This month the Connecticut Passive House Community welcomes guest Albert Jensen-Moulton from Building Performance Cooperative, Inc. / BPC Green Builders (a BuildGreenCT Steward Sponsor 🙌) joins us to talk about a Passive House-inspired residential retrofit in Fairfield and trends they’re seeing.

Guest

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BuildGreenCT Community Roundtables

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[SH] I want to welcome everybody to watching our April Connecticut Passive House Roundtable that we pushed back a little bit past our usual cadence to avoid April vacations, but we’re very happy to be joined by Albert from Building Performance Cooperative. Did I get your name? Yes. Your updated name correct? And I hope you can tell us about that, too. He is generously, sitting in with us for an hour for this informal chat, and we’ll hear about some of his projects and what he’s up to. So thank you again, Albert, for making time for us.

Sure, happy to go. You can start by telling us about your company. Yes, sure. So, BPC, was started about, 27 years ago by, Mike Trolley, and quickly, shortly after that, his brother, Chris Trolley, joined, Mike doesn’t have a building background, but he was in commercial real estate, and always wanted to build a better house. And Chris, his brother, was a mechanical engineer doing, larger-scale stuff, working for Turner Construction, those types of things. So they got together and, were really kind of the pioneers in our area of doing, passive house-level, construction. And, also Mike did a house that was a heart-healthy house that he thought was going to be the wave of the future, and I think he was, you know, about 20 years ahead of his time. Because now…

[SH] A little too early for everybody.

Really, yep. And they’ve just been kind of quietly without a lot of fanfare, and not a lot of them, you know, probably should have had more involvement in the local groups and stuff. But, you know, here and there, they’re part of the Green Billing Council. We’ve done, you know, LEED Platinum homes, certainly. But kind of under the radar, just kept doing that, you know, a couple houses a year. And then I joined the company, it’ll be, 8 years this fall. And we were… so we’re a construction management company, so, you know, we don’t have our own crews, but we serve as a general contractor. We do, all architect-designed homes. And, we’d all been… each of the… the three of us at the time were all doing our own projects, you know, managing everything top to bottom. No… no office manager, you know, part-time bookkeeper, just literally, you know, the site supervision, the project management, everything, just one person, one job. And… You know, kind of being in niche, contractor. We had to go where the work was, so our geographical area was and still remains pretty wide. We do Fairfield, Litchfield, and New Haven counties in Connecticut, and then we do Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess, and sometimes even consider things further north than that over in New York. Actually, we’re doing one in Orange County, so across the river this year, that’s a little bit of a stretch. But, now, definitely interest is picking up. We’ve made a conscious decision to really expand our outreach to architects, so we’ve found a lot of architects who have clients coming to them, and they don’t really necessarily know how to meet their demands in terms of high performance. So, we’re finding we’re very helpful in that way, because we can just hand them a lot of the details and say, this is how we We like to do it, so if we’re going to be your builder, you know, get these on the plans sooner than later, and you’ll be in better shape. You’ll be ahead of the game. So we’ve, expanded to, you know, expanded our staff to include, you know, dedicated site supers on our projects and separate project managers. We have a production manager, Ben, Bogey, my colleague, he is, doing the pre-construction. We’re calling him the Director of Building Science, but all the projects come across his desk in terms of looking at the assemblies and doing some of the pre-construction work. Chris Trolley is retired, Mike Trolley is still our Director of Sales, about 3 days a week. So he’s, the person to meet with clients. And as I said, we have a production manager, and I’m the… now the general manager of the company. So we’re… we’re up to about… 11 going on probably 13 people by the end of the summer, I’d say.

[SH] Well..

Yep, a bunch of new… bunch of new projects starting up this year. Both… actually, a lot in New York right now, but a couple in Connecticut. The project I’m working on should be wrapping up in June, and we’re looking at an interesting, really historic retrofit, energy retrofit in New Haven coming up, and then a handful of new houses as well, and We don’t, the project that, this is my last project that I’m going to be managing. It’s a… it’s a modest, 2,700 square foot house in Fairfield. You know, middle-class homeowners, but, you know, smart couple, and a husband’s an engineer, software engineer, I think. He’s really looked at the energy savings and, you know, looked at it from the return on investment. They bought a house maybe 15 years ago, they’ve, you know, raised their kids, the kids have moved out. There are always things that they wanted to do with it. I mean, there’s a lot of things that, you know, leaking showers and things like that, that they knew they had to address eventually, and it got to the point where they said, well, let’s just consider doing a gut renovation, and maybe we can make it a healthy house at the same time, and get off of fossil fuels. So, this is certainly, you know, not passive house level, but, I am Passive House tradesperson trained, and, you know, I mean, the Passive House principles are what we, what we build with at BPC. So even if we’re not doing a, you know, complete, energy model or, you know, thermal bridging analysis, we’re all… we’re all… I think all of our our current people have yet to be trained, but every one of us is a Passive House certified tradesperson, if not consultant, so we’re all aware of all the other things we should be looking at in terms of air tightness and thermal bridging, and we’ve been doing, you know, triple pane, high-performance windows for forever, and I’ll be talking a little bit more about that when I get into the window part of this project, but… For this particular house, we decided we could, forego an architect and save on those fees, because we weren’t really making major changes. Sorry.

