Category: Consumerism

Does it make sense to pay for high-net-worth insurance in coastal South Florida?

by philg

Happy Middle of Hurricane Preparedness Week for those who celebrate…

Conventional insurance companies such as State Farm have mostly walked away from insuring coastal South Florida due to a combination of litigation risk (“Prior to the reforms, Florida accounted for more than 72% of the nation’s homeowners claim-related litigation in 2023, despite representing only 10% of US homeowners claims.”) and hurricane risk. Our house is about 2.5 miles from the ocean, but it is still redlined by the insurance companies most people have heard of. Here are the options for insurance:

  • a Florida-only carrier that turns most of its premium over to reinsurance
  • a “non-admitted” specialty company that isn’t regulated by the state and that may have unfavorable terms, including penalties for early cancellation and even a “wind exclusion” (i.e., they pay nothing in the event of the most obvious risk: hurricanes). (This option is so expensive and dumb that I won’t cover it here.)
  • a “high-net-worth” (HNW) carrier such as Chubb (mostly rejects additional Florida risk; famous for a low loss ratio (payments as a percentage of premium collected)), Vault, PURE, and Berkley One (despite the name, these are available to peasants whose house is worth less than a Palm Beach starter home ($10 million))

The cost of HNW insurance is 2-4X what a Florida-only company might quote.

Nearly all Florida insurance includes at least a 2% wind exclusion. If the dwelling value is $1 million, in other words, the homeowner pays the first $20,000 of any hurricane-related loss. Thus, the vast majority of customers with hurricane damage will receive nothing from their insurer because the typical hurricane damage might involve only some blown-off roof tiles or shingles. The band of likely serious damage from a Category 4 or 5 hurricane making landfall is 20-60 miles, e.g., for Hurricane Andrew in 1992 that resulted in major changes to the Florida building code or Hurricane Michael in 2018 that damaged Tyndall Air Force Base. Note that this exclusion results in the HNW policies paying less after what would be typical hurricane damage because HNW companies write for 2X the dwelling value on the same house.

The Florida-only carriers are typically unrated by AM Best, the standard rater for insurers. It has been historically rare for an insurer rated A or better by AM Best to fail. Florida insurers get rated by Demotech. How well does it work for an insurance company to have all of its customers in Florida? According to ChatGPT, nearly all of the Florida-only companies that have gone insolvent had A ratings from Demotech (i.e., the ratings were worthless in terms of distinguishing the vulnerable carriers from the solid ones or, perhaps, the solvency of a carrier simply depended on their luck regarding how many customers were in a hurricane destruction zone).

Insolvency after a major hurricane doesn’t work the way that one would think, with the failed insurance company realizing that it is doomed to failure and going into a bankruptcy-style process where every claimant gets paid a percentage of his or her full claim amount. Instead, the insurance company, even after a major hurricane, pays claims as they’re made and adjusted at 100%. When the company runs out of money they turn out the rest of the claims to the Florida Insurance Guaranty Association (FIGA), which will pay up to $500,000 for a destroyed house. So… the customer with a major loss either gets 100% or a fixed $500,000. The more complex the claim, the less likely it is to be paid. ChatGPT says that it is reasonable to assume a 10 percent chance of insolvency for a Florida-only carrier in the event of a major hurricane. The most recent insolvency that triggered a FIGA payout was of United Property & Casualty Insurance Company in February 2023. That’s three hurricane seasons ago. Since then we’ve had some hurricanes, but none anywhere near as costly within Florida as 2022’s Hurricane Ian. Let’s use a 20 percent risk of insolvency if a house is damaged to policy limits and a 10 percent risk of insolvency if a house is damaged to half of the limits.

What is the risk of a total loss or serious damage? Gemini starts off by saying that it is pretty high, with 300,000-400,000 single-family homes in South Florida either substantially damaged or destroyed by hurricanes over the past 50 years. That’s out of about 2.7 million homes in South Florida today, but only an average of 1.7 million homes over the 50-year period. (ChatGPT estimates this number as only about half of Gemini’s figure; our future AI overlords are smarter than humans, but equally inconsistent?) So a homeowner’s insurance company has about at least a 1 in 7 chance of making a big payout? Not exactly. First, we have to separate out the houses that were damaged by flooding or storm surge, between 120,000 and 180,000. Homeowner’s doesn’t pay for flood damage. Now we’re down to a risk of about 1 in 10 over 50 years. What about the fact that Florida established a strict statewide building code in 2002, hoping to avoid a repeat of the Hurricane Andrew aftermath, roughly 25,524 homes destroyed and 101,241 damaged (Insurance Information Institute). Gemini:

In major storms like Hurricane Michael (2018) and Hurricane Ian (2022), structural engineers found that homes built to the 2002 code (or later) suffered roughly 80% to 90% less wind damage than their older neighbors.

