, my chops saw I got a little battery operated. Chop. Saw that thing's perfect. Um, yeah, staging, scaffolding, you don't, you know, you don't need a ton of it for the, for the weight of the stone.

[00:37:37] Eric Goranson: that's where I was gonna go next, brother. That's where I was gonna go next. How do we find this stuff? We wanna put it on our house.

[00:37:45] Dom Rybak: That's the, that's the best place to take a look. We have, uh, basically national distribution, um, end to, and Canada's also a big market for us because you can put the stuff on, uh, I, I, I was on a job in. , [00:38:00] I wanna say Commerce Township. Mm-hmm. in basically, Detroit was about, it's about negative five when we woke up.

[00:38:34] Eric Goranson: Perfect. Perfect, brother Tom, right back. Thanks for coming on today, brother. Evolve Stone. Gotta check this stuff out and uh, we'll be doing this again soon.

[00:38:47] Eric Goranson: Thanks brother. You've been listening to