[SH] I appreciate… as a retrofit, I can understand why.

We hired a draftsperson, he went through the house, you know, talked with the owners about what they like to see. I mean, we came… it was… you know, a typical, you know, small room, so I wanted to open up the kitchen. Okay, that’s, I mean, we did relocate a staircase, so that was probably the biggest change, but otherwise, the bedroom stayed the same, and we even tried to keep… tried to keep as much as we could, the wood floor we kept in place where we could. We tried to keep some drywall, but then you always run into the trades that say, oh, just… Just taking out… you’re making it more… making my work harder for me, right?

[SH] There is a point when it just makes sense to start from scratch, yeah.

So yeah, as I said, a modest home, the plan was not to do anything to the exterior except windows. That changed a little bit, but I’ll get to that. And yeah, I mean, it’ll be… We started in demo at the end of last summer, and we hit some structural issues, rotted mud sill around about a third of the house, because the, the foundation was poured in a way that, when they did the final grade, it came up over in the mud sill, so… Not the best idea.

[SH] Yes!

They poured the… they poured, like, a 12-foot-wide front stoop right against that mud sill, basically, and then as soon as the stoop started to tip backwards, then it just… of feedback, you know.

[SH] the beginning. Sure.

Cycle of water infiltration.

[SH] Yeah, oh boy. Catch-22 there.

Yeah, and thank goodness they had a good friend who is a structural engineer, so he… I don’t know if it was pro bono or, you know, even.

[SH] Yeah.

It was just at least on the cheap, and he was able to come in and help us out and tell us, you know, what needed to be done. And so there were definitely, you know, change… that was the biggest change order, I’d say, was the structural work, remediation. Which they really wouldn’t have found unless they had, stripped the house from the, you know? If they’d just gone ahead and done bathrooms and kitchens, they never would have found these issues, and it would have, you know… it’s not very wise to put in a new bathroom on a rotting… a floor, a subfloor that’s rotting beneath. Yeah, so… So overall, the homeowners are very pleased, and, yeah, I’ll just start going through a couple of photos, and…Okay, through the journey, so… let me share, Okay, let me go full screen. Sorry you can’t see this, Paul, but… or anybody else. Okay. So this is the exterior of the house, you know, main… single main floor with a walkout basement in the backyard. Basement was finished, so all the… most of the… all the main living space, the bedrooms and kitchen living room are all on the first floor. Here’s the… There is the back of the house. Let’s the walkout basement. Oh, there’s a… Little sun porch area on the left there, and we’re going to… We’re turning about a third of it into a real mudroom for them. So, yeah. Sorry, still navigating the… Hold on. There we go. So, existing insulation, as you can imagine, this house was from the 50s, so oil-faced, you know, maybe… 2 or 3 inches, or whatever, of fiberglass, and not very well. At least this one was tacked in.

[SH] I was gonna say, I’m impressed it’s going all the way up.

It’s not, it hasn’t sagged all the way to the bottom of the bays, yeah.

[SH] Something?

Yep. Here’s an example of… There we go.

[SH] Yeah.

Yeah, the fun stuff. That has a, a large chimney, there were 2 fireplaces, plus the flue for the furnace. You know, ideally, we would have loved to chop the chimney off, at least stop it at the ceiling of the first floor, so we didn’t have the thermal, you know, that bridge, but It is a… we kept the vented attic, So, we figure, you know. it’s at least 5 feet above that, you know, above the air ceiling and insulation level there, and you know, we’re just going to have to manage. It just wasn’t in the budget. They do want to do solar panels, so I’m going to encourage them, when they at some point, maybe in 4 or 5 years, when they redo the roof and add the solar panels, I’d say, yes, please take down the… take down the chimney, because then you’ll have… you’ll have less obstruction, you’ll have more space for the better layout for the panels. But since they weren’t gonna do anything with the roof, it was like, well, let’s just, yeah, let’s just leave this.

[SH] So, did they, I… Do they still have the fireplaces?

