By Krissy Rushing Tomlin
Most people don’t think of power management as the sexiest of home technology products. However, when I sat down with Joe Piccirilli, Owner of RoseWater Energy, and RoseWater dealer Lamar Gibson of Miestro Home Integration in Memphis, I found myself enthralled in the conversation as they laid out the state of the smart home for me, explaining how power can be the primary offender when it comes to building a true Performance Home.
Joe is on the cutting-edge of thought leadership on the topic of luxury power management. His storied career started at Sound Advice, a high-end audio/video multi-store chain in Florida, took him through the founding of AVAD, a national home technology distribution company, and finally to founding RoseWater Energy. The latter was an output of the fact that, throughout his career, Joe increasingly noticed the client dissatisfaction with luxury smart homes. As explained in this interview, he realized much of that discontent was due to power irregularities that plagued electronics. Meanwhile, Lamar is out there on the front lines of luxury home system integration, experiencing firsthand how homeowners feel (or don’t feel) about power and energy management.
From an aging energy grid, to aging in place, to a real-life upscale rural farmhouse that suffered from constant outages, these two have fascinating insights into power in the new era of luxury performance home technology.
Joe Piccirilli
Lamar Gibson
Krissy: Joe, tell us the story of how RoseWater Energy began.
Joe: I went to engineering school back in the dark ages, but not to be an engineer. I felt the knowledge that I would gain and the problem-solving mental disciplines that are developed through the engineering educational process would be valuable to me as an entrepreneur.
As we put AVAD together and I was running it, we were selling everything for the smart home and distributing it all. However, I kept hearing a tremendous amount of customer dissatisfaction. People were not happy. So, I took it upon myself to try and figure out what was going wrong. My first approach was to take the product apart to see what the build quality was like. Products like Crestron and Lutron are extraordinarily well-built products. Their parts selection is good. The way they lay out their boards is really good. So, I discovered through this process that it wasn’t the gear itself making customers unhappy.
Next, I looked at the smart home installations. I knew enough technology design firms who were willing to talk me through their process. What I realized is that not only was the gear very good, but the installation processes were also quite good. That narrowed the problem down to power.
It struck me that we needed to improve power not at the rack level, but at the house level because in the smart home, you are dealing with entire lighting systems, whole-home control systems, and even kitchen appliances that have microprocessors. The current owners manual for a Wolf cooktop, for example, has rebooting instructions! System integrators had to start thinking about large swaths of the entire house, not just a rack of gear for a media system.
Krissy: I love the revelation that power at the rack level was not enough. Integrators need to power the entire smart home.
Joe: Yes. And at the same time, it also solves a problem for the integrator. Integrators need to find new sources of revenue as smart home technology becomes less expensive. A flat-panel TV used to cost $20K and now they are $300. A Crestron system that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars now costs ten grand. How do you make up for the drop in revenue? Integrators can’t scale jobs per year; they have to scale dollars per job! I have spent years evangelizing how power is the integrator’s next expansion for dollars per job.
Krissy: Lamar, I’m curious what the original ask is like for a RoseWater Energy client and how a project evolves.
Lamar: Sure, I’ll give you an example. We recently completed a retrofit of a very elegant, very large farmhouse in Dancyville, Tennessee, just outside of Memphis. This was just one of the client’s homes, and it’s in a rural area. They have lots of storms that cause the power to flicker or go out altogether, regularly. These clients were not focused on a dollar amount but rather the benefit/value of how they spend their money, which always makes the process easier.
Joe: Right, power management at this level is really a lifestyle decision. These devices are lifestyle critical. For the luxury homeowner, the question isn’t how much it costs, but how much is it worth to them for their lifestyle not to be interrupted? For these microprocessor-based lifestyle products not to go down or become damaged?
Krissy: So, for that particular installation, what RoseWater equipment did you use?
Lamar: The RoseWater HUB20 perfectly fit the needs for the project. While not all of the client’s systems are on the HUB20, we were able to route all mission-critical components to the system. The lighting, electronics, appliances and the client’s home office – where trading is conducted – these areas were our focus.
Krissy: What was the end result and benefits to this particular client?
Lamar: The biggest was the fact the client never has to worry about the central lighting system resetting when the power goes out. It may sound trivial, but when you are woken up by the lights going to 100 percent when the power clicks over, it’s frustrating. And if that happens more than a few times it becomes a real problem.
Krissy: How does a RoseWater HUB product get installed?
Joe: This is a panel-level device. The custom home integration channel has very little high-voltage penetration. They work with electricians, but they don’t hire electricians. Most are scared to death because if you touch something with voltage, it tells you that you touched it in an unpleasant way.
So, if you purchase a RoseWater product, clients get white glove treatment, and the product shows up with one of our technicians. A unit is 2,400 pounds. The batteries are 140 pounds apiece, and there are 12 of them! We try to make this a very trouble-free painless proposition for the dealer. And that is the RoseWater way. That’s what separates us.
And because we can’t pull permits in every county in the United States, we supervise the electrician who we’ve prepped on how to execute the installation. That way we know it was hooked up properly. We still require our dealers to always have a person on-site because it is not our client. It is the dealer’s client.