A report from an insurance institute wasn’t quite as rosy:

IBHS evaluated 3,646 single-family homes, 327 light commercial buildings, and 230 multifamily structures [after Hurricane Ian] using aerial and street-level imagery. … Homes built before 2002 had structural damage levels nearly 2x higher, and 2.3x higher in areas with peak winds above 130 mph.

It looks as though no post-2002 house actually lost the plywood sheathing supporting the roof, but at least some had exposed sheathing and, presumably, water damage as a result. A companion report from the same organization says that asphalt shingles were the weak point, metal roofs were the best (12% damaged), and tile roofs weren’t significantly damaged except those more than 20 years old (“no tile roofs assessed that had greater than 50% roof cover damage” and, confusingly, “the small number of roofs with greater than 25% cover damage … These roofs were all 20 years or older”). Our 2003 house has a one-year-old tile roof with two layers of “peel and stick” underneath. If the tiles are blown off, but the peel-and-stick underlayment survives then we’re looking at a $120,000 insurance claim to put a new tile roof on the house (maybe less if the underlayment isn’t too old and can be retained).

ChatGPT says that 4-6 Cat 4/5 hurricanes hit the Miami-to-Stuart coastline every 100 years. Let’s take this distance as 108 miles. If you assume that the zone of total destruction is 20 miles wide then a typical house gets destroyed roughly every 110 years. If the destruction zone widens to 40 miles, the interval between destruction is 55 years. The most recent major hurricane to hit Palm Beach County was in 1949, 77 years ago, but we could use the 55-year estimate to make the high-net-worth companies look more attractive.

[We’ll ignore tornado risk. A tornado could destroy or seriously damage a house, of course, but it wouldn’t affect an insurer’s solvency because a tornado is local. This is a 1 in 100,000-year event for a typical South Florida house, according to AI.]

As noted above, one quirk of the HNW policies is that they force buyers to pay to insure the full rebuild cost of a house, which for a 2003 house like ours is much more than the house is worth. Imagine if we insured our five-year-old Honda Odyssey for the cost of a brand new Honda Odyssey. Why would we want to do that when what is actually at risk is only about half that number? A neighbor has Chubb and they would pay him over $4 million for the house and contents in the event of a total loss (maybe $5 million if we add “loss of use”). His house has a Zestimate of $1.8 million, has its original roof and non-impact windows, and sits on a lot that should be worth at least $500,000 if the house were razed. The contents of the house aren’t valuable. So he has perhaps $1.5 million that could conceivably be lost under his $4+ million policy. (Note that the neighbor won’t get the high dwelling value unless he actually does rebuild, an irrational choice to make compared to simply moving to a similar house and letting a professional real estate developer deal with the wreck. If the family moves to a $1.8 million house a few blocks away, he gets paid only about $1.3 million (the depreciated value of the structure).

Let’s have a look at a couple of quotes. Below is one from Olympus, a Florida-based company that was founded in 2007, i.e., 19 years ago. Whoever started the company should buy lottery tickets because it was founded right at the beginning the 2006-2015 “no hurricanes making landfall” period. That said, the company has survived the following hurricanes that did make landfall in Florida:

  • Hermine (2016)
  • Irma (2017)
  • Michael (2018)
  • Ian (2022)
  • Idalia (2023)
  • Helene (2024)
  • Milton (2024)

Furthermore, Olympus is unusual in being rated by KBRA, which is significantly more stringent than Demotech. Olympus is rated BBB+ by KBRA (over the minimum BBB accepted by Fannie Mae; it’s ironic that the enterprise that generated the largest insolvency in U.S. history, requiring $150+ billion in tax dollars as a bailout, closely scrutinizes insurance companies). For the handful of companies that are rated by both KBRA and AM Best, the ratings seem to be similar.