No, we covered over all the fireplace, and we blocked them with masonry for the department’s requirements. There was a brief period where the owner wanted to… he was considering doing a very small wood stove as a backup. Which, I grew up with wood stove, so I like that idea, personally.
[SH] Yeah, I grew up with a big, open fireplace. And they’re wonderful, but…
And, you know, so this is in… So, and he was thinking about the solar, it’s like, well, we’re not going to have a lot of solar production in the winter, so this would be a good way to reduce, you know, their draw on the grid. So, which I agree with, but then when he penciled it out, because again, he’s an engineer, when he actually did the ROI, there wasn’t, you know. it didn’t really make sense financially, so… Yeah. That’s maybe not the decision I would have made, or my wife would have made, definitely not, but, yeah, he said, let’s just skip it, and so that’s, you know, so it’s staying all electric. We… because he opted not to do the wood stove, I did have, you know, a backup. coil put in the air handler. Probably will… probably won’t ever turn on, but it’s just good… good to have. Yeah. So, yes, we… yeah, the chimney is just… it’s… everything’s covered up, so…

[SH] Nope. Okay, thanks.

We did, they had a sunken living room, which was all the rage back then.

[SH] Yeah! Groovy!

Not really the best thing when you’re. for, you know, age-in-place, single-level home. So, we raised the living room floor. That also raised the ceiling of the basement. Because there was not only a dropped, you know, lower ceiling there, but there was also a lot of ductwork, you know, high, high CFM, you know, furnace, was down there. So, by raising this, we were able to have enough room

[SH] Nice. That’ll make a big, big difference.

Right, so, The slab was in pretty good condition. We used, a commercial flooring product, I think it’s called Roll Coat, which is a vapor barrier. So we painted two layers on that and wrapped it up, just for good measure, wrapped it up at the walls, then we didn’t need a, you know, another kind of vapor barrier. The house had already been tested for radon, and there wasn’t a problem. So, so what we did was, there was a little bit of unevenness, we cut… I had the carpenters rip 2x10s in half, because I was… I didn’t want to give up. A full 5.5 was too much, and there was some high spots, so… so they kind of… kind of scribed it in places and shimmed it in other places, and then we used rock wool bats in between. And then we’re using an Advantech subfloor, and they had a very, very occasional history of water coming in. One was through their garage, actually, mostly due to just bad exterior drainage.

[SH] Yeah, so that was just in through the doors.

Yeah, right, right. So, just in case there’s ever anything like that again, I had them screw but not glue down the Advantech, and we’re using a Marmoleum, click flooring product, so if we ever have to take up a section of… I mean, I certainly… I don’t expect we will, and I don’t hope it not to, but, just to make, if there was any kind of remediation, to make it a lot easier. In the future. So, yeah, we did add, so those are, you know, 2×6 rockwool bats we added there. Oh, I might have missed…

[SH] You may have said this before, I know you said the basement was finished, but how are they using it?

Oh, just like as a, well, as a bedroom…

[SH] Storage space, or were they really using it?

It’s gonna be finished, like, a den, a TV room, yep. Yep, and there’s a bathroom down there, and then there’s a separate… there’s, like, a dividing wall, and then on the other side is a little less finished, that’s the laundry room and, where the water heater is.

[SH] Okay, thanks.

I guess my pictures might be a little out of order. Anyway, this is, I’ll talk… shift to talk to… talking about Windows then. Sure. So, we went with, Alpen Windows on this. We actually had a open house, a couple… beginning of… when was it?

[SH] I was gonna say it was, like, a week or two ago, but… Like, a month.

Time flies. So, you know, we’ve traditionally… BBC has traditionally used all European, tilt and turn, you know, imported windows, triple pane, with occasionally, you know, they’ve been on and off supply of manufacturers in the United States with, you know, UPPC or other things. So, we… Alpen has recently come out with, if you’ve seen them at trade shows, you’re probably used to seeing some of the quad windows with the two film layers on the inside and two glass layers. Well, they have now, using the same glass technology that’s in your smartphone, your iPhone, they are now making those middle… what were film, they’re now making them out of, Gorilla Glass, or whatever, I don’t know if that’s a brand name, but it’s a half millimeter thick paint of glass. So, when you take a sheet of this… Ben went to the factory a couple months ago. When you take, like, a 4×8 sheet, I mean, it literally bends. So, it’s the…

[SH] Wild.

Yeah, it’s wild. So it’s… it’s the pressure… I mean, they pressurize it, you know, whatever gas they’re using it, and that… it keeps it all together, and they have a robotic, assembly line that puts the spacers on, and the… and the, And seals it all up, so it’s pretty impressive, and they’re a very good price point, I have to say. I’m really impressed. They are UPVC with, with fiberglass reinforcement, and, They come in a couple of different colors, but they’re… they work, you know, just like we’re used to, the tilt… they look just like a European tilt and turn. Though they have a better screen system, because Europeans don’t really use screens, and they never know.

