what's fascinating about vermont is that it's got a very democratic legislature overall but there's also a very deep libertarian democratic bent which says we cannot force things on people because that's not what we do and every time they appoint someone and say look what we'd really like to do is to say you cannot sell a house unless you have an energy audit and i talked to the people in those groups who are representing the bank and the real estate side of things and they say you can't do that it'll ruin the sale and my response was when i sell a house and i've sold two houses i've lived in houses and sold them i just made a number up what i was asking for it's not like there was a calculation i went through i've lived in it for seven years i'm expecting this return and if i don't get this i'm an unhappy puppy i just make up a number right so add five hundred to that number and you've got a professional bpi for four hundred whatever it is a professional building performance institute professional giving you the lowdown on your house before you sell it and that gives the buyer something to bargain with and it gives the seller something to bargain with the seller can say look i know that this is wrong with this house and i'll fix these things before i sell it to you because i know i can do it well and cheaply or whatever or i'll take my price down by what the difference is but i'm making the price up anyway so if you're making the price up and you say i bought this house for two hundred thousand and i wanna sell it for two hundred and sixty thousand and then you get the audit and you know that it needs thirty thousand worth of work to really be energy efficient in a way that someone would be happy with it then you can just say okay i'm asking two hundred and ninety right it's that we're making these numbers up it's complete fiction and the banker was like people still not go for it he happens to be a neighbor of mine very nice guy david adams works at the vermont federal housing agency and the real estate people don't want it for reasons that i can't possibly fathom because it only gives them something to sell about the house so what we're gonna talk about from now on is instead of why the real estate people don't want it what all the benefits are so if we talk about how we need to know what our housing stock is like and we need to make sure our homes are safe and durable and durable and we're gonna and you know and then we make it a baseline for people to say when they're buying a house well i wanna know what's the building performance like people should know what building performance is and people don't know what building performance is yeah and something that the vermont green house alliance which is a trade group that's also got members from all different branches is working on is trying to push from the appraisal side to say look if you have a house that's really energy efficient there's a provision in the appraisal rules that say if it's really super efficient then it's not like any house on the market and you can call it a special case if you can label your house a special case then they have to bring in an expert in that case for instance you have a horse farm that you're selling you can't just get joe nice guy over here appraiser who's never appraised a horse farm before you have a right as a person who's selling that to go to the bank and say i'm selling a horse farm i need an appraiser who understands the valuation of a horse farm and they get someone who's had that experience well if you have a house that uses one hundred and ten of the energy that normal house uses you have a special case and you can argue that to the bank and say look that was real estate agent i need a special appraiser for this because my house is unlike any other house and it will come around there are new rules coming up in the appraisals and i might touch on that later if we get back to it but why don't i turn it over to all right i think we might as well get started we may get some more people i don't know if we have to introduce chris because he's got his credentials up there which is nice cause if they can memorize anything but the jericho energy task force meets once a month generally on the second thursday of the month but just to confuse people this month we're doing the second tuesday we're a task force which means that people can come or not come whatever they want we work on a whole slew of things but one of the things we'd like to do is bring some public presentations to educate people we've also done buttonedup workshops we've got the home energy makeover trailer to the underhill harvest market and today we bring you chris west if anyone has any questions about the task force feel free to contact me afterwards if i'm not in a run eating stupor and i'll leave my stupor til afterwards so my name is chris west i am a passive house consultant i have a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering that i got living in the netherlands and i worked as a mechanical engineer at the bachelor's level in the netherlands teaching and also doing energy audits on schools and i'm going to give you tonight a basis a basic understanding of what passive house is because a lot of people have heard the name it's really if you're interested at all energy efficiency it is the most energy efficient building standard in the world and it's all based on building science in the last fifteen years we've had huge advances in building science and building energy science and we can using the application of modern building science we can build houses that use almost no energy to heat and cool i like this slide like starting off with it because people usually don't have a good understanding of what the energy mix is in america this is from architecture two thousand and thirty which is a group that's pushing for energy efficiency in buildings and what we see in this graph is us energy consumption by sector and what's important about this is this orange slice right here the two slices together give you the amount of energy that we've put into our buildings together and it's about forty nine of the energy that we use goes into our buildings the smaller slice this fifty five is the energy we put into actually building our buildings and the four hundred and thirty five is the energy we used to sustain them after they're built so when you think about where we're putting our efficiency things like leed in the national green building standard are very into sourcing locally and doing all of that but if you look at the proportion that that actually saves if you're going to look for savings in energy that is only forty five of all the energy we used while the building operations heating cooling and other things like that is four hundred and thirty five so if we can cut down on the energy that our buildings use we have a much bigger influence on overall energy use the vermont state comprehensive energy plan which the vermont state legislature passed a number of years ago says that by two thousand and thirty one hundred of the new homes that are built somewhere between one thousand and three thousand depending on the year should be net zero houses thirty of all new homes built by two thousand and twenty need to be net zero to fulfill the requirements of the comprehensive energy plan and a lot of people have and i run into this every day in my normal business have ideas about what net zero is okay i'm gonna tell you what net zero is net zero means that your house uses a certain amount of energy and you have a certain amount of renewable energies that covers the amount of energy your house uses that means that you can have a huge wasteful horrible house and have a field of solar panels and you have a net zero house that's the truth because it's all about balancing it out however the other path is to make a super energy efficient house put a lot of money into building a house that's really energy efficient and have a couple of panels to get to your net zero and this is the path that we're working on ph is just my abbreviation for passive house this is something i learned when i was in the netherlands it's called the energy triangle and it's based on the recycling triangle which is reuse reduce reuse recycle you reduce first right stop using stuff and then reuse what you can before you recycle and the last of it you put it back into the system and they churn it around and then make it into something we can use again but the third part always uses more energy than just not using in the first place or using it without recycling it so the energy triangle says the first thing we do is we reduce the load that we have and the second thing we do is we use renewables to take care of as much of whatever the first one couldn't get rid of and then if we can't completely fulfill the requirement that that load is with renewables then we use fossil fuels as sparingly as possible passive house now a lot of people confuse passive house with passive solar and a lot of people who have been talking about the introduction of passive house which came to the united states in about two thousand and five started in one thousand nine hundred and ninety five in germany say oh passive house i've heard of that that's where you have a lot of windows in the south no actually that's passive solar and passive solar is something that was developed and designed in the 1960s and 70s and it was a great thing for what it was at the time but it's not a passive house passive house does use passive solar heat gain and that's really important but it's not the main part of it now passive house has become more and more a part of the vernacular of building industry in america and only the eight years that it's been here it is now the target for the department of energy the department of energy says okay we're trying to be like passive house and the journal of light construction when they have someone talking about air sealing in the journal of light construction when they're talking about insulation they said well we're not gonna go as far as passive house but that word is still there passive house is still the gold standard the green building advisor which is something