Why doesn’t the Wallflower Smart Monitor for electric stoves turn off your stove?
Think about it, if you’ve forgotten to turn off your stove you were just cooking. Which means you are are still in the house or very close to it. Wallflower is designed to warn you very soon after you forget that it’s still on. This is the fundamental reason why our Stove Monitor does not contain the electronics necessary to turn your stove on or off.
Early prototypes we developed included this feature, but we found that the necessary components resulted in a product that was too bulky to fit behind most stoves and too expensive to be commercially viable. We also learned that there are many regulatory barriers to getting such a product certified for safety.
The current safety standards for cooking equipment were written long before smart features were even possible and are therefore very restrictive. We’d need to prove that the product couldn’t turn off your oven without you knowing about it, ending up with undercooked food. We’d need to prove that it couldn’t turn the stove back on without you knowing about it, or with the stove still active. These challenges turn a problem which seems simple on the surface into a development nightmare.
We did user testing about having shut-off functionality at a higher price point vs. strictly building a monitor at a lower price point (think smoke alarm — it tells you there’s a fire but doesn’t put it out). This will change in the future, but the reality is that to build shut-off functionality and run through all the approval hurdles isn’t currently feasible if we want to hit our desired price point.
At its core, Wallflower is a monitoring and alert system that reminds you quickly, before you get too far away. If you leave your home with the stove on you will receive an alert within 1000ft — about 3–4 city blocks.
One of the biggest challenges companies face when developing new products is deciding which features to release first. Every feature, no matter how small, must be scrutinized to judge its benefits to the end customer. Smart companies know that must-have features should make it into the first release, and nice-to-have features don’t. Too many companies make the mistake of piling every possible feature on their first product. Usually, that ends up making the product more expensive, more complicated, and more confusing than necessary. The end result? Weak sales.
Look at Tesla for example. Their CEO is a genius, their cars drive extremely well, the software is state-of-art, their technology is leaving all the other automakers in the dust, and they are now worth more than General Motors, but their interiors leave a lot to be desired (sorry, Elon). In my personal opinion, their interiors are no better than a $30,000 car yet they are asking nearly $100,000 for their vehicles.
The lesson? Tesla decided to focus on technology as its core feature. That’s the reason people buy their cars over the competition, not their interiors. They decided that a premium interior wouldn’t make the cut (for now), and they’ve been extremely successful despite this.
Coming back to Wallflower, our decision not to include remote shut-off in our first release is a result of development and regulatory testing realities in addition to extensive in-home testing of our prototypes. When considering the increased cost and regulatory complexity of adding a shut-off mechanism, it was a no-brainer — we want to help the most people possible at the most affordable price possible.
We were surprised: when the shut-off feature was available to our testers, in 100% of the cases when the homeowner forgot that the stove was on, they were either close enough to home to quickly turn the car around or at home so that they were able to just walk over and turn off the stove. Those homeowners told us they preferred a monitoring solution without shut-off in exchange for a lower cost of purchase. To them — our future customers — auto-shutoff was not a core feature that was required, and we listened.
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Victor Jablokov is the CEO of Wallflower Labs, a technology company based in Boston, MA that is developing products to reduce home fires caused by cooking. Learn more at wallflower.com.