Could they survive a repeat of the 1949 hurricane that came right into Jupiter? (the most recent major hurricane to make landfall in Palm Beach County) There doesn’t seem to be any way to find out. An insurance company with 50,000 customers, each of which is on its own square mile within the 53,625-square-mile state of Florida is going to be much less stressed by a hurricane that hits Fort Lauderdale than one whose 50,000 customers are all in Broward County, for example. (Broward County was last hit by a major hurricane in 1947, though Hurricane Wilma, Category 2, did about $4 billion in insured damage in 2005.) The information on risk concentration by company is nowhere to be found. In theory, the reinsurers who agree to do business with the companies are looking at this and maybe the regulators.

It is difficult to have faith in regulation when one hears about Florida-based Slide Insurance. The founder and his wife siphoned off $50 million in compensation out of a total profit of $288 million in 2023-4 (source). Based on this, it seems that an insurance company could pay out all of its profits to employees and shareholders during 15 lucky years without major hurricanes affecting its territory and then fold up its tent after a Hurricane Andrew-type event occurs. ChatGPT: “There’s no strict statutory cap tying executive pay to solvency. … As long as they stay above minimum surplus requirements, they’re compliant. But those minimums may not cover a true tail event (e.g., Andrew-scale).” People with inexpensive-by-Florida-standards houses will still do okay with $500,000 from FIGA, of course, so this is a great example of privatized profits and socialized losses.

What did the high-net-worth companies have to offer?

Notice the PURE quote with a 5% wind exclusion. If our roof were destroyed, but didn’t leak, and we lost 7 or 8 of our impact glass windows they would still pay nothing because the wind deductible would be $195,000. In a “medium bad” event, the Olympus policy at less than one third the cost could easily pay 2X because of the deductible being only 2% of a much lower dwelling value.

Let’s do a spreadsheet model

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Wall Street Journal: Americans can’t afford to live in America because house maintenance costs too much

by philg

Happy National Home Improvement Month for readers who, like me, have been dumb enough to buy rather than rent. Also, Happy National DIY Day.

Previously, on this blog:

This month in the Wall Street Journal, “The Typical U.S. Home Is 44 Years Old—And Needs Tons of Work”:

More recent new construction hasn’t replaced America’s graying housing stock, meaning the age of the median home is a record 44 years, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.

The cost of home maintenance, even after accounting for broader inflation, has jumped. Structural repair costs grew by about 14.1% in real terms between 2022 and 2024, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Plumbing jumped by 23.6%. The increase reflects the rising cost of individual parts and labor, and the larger size of necessary repairs.

This is on top of the rising costs of home insurance, property taxes and homeowners association dues, which are making it prohibitive for many to simply own a home, not to mention buy one.

The newspaper says “it [is] prohibitive for many to simply own a home, not to mention buy one” and at the same time tells us that the U.S. should have increased immigration, i.e., more demand for a relatively fixed supply of houses.

Our shabby/old house by Palm Beach County standards is 23 years old and that puts us in the top 25 percent of home youth:

Getting close to my 4% number:

Financial advisers traditionally suggested setting aside 1% of a home’s value annually for upkeep, but many now argue that isn’t enough. While 1% may cover routine upkeep, 2% to 3% provides a more realistic cushion for expected maintenance, home-improvement projects and unexpected repairs, particularly for older homes, said Angie Hicks, co-founder of home-services company Angi.

The Americans who were most eager to lock themselves into their homes during coronapanic will now bear a heavy burden:

Forty-nine percent of all improvement spending is now for necessary replacements like HVAC that owners can’t delay, said Rachel Drew, director of Harvard’s Remodeling Futures Program. The financial burden is particularly heavy in regions like the Northeast, where homes tend to be older.

Speaking of old, the article highlights the inability of folks in the Northeast to adapt to changed circumstances:

Mindy and Joseph Mevorah own an 88-year-old colonial [“more than 3,500-square-foot”] in Sands Point, a New York City suburb with plenty of old homes that is often considered an inspiration for “The Great Gatsby.” The house is due for a new coat of paint, a task they know to approach with caution. … “A new brick next to an old brick would look terrible,” said Joseph, 66. … The Mevorahs have stayed in their home for 29 years … They have a pool that could be a draw for future grandchildren. … When replacing their copper gutters a few years ago, they considered switching to aluminum, which would have been cheaper, but ultimately stuck with copper to preserve the home’s integrity. After all, they expect to be there for many years to come.

A 66-year-old in Florida whose kids were grown wouldn’t stay in a 3,500-square-foot wreck of a house. The Floridian would recognize that different kinds of real estate are suitable for different phases of life and likely move to a condo or small new house.

