Episode 1: PILOT - Everything You Need To Know

00:00 Pete Hello there. Welcome to A Very Fine House brought to you by The Energy Pros. This is the show where we help you keep your home safe, comfortable, and efficient. My name's Pete.

00:22 Marty And I'm Marty. We're The Home Energy Pros. We're going to talk to you about everything you need to know about heating and cooling and insulation, your drafty attic, your windows, your doors, and everything else you need to keep your home safe, comfortable, and efficient.

00:36 Pete On today's episode, we're going over everything you need to know. Let's get started. So what are we doing here, Marty?

00:42 Marty Well, Pete, it's difficult to turn on the television or open up your browser on the internet and not read or hear something about energy and sustainability and going green. What we do though at our company at Berry Installation is we have dealt over the past with thousands of homeowners, helping them solve issues surrounding comfort, safety, and efficiency in their homes. So you're almost a how-to manual, giving them some real insights on how to do this and sometimes doing it for them. Yes, I think so. We've seen every different type of house configuration and very, very many interesting people. We've dealt with tiny houses, mobile homes, penthouses, apartment buildings. Any outhouses? No, no outhouses. And then regular family houses, three-bedroom, colonials, bungalows, and very large houses. So we've seen it all. By that, I mean we've seen many different types of configurations of homes.

02:00 Pete And so with those, I'm sure you get a lot of commonly asked questions. This is the FAQ of your business. What are some of the things you guys have seen most commonly?

02:13 Marty What's interesting about our business, Pete, is people usually contact us with a problem. Nobody wants to buy insulation. They would rather have granite countertops, as would I, or a new kitchen or something you can see and utilize every day. But people call us with problems, such as the second floor of my house is 10 to 15 degrees warmer in the summer than the downstairs and the opposite in the winter. My basement smells so funky I can hardly use it. We put an addition on years ago, and that addition is always cold. My daughter's bedroom is not usable. We have ice dams that could damage the roof and cause safety issues around the house. So one of the reasons I thought this podcast might be interesting to folks is there is a certain commonality to problems. And if we can use this as an educational tool to help people get a jump on how they can improve their homes and also save some money.

03:15 Pete Yeah, I'm sure that funky house basement person sounds like a personal problem.

03:18 Marty No, you have some issues. Yes, there are some things we can do.

03:22 Pete Some things. There are some limits.

03:27 Marty There are some things we can do. For example, just this past week during this cold spell, we received a call from the Eben's in Bay Village. Beautifully remodeled house in Bay Village. And they're having pipes freezing. Their second floor bedrooms that kids sleep over when they visit were basically unusable because they were so cold. And through some diagnostic techniques using infrared cameras and some other tools. Sounds like James Bond over here. We'll talk about that in some future episodes. But using some diagnostic techniques and visual observation, we were able to do a number of things. They had issues with undervalued insulation. The second story attics that were uninsulated. They had a lot of air leaks into the attic, which also brought in pests. You know, they had a mice problem that was a result of that also. And then they had a ventilation issue where some of their bath vans and exhausts were not ventilated properly nor was their roof. So at a very reasonable cost, I believe we were able to address all those areas, improve the insulation, reduce the air infiltration, improve the ventilation, stop the freezing pipes and I think we could document in their case about a 35% improvement of overall efficiency just through insulation.

04:37 Pete Fantastic. So that 35% savings, that's fantastic. So you're talking about a payback period on the whole project in call it three years.

04:42 Marty It's hard to calculate exactly what the paybacks are, but it depends on where you start in your home. But typically we tell folks, I think most projects have a financial payback of anywhere from three to six years. But more importantly, the return on investment over the life of the install, 20, 25, 30 years, you're saving the energy every month, month after month, year after year after you make that investment.

05:14 Pete Yep. It's compounding. And energy costs, of course, are rising. So there's this kind of ongoing education that you guys are providing to the consumer. Think of it almost as like a owner's manual for their house and how they tackle these kind of different things. Sure. All right. So that's the general idea of the podcast. I think everyone can see the value of what we'll be discussing and some of the topics. But what are those brass tacks? What are some of these topics? Just to go hammer through them.

05:46 Marty We're certainly talking about installation, which is our area of expertise at Barry installation, but certainly the heating and ventilation system, air conditioning systems, the windows and doors. Everyone's always talking about windows and doors on television and in advertisements. Like we mentioned earlier, issues in the attic and basement. And we're also want to talk about some other things like indoor air quality, which is very important. We're going to touch on utility costs, tax credits and incentives and other. It's quite an exhaustive list.

