IFTTT as a Lean Enabling Tool

A few weeks ago we had a bad cold snap in Connecticut, and a few of my pipes froze.  The pipes froze not just because of the sub 0F temperatures, but also because I had my wood stove running pretty hard throughout the cold.  Because it was so warm in my house from the wood stove, the thermostat in my hall never turned the furnace on, which would have circulated hot water through my baseboard heating system.  Instead, the water sat in the pipes and cooled down, and eventually froze.

While I waited for the pipes to thaw, and also while I was repairing one of them, which had burst and started spewing hot water into my basement, I thought about how I could prevent this from happening again.

I could have bought electric heaters for the pipes, which would have been a lot of expense and time buying and installing them.  I could also just not run my wood stove, which would mean I'd use more oil than I had been, which would also be pretty expensive.

Instead of spending money on the problem, I decided to try to implement some standard work for handling the cold in my house.  I know how silly that sounds, but bear with me. It doesn't get this cold very often in CT (although it has been fairly often this winter), so I knew I'd get careless some night or not pay attention to the forecast, and I'd be back to doing extremely bad pipe soldering jobs (actually, if it happens again I'm going to use PEX).

So I turned to a very cool web-based tool called IFTTT (IF This Then That), which is a service that monitors any of a huge number of different "conditions."  The condition can be generated by (currently) around 70 different web services like Facebook, GMail, or Pinboard.  When a condition is satisfied (like a new tweet to you, or a new email), you can then have some action run, again against this huge list of web services.

The really cool part of IFTTT is that they have some links into the real world, and not just messaging services.  One example is the WeMo switch system, so you can have a lamp turn on when someone sends you an email (who wouldn't want that?).  They're also hooked into the weather forecast, which is why I mention the pipes freezing.

So what I ended up doing was, setting up a trigger condition, to send me an email when the forecasted temperature is supposed to be less than 8 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a few degrees above where I've ever had problems with pipes freezing.  But I built a list of "tasks" to do when the weather is going to be cold, basically:

1. Make sure my basement has good airflow, so my cedar closet gets good air flow (that's where the burst happened)
2. Make sure I turn the thermostat on before I go to sleep, to warm the pipes
3. Lay off the wood stove a little bit, so the thermostat is able to come on through the night

Now, I don't have to spend any mental effort on what the weather is like, I just let the IFTTT service keep an eye on things and tell me only on days when I have to worry about it.  I actually set the alert up to send me an alert when the forecast is for less than 8 degrees, and then again when the temperature actually dips that low.

And really, I feel like the optimal set up for me would be to have something like the Nest thermostat, but have it controlled via the IFTTT service or something similar.  I'd like it to go into a different mode when the temperature outside my house drops, and no matter what the temperature in the house, just circulate the water in the pipes every hour or two.  If only there was an IFTTT trigger for when Nest integrates with IFTTT. And I just looked, and they actually have a trigger for new channels.  Crazy.

So after all that, my point is, you should have a look at IFTTT.com, and think about whether there is some trigger you could use to alert you so you don't miss something.  Or maybe set up a trigger so when your most important client sends you a message, that lamp does turn on.  Why not?  How much is it worth to make them happy?  Also, that WeMo system has a motion detector, so you could set IFTTT up to text you when someone trips that motion sensor.

I've actually thought about this topic quite a lot over the last few years, after noticing that a lot of the reason that organizations struggle with change because they let processes stagnate for years regardless of changes in conditions.  So I've always wanted a tool that would let me input the conditions that affected some business decision, and once those conditions change, they tell me to re-evaluate the conditions and update my processes.  That's what's exciting about IFTTT, because as they add more and more of these trigger channels, the tool I want so badly gets closer and closer to fruition.

So that's why I say IFTTT is a lean-enabling tool.  It lets you focus on other things, but makes sure you don't miss out on something important.