The Internet of Things

It's clobberin' time! IoT 10 years after peak Hype

I got an email from the insurance company for my cabin at the top of the mountain. Subject: URGENT!!! FARMERS HOME POLICY - REQUESTED ITEM BY 12/30/24. Spammy sure, but I clicked. They’re going to cancel my insurance unless I install a smart leak detection / water shutoff valve like this Moen one.

It’s really hard to get Insurance in California. I don’t pretend to understand why, but every insurance person I talk to, gets excited and that’s what they tell me. My agent said it was another new requirement to reduce the cost of claims. Ugh.

I hit up the Facebook group for the mountain and one guy had just installed a smart valve. He shared this picture:

The metal T handle in the middle is the manual shutoff. When you leave the cabin in the winter you crank that 90 degrees to turn the water main off, crack all the faucets so air can escape and pour antifreeze in any standing water like toilet tanks. Water expands when it freezes and that’s how you get busted pipes.

The black box with the green dial is the smart device. It connects via WiFi and there’s a companion app for your phone and with that app you can remotely turn off the water. It turns the crank for you. But it does more. It also measures your usage with pretty dials and graphs so you can be horrified at how much water you use and do better.

The most important thing it does is detect leaks. The device and internet service examines your standard usage patterns for outliers and detects the continuous flow characteristics of leaks. Then it quantifies leaks by flow rate to differentiate between a dripping faucet or a busted pipe.

One of the mountain Facebook friends suggested I check with the local water district because they just updated their metering infrastructure to provide usage based billing.¹ They pointed me to the app for their smart meters. I put in my address and account number and voila I had all the things that the $500 smart home valve and app does:

I got excited and called the insurance company and they said good for me but not good enough for them - you need to be able to turn the water off remotely. So I called the water district back and they said nah - while they’d alert me if there was a significant leak, they had their hands full keeping the water running to my front door² with no time to babysit the water flow on the inside³.

So I’m still looking a plumber willing to go to the top of the mountain and install the smart valve for me - I have until December 😬

Smart, internet connected devices are great, and they’re a godsend when you have place exposed to the extremes of mother nature, but you’re not always there to tend to it. I have a little camera mounted above the driveway to see if it’s plowed and how deep the snow is, a thermostat so I can keep the temperature inside 50 degrees to further avoid the freezing pipes and a meter on the Propane tank that I obsessively checked when we lived up there because it’s no fun to refill the tank when it’s under 15 feet of snow.

But it’s next level when public utilities update their core components to report internet telemetry in real time. Factory automation and monitoring as well as infrastructure all level up with internet connected devices. Complex structures like airports are now built and instrumented using techniques called Digital Twins that enable remarkable new levels of management and maintenance.

6 weeks ago I wrote about how AI had reached peak hype in:

Pick none: Death, Sorrow, Disillusionment

Smart or Internet connected devices like the ones above are now mature products built atop Technology that hit peak Hype before AI - the Internet of Things or IoT.

The Thing and his Internet

IoT hit peak hype⁴ 10 years ago in 2014. Will it take another ten years to really see the impact of AI products? Perhaps, but things are moving fast, so maybe five and please I’d like a AI Robot that does plumbing .

best, Andrew

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Postscript

IoT product maturity caught my attention considering its intersection with the current hype around AI, but the real reason I wrote this post was to draw The Thing smashing the Internet.

The Thing is the stocky, stony dude shouting his signature battle cry ‘It’s clobberin’ time!’ For my non comic book reading friends, his real name is Ben Grimm from the Fantastic Four.

Ben hangs out with Reed Richards aka Mister Fantastic who can stretch his body into crazy shapes, his wife Sue Storm aka the Invisible Woman and finally Sue’s brother Johnny Storm aka the Human Torch and flying fireball. The Fantastic Four got their powers from exposure to cosmic rays on a space mission and predate my namesake Spiderman.

My local library in elementary school had a fat stack of well worn Fantastic Four comic books and that was my intro to superhero’s.

1. It’s a small water district that originally just treated water from one of the lakes and charged a flat fee to everyone. But now that the community has grown and water has become a scarcer resource they have had to change to keep up.

2. Keeping the water running is a complicated engineering job for any water district, now add getting and treating water from a lake that’s frozen half the year Sierra Lakes County Water District (slcwd.org)

3. The water district meters connect via the cellular network and that gets spotty when it’s covered under 15’ of snow.

4. According to Gartner’s Hype Cycle which I cover in Pick none: Death, Sorrow, Disillusionment