06:27 Pete I can see. Very interesting. How about we take a short break right here and we'll come back when we talk about it and we can do our best to delve a little bit deeper into some of those topics. Great. And we're back. So listen, Marty, my house was built in 1953. It has a lot of those issues. I don't even know where to begin with this. So how would you educate and consult somebody like myself? And mind you, we're just talking about my house, not my mental, psychological.

07:02 Marty Your very fine house, of course. The first thing we try to do, Pete, is listen to our customers because people spend a lot of time in their homes. They love their homes usually and they're familiar and they have a problem. That's why they call this. Like I said, no one wants to spend money with this if they don't have to. It's a diagnostic. Yeah. Well, we listen to the customer and then we try to, you know, we're not doctors, but we try to then use that information to lead us to a solution. But it starts with some very basic diagnostics, listening to the customer. And there are some diagnostic tools we can use to pinpoint these specific problems. Over the phone or is this an in-person? No, in-person visit, usually a 20 or 30 minute walk through the house. We have infrared cameras we can use to determine the level of insulation in walls and hidden spaces, a visual observation of attics and crawl spaces and places that people never go. There are some also diagnostic tools to test the efficacy and efficiency of a furnace. And we take all that information and then compile a prescription. We call it an energy assessment for a customer. We used to call it energy audits, but we decided and learned very quickly, no one wants to get audited. Yeah. So we do an energy assessment that outlines with some objective numbers, which we'll get into in some subsequent episodes, predictive numbers on how we can improve the house. So it's a pretty thorough, comprehensive diagnostic on the home. Sure. A prescription. Like I said, we're not doctors, but a prescription that in the details, the various things one could do to improve their comfort and efficiency, not all of which are feasible and not all of which someone might undertake at this time. So roadmap of sorts.

09:02 Pete Yeah, that makes sense to me. So after you have the roadmap, the prescription, the name of your company has the word insulation in it. So is that normally the first step in a lot of the situations?

09:14 Marty Yes, insulation. So when we're looking at a house like yours or any of the number of other types of houses we've seen, there are three pillars of improving the building shell of the home and that revolves around insulation, ventilation and air sealing. And if I can digress for a moment with a little physics lesson, I know you're a liberal arts major from a very fancy college.

09:36 Pete Well, yeah. D is for diploma.

09:40 Marty Right. In the physics class anyway. This is important, as my wife says, very boring also, but there are three types. When you're living in your house, this 1950s house, or it could be a house built in the year 2000, there are three things that affect the comfort of your home. And that is the amount of heat that is conducted through the walls of the house, how much is convected and how much radiant heat you get into the house.

10:06 Pete Hold on, man. That's super complicated. I don't have my computer to look up convected.

10:11 Marty This is important, at least to me. Conduction is transfer of heat from the inside to the outside. So today's 40 degrees outside, your house is at 70. The goal of your house is to keep the 40 degree temperature out and to equalize the house at 70 degrees. The transfer of heat inside out is called conductive heat. And you know about this, if you've ever held a spoon in a fire or over your stove, that's conductive. It's transfer of heat through a solid medium. Is that too complicated for a kid from a fancy college? That's pretty good. The second is convective heat transfer, which is when the wind hits the house and forces cold air into the house through cracks and gaps. And then the third is the radiant heat that comes from the sun. And that's particularly important with windows. So if you keep those, I know this is boring, but if you keep those three types of heat transfer in mind, that will speak to the different things we're going to talk about. Conduction, convection, radiation, and then air sealing, insulation, and ventilation. How's that?

11:14 Pete That's an excellent answer. So how does that relate to your house?

11:17 Marty So when we insulate the house, we're usually looking at the sidewalls. Does your house have insulation in the sidewalls? Does it have insulation in the attic space or sufficient insulation? And is the house air sealed? So air sealed. Air sealed means simply, do you have a lot of cracks in your house or gaps that allow cold air to come in the house in the winter, hot air in the summer? That could be through a door. It could be through your foundation. It could be through a window that's misaligned or is damaged, or it could be from your attic. So air sealed.

12:01 Pete We would look at how can we air seal this house better?

12:05 Marty Right.

12:06 Pete And I assume with some of this, you'd have to be looking at any entry point to the house, any window, any door.

12:09 Marty That's correct.

12:10 Pete I assume more diagnostics and fancy words. No, I'm kidding. But more things to look at there, right?