it's an industry website that with lots of blogs about how to build stuff and i recommend it highly if you're interested in doing something to your house go to the green building advisor look it up see what the experts are talking about they poopooed passive house in the beginning and now they're always referencing it even if they're saying it stinks because of this they're still talking about it bad publicity is still publicity better building by design i started going to better building by design do you all know about that this is a yearly conference that efficiency vermont puts on for building industry members builders architects et cetera at the sheraton in burlington in february and i went the first year we just set up the passive house alliance the first year before we set up the passive house alliance so i went there and i was like well passive house and people were like yeah i've heard of passive house a little bit of this two years ago it was like okay we've got a table we got the passive house alliance which is a group of passive house consultants and other people interested in passive house and every now and then in one of the sessions you'd hear someone say passive house this last year every session that was talking about building energy talked about passive house it is what we're trying to get to so even people don't like it are talking about passive house oh that passive house there's even a group who decided to call their thing an active house which is beautiful right on because you're pushing against passive house wonderful so when we're talking about building energy standards in america and in vermont we really have to just know what the playing field is before we can understand where passive house fits into it so as a part of the americans for recovery act the arra money that vermont got and we got something like ninety million we had to as a state implement a building code that is based on energy vermont does not have a building code you can write on a napkin what you want your house to look like you can go to the jericho town hall you can register that as your house and you can build it yourself you need a plumber who's registered licensed plumbing and your licensed electrician you don't need an architect you don't need a builder you just need a home depot card with enough credit to buy the stuff and go and get it and build it yourself allowed until arra until we took that money and we said to them okay we'll implement a building standard and we now have what's called the rbes and that's the residential building energy standard it's tied to something called the international energy commission code which is the minimum that you can build to and that's an r i'm gonna be using rvalues you all know what an rvalue is rvalue is the resistance to heat passing through a wall a wall a twobyfour wall filled with fiberglass in between is about an r11 so that's the standard a lot of people have just a standard twobyfour wall with some fiberglass in the middle and that's an r11 so the rbes says an r20 wall r40 in the roof two inches of foam under the slab in that and four air changes per hour i'll explain that in a minute what that means so that's what they have to build to even though until recently it was not required that the certificate saying that you built that was in anyway filed anywhere but we've been working on that that was passed in the last legislative session the next step down is energy star so if you build an rbes house 2000squarefoot house you're probably spending three thousand five hundred a year to heat that house pretty standard and if you built it with how we were building before the rbes you're probably spending four thousand four thousand five hundred a year to heat that house energy star is a department of energy program it makes a house that's thirty more efficient than code and that means slightly better walls slightly better roof actually the air changes five air changes per hour instead of four which is kind of odd but it is thirty more efficient you also have to buy all energy star appliances inside all cfls compact fluorescent light lamps then we have the building america which is a program that the department of energy uses to showcase new building energy standards that will then be rolled into the next version of energy star so it's kinda like okay we're gonna do whatever we think is the next thing and in two years we'll just make energy star forty and that'll have some of the stuff we did in building america and then we have passive house so building ventilators fifteen more efficient than that but passive house is ninety more efficient than the rbes and than your vermont energy code and costs approximately fifteen more to make i'm gonna be showing a number of graphs during this presentation all of these graphs are based on actual data from efficiency vermont that's the beauty of efficiency vermont efficiency vermont is an amazing resource they have a lot of data they've collected from houses and how they work we have actual realtime data on a hundred houses in vermont something like that with monitoring systems so we can say with certainty that if we're gonna look at a vermont baseline which is that house that they were building before they adopted the federally required rbes that it was using this much heating see heating is the red water heating is the green ventilation is orange cooling is the blue which in vermont is almost nonexistent and you have lights and appliances on the top we have a wonderful environment for cooling in vermont because you have these 85degree days you have the 65degree nights and you just open up your windows and it cools your house off and you close them up in the daytime that's called night flushing and it really works here there are places in the country that that doesn't work and we're just very thankful for that but you can see here i've got rbes vermont energy code i've got vermont energy code plus which is adding a little more rvalue and then you have energy star there and then you have passive house and what you notice with all of these is what's being reduced in general is that red bit we're cutting down on the heating load there is in the passive house is green but it gets very small at the end because passive house also likes to put passive solar hot water up and that cuts down or a heat pump water heater which uses about fifteen of the energy of a regular water heater and that's how we can get that water heating demand down people are still using the same amount of water but it's the amount of energy you have to put in to get that water so how does passive house get from this rbes right this what i considered to be a horrible wasteful thing but is the minimum energy standard you have to use in the state well let's talk about the history of houses first just a second in the 19th century and before the 19th century we built houses to keep the weather out that was pretty much it you wanted the rain outside you didn't want the rain inside so they built houses that kept the weather out for the most part right cause you had these big gaps that sometimes rain got in sometimes snow got in but in general the weather was outside and you built a big fireplace in the middle of the house and you stoke that with lots and lots of wood and even with that you still had your outside clothes on inside to stay warm enough and be comfortable then came along the 20th century and what did the 20th century bring us well it brought us a lot of machines and it brought us cheap oil which is basically what we've been running on as a country for a hundred plus years so we have all these new machines these boilers these hydronic systems forced hot air that are not efficient because they don't have to be cause fuel oil was fifteen cents a gallon twenty cents a gallon and we can waste it and who cares there was no concept of putting out too much co2 or co or any of the other pollutants and i don't focus on global warming in this presentation because although i personally think it's very important to cut down on our emissions of these gases it's not that important to the story so in the 20th century we didn't fix the shell we didn't add insulation to any great effect until the 1970s and 80s which is not that long ago speaking just historically and we just have these honking machines that they're oversized because the plumber doesn't wanna get called back that hvac person doesn't wanna get called back and say oh my house is cold so they make it one hundred and fifty more powerful than it has to be so you're just burning a lot more but who cares it's really cheap now we're in the 21st century in the 21st century they've really gotten into the science of how buildings work and i'm about to give you the story of what that is cause this is this one person with really thick walls capturing solar heat gains and using a couple of small but very efficient mechanical systems a lot of these standards that you hear about leed in the national green building standard they're really not focused on energy leed is about fifteen interested in energy but more importantly they're pages and pages and pages and pages of these checklists very complex really hard to get through passive house is simple there are four things you have to hit on passive house you have a maximum heating load you have a maximum cooling load like i said in vermont is not such a big deal you have a maximum total energy demand and that source means that the energy they have to put in at the fuel plant the coal plant that sends you that fuel that electricity or in saudi arabia what energy it takes to pump that out ship it here and put it in so the source energy that's used and airtightness in the passive house we start by making the envelope really really good as far as a thermal transmittance okay there are three ways that a house loses energy it loses it through conductance conductance is the heat that goes through a material and out into the cold heat now i'm gonna ask the question does heat rise no no hot air hot air rises heat goes from hot to cold if you're in a warm room and it's colder below you the heat is going down only hot air rises right so when we're dealing about with