[SH] That’s right. They apparently don’t have bugs in your.
I guess they don’t have bugs in the earth, right? So it’s always, like, an afterthought, trying to get. beans on European windows, but not without them. They’ve got a couple of good… they’ve got a pretty good system for that.

[SH] Yeah. We had, Craig Meyerhofer, I believe is his last name, as a roundtable guest, last year, and he was talking about how, since they’re in Colorado, they used to have to use those balloons for pressurization, but that they’ve figured out how to do away with those.

Me personally, yes. EPC may have a long time in the past. I know, I don’t know if it was different management, I know there were some concerns about some of the service or something, but I think that, from what Ben’s experienced visiting and talking to other people, that it’s, that they’ve really improved their, quality control and things, so… so we feel good about it. So, and we, you know, we did things like, encouraging the homeowner to understand that, like, they didn’t need all operable windows. This is a big one for them to learn, because they had double hungs before, and I said, well, they have all these bedroom corner windows where there’s two windows that meet, and I say, listen. We’re gonna give you one tilt and turn on one side, and one fixed window, and because the frames I’m fitting in are so much bigger, because that actually had… These weren’t the original windows, so they were already, you know.

[SH] Oh, boy.

basement window, so the frames are even smaller than they were the first time. So now I’m giving them an ultra-thin frame, you know, a beautiful fixed pane, and a beautiful, you know, no mullings or anything. So I’m trying to explain to them that you’re actually getting more… air… like, they like to open the windows. I said, well, you’re actually getting more free air movement, you know, when you open the windows than you were before with your double hungs. With two double hungs, you’re getting more with one… one tilt and turn, and you get. And you get the different kinds of operation, you can open it a little bit, so… So yeah, we… and since the other thing is, and this was interesting to have to sometimes, convinced the building department and the inspectors that because we’re using the continuous ventilation with an ERV system, that we don’t need an operable window in the bathrooms, and a couple of the bathroom windows are very small, and it’s like, if you make it operable, it’s gonna… or it was an odd size, and so… so we did those things in addition to, you know, I mean, they’re… very well… they’re very airtight windows to begin with, even the tilting turns, but we eliminated as many operables as we could. So there’s a… there’s a unit that’s half operable. Kitchen, see the corner.

[SH] Nope.

Those are a little tricky to get the alignment just right, but, Wanna just, I guess, with this next picture, I’m gonna jump to insulation. So it was a vented, vented attic with just bats laid in between the joists. Not a lot of room at the heel, as you can see, here. So, what, I’ll take credit for this idea. I decided, because they were opening up the… this is the living room, and they were opening it up to the kitchen, that I would make a soffit and continue it around the entire living room and kitchen, and that would enable us to… so we’d cut these joists at 2 feet when we were raising the ceiling. To maintain space, to get enough insulation at that critical point. And that, that we did that, So here’s a view looking straight on into the eaves, and we have, the traditional, baffles up above in black, it’s a little hard to see. And then we did, foam polyiso, blocks. They are above the top plates. And then, what you see coming at you is, like, the bottom of that soffit, and that will all be filled up with cellulose. So… Yep. So that was one of our installation strategies. Another strategy was air sealing. So… You know, it’s very difficult to air seal an existing house, Especially, I mean, the foundation is the worst, the foundation to framing connections. I’ve… I have personal experience with that. So… and we weren’t replacing anything at the time, we weren’t… the plan was not to replace anything in the exterior, so we didn’t have a way to do, like, an WRB. So we decided to go, which actually we’re… we are putting into our budgets for almost all of our projects now, is to do the aerosol. Aerosal. Yeah. Air barrier. So, this is, Lord Billing Solutions from, Maine. Actually, his, his, is Alex Lord, his father is Mason Lord, who does, Hudson Valley up, northwestern Connecticut. So he does interesting… just an interesting guy. He does framing… well, he does, basically, like, panelized house assembly and air sealing, and you realize, after you’ve been doing this a while, that those are two really… they actually go together.

[SH] Yeah, sure. You can…

Typically, we’ve trained our framing crews to really be mindful of air sealing when they’re doing things, so that they… that they don’t… that they are okay with us saying that, like, you need to put this little floppy bit in here, or you need to… I want you to do this a different way, because we need to, you know, be mindful of the… where our red line is going with the air sealing.

[SH] Yes.

Yeah, so we did a, when he did the first blower door test, you know, we had done a certain amount of air sealing ourselves, you know, caulking and taping and things like that, but it was coming in around 17 ACH when he got there. And by the end, he got it down to about… I think 1.7, and that’s for Ford driveway, so… 10%. Yeah, so… and part of that is the, so you see here the upper part… Board sheathing, right? Yeah.