12:18 Marty Right. Air sealing is the easiest and least expensive impact you can have on your house. Weather strip your doors, caulk those gaps in the basement. Just simple things like that. That's the first step. And then you can retrofit and add insulation to the side walls or add insulation to your attic. For example, if one of our listeners were to go up to their attic and they look and if they saw three or four inches of insulation, if they stuck their head up in their attic or walked up their attic, the current building code in Ohio in the Midwest is 14 inches. So many times when we go into very nice or very fine houses, we can double or triple or quadruple the amount of insulation in their attic, which has a tremendous impact on the comb. I would think that's a huge entry point for the conduction and conduction of air. That would affect the conductive heat that comes out and the convective. Heat goes out. Yeah. It's kind of like windbreaker sweater. If I go outside and I have a sweater on, that's keeping me warm. But if I put a windbreaker on, that keeps the wind from keeping me cold.

13:25 Pete One other thing too, I'm thinking when people call, they might have just got a real high energy bill and are frustrated by it. So they call you guys. What are some things you talk about with energy bills?

13:39 Marty It's interesting. Among the thousands and thousands of customers we've talked to over the years, Pete, very few have made their first inquiry with us or had conversations with us about their energy bills, because a lot of people assume that the energy bill and the amount of money they're spending on energy is a function of the type of house they want to live in. It is a fixed cost that can't be addressed. So we can help change that by some of the things we talked about, some of those fancy words we used, and impact the energy bill in that way. For example, just a couple of weeks ago, a typical house, we worked with some folks in a community near Cleveland who had just remodeled their house and done a lot of work. It was a beautiful house, but they experienced frozen pipes. The second floor bedrooms were too cold or too hot for their grandkids to stay in. They had some air infiltration, drafts. They also had a little mice problem that came as a result of the drafts. And we were able to take this diagnostic approach that I mentioned, address those issues, and through air sealing, insulation, and ventilation, remember those three things, improve their efficiency by a measurable amount of about 30%. Wow. 35%. Wow.

15:05 Pete And what did you do with the mice then? I'm kidding. Or derps. Yes. Yes. No more mice. And one thing you showed me and co-worker Steve when you came in our office, that the consumer actually has a choice in their energy. Maybe you can explain a little bit about that. We'll get into it more in a future episode. But I was just in disbelief about this.

15:33 Marty Yes. In Ohio and in most of the Midwest and most states around the US today, consumers now have a choice from whom they're going to buy their energy, from whom you buy your natural gas or your electricity. And it's similar to purchasing gasoline for your car. Gas is, you know, now it's $3.50 a gallon, but the gas station down the street might be $3.80 and the one downtown might be $3.20. You can choose where you buy your energy. And consumers can save money by choosing low cost suppliers with different terms of service, a one-year deal or two-year deal and things like that. So you can save by purchasing energy better.

16:16 Pete And this is a huge savings. I mean, natural gas is off more than 75 percent off its peak prices. And I think, you know, maybe not everyone knows that who doesn't pay attention to commodity markets and prices.

16:31 Marty Right. So two things, just like if you're using the analogy of a car, you can improve your home by some of the things we're talking about and also purchase the fuel at a lower cost. So use less and pay less per unit.

16:48 Pete You've mentioned the heating and the cooling of the house. So HVAC is something that, you know, first of all, what does HVAC stand for? Help us with that term and what it entails.

16:58 Marty Sure. HVAC stands for heating, ventilating and air conditioning. And let's take those separately. So heating, we all need heat in our house, particularly here in the Midwest. Most, I think, two-thirds of the homes in the United States are heated with natural gas. And most of us have forced air furnaces, ductwork and fans and things like that. I think you have that in your house. Right. And like many things, the technology has really improved and advanced, much like in cars, going back to the car analogy. If you haven't changed your furnace in the last 10 years, you probably have a 70 or 80% efficient furnace. That means for every dollar you spend or every unit of natural gas you use, 20 or 30% of it's going up the chimney and is being wasted. Today, if you upgrade your furnace, you can get a 90% furnace, 92%, all the way up to 96%, even a 98% efficient furnace. So regardless of what you do with the insulation or the shell of the house, your saving could be 10%, 15%, 20% just by having a more efficient system. But it's still a big investment, but that's some of the technology improvements. And there's other things surrounding furnaces, which we'll get into in subsequent episodes about controls and fans and different things. So suffice to say that for gas furnaces, the technology has advanced, has advanced greatly, and you can have a more efficient system. And the same goes for electric furnaces. There's a big push on right now to get people to switch to electric furnaces and heat pumps. And in the same fashion, there's been a lot of improvements in the efficiency there.