trying to cut down on the conductive losses we make very thick walls there are two other losses one is a ventilation loss which is the air that you purposely bring into your house to bring fresh air into your house there's a loss there because you're bringing in cold air and then you have the real demon the infiltration loss and infiltration is the uncontrolled ventilation of your house through gaps in your house somewhere around the windows at the soffits at gaps where this sill plate sits on top of your foundation they're all over the place and the older the house the leakier the house so the first thing we're attacking is that conductive loss and in vermont because we're in one of the coldest climates in america we're in climate zone six cold and humid climate we need an r50 to r60 wall r80 to r100 ceiling and r50 to r60 under the slab now why do i have the other numbers here because it really depends on your sighting of the house and how much solar heat gain you get as to what you need the size of the house and those things all have an effect the passive house system is not proscriptive i cannot say to you build a house with these walls and you'll have a passive house because there are too many factors involved when you get to a super energy efficient house a house that uses almost nothing to heat every loss every gain has to be taken into account high performance windows windows with a uvalue of sixteen or less with a high solar heat gain coefficient if you were to go to home depot right now and buy windows andersen super lowe windows they have a uvalue of twenty nine which is almost double what you need as a requirement for the passive house and they have a solar heat gain coefficient that means the amount of heat that gets through the window into your house is thirty six or thirty nine those windows are not designed for vermont those windows are designed for georgia where you wanna keep the heat the warmth of that heat from the sun out of your house we look for in the passive house we look for five or higher on the solar heat gain coefficient and there are companies that can give you six and sixty one i've even seen as high as sixty four eliminate thermal bridging i work with a contractor who does energy audits and we walk around the thermal imaging camera and what you see here is a picture of a thermal image of a house in a cold day what we're seeing here is the nice warmth inside the red is warm so the inside is nice and warm they're losing a lot through the windows cause windows in general are not very good thermally but these ribs here those are actually the wood studs the wood studs are conducting heat from inside the house outside the house just like the fins on the lawnmower are cooling the lawnmower off by letting that surface area radiate a lot of houses have thermal bridging and in passive house we need to eliminate that thermal bridging in order to get to a super energy efficient house airtightness i'm gonna be throwing out this term air changes per hour and what does that mean i said that the rbes has a four air changes per hour at fifty pascals that's ach50 fifty pascals is the amount of pressure that a twenty two twelve mile per hour wind blows against your house so when it's zero degrees outside and it's sixty eight or seventy degrees inside your house and it's blowing twenty two twelve miles per hour against your house if you have a house that's ach4 that means every fifteen minutes all of the air that your furnace had worked really hard to heat up has been blown out of your house and is now outside and you've got a whole bunch of new fresh freezing cold air in your house that your furnace has to heat and then fifteen minutes later it's happened all over again so one of the things that we try to do if you have that situation four air changes per hour five ten i've seen more then you are heating the outside and you need a really big furnace to keep heating that cold air that's coming into your house passive house has a minimum requirement for new buildings this is a mall right now i'm talking about new buildings of six air changes per hour at fifty pascals that's less than one an hour that means that every hour and a half or hour and twenty minutes that fresh air has been blown in that cold fresh air has been blown through the gaps in your house so you need a much smaller heat source to heat that back up when you get a super energy efficient house you are heating your house internal heat gains your refrigerator your washing machine your television all of your electronics your light bulbs everything your dog everything that you have in that house that's giving off heat is a heat source every one of us gives off a hundred watts of heat at rest if you're jumping around you can give off more but you're putting off as much as a hundred watt light bulb now we're all old enough to remember what a hundred watt light bulb is so there are certainly children in school who don't but every one of us is like a hundred watt light bulb and we used to use those in the incubation for the chicks to warm them up right so when you get a super insulated house every one of these people is giving off a hundred watts i have houses that i've helped design that if you invite fifteen friends over you're heating your house we orient our houses and we get those high solar heat gain windows so that when the sun is up in the winter and we wanna capture it we can hold those solar heat gain so more windows in the south not crazy not greenhouse number but more windows in the south fewer on the east and the west and almost none in the north small picture windows so that you're not stuck in a room with no light but not big windows if you wanna do that you can you can still build a super energy efficient house it just won't hit the passive house standard it'll be a little worse than the passive house standard i called them near passive house and i love near passive house houses because if you're gonna try to hit passive house standard and just not make it you still have a super energy efficient house we wanna make sure that when your house is really wellheated by the sun in the winter it's not overheating in the summer so we use things like overhangs and shading to make sure that your house doesn't overheat there's a maximum overheating of twelve that means that something like eight or nine days in the summer your house can go over seventy seven degrees according to passive house standard when we make a house really really tight i said six air changes per hour so everybody says well wait a second i'm getting that fresh air in my house if i stopped that fresh air coming in isn't it gonna be sick aren't i gonna not have enough oxygen and the answer is if you don't bring the air in on purpose yes but what we have is a new technology it's like twenty years old it's called a heat recovery ventilation system and what heat recovery ventilation system does is it has a heat exchanger in it and in that heat exchanger are it's kind of a bunch of straws that pass each other and it sucks the warm stale air out of the house and sucks the cold fresh air and it passes them along each other so that the heat from the stale air is transferred to the colder coming in and comes into your house fresh but warmed now it's not heated to the seventy degrees you want in your house but some of these european systems are eighty five to ninety efficient which means that if i have a house and it's zero degrees outside and it's seven degrees inside my heat recovery ventilation system is bringing in cold fresh air at fifty eight to sixty degrees and then my heat pump my heating system heats from sixty to seventy instead of from zero to seventy and that is key and when you put all of these things together including a very small heat source in our environment here in vermont because it's just too cold to do without it you have a super insulated house so the passive house concept heat recovery ventilation that uses almost no energy in and of itself triple glazed windows with a thermally broken window frame so that the whole window has an rvalue of seven or better we use materials with lowembodied energy now you can build a passive house with lots of foam either the blue boards that you see at lowe's or with polyiso or any of these foam products the thing about foams is that they take a lot of energy to make so you're using a lot of energy to make them and part of the whole passive house concept is to use as little energy as possible to make your house and to run your house so we prefer natural products if possible and where we can use them we like cellulose which is recycled newspapers we like rock wool which is recycled slag from the steel process it's a leftover from the steel process we like using foam underground below grade we like using extruded sorry expanded polystyrene which is what we know as styrofoam the blue board is something called extruded polystyrene and it has an enormous global warming potential which means that the gases that it gives off are bad for the environment and it takes a lot of energy to make foams where you must and we try to use natural products when we can short runs for your domestic hot water which means when we design a house we want all the bathrooms and kitchens pretty much near each other so you don't go from here all the way to here in your house and lose all that heat so you have to run your hot water longer and we try to keep our houses compactly designed that is a big deal it doesn't have to be small you can build an eight thousand square foot while you'd want to an eight thousand square foot passive house because it's about how many once again just to run back it's about the load per square foot per year as long as you hit that you have a passive house but the passive house community is also into less is more so we like to make small houses if we can and in europe you have a family of four living very happily in one thousand two hundred square feet and thinking they have a lot of room and in america that same family has a feeling they need three thousand two hundred square feet so we're trying to get people to design houses and also houses that are not crazy designs with a lot of bumps out here