142: Passive (House) Aggressively - Net Zero at Scale

[Music] hey everybody on today's episode of still to be determined we're going to be talking about how passive homes aren't just for homes wait what hi everybody as usual I'm Sean Farrell I'm a writer I write some stuff for kids I write some stuff for adults and I'm also just generally curious about technology and luckily for me my brother is Matt of undecided with Matt Farrell a conveniently named podcast Matt how you doing today pretty good pretty good weekend just a little personal detail I was just out at my parents house I was helping them to move and it was chaos and the fact that they're moving now and I'm gonna be moving in a few months it's gonna be a stressful few months yeah it feels like right now the end of 2022 feels to me like it's trying to pack all of 2023 into it and it's not fitting I'm I'm right in the same boat with you and it's for me here in New York City the New York City marathon is currently running by outside my house those of you listening to this are listening in my future but I am in your past so right now marathoners are going by and the crowds are going wild I like to pretend that when I hear the swell of Cheers they are cheering for me for the doll things that I'm doing in my home so I just poured myself a cup of coffee and there was a a massive swell of yays outside with bells and vuvuzelas and I thought that's right folks I got myself that cup of joe but enough about me and the crowds that love me before we get into today's discussion which is going to be about my Matt's most recent episode which was about use of passive energy production in a hotel setting as opposed to a home setting yeah we're gonna get to that talk in a minute but before we do want to share some thoughts from our most recent episode this is from our discussion about nanotechnology and its use in harvesting lithium in a faster and more efficient means than other techniques such as brine evaporation and there were conversations like this one fortitude the dog walker asked a very straightforward question can you use the brine from desalinization Matt I know you've talked about this before but do you want to weigh in on some of the uses for the brine yeah there's different things you can do with the brine there's different salts and materials in there that can be extracted the usefulness of it is kind of up in the air it depends on what you're getting out of it but like you can extract lithium then you can get other salts that could be used for like road salt for you know melting snow it could be for creating kind of a grit that could be used for you know like you have those little pads that create traction it's like there's different things that you can get out of it that you can reuse the question is can you make a use of all of it that's the the million dollar question that seems to be the million dollar question around most by-products in our world right now recycling projects being one of the biggest ways that recycling is pushed as well we can reuse all these things and then everybody stands there and says how and we're discovering more recently that that how has not really been answered even though we've been trying to do these things for a couple of decades so it does become a that's part of the scale of decision making I think you have the desire to gain lithium and maybe this is the best means of doing so and maybe it's worth the excess byproduct for the time being even if we don't know what to do with it there was also this conversation or question from Ian Fisher this is in response to my revealing that I play Destiny Ian asks Hunter Titan warlock simple the answer for me is Hunter is oh no yeah and here comes Matt with yeah Titan Titan all the way that's all I do so Ian let us know what you what you play we look forward to hearing from you so on to Matt's most recent video this is the episode that dropped uh once again Google is doing some interesting things with the date stamps on their videos they are not doing something where the date is embedded in you have to hover over the number of viewers watched so here's your video it says viewers and then it says five days ago it doesn't sell say the date it just says five days ago and you hover over that and it will say November 1st 2022. so once again YouTube uh coming up with more and more efficient ways to really get under my skin how big can you make a passive house that's the title of Matt's episode it dropped on November 1st 2022 and it is a building that as soon as you show it in your video I was like I've seen that building from a train yeah like I've gone past that building I recognize it it's got a very recognizable profile it is located in Connecticut and my first question was how did you first hear about this project at this hotel one of my patrons and he's become a friend of mine his name is Paul Barron runs a website called Tinker try he introduced me to Bruce he's Paul's part of the like a Tesla EV group and met Becker uh Bruce Becker through that because Bruce Becker used to be the head of a the EV Association in Connecticut and so the two of them had gotten to know each other and so he was like the Matchmaker and brought us together and got me introduced so that I could get this tour and walk through the hotel and when did this revamping project begin a few years ago it just opened they finished just this this year so it was like I think it was opened in May of this year but it took them several years to complete this project so it's been in the works for quite a while I'll admit to Year's worth of work sounding surprisingly fast considering everything that is in this building it's now got solar panels on the roof the wiring has been converted over to basically digital like computer cable is what their Cat6 Cat6 cable the part of the video that made me kind of pause it for a moment not because I needed to rewind and figure out if I'd heard it properly but just to digest what he said when he said the entire hotel when all the lights are on use about 5000 Watts you could run the entire Hotel electric from a generator in the parking lot and I was like yeah what how and the spikes on the graph on his phone when he pointed out yeah these orange spikes are when they're running the laundry that's the thing that uses the most energy the most energy in the