18:45 Pete What's that push? Is that from an environmental standpoint? It's better for the environment?

18:50 Marty I would say that's debatable, but our government is pushing us towards reducing the amount of natural gas we're using and switching more to electricity, whether it's cars or heating. I'd say the jury's still out on that a little bit, but we could have a whole episode on that as well.

19:04 Pete Yeah, it sounds like each of these topics you kind of peel back the onion on.

19:13 Marty And the question always comes up, do I need a new furnace? Should you get a new furnace? And it's a big investment. And there's, again, some diagnostic tools that can test the current efficiency of your furnace to see if it's degradated. My advice to folks is always, if your furnace is working well and it's operating as efficient as it can be, you're probably best to let it serve out its useful life and then see where the technology's at when that system is ready to fail.

19:43 Pete If it ain't broke, why fix it? And a thing like that, a useful life of a furnace, how many, is it, are we talking year, decades or, you know?

19:50 Marty I don't want to get in trouble with furnace folks, but I think most furnaces purchased today have a useful life of 15 years. 20, you're probably pushing it. And it's a fairly big capital investment, of course. Air conditioning is a different animal, and the amount of air conditioning capacity you need is a function of a lot of things a little bit different than your furnace. It has to do with the types of windows you have, the amount of sun that's on your house. One big function of how much air conditioning you need and how much you need to spend on that is your individual preference.

20:26 Pete How comfortable are people? I mean, I still remember even to this day in my parents' home growing up outside of Chicago, it was always a big production to get the window unit into the window and arguments and, you know, and yelling and screaming. But then the end product was that room was really, really cool. And we spent a lot of time in that room.

20:49 Marty So much, much like furnaces, air conditioners have become more efficient also. And you can buy a more efficient unit, but air conditioning is a little more complicated because two things. In the summertime, if you just think about it for a moment, in the summertime in the Midwest, if it's 90 degrees in August, most people are comfortable at 72 degrees. So you're trying to overcome at most a 20 degree temperature difference. Right. In the winter, we just had horrible storms around Christmas Eve. It was zero minus 10 degrees. You're trying to overcome against an 80 degree temperature difference. So it's a different animal. And air conditioning and comfort, because the topic of our show is safety, comfort and efficiency, right? Yeah. Comfort in the summer or in the cooling months is largely a function of humidity. And humidity can be addressed in a number of different ways, which we'll talk about later on and dive into that. Air conditioning is a little bit different.

21:49 Pete It sounds like we, again, with each topic, I have a kinder garden understanding of, and I would say I'm talking to a PhD student who's explaining it.

21:58 Marty But you went to a very fancy school though.

22:01 Pete I didn't take any HVAC.

22:03 Marty Right. Well, that's why you need people like us and our crew.

22:08 Pete You can't go more than a commercial set or two and do a watch and a ball game, and then you have all the window and doors commercials. And I kind of just tuned them out. But I know there's probably something there that would make our homes more safe and more comfortable and efficient. So what are some of the things that you think about with regard to windows and doors?

22:31 Marty Well, in a typical home, if there is such a thing, but on average, I would say windows account for anywhere from 15% to 25% of the surface area of the home. And they bring in light and they make the home look good. And there is a lot of marketing out there about windows. There's three things that affect windows that relate to windows as it relates to our subject matter, safe, comfortable, and efficient. One is, are they installed properly? Yep. And are they functional? Or are they damaged or they don't open properly? And are they letting air infiltration into the house? That's the convection thing we talked about a few minutes ago. So that's one thing. And then when you get into the window itself about choosing new windows, if you have single pane windows in your house, that's kind of the one extreme. Those probably should be replaced because single pane have a low R value. And R value being just the quality. Yes. R value means, and we didn't touch on this in the installation section, but an R value, which you see on products when you go to Home Depot or Lowe's or walk around a lumber yard, relates to the level of thermal conductivity that you're going to see. The higher the R value of a material, the better it resists heat transfer. Okay. Makes sense. So if you have four inches of insulation in your walls, that's like an R13. If you have 14 inches in your attic, that's R49. Windows have very, very low thermal. They're very high thermal conductivity. But a single pane window has about one third the R value of a typical double pane or triple pane window. Okay. So single pane windows, you can make an improvement. Second, the window frame itself, there's all different types of frames. We'll dive into this in our segment on windows, but you have aluminum windows, wood, vinyl, all of them have different characteristics. And even glass block.