and there because every time you have a change in geometry every time you have a dormer sticking out you have a potential for a thermal bridge what do we get when we do all this we have a ninety reduction in heating and cooling compared to the vermont code we have a seventy to eighty reduction in our total energy demand superior indoor air quality i'll explain that in a minute occupant comfort this is a big one when you are in your normal vermont vernacular house i live in a one thousand nine hundred and seventy raised ranch the feeling of comfort changes from when you're standing in the middle of the room to when you walk towards the window the closer you get to the outside wall the colder it gets that's why we put our radiators under our windows on our outside walls that means that the wall in the middle of your house is actually radiating heat that's a more comfortable level than your outside wall which is actually taking heat from you in a passive house we strive to have all six sides of the room you're in now this room has more than six sides but in general sixsided rooms that they're all radiating the same temperature to you and we found through studies that people are comfortable at a lower set temperature if all the surfaces are radiating the same temperature we can heat our houses to sixty eight degrees and that's not cold we don't need it at seventy two because you're not getting this change in temperature as you move away from the center wall lower annual energy costs hello and smaller carbon footprint so a lot of people who've heard about passive house say it's really expensive and what we found in vermont cause there have been eight built in vermont and there are four more that are in the process of getting certified and there are like seven or eight almost passive houses that they cost between ten and fifty to build brand new retrofits they're expensive they're about thirty of the valued house and i'll get into that later but what we found interestingly enough is that it doesn't cost the outofpocket cost for a passive house is not more from day one than building a code house and when you build a passive house for that six air changes per hour you have to have a builder who builds it so well that you have a much higher quality construction you're not gonna have water infiltration into the house where you've thought about if moisture gets in how it gets back out where you've thought about that airtightness and when you get to that point where you need that airtightness then you get a house that has a much longer life span than a standard house more durable and then we have people who say yeah but i gotta have my marble kitchen top well what's the payback on a marble kitchen top people always saying how quickly is my investment in passive house paid back well what are you investing in what are you interested in this is actual data from a project team in vermont this is the code house and what the mortgage would have been and the energy costs and this is a almost passive house actually it's not a passive house and what the energy costs were and what the extra mortgage was and it shows that the out of pocket from day one is exactly the same and as soon as the energy that you're using goes up in price then because your passive house is using ninety less than that house your incremental increase in cost is smaller so you're basically making money from day one i'm gonna give you a case study so you understand the history in vermont this is the first passive house that's ever built in vermont this is a habitat for humanity house that is built in charlotte it's one thousand and fifty square feet on the inside it's one thousand two hundred square feet on the outside just cause you have 16inch walls that's what happens when you're building a passive house to get that r40 fifty sixty outside wall right here next to this couch is the only heating source in the whole house it's a airtoair heat pump which means that it doesn't have any holes in the ground it's just a suitcasesized unit outside and if you've ever been in a hotel and you've seen those kind of things on the wall some people call it wallboard that's the inside unit so the air's blowing out into that room right there and i'll bring that back up in a minute a passive house can look like anything this is a vermont vernacular house you can also make it look like a contemporary house here's the south elevation not a greenhouse it's not only windows this is the west elevation the east elevation and the north elevation you'll notice the north elevation has small windows this is the actual house you see it's got solar domestic hot water panels on the top nice looking house doesn't look crazy these are the mechanicals for the house except for the heat pump this is the heat recovery ventilation system this is a ground source system that actually preheats the air before it gets in during the winter so that the core doesn't freeze this is the solar hot water tank and this is the backup because vermont does not have enough sun in the winter we have very cold winters to give you all of your hot water through that system people were worried that because we're only putting heat into this room without any distribution system or ductworks that this room up here would be cold but what we found and this chart shows it what we found is that that heat recovery ventilation system is so efficient eighty five efficient that it's actually taking the heat from that room and blowing it up into the first bedroom in passive house we use something called whole house ventilation which is where we blow fresh air into our living spaces and we extract air from our moist spaces that's our kitchens our bathrooms and our mudrooms and what that means is that we're actually drawing air through the house the whole time and it gives a nice fresh air all the way through and what we have here is the heat pump in kilowatt hours that outside temperature and the temperatures in the rooms now this is actual data from this house from december of two thousand and eleven and we now have data that has been collected on this house for almost two years and it is still operating this way what you're noticing first of all is that that red line is all over the place and if you were living in a code house you'd expect these things which are the inside temperatures to be following that because it gets cold and your house loses heat and your thermostat says turn my furnace on and it turns the furnace on and brings the heat back up and then it all goes away and it goes back up so you get this up and down up and down on the inside temperature so the first thing you noticed is that the temperatures inside this house are very even the outside temperature is fluctuating wildly we're down here we're going from forty degrees down to twelve degrees the inside temperature is barely changing at all the other thing we'll notice is that this orange dot is the room that has that heat pump blowing that warm air in the blue diamond at the bottom is the furthest upstairs bedroom there's no heat in this bedroom the only heat is what that hrv is going back into the house throughout the house the temperature differential between the warmest room and the coldest room is four degrees so it's seventy two in that living room and it's sixty eight in that bedroom without any distribution ducts except for the hrv how's the indoor air quality very important question first of all about this graph you need to know that the limit for air quality is one thousand two hundred parts per million this maxes out at five hundred and eighty five parts per million so if we were to make this graph show it to where the actual limit is for safe air we'd be up by the ceiling outdoor air has four hundred and fifty parts per million co2 so this graph is showing except for some outliers here when there's some cooking done and you can see when people cook in these because the indoor air quality meters can see the rise in the volatile organic compounds that the indoor air quality is hovering around five hundred and fifty parts per million showing that the indoor air quality in this house is better than any house in vermont that was built to any other standard when you go into your bedroom at night in your standard house you close the door if you had a co2 meter when you woke up sometimes you're hovering around two thousand which is dangerous it's not gonna kill you but it will make you groggy and it will make you lethargic and our kids have to suffer this too what does it cost for this person who's living in this house now this is a habitat house like i said it was given to this woman she has a mortgage on it as well which is given to her she has herself and two teenage children living there and her monthly utility cost in january was one hundred and thirty two now i have to explain something about that that is her total electric bill she only used electricity that is her heating her hot water her cooking her televisions her computers the xbox is for both of the children and lighting average through the year she's spending sixty seven a year for everything sixty seven a month through the year if you see when they break this out that the heating is only thirteen or fourteen of this they're spending about twenty a month to heat this house on average in vermont for a family of three that is what passive house can do this is a second home this is in norwich this is not being lived in for yearround the people come up in the weekends this is more data you recognize this graph now there's no heating system on in this house this house is only being heated by the sun at this particular time here's the outside ambient air temperature here are the inside air temperatures the hrv is not even on see the hrv is not even running it it didn't get below fifty degrees with no heat on the only thing heating this house at this particular moment is the sun on the coldest day in january of last year brand new data so when we look at the energy that houses are using this is more of that data that efficiency vermont has given us this is actual data from actual houses in vermont the first five are energy star houses the last two are passive houses actually