building the energy conserving in some cases energy producing things within the hotel like the elevators all of these things are available Tech and they by definition they have to be there in this hotel right now they are all available right now and he's just one of the first to say let's put them all together in a hotel is it really that simple yes it's really just that simple what's great is one of my patrons his name is RAV sent me a message and a video to a apartment building in India from a couple years ago that basically did the same thing in India so it's like this is these are techniques and technologies that have been available for years but just nobody is taking the holistic approach and building from kind of the ground up of trying to make all these things work together as one giant organism and so in the U.S Bruce is like the first one doing this at the scale uh for a hotel like this and then but it's been being done for several years in countries like India and over in Europe there are different places that have examples just like this U.S we're number one except for this kind of stuff um we're kind of lagging behind so it's the first one here but it's not the first one in the world well as he pointed out it is typical that when people approach a project like this they follow the book the book which is now decades old and is the creation of trial and error from different Architects and developers across the country and across the world and it's obvious that they follow the pattern of well this is what's proven to save costs and be most efficient and it feels like right now the disruption of these new texts hasn't yet filtered in to the hotel industry and it'll be interesting he mentioned they're going to be doing sustainability and hotel conferences at this hotel I would love to be a fly on the wall because I don't think this is something he's going to be promoting like himself out in public but I wouldn't be surprised if her hotel developers there's the push of you know just because you shave your costs with all of this doesn't mean you have to shave your prices the profit margin would go up on a hotel like this that is producing its own energy is running the entire electric grid of the hotel you mentioned that this is basically like a microgrid and it is kind of a proof of concept for a neighborhood as well as a hotel or an office building but to say well you've got this building which is running on only 5000 Watts it's producing its own electric it's not completely Net Zero but even if it's not it's very very close yep exactly and all of that is saving money so if your room is 250 dollars at a hotel that has to pay for all of its electricity and pay for all of its power usage and this hotel doesn't have to pay for all those things that's profit well it it all comes down to risk it's one of the reasons that all the hotels Follow The Playbook because all the risks have been proven so you you go in knowing I spend x amount of money I'm going to be able to get this kind of return you know exactly what's going to happen and the reason that you don't see what's happening with Bruce happening at large is because nobody's willing to take that risk it takes somebody like Bruce to kind of step outside the box and say screw the Playbook I'm going to try something different and now he's basically helped to write a new book for hotels that he can try to educate and reduce that that perceived Risk by other chains and things like that so it's it's going to take people like Bruce around the world to really kind of move the needle forward and the sad part of this is this has stuff been it's been around for years and it's just only now being put into practice so it's it's very frustrating to me to look at this and go okay well you can do passive house on a house you can do passive house stuff on a apartment building a hotel Hospital commercial building whatever you want why are we not doing this everywhere is the thing that keeps I keep coming back to again and again and again there was a lot of conversation in the comments around just what you spoke about the question of how do we take this and use it in other locations like this one from save money save the planet what I like most about this is that the hotel was a retrofit on an already existing building I was reading a study the other day by a group in the UK they found that even if we make sure that 100 of new buildings are Net Zero that won't be enough because most of our emissions come from our already existing buildings so we have to aggressively pursue retrofits like this one on all buildings if we want to hit our Net Zero goals it really is like the the secret that's out in the open like talking about you building a passive house is fantastic you know you building a house that's as energy efficient as possible is fantastic the neighborhood with the hundred other homes in it that are not even close to being passive that you know you in isolation no one Builder no one owner no one hotel developer can solve this this is really a collective issue that has to be embraced neighborhood-wide city-wide it has to take the approach of encouragement to get people to retrofit I work in an office where we have in fact taken that approach there was a major Redevelopment of our building where the entire building the entire staff of the company I worked for we had to relocate for about it was about a year and a half two years and they did massive changes to the way the building is run and the goal was to take it as close to Net Zero as possible so it was Energy Efficiency it was how does solar impact our building just in the form of heat like you know what where can you put the desks in order to create environments where there would be enough ambient heat in the winter and there wouldn't be over production of heat in the summer simple things like that seeing the use of braking technology to create electricity in the elevators like something like that is so obvious the moment that he pointed it out to you and you were like wait a minute so this is just something as simple as the braking in the car which is used now in all types of cars it's not just cars that are yeah EV that's technology that's been used in cars for a long time at this point so the adaption of that to something as simple as well let's put it in our elevators it that that