How the Hygge Apps Cellular Monitor Started

 

Hi, I'm Brian Kaufman,

Thank you for coming to my company's site. I'm currently a product manager at Google helping businesses both large and small deploy and scale applications on Google Cloud. I'm an Electrical Engineer by trade and have worked as a freelance website developer for over 20 years.

Why Hygge Apps?

I've always had an interest in building physical products and went to school for engineering because of a dream to someday build toys + a love for the 80s movie "Real Genius," which I stumbled across long ago at my grandparents' house (they had HBO, which was always a treat when going over). While IoT sensors are not kids' toys, they have given me a great way to get back into the physical product world. Additionally, they provide an indirect way to save on product consumption through preventative maintenance and lower electricity bills. The story outlined below created an incredible amount of waste. I like to think of IoT sensors as a dentist's preventative care - much easier to prevent issues than to fix them. 

Company Vision: 

Hygge Apps is a  "preventative maintenance company" first, and a technology company second.  I chose the name "Hygge" , which is a Danish word for coziness and comfort, to represent this. The company vision is to "provide comfort to remote areas". 

I hope you like our products - We are always looking for feedback so if you have ideas on how we can do better, create partnerships, or new areas for us to look into please reach out!

How we got here, one scary, expensive night in Boston...

I've been a landlord for about 16 years and have gone through everything from gut renovations to emergency pipe breaks which was the inspiration for this product. What I've learned the hard way is simple preventative measures can save you small fortunes in the long run. 

I received the video below from a tenant in a property I manage at 10:30PM on a Friday night in the middle of winter in Boston. The temperature outside was approximately 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A pipe in the back of the basement had frozen and was spraying all over the electrical panel to the building units and all their water heaters. 

Finding a plumber was nearly impossible that night due to wide spread damage but luckily we were able to get the water shutoff to the building, electrical off to all the water heaters,  and were able to keep the electrical heat on for the building upstairs. 

How did this all happen? Someone left the door open to the basement just a crack. Total cost of repairing all water heaters and pipes was $11,000+ as everything needed to be replaced. To make things worse many of the water heaters were not even 2 years old. This was an incredible amount of waste, not to mention the stress. 

The Solution 

After the dust settled, we went to work looking for a solution to this problem. Some owners in the building brought up rebuilding this basement in a different way to prevent this situation in the future however that would be a massive expense. In addition to adding more insulation to the door I wanted to at least get some sort of sensor down there to give us a hint that trouble was brewing but I could not find many options for temperature sensors on cellular networks without confusing subscription plans for HOAs. Water doesn't freeze immediately, you have lots of time to determine if things are headed into a danger zone. Because I couldn't find what I needed, I built it and after extensive testing and soak time am offering them for sale to others.