this is a passive house and this is a near passive house and you'll notice immediately that the passive house is using a lot less of everything certainly a lot less heating that red bit why however is that so high why is this one using three times the heating energy of that it happens that that family is being lived in by the family that lives there was from the sudan and they'd like to keep their house at ninety degrees so they're keeping their house at ninety degrees yes they're spending four times what this family who was keeping their house at sixty eight degrees is but that's still only sixty a month to heat their house at ninety degrees that's actually this house here that's where the sudanese family lives that's the passive house so peter schneider who's given me all this data and who works for efficiency vermont built this as an experiment this is a passive house this is ten less worse than a passive house and that's fifteen worse than a passive house he just wanted to see what he could do this is a three thousand two hundred square foot passive house in stowe and these slides are just to show you the variety of what a passive house can look like it doesn't have to look like anything you can decide what it looks like you can make something with all kinds of dormers and wings and everything a passive house it'll just take a lot more effort to get there not my favorite house i'm not very fond of the look but it's on piers they decided that they didn't wanna build it with a basement or a slab or anything so in conclusion with passive house you get a high quality home a healthy living environment slightly more expensive to build payback in three to seven years depending on the fuel you're tracking and we're expecting a high resale value i'm saying expecting cause nobody has built a spec passive house a spec is it's when someone builds a house puts on the market and lets it sell people are as clients having these houses built and they're moving in and they're living there so we don't have any houses that have been been sold in the open market and net zero energy is easiest to reach by using the passive house standard so that's the first presentation i don't wanna lull you all with my sonorous tones into too deep a stupor passive yeah into a stupor but i did i know that a lot of people have houses and they wanna know what it takes to make a house that you already have into a passive house now my house isn't a passive house you see all that four hundred and seventy five with retrofits it's actually more like eight kilobtus per square foot per year and i got mine to something on the order of twelve so it's three times as bad as a passive house but i did get my house from one hundred and ten thousand btu per hour heating system to twenty four thousand btus per hour so i've reduced my load by seventy five so when i bought this house four years ago i have these two garages those two garages are under my bedrooms the first winter we had frozen feet whenever we walked from the conditioned space below over to our bedrooms now we like our bedrooms a little chilly but we didn't like them that chilly so i have a northwest orientation with the ridge which means i have eastwest orientation with the main access for my building exactly the wrong orientation i have a heated garage it was wonderful it went from my furnace i had a hydronic heating or baseboard heating it went into my daughter's room then into this garage and then in my son's room and then into my bedroom and then back into the garage and then into my bathroom by the time that circuit got to the bathroom there was no heat left in it i was heating the outside literally now you all know what a raised ranch is right you've got about two to three feet of cinder block wall on the bottom you've got a walkout basement which is where the garage is and then it's all frame going up when i moved in it was originally singlepane windows and i just moved here from the netherlands where they have pretty good windows and i said to the local contractor whose name i will not divulge because i don't think that he deserves to be beat up about this cause he just didn't know any better i said what are the best windows you can find me and he said oh andersen super lowe they're the best thing around so i said well you're the expert i just moved here i've been living in europe for ten years get them for me and put them in cause they're better than single pane and he did and it costed me fifteen thousand which is what a set of windows would cost you and as soon as i finished having them installed i took the passive house course and i fell over dead cause i was like oh for seven thousand more dollars i could have had the best windows in the world triple glazed with a thermally broken frame the whole thing but didn't okay so in my renovation plan i decided i'm not gonna replace these windows i just bought i'm just gonna live with the fact that i have these windows there are two bed downsides to these windows they're double hung so that they're very leaky so i can't make that air changes of point now with the retrofits it's one air change per hour instead of six but i can't hit that the other thing is that they have a horrible solar heat gain coefficient that three they have an uvalue of twenty nine which is like rvalue of three and okay it has a couple of good things going on it has some fiberglass in the walls the twobyfour walls now as a person studying auditing i have learned that you cannot install fiberglass so that you get the number rated on the package the package says rvalue of thirty three per inch but if you go like that to fiberglass it's got an rvalue of one or two and who doesn't do that with fiberglass and if you do that with fiberglass and then try to pull it apart you're still not doing it no one even the best installers cannot install fiberglass to the rating it's given in the factory impossible they even have grades of insulation installation one two and three where one is the best and three is the worst and they even say in some of the standards you cannot get fiberglass to class one installation it's impossible so i'm saying that i've got an r11 wall but i know that it's really like an r7 or eight best case scenario no insulation on the cinder block wall above or below grade no insulation on my slab and twelve inches of blowin cellulose in the attic but my top plates are completely unsealed so as my hot air rises right as we're talking about that as my hot air rises it hits the ceiling in my roof goes through the holes and gaps in my ceiling goes through my insulation making it absolutely worthless creating a negative pressure plane sucking cold air through the holes in the bottom of my house just creating this convective current which is just spilling energy out of my house what do i have i've got a 30yearold oil burner that was about eighty efficient i was using between five hundred and seven hundred gallons of oil and three cords of wood to heat that house when i first moved there i said i've been living in a house that always had natural gas cause i lived in a city and i didn't really feel like heating with wood and then i got the oil bill because i used a tank a month and i was like wait a second this stuff costs three a gallon and okay i'm gonna learn how to stoke wood in my wood stove and i did and i went through seven hundred gallons of oil and three cords of wood and i learned that you spend an hour a day tending a fire when you have a wood stove at home and that's life and i got used to it i even like it now it's kind of cool but at the beginning i was like so i have one bathroom fan that you know not continuous but i can turn it on to one hundred and twenty cfm cfm is cubic feet per minute in the initial blower door test which i've actually done at your house and i've done it at her house and i actually recommend that anyone who's interested in doing any upgrades to your house first have a professional come and do a real audit with a blower door test was eight hundred and twenty five air changes per hour that means with a twenty two twelve mile per hour wind and zero degree air outside and sixty eight to seventy two degree air inside my house every seven minutes my furnace had to turn on to reheat the air that was just blown into my house now that does mean however that if it's a forty mile per hour wind that's happening a lot faster so vermont is a climate zone six cold humid with seven thousand two hundred heating degree days heating degree days are based on the amount of time and the number of degrees that it is below sixty eight degrees that you have to heat for so what do i have to do so i took the class the chpc that's the certified passive house it's actually phc that's a spelling error is a certified passive house consultant test and i learned that these things stink never buy them talk to me first i will get you more expensive but awesome windows so what was i gonna do first thing i was going to remove the garage i was gonna frame the garage out i was gonna add a sixinch sweater of polyiso foam to the outside now why polyiso polyisocyanurate board is got a very high rvalue and you can buy used very cheaply which means that i'm saving it from going into a landfill i'm not causing them to make more for me and i'm getting a high rvalue i found a guy who told the guy who sent it over i got all of my insulation external insulation for this job for four thousand seven hundred that's not the cost the cost was all the work that had to be done i did a modified chainsaw retrofit which means that i was trying to eliminate thermal bridging where your ceiling is if you have a flat ceiling a cathedral ceiling is different your twobyfour's running along like this and you have a top plate and then you have the ceiling joist that goes like that and actually sticks out to make your eave well this bit that sticks out that's actually a fin allowing heat to go up and out of your house and i want to eliminate that so i cut a bit out and made sure that when i put that six inches of insulation in it made a continuous insulation layer with the cellulose in my attic i'm also adding seven twelve inches of rock wool downstairs on the inside because