Circling back to the immigration theme… how can end-of-career financially comfortable Americans who struggle to afford house maintenance imagine that the U.S. can afford to house tens of millions of additional welfare-dependent low-skill immigrants?

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Why do we pay for cable TV if all agree that it is a terrible value?

by philg

I’ve been trying to help our HOA (right there you can stop reading if you want to know the definition of a thankless effort) deal with our bulk cable TV contract and establish a bulk fiber Internet contract. I hit Consumer Reports for their survey of providers. For pure cable TV, here’s something remarkable: all of the companies are rated 1/5 for “value”. If we can all agree, which we apparently do, that cable/satellite TV is a terrible value, why do roughly 70 million of us subscribe?

(Bulk is much cheaper than retail, incidentally. We pay about $55/house per month for a decent slate of channels, 20 hours of DVR, up to three cable boxes per household, and Xfinity’s famously awesome customer service (rated 1/5).)

Conversation with Xfinity rep…

  • them: we are offering our Hybrid fiber-coaxial network in your neighborhood
  • me: if I’m using AOL dialup aren’t I on a “hybrid fiber” network? The computer that answers my 56K modem’s phone call is connected via fiber, right?

Readers: Anyone have experience with TV from FiberNow, Blue Stream, or Hotwire?

Note that the 1/5 value rating for cable TV isn’t because they surveyed 73,000 sourpusses. The same people rated their Internet providers at 4/5 or 5/5 for “value”:

How did Elon’s company do?

I’m not sure why Starlink was perceived to be mediocre in value. The only people who would buy it are those who can’t get fiber or good cable modem service, right? The alternative is LTE or smoke signals?

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Shout-out to our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Minneapolis

by philg

Some gratitude to the good people of Minneapolis. The city’s martyrs of ICE resistance, such as Alex Pretti and Renée Good, are apparently forgotten because Donald Trump briefly posted part of a “king of the jungle” video (apparently suppressed by the righteous who run YouTube, but available from the haters at X). Front page of the NYT today condemning Trump for his racism; nothing anywhere on the front page about Minneapolis, as if the sacrifices were for nothing:

I will celebrate Minneapolis, therefore, with a shout-out to SANUS, headquartered in suburban Minneapolis (a 3-minute drive from the Al-Amaan mosque). Mere hours before we were to our Super Bowl extravaganza guests are arriving, our four-year-old $900 Costco 86″ TV wouldn’t turn on. Thanks to the Sanus BLT3-B1 “tilt 4D” mount, however, I was able to pull the recalcitrant machine from the wall and use my Ph.D. in EECS skills to unplug it and plug it back in. The kids are watching the Puppy Bowl and, if the Costco gods are with us, the party will proceed as planned.

I suppose that we also have to celebrate our brothers and sisters in China (not too many binary-resisters there) for actually making the Sanus BLT3-B1 so that it cost $100 instead of $300.

(I do wish that ICE would detain and deport whoever made the Xfinity XG1v4 box, which I picked up because of its advertised 4K capability. It needs to be power-cycled almost every time that we want to use it and the boot-up process is almost 10 minutes.)

Let this be a cautionary tale for anyone who is considering a super-slim wall-hugging TV mount that requires professional skills and multiple humans to execute a dismount and reach-around. (I guess we could have accomplished the power-cycle via flipping breakers. I’ve never seen a behind-the-TV outlet that is associated with a convenient switch that could be used for a convenient power-cycle.)

Finally, maybe this is the time to start an extended warranty claim on the TV? It was a floor model at Costco and they threw in a five-year warranty from Allstate. The warranty was already used once to replace the TV’s main board, possibly a casualty of a lightning storm putting high voltage into the Xfinity cable (another good reason to go with a fiber connection if you’re lucky enough to live in a place where fiber is available).

Loosely related

From the masjid around the corner from Sanus, a Facebook post from one month after the Gazans’ peaceful October 7, 2023 excursion into Israel:

Allah is the All-Mighty, the Most Merciful, the One Who has the absolute ability to save the oppressed, inflict punishment on the criminals and stop the brutal massacre and genocide happening in Gaza.

It’s a challenging theological question. Allah is “All-Mighty, the Most Merciful” and with “the absolute ability to save the oppressed” (redundant with “All-Mighty”?). Yet the genocide happening in Gaza wasn’t stopped until the Gazans had suffered the loss of most of their military capability. Why did Allah wait two more years and, perhaps more importantly, not assist the Gazans in realizing their military goals, including the destruction of the Zionist entity and the establishment of Hamas rule from the river to the sea?