Krissy: How do builders flow in this process?
Joe: We sell through systems integrators, but builders love us. One of our integrators in Orange County was called into a job that they didn’t do, and there were tremendous problems on the job. I went to see what was going on and discovered that, yes, we could absolutely solve all the problems. The builder happened to be present and gave us the green light. The problems in the house disappeared.
Krissy: Like magic!
Joe: Absolutely. So, the builder asks, “Hey, I have two more houses. Can you put RoseWater in those as well?” The integrator of course got that sale. But now, this builder and others tell their clients that if they strike RoseWater from the plans, you need to find another builder.
Krissy: I get that the RoseWater solved the issues with the smart house, but tell me the benefits to the builder.
Joe: Simply put, RoseWater houses have no pain. For this builder, houses without RoseWater delivered constant pain. And the builder likes it because remember, we are filling houses with microprocessors. Think about all the devices that have microprocessors and their impact on your home. If you have children and your network goes down, you can’t stream entertainment.
Krissy: As a parent, you’re toast at that point.
Joe: Exactly. Microprocessors are in your refrigerator, in your oven, they control your lighting. And those microprocessors do not have manual overrides. So, if you blow a lighting control processor, you can’t turn your lights on! That’s a pretty unpleasant experience. Now we have shade controls, we have environmental controls, we have plumbing that has microprocessors in it. As they miniaturize microprocessors, one of the biggest problems is heat dissipation, which is really destructive. In the very best case, heat just compromises the microprocessor’s longevity. In the worst case, it shuts them down completely.
Krissy: Lamar, what has been your experience in the field when it comes to showing the trades the importance of better power?
Lamar: We are still struggling to make those connections in the minds of builders and architects. Afterall, its counterintuitive for those trades to consider power first. It’s big and it has to go somewhere. Sometimes, they don’t perceive it adding any value to what they do. If there is one thing I can convey to all trades involved in a client build or remodel it is this: Adding power management from RoseWater ensures the client has real peace of mind that their expensive kitchen appliances, elegant lighting, and their smart exercise equipment works, every time. That makes everyone look like a rockstar. And when the client has a great building experience, that usually means we are likely to get their next project, and their friends’ and families’ projects as well.
Krissy: What is the experience like convincing a homeowner they need luxury equipment to clean the power in the smart home?
Joe: Well, they have to understand. Most people don’t blame the utility company when their smart home goes awry. People have to understand that it is a power problem. And most people blame the gear. It’s an educative process. It’s not simple.
Lamar: At Miestro, it’s the very first thing we mention to a client once we start the discovery process so we can gauge where their mindset is about the power subject. Unfortunately, very few clients are familiar with what good power means to their home and lifestyle. Not that our clients aren’t smart, the opposite is true. It’s just such a foreign concept to them since they’ve never been educated on what good power is and how it impacts their home’s functionality. We find ourselves really having to stress the benefits of clean, on-demand power.
And the number one benefit is peace of mind. The systems just work and they work better than if power management wasn’t considered in the project. The speakers sound better, the video looks better, and the smart “things” just do what they are supposed to do better.
Control4 Centralized Lighting Panels
Krissy: What do clients and builders say after they have lived with the system?
Lamar: While we are still working on the other specifiers on the project to fully embrace the concept, the best compliment we can get from our RoseWater clients is silence. That’s right, they simply don’t have to call us for service needs. Some of our biggest projects have RoseWater for the foundation and those clients have virtually no service needs. No lighting resets when the generator kicks on in the middle of the night, no Apple TV lockups – really, it’s true! The number of service visits on a large six-figure project with RoseWater at the helm is zero. Compare that to smaller jobs with no power plan in place, and the proof is in the pudding, as they say.
Krissy: Where is the power of the worst in the United States?
Joe: Well, we have two outstanding candidates for terrible power. We have Southern California and then we have where I live here in Florida. If you look at the state of Florida, it’s very interesting. When I moved here in 1974, there were 7.4 million people in this state. There are now 23 million people in this state, many building giant homes on the water. Yet they have not built a power plant in Florida since 1974. Power here is not so good. So, this is a huge market for us. California is a huge market. Aspen, Colorado has also become a very big market for us.
Krissy: What is in store for the future?
Joe: I was talking to one of the largest contract manufacturers on the planet about the next big home trend. They claim it will be home diagnostics. They’re thinking that in order to truly bend the healthcare cost curve, the diagnostic lab needs to be taken out of the equation so that telehealth can work better. So now your network and microprocessors become a real health issue. There are people who want to monitor their water quality, want to monitor their indoor air quality. They want to monitor all of that stuff. That’s all sensor- and microprocessor-intensive.
So, the ability to have predictable constant voltage becomes more and more lifestyle critical. RoseWater has a very bright future in that respect.
Krissy: Congratulations on winning the 2023 Technology Designer Performance Home Award for Best Product for your amazing HUB40.
Joe: The ability to get industry accolades – accolades from my peers – is really exciting to us because to get an award from people who actually know what you’re doing is a big deal. It’s like being an athlete, and another athlete says, oh that guy’s good. I really appreciate this award from Technology Designer for that.