you have that bump out with the cinder block wall and i decided i just wanted to fill that up so after that insulation on the outside i wanted to airseal the whole house i had a bay window on the front which was a horrible leaky thing that was just hemorrhaging air and if i'm gonna put six inches onto my house then suddenly that bay window it's got this really weird detail how do i have six inches sticking out but the window starts here how do i actually make that work in the new i just decided to rip it out i ripped my oil burner out the other day a guy came and took my oil tank away i have pictures of it and i was like dancing it was one of my happiest days ever i bought myself a really expensive but very good hrv it costs about five thousand five hundred and i'm doing the installation myself and my budget is seventy thousand my sorry hrv heat recovery ventilation that was that thing that passes the heat over is that the same thing as an air exchanger an air exchanger unit does not have to have heat recovery in it there are air exchangers that just bring the cold air in and take the warm air out and don't do a heat transfer so that's why we have heat recovery ventilation hrv and entropy recovery ventilation erv which also brings the humidity and keeps the humidity between the two places balanced i don't like that we live in a very humid environment i don't wanna bring that humidity into my house i prefer an hrv so i'm not replacing my windows i already did it i got twenty years with these stupid windows unless some rich relative that i don't know dies i'm stuck with em so the first thing i did was get rid of the garage so here are the guys i hired a local contractor who i'd never hire again doesn't that happen you hire a contractor and you say boy we're gonna do this project isn't it gonna be great and then you just at the end you're like here's the money i'm not gonna argue about it but i never wanna see you again not a bad guy he just doesn't know any better so you saw at the very beginning of the thing there's my garage there's my garage gone he didn't even know we shouldn't be using tyvek anymore if you build a house and someone says let's put tyvek on the outside and make sure that when we put the fiberglass in the wall make sure you put a thing of poly of that clear plastic on the inside that's death to a wall what you're doing is you're ensuring that any moisture that gets trapped in that wall never gets out and if we're sheathing our houses with osb oriented strand board that's predigested wood which means as soon as it gets wet it turns to mush you've seen it if you leave that stuff out in the rain a week later you can just squeeze the water out of it as soon as the epoxy that's holding it together is gone it's worthless we are now building houses that have what we call double vapor open walls we allow the moisture to get in when it has to not moisture vapor what's the difference moisture is droplets that you can actually see on the surface of something vapor there's vapor in this room that's just gaseous water gaseous water can move into the wall and move out of the wall as long as it doesn't get to the point where the dew point is met inside the wall you have no problem here's the insulation so it's three thousand nine hundred for the entire project but it was five hundred for delivery so there's your four thousand five hundred what do you do here's the modified chainsaw so here's my wall coming up and here's my ceiling joist coming out and that's my roof joist my truss my it's actually gusset this is called a gusset and so this is a twobyfour coming out that way and i didn't want the insulation that i was gonna have here i wanted it to attach to this installation so i have a complete insulation wrapped around the house i don't have this and then a break and then that cause that point will allow moisture to i mean heat to get out so this is my thumb that's my mouth this is what i did to my joist my joist comes out this is the house there's the tyvek and now what i'm doing is i'm cutting out this mouth so i can shove the insulation up here and i'm gonna have other insulation blowin cellulose is gonna meet it right here so there's no point at which this piece of wood that is then sticking out is going directly to the wood that's in my ceiling causing that thermal bridge and allowing heat to escape that way and here you see just the mouths that i cut and here's the osb i put on the inside so that i could blow insulation so you could actually say well that's a thermal bridge and you're right but it's this thick and the thermal bridging is insignificant so air sealing in the attic you can see here my contractor jim bradley from caleb construction who isn't someone who i sent away after i hired him he's the best contractor i've ever seen honest to a fault does the best work i've ever seen his crew is great this is all the spray foam that he did against that osb that you just saw giving me an rvalue here then he's then going to go ahead and fill that with cellulose and not a little bit of sorry this is my nephew i'm sorry i lost that that's my son yeah there you go i blew twenty four inches of cellulose into my attic i wanted thirty but twenty four is enough that gives me an r88 up there and because i had him foam all the top plates and all the recess lights all that heat is staying in my house instead of going up and through my cellulose making it worthless what's my son doing here i had an attached deck attached deck is a you have your band joist going around your house right that your floor membranes are sitting on top of and then to make a deck they just stick a plate to the side that they call ledger board and that is directly attached to my band joist that is the floor joist going around the perimeter of the house that's a great place for water to get into and to rot but it's also a thermal bridge allowing heat to come out so i said instead of doing that i'm gonna put a bunch of fourbyfours on stilts into the ground that's one of the holes that we dug and that's my nephew and right here i have a gap of about a foot right now i'm gonna be able to be building that back but there is no connection between my deck and my house had the front stairs the same thing it was a little deck i pulled it away i'm gonna put it on stilts it's not gonna be attached to my house i like the deck i use it daily but i don't want it to cause this problem so here i have some friends who are helping me do that and that's the gap now here's my house here's my deck you can tell everybody to jump yeah well no i've built it out this is the same thing the guy who i bought the house from had this concrete precast stairs that he thought were ugly so he built something on top of it but it's attached to the house so i ripped it off i broke it up and when i was done i am rebuilding it back on but not attached to the house something i did myself because i happened to have had the time to do it is that i bought myself a tagalong backhoe for three grand cause renting them was one hundred and fifty a day and i figure i'm gonna need it for a couple of weeks and i dug down to the foundation of my house and i put six inches of eps around the entire foundation and then i put this stuff this is a bituminous coating with a vinyl cover that actually protects the eps from water now a lot of builders will say oh eps is waterproof oh xps is waterproof absolute malarkey anyone who's ever been to a beach and been on a floating deck and had to haul one of those floating decks that used eps as a float knows that that stuff gets waterlogged and the science is now showing that eps loses its rvalue at about a half an inch a year because it exchanges the gases that are in it for the water that's pushing up against it and water is conductive so not only are you losing the rvalue but you're bringing water against your house when you do that you have to have a moisture barrier oh they do yeah yeah you gotta be careful so i put in a fresh perimeter drain around the whole thing and here's me putting it back in with my friend's kubota it's nice having people who like collecting big tools we ripped all of the siding off the vinyl siding was beginning to crack anyway and my wife hated the light blue so this is the first course of that threeinch polyiso i put on the house there's the two inches and around the windows i decided not to move the windows out to the outside plane i decided to leave them in personal choice and there's my bay window you see it's gone i ripped it out then i used this highquality european barrier this is a vapor barrier and an air barrier and i used this highefficiency tape and i went from eight hundred and twenty five air changes per hour at fifty pascals to two air changes per hour so seventy seven reduction the strapping is on there because when we do all this work we actually wanna have a plane for drying we want to allow any moisture that gets in to have somewhere to dry to so i put strapping thirty four inch strapping in and then i put the vinyl siding back on top of that here's the window bucks that we put in using this nice jig that's what it looks like on and then they framed it around with a nice trim there's my window i ripped it out and now it looks like that i was amazed i thought that i had a great view with this window with the fivebyfive and then the two side windows the second that this window was put on we were all like wow what a beautiful view i have mount mansfield right out in front of my head in front of my house a chimney we all have chimneys some of us are lucky enough to have a chimney inside the house where it heats the houses as it gets warm not me i have a chimney outside the house not only outside the house but on the north side of the house great i decided that i didn't wanna break it off although i had a deep need to get up there and knock the bricks out but i decided that was a part of my mix i needed to keep wood in the mix because sometimes the power goes out for days at a time maybe a week at a time and i don't have a passive house that i can be sure will be at that sixty degrees with no heat at minus ten degrees for a week i'm pretty sure it would be above freezing but i