[SH] Yep. All those little gaps.

You can… all those little gaps, and you can. Great stuff coming out is the, cool. That’s the… the Aerosal, you know, building up on the. It’s really neat to be able to really see it working. That’s a… that’s a great diagram about what’s going on. And when… When it was… so he would pressurize the house, and then… initially, when it was, you know, 17 ACH, we found some obvious things that we missed, and he took care of the, you know, I’d help him take care of those, and then he would pressurize it and start the system. It took probably… I think he had it running, you know, the house pressurized and aerosolized, you know, with the jets running for probably… I wanna say 7 or 8 hours. And he would occasionally go in with a caulk gun, you know, with full respirator and full gear on, and, you know, because once it gets started, you can kind of start to see, it’ll leave a path, so even from the inside, you can see where things are exiting, and so he would just, you know, caulk here and there to speed up the process, you know, help himself out, so…

[SH] Now, for anybody who isn’t familiar with it, could you do, like, a very high overview of AeroSeal? Sure, sure. Which, that’s, I suppose, AeroSeal is a brand name, but…

Well, yeah, that’s true. And so… Aerosil was… people might be more familiar with it as the duct ceiling. on the duct sailing part side of things. So, typically, we still do this on all our projects, to meet the duct leakage requirements, We have, an aeroseal application, so they would pressurize the… like, do a duct blaster, basically, but pressurize the ductwork and inject, it’s an… Basically, we describe it as, like, aerosolized Elmer’s glue, so it’s very non-toxic, and it finds all the cracks because the air is rushing, you know, the highest velocity at the cracks and leaks, and starts to build up, and you can… you can seal, I think, like, a quarter-inch gap. So Aerosal, Aeroseal… well, it used to be called Aerobarrier, now they’re calling it Aeroseal Envelope, I think. It’s the same thing applied to an entire house. So, they pressurize, so there’s… you know, it’s a patented system, it’s a brand name, and there are authorized, you know, trained professionals across the country that do the installation. So, they pressurized the house to, usually 100, pascals, and… They, set up In this house, it was, like, 5 different stations, so looks like, almost like, It looks like a snowmaking machine, basically. You have a… you have a tank with the fluid in it, and then you have, high-pressure air hoses attached to each station, which sprays out through a nozzle and turns it into a mist, and basically, if you walk into it, you know, wearing protective gear, it’s basically like a fog that’s taking up the whole house. It’s really floating, it doesn’t… doesn’t… when they protect, like, the windows and delicate surfaces, it does fall, and then during construction, it’s like, you know, it’s kind of a little bit… can be a little bit of a sticky mess, and you clean it up. But it doesn’t just… It doesn’t really fall until you depressurize the house, then it starts to… you know, you try to get as much out of the house as possible.

[SH] Sure.

But yeah, it’s a fascinating process. They have to, heat the air and dehumidify it, because when you’re adding the aerosol, you’re instantly creating high relative humidity. Even though it’s not water, it’s a… So, it’s interesting, it has to be, you know, you can’t do it in super cold temperatures. But yeah, Alex has a whole setup in a trail there that he takes around with him, and for big jobs, he has, you know, multiple assistants doing the prep… cover, you know, operable windows, they would tape up, you know, things that are gonna be open anyway, they… they tape over so that we’re not… they’re not getting gunked up, you know, like… like the windows. But he will do, He would do a… a couple of tests, like, before taping the windows, so he could try to, record how many… how many CFM were a result of the windows, how many CFM were a result of the HVAC system before he, covered over the, all the, the grills and vents and things like that, so… Yeah, so, and you get a full report, and like, you can watch… you can watch it on the computer, how it goes down over time, and you see the CFM and everything, so… Cool. Yeah, I mean, it’s, It’s not cheap, but if you look at your basic principles, you know, the insulation, windows, you know, it’s… it’s one of the… it’s still one of the least expensive items, and you’re getting a lot of bang for a buck when you’re going from 17 ACH to…

[SH] Oh, for sure, yeah. And as you’re… you’re illustrating, I mean, in a retrofit situation, I mean, you can’t always get into all those spaces. Yep. Yeah, that’s great. Thank you.