24:36 Pete I recently had to replace a glass block. Not me, but I hired somebody to replace glass block, which had cracks in it. I think somebody might have hit a slap shot. It might have been me at the glass block. But yeah.

24:53 Marty So most windows sold today are at least double pane. And there's three things to consider about with windows. That's the number of panes, double pane, triple pane, single pane. You want to at least have double. The gap in between the panes is usually filled with an inert gas like argon. And then there's a coating on windows. So if you look at a label, a sticker at a store in a window, it has the U value, which is a measure of the R value, the inverse of it. And it has the type of filling it has and a coating. And then it has something called a solar heat gain coefficient. If you've ever stood in front of a single pane window, it's like standing under a magnifying glass.

25:33 Pete I'm glad you're saying that because you're starting to lose me when you're talking about U values and R values and coefficient covalence. But I can understand standing under a magnifying glass. So that makes sense to me. How about on the door side of things? What are we talking about there?

25:49 Marty Well, doors are part of your building shell. And the first thing with most doors is they should be insulated. And more importantly, closed properly and sealed properly. How many times have you gone into a house, Pete, including my own, by the way, when I go home tonight, it's going to be a big sock under the front door because it leaks. And so that's because the door is not sealed properly. So the first thing the folks can do to improve their comfort in their home is to make sure the doors are sealed and closed properly. If you're replacing the door, setting aesthetics aside, you can get insulated doors and different levels of insulation on the door. So that's a little bit about doors.

26:30 Pete As you can see, there's a lot of aspects of the home that we'll get into in terms of making it more safe and more comfortable and more efficient. We're just about running out of time here, but we hope that you folks and listeners have enjoyed the conversation thus far and kind of a primer for what we'll get into during this season. So we also talk about air quality. What are you mostly talking about when you think about air quality?

27:01 Marty Well, when we're up here in the Midwest, we're inside our houses a lot, particularly in the winter. And as you make your house tighter or insulate your house and make it more efficient, indoor air quality suffers. So the enemy of an energy efficient building shell or house is indoor air quality. What do I mean by that? Your house is leaky. It has a lot of convective leakage, going back to that term. It airs out. It changes over the air, gets rid of cooking smells, lowers the humidity, and makes the house healthier. If you tighten up the house and you reduce the amount of air changes in the house, you have to introduce ventilation or other measures to make the house healthy. If you have a lot of people, if you have pets, if you're cooking, allergens, dust can cause serious problems for many people. And that's one thing that has to be considered as you change the makeup of a house that may have been there for 20, 30, 40, even 100 years.

28:26 Pete So indoor air quality and insulation and ventilation have to go hand in hand. That'll be a very interesting and especially topical now given the post pandemic world that we're entering into. Yes. Very conscious of that. So we have a lot of topics as folks can see that we'll dive into. We're just about out of time here, but we do hope that folks have enjoyed the conversation so far and a little primer on what we have coming up. We have a lot of local pros from Marty's network that he's worked with and knows they're going to be sharing their insights. And we think our goal is to make this as useful as we can for all the consumers and homeowners out there.

29:10 Marty Thanks Pete. Those were all great questions and we're really looking forward to sharing more and more insights with our folks and we hope we can educate people when they find this very interesting. Very useful. Should be fun.

29:25 Pete Thanks for listening everyone. I'm Pete Carroll. And I'm Marty Berry. And this has been a Very Fine House with the Energy Pros sponsored by Berry Insulation. You can find Berry Insulation at Twitter with the handle Berry Insulation.

29:39 Marty Or on our email, [email protected] That's Berry like Strawberry.

29:47 Pete Got a question that you think we can answer? Hit us up. We'll answer it on the show. Learn about Berry Insulation on the website or in the description on the podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, a five-star rating of course would go a long way. We appreciate it.

30:00 Marty Subscribe so you never miss an episode. Our sound designer, audio engineer, and producer is Noah Fouts. Recorded at Evergreen Podcasts. Executive producers, Michael D'Aloya and David Alan Moss.

30:12 Pete We'll see you next episode. And if you only remember one thing from this podcast, it's this.

30:18 Marty Noah, you got to do me a favor before you leave. Before we meet again. You got to watch The Graduation. It is a good one.