don't think we'd be there so i decided to keep it but i decided to wrap it so i wrapped it with roxul roxul like i said is made from the slag slag from the steel industry which means that it is fireproof in boilers they wrap boilers in this stuff what'd you call it rock wool is the name of the actual stuff roxul is the company that makes it and then i wrapped it again and in the end it also has a siding around it up to that point this is that cinder block wall i decided that i was gonna add two inches of insulation so i have six inches of that poly of that styrofoam outside i put two inches on the inside and i'm building the whole wall out to meet that instead of having that step that you often have downstairs where everybody puts their books i decided i just wanted the wall i sacrificed the extra square footage i don't care i want a straight wall downstairs it's just a personal thing my final wall value is an r66 which is passive house standard here's the buildout this is just one of the walls this is the original stud wall i put another stud on just a twobyfour stud so i could get two layers of three 12inch rock wool in there making seven inches and this is what it looks like this is an intelligent membrane this is a membrane that senses where the vapor drive is coming from and the vapor drive is coming from inside the room towards the material it closes down and has a perm rating of four perm rating is the amount of moisture that it'll led in and when it feels the vapor drive from the inside of the wall that opens up and has a perm rating of thirty four so moisture that's inside the wall can very easily transpirate into the house what i did on top of that is i put twobythree stringers on top of this so that i have a two twelve inch gap between this and my wall allowing a drying plane so the moisture can get out it also gives me a handy place to run wires and stuff i decided that i was going to turn my chimney into a sealed combustion do you all know the difference between atmospherically vented and sealed combustion atmospherically vented means that if you have a wood stove or oil furnace or an oil boiler it takes the combustion air from the room and it uses that for the combustion process and then sends it to the chimney my house is too tight for that if you have a leaky house it's creating a negative when you're burning your wood stove it's actually creating a negative pressure sucking air from the outside in to give you air to go up the chimney sealed combustion means that you have a pipe that brings fresh air to the unit and then out the chimneys so you'll have a complete circuit that does not include the indoor air in order to do that i had to hire a company to do that this is from the outside going through the rock wool this is the tube this is me making it all that's my daughter helping me out and this is what it looks like in the end that's the fresh air supply that is attached on the inside to my wood stove so when the wood stove acts for air the air doesn't come from the room it comes from outside yeah chris do all wood stoves no you have to be very careful as a matter of fact i had an pendleton avalon and i thought that i could buy an outside air unit for it and i found out afterwards that i couldn't so i had to get rid of my wood stove and buy a brand new wood stove i bought a hearthstone that had that attached to it had a larger burn box so i decided just to upgrade altogether since i had it anyway and a 12hour burn time instead of six which means that instead of an hour maybe i can spend only fifty minutes doing my wood stove when i'm doing my air sealing when i am in a passive house or in a house that i'm trying to make really tight every hole in your wall is going to increase your air changes per hour so i need to catalog every hole in the wall i need to talk to every contractor every subcontractor and say look we worked our butts off to make sure this was gonna have a very low air changes per hour if you make a hole in the wall tell me and i will seal it and we had a real problem at the beginning when we had the vinyl sliders come up they wanted to use that inch and a half nail and we said no you're using a 34inch nail because we don't want it go in through our air barrier electrical sockets well water supply hose outside garden hose flora drains in the garage fresh air supply for the wood stove all had to be air sealed my cat decided that my very expensive membrane was a scratching post so i realized that and stopped her from doing it and then i had to fill it up there's the pump that's my old access hatch i have access to the gable ends now i don't have any access to the house this is a drain in what was the garage that had to get covered up and i had to get the hrv installed which in a house that is being lived in is hard so i went into closets as much as possible fortunately the basement was not all that finished so i have an opportunity so here's the end i ended up with i have a heating plant fifty five thousand btu wood stove and a twenty two thousand five hundred btu heat pump which works at that efficiency two hundred and fifty efficient to five degrees fahrenheit and then it loses output down to eighteen so this heat pump works down to eighteen but it gives off less btus so it's expensive it costs me seventy thousand to do this work and i wasn't paying myself for my time so if you add my time i'm estimating around eighty five thousand for this project that is a third of the value of my house my payback if i'm looking at oil which is what it'll replace is somewhere on the order of ten to thirteen years depending on that's where the two increase in oil cause i wanted to be conservative when i'm doing my calculations i'd like to paint a rosy picture and say i'm expecting a five increase or a seven even historically at seventy five increase that brings my payback down to about seven years which is pretty good at that point so these are the numbers which i'm more than happy to let you stare at but it doesn't help the pain the fact that it costs so much i happen to be very fortunate that i had a lot of equity in the house when we bought the house we had a big down payment and i could take the equity out but here's the key i've reduced my heat load by seventy five three times worse than the passive house retrofit numbers but i don't care i have my heat pump on now we had a 21degree day the other day my hrv isn't even working so it's not redistributing the heat in the house the heat pump was set at seventy two the coldest bedroom was seventy degrees i'm in heaven and the heat pump like i said is two hundred and fifty efficient that becomes because it has a part of the heating mechanism is that it boils a refrigerant that refrigerant boils at fifty four degrees fahrenheit that means that even at fifteen degrees fahrenheit there's enough heat in the air to boil that refrigerant and that's where the efficiency comes in that's why it can be above one hundred because we put one kilowatt of energy and you get twenty five kilowatts of heat out of it this is the actual blower door test it was four hundred and twenty five we actually got it down to three hundred and ninety five and we're gonna do another blower door test when we're done and hopefully we'd be down in the the thirty five range which will bring my air changes per hour down to seventeen or something which is awesome when it was forty five degrees out i didn't have to heat my house just us the cooking and things like that were heating the house so it's its own payback that's what the house looks like now and jc who is jc earl who's a member of the group the energy committee is going to be setting up a tour of my house and also of the shelburne almost passive house that i helped design and built with tom moordown in shelburne and we're gonna try to get that together in january he was gonna try to do it in december but i'm leaving in december and we wanna make it work so if you're interested in seeing my renovation you can make an the appointment just to come and see me or you can wait for the tour if you're interested in seeing that almost passive house in shelburne you can let me know about that and we can arrange that and you can come with a group through the energy committee and if you're interested please if you know someone who is planning to build a house have them talk to me before they do don't let them build a house that is gonna cost them three thousand five hundred a year to heat when we can build them a house for almost no more money fifty more down but no more outofpocket per month money that they'll be able to heat for four hundred a month in the winter any questions i know it's a lot to take in i apologize for being wordy i hope i was lively enough that you're not all falling asleep are there questions i got one yes david chris did an audit on our house which is probably two or three times the size of your house and i was feeling really bad afterwards but now i don't feel so bad i felt bad for you oh gosh you have a big house yeah yeah that's the way til i get the bulldozer well there are some people who i would suggest if you want to work on your house sometimes the best way to work on your house is to sell it and build a passive house oh no did you just say that to us i did oh okay although i felt really bad although i must say that if you want a house that is really going to be super energy efficient the only way to do it is to build it new or do what i did which is throw money at it it's a great house i love this house well i'm an engineer engineers are into function over form in general so i want the thing to work well i don't care so much about the aesthetics it's a raised ranch is it pretty are raised ranches pretty no not in my opinion but i don't care it's warm and it's a place where we have our happy family and our dog and our two cats and our mouse and that's the mouse that we have on purpose by the way when you make a house really energy efficient you don't have mouse problems you don't have a mouse yes anything on mice we have lots of mice that come in especially around this season yeah and so the walls are fourinch walls they had oh what's the the xps the fiberglass insulation batts okay