So that was the air ceiling. So, we’re big in, Ben especially is big into testing. The insulation strategy for the walls, we did a horizontal strapping, so this is 2x3s, this is a picture for those of you who can’t see. This is a typical 8-foot-high exterior wall with the 16-inch on center studs existing, and then we ran 2x3s horizontally on 16-inch on center. And that, is really significantly reducing thermal bridging, so you’re basically continuous insulation at this point, so… and then we are dense packing that, so… except for the basement slab and a rim joist that we did use a little bit of spray foam on. This house is entirely insulated with, TimberHP wood fiber insulation, so we used, some of their bats, for some places, like after the spray foam that we put up a… Next to the… and in the rim joists. We used, their loose fill in the attic. We put approximately… Yeah, I’d say an average of 22 inches of loose fill in the attic. And this is similar to cellulose in terms of R-value. And then in the walls, we’re doing the dense pack cellulose. So Ben wanted to see, because this is a fairly new… the… that product, I mean, the Timber HP line is fairly new to begin with. We wanted to see how it behaved, from a, thermal standpoint and, for moisture issues. So, We put, a little A-B test. We have, in this wall here, we have two sensors. Or two sections we were monitoring. One, we did an open-cell spray foam, we did one bay, and then two bays over. We just put… it’s gonna be the dense pack cellulose, but this is a picture before we did the install. And we’re… we’re monitoring the temperature and relative humidity, at the back of the sheathing, so we can see what’s going on to make sure there’s no, moisture risks. So… This is.

[SH] How long will you be monitoring that?

As long as the battery’s last.

[SH] Definitely.

It’s a couple of years, yeah.

[SH] Okay, cool.

Yep. So we, we do a lot of things like this, just, you know, kind of real-world testing, which is better than just doing it in the lab. So there’s a picture of the installed, That same section with the, with a timber HP, wood fiber insulation blown in, they were… it’s a little different than cellulose, it’s a little bit heavier, it’s not as dusty, but it’s, you know, I think it’s more like a wood chip than a shred of paper, or, you know, paper. Try to paper. And we go around and do… we do sampling, so we make sure that the density is what the manufacturer recommends. But it’s just, when you think of the first picture I showed you with the, you know, the couple inches of foil-faced, you know… Compared to this, you know, you think, oh, well, you’re only increasing the wall thickness from 3.5 to 6. Well, yeah, but this is, you know, you’re eliminating almost all the thermal bridging, and you’re… it’s because of the nature of the dense pack, you know, and that kind of insulation versus a bat installation, you know, it’s a really good, insulation. Install. Here’s, One of those places that people never think about, the… this house has a… the garage in the basement, so half of the basement is a garage and storage. Typically, people don’t think about the barrier between the house and the garage as being important, but of course it is. So here you see we did the same dense packing in the… 2×12 floor joists above, and then what you’re seeing is the, kind of, the demising wall. We had to use a little bit of spray foam, because we didn’t have much room, and then we had a chimney behind. The chimney was behind that. The other reason I showed this picture is we… there’s a… in that soffit is the ERV venting, so right behind the spray foam to the right is the mechanical room where we have a, 2-ton heat pump, and then we have, I believe it’s, I won’t say the brand, because I forget which… but we have an ERB, that’s hooked in with a… it’s not typically for what we do. Typically, we do a Zender or another kind of standalone ERV, but, you know, this is… this is more of a budget project, so we’re using an integrated, I mean, an add-on ERV, and this soffit is hiding the… Ductwork to the, you know, the interior, the, exterior air, and the stale air out. Going through there. Here’s a picture of the inside of the house after the drywall. You can just mostly to show how we wrapped that soffit around the entire, kind of, great room.

[SH] Yeah, nice!

make it a feature. Where the stairway was, that’s where the… where the stairway is in this picture. It’s behind that pony wall. That’s where the fireplace was originally, so… So, after we’d done the windows, and we… Explain to the homeowners, you know, what was required, and did they want to, you know, how we were gonna repatch the siding. Oh, and another thing that happened was the, that, part of the structural issue in the front was related to, a brick, like, wainscot, kind of, like, a half-high brick features on the front of the house, which was getting water in behind the brick, so… We demoed that as part of the structural remediations, and then we had the house, you know, we needed to at least re-side the front of the house. Then we looked into the price of cedar versus, What we ended up going with the LP Smart side, so engineered wood product, clabbard, and it wasn’t really much more expensive, because the cedar itself was about 3 times as expensive. square foot. So, and then just the effort of, like, patching it in, and you have to paint the whole house anyway. So, I think they made the right decision. And then that let us say, well, now we get to do a real WRB, or at least as much of one as we can manage to do. I mean. Ideally, we like to do a full rain screen, you know, in our new construction, but this house has no overhang in the gable ends, so there’s no room to really add that. But, Ben had done some product development, with the, the Hydro Gap project. He actually helped develop the self-adhered version of this, so, we used the self-adhered Hydro Gap, which… I realized that even though we had done the air sealing, we hadn’t yet, demoed the shingles. So, if we demoed the shingles without… without patching over all the nail holes, we’d have lost all the… all the, you know, like, that we’d be making…

[SH] Gotcha.