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Artificial stupidity meets the bathtub faucet

by philg

Loyal readers may remember Moen Flo Artificial Intelligence Water Overlord, in which the intelligent water overlord was dumb as a rock. This post is about what happened after I got the cartridge out of the faucet.

ChatGPT confidently identified the Roman tub faucet based on a photo of the top of the cartridge. The identification came with “100% certainty”:

The Pfister cartridges it told me to buy are plastic and don’t have a splined top:

When I pointed this out, ChatGPT told me to buy some other Pfister cartridge that was obviously wrong and intended for a sink faucet, not a tub faucet. I managed to get the cartridge out and sent ChatGPT a photo:

(Of course, this was obviously false as well.)

I went to Broedell Plumbing Supply here in Jupiter. The guy at the counter quickly found a Phylrich web page with dimensions that matched the faucet. I asked ChatGPT “You sure it isn’t a Phylrich 10240?”

The Phylrich web page says that its cartridge has 16 points, not 12 as ChatGPT confidently says. When I sent ChatGPT close-up photos of the top of the old cartridge and the bottom of the handle, it found 20 splines (I counted 16). ChatGPT still wanted to replace the failed cartridge with a Pfister. It came up with a dog-ate-my-homework story:

Grok was a little better. Shown a picture of the top of the cartridge (not the entire cartridge):

The dates have to be wrong since our house was built in 2003 and I don’t think that they used vintage materials. A Google search for the suggested “Phylrich Regency” and “Phylrich Versailles” doesn’t bring up anything with dual spouts. When I pushed back on Grok it changed its mind to Newport Brass or Jaclo. When I sent a photo of the complete cartridge, Grok said that it was American Standard or Pfister. Grok seems worse in terms of hallucinating the existence of similar-looking dual-spout roman tub faucets.

The plot thickened a little further. I ordered two replacement cartridges (one hot, one cold) from Phylrich ($155 including shipping, i.e., about the same price as a Glacier Bay deck-mount tub faucet from Home Depot (bizarrely rated at 2.4 gph, which I don’t think can be right because that’s roughly Federal shower flow limit and a standard Delta tub filler is about 20 gph at 60 psi)). The cartridges fit and work perfectly. So the faucet is definitely Phylrich, right? I emailed a photo to the company’s customer service department and they say that they never made a faucet like that. ChatGPT, to its credit, did have a plausible explanation:

Many manufacturers bought cartridges from the same OEM suppliers. … Boutique brands (including Phylrich) often used “generic” brass compression stems early on. … So Phylrich’s cartridge fits simply because the valve body was designed around a widespread industry-standard stem pattern. … Your faucet is almost certainly a “private label” or discontinued OEM roman-tub set

(It still erroneously believes that the stem pattern is 20 splines and referred to that.)

Maybe I could order two of these swan sets and use two of the spouts on the existing rough-in kit? That would cost only about $10,800. That’s a mere trifle for some of our Palm Beach County neighbors.

I think the above tale at least demonstrates that (1) AI is not always ready for the real world, and (2) one should never install anything in one’s house that didn’t come from Home Depot.

Speaking of Home Depot, nearly the complete range of South Florida vehicles in the parking lot: airboat, Tesla, Rolls-Royce (I have seen Ferraris in that lot before, but not on the same day as the below photos were taken):

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Audioengine HD4 desktop Bluetooth speaker review

by philg

I called in an airstrike on my own audio position by “upgrading” from a 10.5-year Windows 10 PC to a brand-new Windows 11 machine with 100% pimp ASUS ProArt Creator motherboard. If I’d spent half as much on a motherboard from ASR the machine would have had an optical S/PDIF audio output compatible with my old Nuforce Dia amp (mighty 18 watts) and Audioengine P4 passive speakers (both purchased in 2012 and worked without failures for 13 years). The cheap ASUS motherboards seem to have a header for S/PDIF even if there is no connector.

