Samplize - Paint samples made from real paint

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Like many of you, we have started (and finished) some home improvement projects these past few months.

One of the most difficult things about home projects is paint. There are hundreds of thousands of paint colors. If you just take white as an example, there are DOZENS of white paints. And when you look online, can you really tell the difference?

You can order paint chips - colors that are printed on a piece of paper. Let me tell you - these are mostly worthless.

The tried and true way of picking paint is to pick a few colors you like and then getting a small quantity of paint and then painting your walls in squares to compare them.

You really need to see paint in the natural light of your rooms. In daylight and also under the effects of your light bulbs which can totally impact the way your paint color looks.

Well, my sister told me about this amazing website called Samplize. They send you a 12” square of actual paint on the same substrate of paper your sheetrock is made from. They come on contact paper so you can stick them on your wall and leave them there for as long as you like. When the time comes you can just peel them off.

This has to be the single best way to evaluate paint colors. So next time you want white paint and are choosing between Decorator White, Simply White, Chantilly Lace, White Dove, etc (just take a look at this article).

Here is my daughter’s room when she was deciding on a green color for her accent wall.

File this away and use this as a handy reference in the future for selecting your next paint colors.

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Air Quality Products for your Home

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Over the past few years, I have been experimenting with air filtration in our home. In recent years, the onslaught of summer fires in the pacific northwest has made air quality poor and unhealthy for our family. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought filtration and ventilation to the forefront of my thoughts. I wanted to summarize what I have done and which products I am using to combat poor air quality and poor air circulation.

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August Smart Lock - HomeKit Edition

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I previously reviewed the August Smart Lock and gave it 3 stars. Back in that review I mentioned the following issues with the lock

  1. Auto unlock does not always work.
  2. The auto lock (ever lock) was not customizable enough
  3. The auto lock can damage your door frame if the door is not completely shut when the August attempts to lock the door.
  4. The battery door is held in by magnets, and often people in our house turn the lock and inadvertently unseat the battery cover

In the time I owned the original August, issues #1 and #2 were solved through better software. In that time the software has really matured a lot.

But August released a new version of their lock, and this review is about that.

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Lutron Caseta - 5 stars

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I installed my first "smart" switch in 2010. It was a Leviton Z-Wave switch. Back then, getting automated "smart home" stuff was expensive, hard, and complicated. I was forced to do this as a result of some wacky wiring in my kitchen that required I have a smart keypad that can turn two lights on at once. The Leviton Viza RF+ products did the job for a number of years. But programming Z-Wave products stinks and interoperability is not perfect.

However, there has been a significant lighting change that required that I revisit much of my lighting: LED Light Bulbs. Lighting is the #1 consumer of energy in my home. We have over a hundred recessed lights in our home. Each room has 6-10 Par 30LN or Par38 bulbs each consuming 50W-90W of energy. Our kitchen and family room alone is about 1000W of energy for 10 hours per day. In a year that's about 3000kw of energy, roughly 15% of all my electrical usage or $400 a year. To light one room! I have been motivated to cut this down with LED bulbs to roughly 210w (vs 1000w). 

My quest for high quality replacement LEDs throughout the house meant all new dimmers. LEDs don't usually work with traditional dimmers and especially not my Leviton Z-Wave dimmers.

Around this time, Lutron had announced their Caseta "home" products. Lutron is an old name in custom lighting and makes most of the commercial and high end products in the market. They are all branded and packaged differently, but customer builders will use products like Radio RA2 and HomeWorks (for new construction). In fact, the way that new homes are getting wired resembles nothing like how current homes are wired. Lutron HomeWorks allows you to discretely control each load in the house through a central control panel. 120V is run to every light and Cat5 cable is run to each switch or dimmer as a "home run" back to the electrical panels. From there the nonsense of multi-way lighting (3, 4, 5 way) is eliminated along with all the head scratching ways of doing the wiring. It also means a lot less copper 14 gauge wire running all over the place. 

For me though, I went with the do-it-yourself Caseta system. Most of the components can be purchased from Amazon and the entire system is HomeKit compatible, meaning you can say "Siri turn off the Main Floor" and she will turn off all the lights on the main floor. Other neat thing I can do, are dim the lights to 60% when the TV remote is used to turn on the TV. I can also use IFTTT recipes to trigger other remote actions. Siri is really powerful here with lots of easy to use commands. You can even dim lights for movie night or guests.

So how do you get started?

  1. You need enough electrical knowledge to replace dimmers and switches, including finding the neutral wire and connect that to some of the switches.
  2. You need to have a basic understanding of 3-way circuits although you will not be using them as Lutron accomplishes 3-way to using small little remotes that run off batteries that replace your old 3-way switch
  3. A Lutron Smart Bridge
  4. Some Dimmers, Switches and Remotes
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