We’d be making it worse, so we had to do something. So that’s why we chose the self-adhered product, because we, you know, we can. All those holes. And it has, you know, a very small drainage, plane in front of it with the little dimples, create that drainage plane, so… So this is… you can see the windows with the taping, and the WRB going on. And there’s our first bit of siding from last week, so it looks a lot better than the…

[SH] No?

Yep, I think that was… that’s it for the pictures, Trying to think if there’s anything else. I talked about air sealing, insulation… The HVAC system, I mean, it’s pretty much our standard. So we have the ERV that extracts from every bathroom. And then that goes right to outs… you know, through the ERV core, right to outside, and then the… the supply side of the ERV goes into the HVAC supply to get the other rooms. In this house, we’re doing… two zones. We did, You know, a lot of people do… like, by floor, but that’s really not always the best way to do it, depending on solar gain and things like that, and how the house is used also, so we did the… all the bedrooms as one zone, and then the living room and the den, which was directly below it, and will mostly be open, because a stairwell going down, and they’re not going to be even using the basement that much, and it’s a tiny, tiny load down there, so… and we can… that’ll be easier to get to, to make seasonal adjustments if we have to, to the dampers, so… so we have two zones. It’s a two-ton, you know, Mitsubishi hyperheat. Hi, boy. And what else? We… made a decision for budget reasons to keep the range hood to, you know, a 300 CFM range hood, so we don’t technically need the, makeup air. And I always… Maybe this isn’t… I mean, Mechanical engineer would argue with me, but you have the ERV… you have the ERV intake and exhaust anyway, so you’re not, you know, you’re not really going to get a significant depressurization when you… or you always have an opening to the exterior. Yeah. You know, that’s how I feel about it. So, and I’ve noticed that, in my own house, that the dryer is as much of an issue as the range hood can be. They’re not, you know, when you have a tight house, that’s not insignificant, so we encouraged them, and we threw in a little bit of extra to get a, eventless dryer. They were going to reuse their existing washer and dryer, and I said, well, listen, it’s, like, we don’t have to make this penetration, we don’t have the cost of that, we don’t have the air sealing issues with it. penetration, and we don’t have the additional depressurization, so let’s… Give you this, we’re gonna… we’re gonna upgrade you to the heat pump, non-ventless dryer, so…

[SH] So it sounds like they really embrace… I mean, it sounds like, either with your coaching, or they just figured it out on their own, that they’re embracing the… the system, the…

Yes.

[SH] of the building piece.

Yep.

[SH] Airtight and penetrations and everything.

Yeah, they definitely.

[SH] How much of that knowledge did they come with, and how much did you teach them?

We taught them a lot. I mean, they, they, they… they get it, and they support it, but it’s more about just going off of fossil fuels. They don’t, you know, I’m teaching them more about the advantages, and then how the ERV is going to work, and all of that. So they were not super educated, but definitely easily educated on those things, and fully supportive of it all. Including, yeah, going from, gas range to an induction range, that was a… That was maybe the… maybe the heaviest lift, yeah. But for… for… for the wife, it was more about, they’re Jewish, they have Seders, and they, like, have a big… a lot of family, and she’s like, it has to be, like, they had this, I think it was, like, odd size, like, a 42-inch… 42-inch gas range of 6 burners, and, you know, she’s like, I have to have enough room for the XYZ.

[SH] Yeah.

And, she actually went out, you know, I gave her some recommendations, and she measured and everything, and was like, oh, actually, this particular LG 30-inch range has the same oven size as my, whatever, 42. So I’m gonna be okay with that if we can do a speed oven. So I said, yes, we can. Definitely do, you know, a little fancier microwave that does, you know, roiling in.

[SH] Yeah, the convection. Convection. Yeah.

Yup.

[SH] Oh, that’s great! So… How… how do your clients feel when you say, you know, Ben goes up to them and says, I’d like to experiment on your house, let’s see what happens?

I don’t know if we quite put it that we’re any house. We do, you know, BBC, we do some promotion for other companies, you know, they supply us with some things in kind in order to,

[SH] Oh, great!

For us, publicizing things, so we pass the… we try to pass some of that off along to the client and say, like, we’d like you to consider using these windows, you know, that’ll be, you know, it’ll be more affordable for you. You can get more of other things that you wanted if we use these, and you know, you just need to open up your house and have videos and things like that, and they were fine with that. Yeah, I don’t think there’s… I mean, yes, I guess using all Timber HP is a little bit of an experiment, but I think it’s been around long enough, and… We don’t see a huge difference in terms of… Compared to cellulose. I mean, there’s all kinds of people out there who don’t… who have fears about the double-stud walls that we do, but we have… we have done all kinds of research and… and, feel very comfortable with how we… how we do those, so…

[SH] Sure, well, I think, I mean, you’re… the things, you know, I’m thinking of that picture you showed us with the different… where you put the sensors.