I decided to give the P4 speakers a vacation and purchased an Audioengine HD4 Bluetooth speaker system. They’re about the same size as the P4 speakers so I put them on the same stands. The result is less desktop clutter because the Nuforce Dia is gone. The Nuforce Dia’s power supply is gone (the HD4’s power supply is internal). One of two speaker wires is gone (the powered HD4 on the left still needs a speaker wire, included (with banana plugs!), to send the output of its power amp to its passive brother/sister/binary-resister on the right). The cable connecting the PC to the amp is gone. (Note that if you’re a serious audio nerd you might nonetheless need to reintroduce a USC-C cable from the PC to the Audioengine HD4; the digital-to-analog converter in the HD4 is capable of handling 96 kHZ/24 bits, but Bluetooth aptX HD is limited to 44 kHz/24 bits. One thing that is painful about my ASUS motherboard is that it doesn’t have any standard connector for a Bluetooth antenna. It has a proprietary pair of connectors for a combined WiFi/Bluetooth antenna that is huge and connected by a long ugly cable to the back of the PC. Given that my PC is hard-wired to the switch via a Cat 5 wire that the 2003 builder of this house thoughtfully included, I just need a small Bluetooth antenna that will live on the back of the motherboard. This apparently does not exist in the ASUS universe.

Setup took about 2 minutes. I powered the HD4 off and then on after 5 seconds to simulate a brief power failure. The Windows 11 machine reconnected automatically. Sound quality seems similar to what I was enjoying before. So… my stupidity in assuming that every modern motherboard would have an S/PDIF optical audio output resulted in the recovery of a bit of desktop space at a $329 cost (on sale from the usual $429 price).

Unlike Sonos, Texas-based Audioengine suggests via its photos that white people may purchase and use its products. Here’s a person at serious risk of “tech neck” unless the AI revolution renders the job obsolete.

The one thing that I don’t love about the speakers aesthetically, compared to the P4, is the metal strip across the front. I guess it would be pretty tough to design a wooden volume knob and a wooden headphone jack!

This photo shows the speakers with the Bluetooth antenna pointing up, which was completely unnecessary in my setup. It also shows the old-school RCA inputs and outputs. The RCA output can be used for a subwoofer. I don’t think that the HD4 has a crossover network and, therefore, the HD4 would keep getting driven at full range even with a subwoofer hooked up. Audioengine seems to include a low-pass filter in their subwoofers so that maybe it all works out, but I’m not gaming in the home office nor watching Hollywood action movies so I don’t think I will be trying out the subwoofer config.

Conclusion: this thing works, but it probably would have been smarter to buy a motherboard with S/PDIF optical out! Also probably smarter to buy a motherboard with a standard antenna connector to which a short Bluetooth antenna could be attached.

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Moen Flo Artificial Intelligence Water Overlord

by philg

Everyone in Florida prepares for the Category 5 hurricane that, generally, never shows up (e.g., Tampa hasn’t been hit badly by a hurricane for 100 years). Hardly anyone prepares for an internal water leak and quite a few of our neighbors have suffered severe home damage from, e.g., burst sink faucet supply lines. All of the houses in our neighborhood are about 23 years old and that’s apparently a great age for a massive water escape.

I debated and dithered between the Moen Flo and the Phyn Plus. The vulnerability of the Moen Flo is a mechanical impeller that reportedly fails after 1-3 years, but my friend decided that the Phyn Plus would impose more restriction on water pressure (maybe due to 3/4″ internal pipe where our supply is 1″?). Our plumber has a Flo so we decided to go with Moen (the evil Kohler empire rebrands Phyn Plus). The Phyn Plus makes some stronger claims for intelligence.

About one month after the Flo went in we had our first leak, a steadily dripping Roman tub faucet. Here’s an excerpt of the Flo’s recorded usage:

What’s remarkable about the above is that the AI Water Overlord decided that it was a perfectly normal usage pattern for a human to stand at a faucet for several days and pull out 0-0.01 gallons per minute. No alerts were issued. I did an AI support session with the app, which told me to go onto the web site and see if I could do a “MicroLeak” test there. The app wouldn’t let me do it maybe because it thought that a faucet was legitimately in use. In any case, the history showed a few MicroLeak tests passed with flying colors during an obvious and steady leak. Through all of this, the app displayed a “fat/dumb/happy” screen:

I eventually did call the Moen support number. The phone line was quickly answered by an American with no accent. He had no explanation for why the device hadn’t raised an alert, at least, and decided to escalate the question to Tier 2. Meanwhile, although I’d purchased a bundle of the device and three years of extended warranty and other support (assuming that the impeller will fail for us as it has for everyone else), the Web application showed me as not subscribed to “FloProtect” and kept trying to sell me “FloProtect”. The customer support agent confirmed that I actually WAS subscribed.

