Haha, oh man, this should be fun!
Hey, I’m Eric and I love answering 3-Way wiring questions.
I’m from Kalamazoo, MI, but actually grew up in New Jersey (don’t hold it against me please). My dad is an Electrical Engineer at DTE (I did get a chuckle out of @oscopeaaron’s DTE comment) which clearly did not pass down the EE genes to me. I chose the exact opposite field… marketing (think, pretty pictures).
Ok, so how did this start and where did Inovelli come from.
As I’m sure you know @simriv123, it’s cold up north. While I’m sure Canada is colder than Michigan, it gets pretty dang cold up here. So, every year around Christmas time, we make the trip to Florida and spend a week or so there to thaw out a bit.
One year (I think it was like 2015 or so) I remember sitting there on the couch in FL thinking, “there has to be a way I can regulate the heat at my house – I’m wasting so much leaving it on right now when no one is home”. So, I did a quick search and stumbled upon the Nest Thermostat and I bought one.
From there, I was hooked. I thought, “what else could I waste… I mean invest in?”
I did some research and bought a (wait for it everyone… hold the laughter) Wink hub along with a ton of GE Link smart bulbs.
Then I realized I wanted switches bc people kept turning off my smart lights, so I invested in some Quirky Tapts (clearly a terrible investment lol).
Another paycheck, another bunch of smart home products (Nest Protects, Drop/Nestcams, Philips Hue, some random Z-Wave outlets, etc). Before you know it, I’m all in… sort of.
I noticed my network was slow, never did what I wanted and those damn Quirky Tapts were made by the devil himself… always offline, never worked. This is where the phrase, “Eric, this house is dumber than it was with normal switches” came from.
However, home automation was always kind of a passion of mine as I like tinkering with things and there’s something about pressing a button or asking Alexa to turn lights on, so I started to really do some research and stumbled across Z-Wave and started to understand the difference between all the various protocols.
Out came the Tapts, and in came the GE Z-Wave switches.
Ok, if you’re still with me, here’s how Inovelli came to life.
I was working at Kellogg and also studying for my MBA and one of the classes was a marketing class where you had to take an existing company, develop a marketing plan for it, and improve upon their existing product line.
I chose Wink and while I was doing it, I realized, “dang, there really is a huge opportunity for a brand to come in to the space that’s really innovative.” ← I’m serious…
My job at Kellogg was on the brand marketing team and so if I leveraged my experience there along with my passion for home automation, maybe I could do something with it.
The rest is history I suppose.
Currently, I’m running SmartThings, ditched the GE Link Bulbs and Tapts, kept the Hue’s, Nests (although… c’mon no more Works With Nest program… grrr, don’t get me started), and GE switches (although it’s a mix between GE, Inovelli, and HomeSeer switches – slowly transitioning to all Inovelli of course – just haven’t had the time to swap them all out).
TLDR: Went to FL and wondered if there was a smart thermostat, bought Nest and got addicted.