Yeah. I mean, those two things you’re comparing are known entities. Right. I mean, it’s, you know, they both perform well, just sounds like you’re curious, you know, in different conditions, how they behave, yeah.

Yeah, we did another test on, smart vapor retarders. So we did one bay with no vapor retarder, one bay with Intello, and another one with, Sega Myrax, just… and that’s an ongoing thing in a house we built a year and a half ago, to see, you know. Yeah. We get the hype from the manufacturers, but what… how does it really compare to nothing at all?

[SH] Yeah.

For not… air tightness, that’s, you know, yes, you need something for air tightness if that’s where you’re doing it, but, like, is, you know, these variable or smart membranes, you know, like, how… how much difference is it really making? So, it’s…

[SH] Nate! Well, it’s certainly, there’s constantly new products, advancements, so it’s hard to keep up, so I really appreciate that you guys are still, you know, using every opportunity to learn and explore and test and…

Yes.

[SH] You know, pass that along to the rest of us.

Yep, and actually, so I guess that’s a good segue into kind of the future of BPC, so… Yeah, we became, we became Building Performance Cooperative in 2023, and we became a cooperative in order to, extend the life of the business beyond the, you know, the founders, which can be difficult. But the other, what we’re getting into now with Ben’s, connections and interests in product testing and development and in education and outreach, to be sure, is we’re looking at, Kind of having another kind of a parallel side of the business that’s really focused on workforce education, product testing, content creation, educational curriculum development, a whole lot of things. I could go on hours… I mean, Ben could go on for hours about it. I’m still like, wow, you guys are coming up with some… some crazy ideas, but to really make an impact, I mean, that’s why I got into… I didn’t start out as a builder, I got into this… I got into this because of climate change, and although my dad was a shop teacher, and I’m like, oh, like, there’s nothing interesting in construction, and then when I… I went to a Passive House conference in New York City, and I was like, wow, there’s, like, science involved in building. That really got me interested, and that’s, you know, when I went to get some training and then connected with the BPC. But, you know, as I said, I didn’t… I never… I never set out to become a builder in my career shift. I wanted to make an impact, and so this is a way that BBC can both have a, you know, test things practically and show how we can do these things. Retrofits especially are a hard nut to crack, and… but we can also then take that and amplify that knowledge and, You know, bring up the level of all the contractors and retrofits. And we’ve committed, as a company, we’re committed as a goal to doing about 10% of our revenue as retrofits. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but retrofits are typically smaller and less dollar value, so it’s a… that’s a significant, A goal for us.

[SH] Yeah, well, I think about driving along 95, or looking out from the train window, and it’s just so much building stock.

Yep.

[SH] And sort of chipping away at that is really important. Absolutely. That’s great work to do. Before we leave, I want to make sure that, BPC gets a shout-out for their Rock House project, the Green Hour… the Build Green CT Green Building Impact Award winners were just announced, and your Project at the Top Award for Single Family Project, and also a special citation for the best airtightness score of all the projects. That were submitted, and we had a lot of projects, so maybe you can share your… your airtight number. I have it in front of me.

I know.

[SH] Oh my gosh, good.

I don’t either, definitely was, you know, exceeded the passive house, for sure. The amazing about that is that that house is glass on three sides, so… it’s a curtain wall system, yeah.

[SH] Yeah, so it’s, I see you submitted it was, .35.35 for ACH50. And Passive House, of course, is .6, so you’re almost…

And that’s without, or that’s before we started doing the arrow barrier, so it’s, all the typical…

[SH] Really, construction is doing the work.

Yep, yep.

[SH] Well, that’s a real accomplishment.

Yeah, thanks.

[SH] It goes to show that you’re… BPC is… you’re really walking the walk. You’re… you’re doing… doing the… the right work. So, I’ll also mention that we have a couple We partner with, Energize Connecticut for some free webinars, and one of them coming up is, by a fellow at Alpin. I forget exactly what his topic is, but he’ll be talking about glazing, of course, so you guys might be able to teach the course, I don’t know, but that’ll be a good one to… Tune into.
Anybody else jump on, or are there any other…

[SH] Yeah.

That’s my money.

[SH] I see we have a couple people, I know one of them is driving, so stay on that. I can… if it’s alright with you, Albert, I can, share your email address. So if anybody thinks of some questions after the fact, as I always do. They can reach out to you.

Sure thing.

[SH] Great. Well, thank you again for your time, we really appreciate it, and I hope to run into you soon.

Greg, thank you for having me.

[SH] Alright, great, take care, everybody. Bye. Bye.