The leak was bad enough that if had happened while we were away for a few weeks it could have caused $50,000 of mold and other damage. Fortunately for us, however, it was leaking into a tub with a drain and we observed it with our own eyes.

The second fun part of this story was that I had previously asked a contractor to sort out the access panel situation for the Roman tub faucet and the shutoff valves. These were mostly tiled in so a plumber couldn’t service them. He converted two of the tiles to a magnetic mount. “Just cut the grout with a utility knife,” said the contractor, “and then maybe use a suction cup to get the tile out.” Of course, this was a huge challenge for me and I didn’t succeed without a trip to Home Depot to get a pro-grade suction cup grabber.

When I did get my unskilled paws on the 23-year-old shutoff valves I was able to turn them all the way to the right. This shut off the cold water to the tub, but the hot water still flowed out at a substantial rate and continued to drip (apparently, it was the hot water that was dripping). I torqued it down some more and finally got the pressure low enough that the dripping stopped with the faucet tap turned off. ChatGPT says that failure of old shutoff valves is common:

Most angle stops or multi-turn shutoff valves use a rubber washer or packing that seals against a brass seat. Over time, the rubber hardens, cracks, or disintegrates. When you turn the handle clockwise, the valve stem no longer presses tightly enough to fully stop flow — so you get a partial seal and reduced flow instead of a full shutoff.

So, as part of the joy of homeownership, in one day we had

  • a leak detector that wouldn’t detect leaks
  • an access panel that couldn’t be accessed
  • a shutoff valve that wouldn’t shut off

I’ve been wanting to replace the tub filler for a couple of years but I can never wrap my head around how to find something that will fit the hole pattern that we have. Nobody has ever been able to figure out what kind of faucet this is. There is no manufacturer’s name or logo above or below the tub deck. It seems to all be high quality stuff, but there wouldn’t be any way to replace a cartridge or the trim (finish badly marred maybe by some previous owner’s cleaning attempt?) since we can’t figure out where it might have come from.

Maybe the goal should be to have it all done by National Fix a Leak Week (March 16-22, 2026 unless there is another government shutdown).

The actual leak:

Did the Flo ever shut off the water for any reason? Yes! The app had been told that we have a pool and that the pool lacks an auto-filler and it had seen multiple episodes of the pool being topped off by hose before. After I turned up the sensitivity following the failure to detect the above drip, the Flo shut off the water after about one hour/1,000 gallons. So I guess if we ever do have a leak in the house, the Flo will prevent more than 1,000 gallons from covering the floors?

Update: Mere hours after this post went live, the Tier 2 folks at Moen called me back. I learned that it does the MicroLeak test by shutting off the water in the middle of the night when, in theory, nobody would want to use it. Then it spends 1-4 minutes watching for a pressure drop that could be caused by a leak. This effect can be masked however, by traditional hot water heaters and their expansion tanks. It’s possible that the layout of our house and the expansion tank would prevent any Flo device from noticing a leak on the hot side (which I think is what we had). The Tier 2 folks watched the above video and said, however, that our Flo should have noticed that level of leakage. So they’re sending me new hardware, but with the caveat that it probably won’t fix the issue. I’m planning to test it by introducing a fake leak. At the same time, I learned that our plumber should probably have put in a new “consumer water shutoff” valve before the Flo. That would enable us to easily replace the Flo without having to go to the street shutoff.

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Why isn’t there a simple 5-channel or 7-channel amplifier that connects to a television’s HDMI eARC output?

by philg

Our family room TV is almost impossible to use due to the fact that the hub of the system is a Yamaha RX-6A AV receiver with a complex user interface and many functions that overlap with the TV. What’s worse, the Yamaha has already had one HDMI switch board failure and seems to be on track for another one (the receiver is about 3.5 years old and sells for almost exactly what we paid for the vastly-more-useful and vastly-simpler-to-use 86-inch LG TV, i.e., $800 (we got the TV at Costco 3.5 years ago for $900, but they threw in a five-year warranty that should have been worth about $100).