yup every time i've undone a wall in the garage or somewhere and looked at that in the basement to look at that stuff it's black with dirt yup it's full of mouse channels and everything so the rvalue's probably down from eleven to about what half or something one first of all if you've seen black when you open up a wall if you see black in your fiberglass you have airwashing airwashing is where there's air infiltrating into your wall and blowing cold air through your insulation and taking that insulated value and making it zero it's as if it was empty because the house have to heat that back up and then it's getting washed again and heating it up it's just like the inside of the house so the rvalue especially if you know you have rodent activity because what's happening then is that the feces and urine are becoming blown throughout the house and you're getting that in your house it's just unhealthy in that situation there are a couple of things that you can do you can rip all the drywall in your house out and start again and if you're gonna do that at least talk to me and i'll give you some ideas you can do what i did which is rip the outside of the house out and add a whole bunch of insulation the reason that mice come into your house is cause there's access it's warm and they can smell food because your house is just blowing when the wind blows this way it's blowing it out this way and all the smells of that food are going out into the world and every one of these hungry cold mice are thinking nirvana they are and i can't tell you how many times we go into a house that has supposedly insulated walls and we looked and you just see these squirly little pathways where the mice or squirrels or whatever voles shrews all of these little rodents get in there and they love it they just love it it's a great place to raise a family and when i pulled down the insulation of my house i had a mask on and i was using a hepa filter vacuum cleaner because the hantavirus although we don't have it in our area is caused by dried rodent feces so it's not just kind of bad for you it's really bad for you and i know your house and i know that at some point you guys would probably be well off taking the siding off and putting your siding on and if you get there then you do this then you buy cheap insulation you hire jim and his guys come in do the whole job they go up in your attic and they seal it all up and then you can heat your house with your ground source heat pump which is what you should be want it's what you want you do it anyway but you're living in that house at fifty five degrees which is okay you can make that choice but that's not the choice yeah it is a forced choice that's not a choice on purpose yeah right cause that you have that old cast iron radiator in the upstairs rooms and you're putting your heat pump water through there i've been to their house and that radiator is not rated for that and the water's in the right temperature to bring that room up to anywhere near comfortable levels but if you did this to it and got rid of that garage and made that garage conditioned space you would have a really nice house warmthwise you have a very nice house feelingwise yes andrew do you attach the eps the slabs to the outside of the house to the cement part no to the sheathing okay now that's a good question now that's not the eps right because the eps was only attached to the cinder block you're talking about this stuff the recycled yeah what we did is we did it in two courses and these are washers and we used screws and jim he had an opportunity because my basement was on drywall it had no sheet rock you could go in and say there's a stud here there's a stud here there's this stud here and when we pulled the sheathing off we saw that the sheathing they put on my house was homasote homasote is sound board they have that on the exterior the exterior sheathing is homasote except in the corners where they thought we needed a little structure so we're gonna put some halfinch plywood that's it if you're not familiar with homasote it's a paper product yeah you can crumble it in your fingers it's got an rvalue but it's got absolutely no air stopping power at all and it's not structural and it should've never been used there but it was really common in 1970s cause it was really cheap to put plywood on the corners and homasote the whole thing and that's what they did in my house so it seemed like a good idea it seemed like a good idea at the time well for the builder it was a good idea cause they wanted the cheapest house they could build so they went through and they found the studs and they actually had to go and buy a 10inch screw even though it's only six inches of insulation because the eightinch screw was just not getting into the stud enough so in the places where the screw wandered and didn't get in on the inside i had basically a two inch end of a screw sticking out that i broke off so that's how they did it and it is all sitting on top of the eps as you can see here so it's not just hanging there that's how they did it and then they put another layer on top of the bigger screws and just longer screws there was a lot of work i mean this part of the project was forty two thousand and then i wanted that bay window replaced with a flat window and that costed me another four thousand and the taping took more time than they were expecting with the typar we just got nobody takes typar or tyvek and it does nothing if you don't tape it and when we went through and i had them use this super mento one thousand this amazing european this german air barrier they had to spend much more time with the taping than they thought they were going to so that costs me another three thousand more than expected and that brought me up to my about fifty thousand that i paid jim to do work isn't that adding to the moral of the story that the more detail you put in on the insulating the better off you are airtightness if you're gonna do anything to your house make it airtight first it takes whatever the rvalue is of your insulation except of course it doesn't mice are not insulative and increases it the second you stop that airwashing you're saving the value of that insulation although i must say when we go and we do an audit it's almost always the case that we tell the people you've gotta get this insulation out of here it's full of mice rodent droppings it's not functioning and it's not sitting properly and like i said in the beginning you cannot install fiberglass to the r33 that they say on the box it's impossible they do it in a factory laboratory and there it's possible you don't live in a factory laboratory you live in the house it's just like the spray foam they say you can only spray it if it's eighty degrees and there's no dust and there's no moisture and that's the best time to do it yeah i know lots of construction sites that have no dust and no moisture and it's eighty degrees yeah perfect so but yes i suggest spend your time and effort making it airtight first and that's what any good bpi it's building no it's been a long day building perform building performance institute certified auditor will do he'll say the lowhanging fruit is air sealing make your house tight and any installation that's in there is good and that includes getting up into the attic and all of the framing cause the way people build houses i hate to drone on please stop me if you're getting bored but when you build a house what they should do is they should build a house before they build any internal walls they should put sheet rock up and then they should build the internal walls that's your air barrier into the attic but they don't do that they frame the walls and then they put the sheet rock on and then you have these pathways through these walls into your attic which is what creates that convective current which we see in every house we go to and nobody knew then that they were creating a convective pathway cause it's not more expensive or take more time to put the sheet rock up first it's just something they didn't do because the sheet rock guy came next week and that was easier so if you just had a crew that put the thing the sheet rock up under your ceiling before they put the internal walls in you wouldn't have to have someone crawling in and taking your cellulose away and spraying the top plates to make sure they're sealed i gotta say once we had it we had it done the stages and the first thing we had done was the top plates were sealed the house was instantly more comfortable i mean instantly it was amazing how much that changed because then the air was not escaping through the top it wasn't creating a negative pressure plane that was sucking in cold air from the bottom it just changed the way the whole house operates air sealing first and get an audit really it's four hundred you're spending the money that you'll save from the work that you'll get done in the audit maybe five six thousand worth of work will be paid back within the first four years cause you usually get a thirty savings on your fuel use and most of us are spending what three four thousand a year on fuel oil easy never mind the wood i mean put it together that's it right there you're saving it and we're at a point where oil is not gonna get cheaper and we don't have enough people getting access to natural gas there's some buying groups for propane now you can get propane moderately cheaply but that's gonna change it's very important in my industry to know what's happening with natural gas prices because fracking has made natural gas very cheap well what's happened is that nobody's building coalfired plants anymore everybody's building natural gasfired plants which means that this glut that we have in natural gas is gonna be used by all these industries that see how cheap natural gas is and the glut's gonna disappear and we're gonna have a rise in the price which is gonna make more fracking i mean this one goes wonderful circles that we call this as so let's get off of that by making our houses once again that triangle reduce first reduce your load first any other questions thank you so much for your attention thank you thank you yes i don't even wanna know really