The Lounge Q+A: David King, Contractor

What does your wife think about you going out on your own?

Well, my wife has a small salon, so she was self employed before I was.We’ve got to ask cause you’re the Smart Home Guy. How smart is your home?

I’m pretty much self taught. I started off doing just TV installs. As I wanted to grow with more products, I pretty much tore my house up and put it back together and figured out how to do it. So everything in here is smart. My house is like Frankenstein. Something comes out, I buy it, play around with it. So I know how to use it when I’m talking to customers and not just looking at a review online. I actually have it in my home. If I like it, I keep it. If not, I’ll resell it to someone else, but I’ll at least have hands on experience with it. So I’m not sitting there trying to figure it out on the spot.I like smart lighting. I can walk through the house and I can say, okay, Google turn off media room lights. I can sit on the couch and control lights. I can set schedules to where, if I’m out of town or anything, lights come on and off, and it still looks like someone’s home. Security is probably the first thing that anyone should do in my opinion, even if it’s something as simple as just a smart doorbell where you can see who’s at the door and you can monitor, if you get packages or anything. A smart door lock or where you don’t have to worry about keys being lost or stolen. Definitely the thermostat. Just essentials, thermostat, smart door lock, smart doorbell, and a couple of smart lights. Then you just build onto it from there.What are the game changing smart technologies? Where is all of this going?

You can do everything from wear smart clothes that you can plug small appliances in and then you can set timers on those like a coffee pot. You can set a smart speaker to where it automatically comes on in the morning as an alarm clock and goes to your favorite radio station. Then the smart plug will start your coffee maker. The lights may come on. So when the alarm goes off, instead of a buzzer going off your radio station comes on or a favorite song comes on the lights gradually come on from dark to light. So you don’t just have a bright light come on and wake you up. Coffee makers going. You can have the iron come on and start warming up. I mean, there are all kinds of things that you can do with it.