What functions of the Yamaha do we actually want? We want it to switch among HDMI inputs and amplify sound for five passive speakers. If we had a subwoofer we’d want it to provide a line-level output for a powered subwoofer. A modern television already supports HDMI switching, typically among 4 inputs, which is plenty for 99% of consumers (cable TV box, some sort of dongle, maybe a slide show player). The modern television also puts out multi-channel audio and volume control commands via its eARC HDMI output. From ChatGPT:

Given how cheap Class D amplifiers are and how inventive Asian electronics companies are, I can’t figure out why there isn’t a display-free and remote-free 5- or 7-channel amplifier with a line-level subwoofer output that could take eARC with Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) input and drive one’s legacy passive speakers. This would enable consumers who’ve cut their cable cords to enjoy true surround sound with just one remote control. As a minor enhancement, when the TV is off and eARC has no signal the little amp could offer to play a Bluetooth source, e.g., from a phone app, through the two main speakers.

There must be something wrong with this product idea because nobody makes a “keep the TV at the center of the TV-watching system” amp. But what is the flaw?

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Where are the 8K computer monitors and televisions?

by philg

I recently did some work in a law firm conference room where we were trying to review some PowerPoint slides that contained patent excerpts and, even after walking right up to the big flat-screen TV it was impossible to see text and figures clearly. A diverse (and therefore strong) group of female scientists of color created the first 8K television 22 years ago:

Why can’t we buy these today? Dell made a 32-inch monitor with 8K resolution and, therefore, an absurd PPI of about 275. It seems to be discontinued. Meanwhile, they continue to sell a 43-inch monitor with 4K resolution, an inadequate 100 PPI (it would be a great monitor with 6K resolution and, therefore, 160 PPI). At the typical desktop viewing distance of about two feet (24 inches), 150 PPI is supposedly near the limit of human perception.

100-inch 4K TVs now seem to be down to consumer prices ($1500). Especially if used as a digital picture frame and approached closely, it would be great to have more than the 44 PPI resolution that 4K affords. Samsung actually does make an 8K 98-inch TV… for $35,000.

I would love to know who is willing to pay 20X for the resolution bump! Zohran Mamdani, AOC, and Bernie Sanders should perhaps try to get a list of these folks and hit them with a new “fair share” tax.

In other TV news, I decided that our boys should be able to watch their beloved NFL in 4K. Our house is in the middle of an Xfinity-only ghetto and the neighborhood of 1/4-acre lots isn’t dense enough for AT&T or Hotwire/Fision to be willing to invest in burying fiber. Three cable boxes and basic cable TV are bundled into our HOA fee. I traded in two of our Xfinity cable boxes for the latest and greatest XG1v4 version (not regularly stocked at the local Xfinity store, bizarrely, considering that every customer now has a 4K television). After being plugged in for a day, and presumably after an Artificial Intelligence review of my weblog posts, both boxes locked themselves to showing only a single station: South Florida PBS. They wouldn’t respond to the channel up/down and Guide buttons on the remote. I would love to see this implemented on a national basis by President AOC! Imagine how much erroneous anti-Science thinking could be corrected if Americans were restricted to watching only PBS.

Circling back to the main question of the post… Why aren’t 8K televisions littering Costco and Best Buy? “There is no 8K content” doesn’t make sense in light of the fact that the latest smartphones can take still photos in 8K resolution (48 megapixels) and some can capture 8K video (e.g., Samsung, Google Pixel). Also, for progressives who claim to be defending the U.S. Constitution against the hated dictator, the idle screen of a TV could be a display of the sacred document (four pages handwritten or, typically, closer to 20 pages with modern typesetting). Lying down in front of the TV could be the progressive’s pit bull tearing apart a Donald Trump chew toy:

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Defend a house against woodpeckers using robot drones?

by philg

Homeowners around the world suffer a lot of damage due to woodpeckers. How about a system of microphones around the house that listen for the sound of a woodpecker and, if heard, dispatches a drone that lives somewhere on the edge of the exterior, maybe under an eave? The drone will then use its own microphone and camera to locate the woodpecker and harass it, with a water pistol if necessary, until the woodpecker finds a tree or an unprotected home to destroy.

ChatGPT refused to draw a picture of a drone discouraging a woodpecker with harmless water: “I can’t create an image that depicts harm being done to an animal — including a woodpecker being shot with water. … Instead of water hitting the bird, the drone could be shown with a water spray or mist aimed at the trim (not at the bird), to illustrate the concept of “protecting the house” without showing harm to the animal.” It then proceeded to generate an image that looks to me like the poor bird is being blasted with water:

(The Gaza Health Ministry reports that more than 60,000 woodpeckers have been killed via water pistol.)

Grok didn’t comment on my desire to see a photo of violence being done to a woodpecker, but it decided that the stream of water should emerge from the woodpecker:

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