part of the tour was the funniest to me because not only did it kind of blow my mind because it hadn't crossed my mind but it was the very first thing that we did the entire tour I just met Bruce we were talking a little bit okay let's get started and we walk over the elevators because let's go see what the battery rooms and yeah we use the Coney elevators which do the Regeneration baking and it was just like okay this is the start of the tour and the fact that he just dropped that like in a side like a oh it's no big deal it was just like he just kind of rattled it off and was going to start talking about the the batteries that we were about to go see and it was just kind of like whoa Bruce slow down I don't think you understand that most people like myself did not know that was a thing right talk about that for a second but so it's it's to me it was clear that's something that's been around for a long time and being used in a lot of places but nobody talks about it like the public doesn't know that this is happening and it's just fascinating to me that I mean we keep saying it again and again these Technologies exist and it's not like this is a brand new thing these are things we know how to do it's like why are we not doing this yeah everywhere and it and it does come down to public information has the ability to sway the needle toward acceptance because I think what happens with a lot of people is the argument is made we need to make adjustments to the way our world works in the name of climate change and there's a pushback from one side that is partly driven by you're going to be asking me to radically change everything about my life public information like this what this hotel is incorporated and the things that your channel is talking about is an opportunity to educate the public about these things already exist you may have in fact ridden in on an elevator that does exactly what this elevator does so on top of that it brings it brings additional Comfort yes it's like to kind of tie back to when we're talking about the windows and the quiet the quietness of the hotel is something that every person visiting a hotel craves we want a quiet room right I just I just stayed in a hotel when I was visiting our parents and it was so noisy the Gap underneath my door was like this big with light coming in and every morning at like 5 30 people were getting up and leaving to go to whatever jobs they were doing and it was just a cacophony of noise coming in the door Hotel like this those kinds of things are sealed the windows are triple pain and you can't hear the highway and it was like stepping to that room was like this Cocoon of just this soft quietness surrounding you and it's like that's something that we all want when we go to a hotel right so not only does it save energy but it makes it more comfortable and enjoyable to stay there so it's like there's a benefit from a user experience point of view as well as from a saving money point of view it's it's it's a win-win-win across the board yeah so I think that making more information like this readily available to the public and letting the public know that these things exist and provide the kinds of comfort and that they aren't alien to us is an important step and then The Next Step Beyond that are people like wild picks who is suggesting that there's always going to be the Vanguard the people on the edge who are experimenting with the next step the next Evolution wild picture this conversation Dreyer is using heat pumps are available that's what I have in my home it uses less power and has no vent rather than generating hot air to increase evaporation and vent all the humid hot air it condenses moisture from the air onto the coils which then drain away I'm sure a commercial use version can be found or made hopefully they could have their current dryers retrofitted so you're talking about wild picks is pointing out here the spike and energy use that this gentleman showed on his phone there are other technologies that might be available to actually take one step further to remove some of those spikes so thanks wildpix for that guy there is one thing about that he's 100 correct for consumers right not for commercial scale and what's funny is I probably should have been more explicit in the video about that but like after the video came out we were seeing that thread of why not a heat pump dryer because I've done a video about heat pump dryers in the past I was an email chain with Bruce and Bruce is like they don't exist like they don't exist at the commercial scale that the hotel would be using so it's like he's still looking so it's like if somebody can figure out how to make this at a commercial scale or some company does offer it he's going to be right there in line to buy one but they just don't really exist yet which leads right to the final comment that I wanted to share this one's from a user whose username is simply an underscore so I'm calling them underscore but that is not the word underscore it is literally the symbol underscore underscore wrote I have a special kinship with experimenters like this gentleman I'm about to retrofit a residential home and I've been wondering why no one inside the US is manufacturing vacuum insulated panels for residential structures yet after doing some research it looks like I can make my own panels for this particular project there are no examples online explaining how the panels are made or how to install them on residential structures so I've already got some materials arriving in the mail this week to practice making some small-scale VIPs and test their effectiveness against closed cell polyurethane foam and fiberglass sometimes you just got to experiment yourself to see if an idea is viable underscore please come back and share the results of your testing you may be on to something for the residents that that is available for corporate and large-scale construction but maybe it is a gap in the residential buyers Market let us know how it goes that actually makes me think about it somebody else reached out to me about a new type of window that it goes beyond the performance of a triple pane a triple uh glazed window because what they're doing is the between the panes of glass they're creating a vacuum seal between the panes of glass and it gets a better r value than filling it with some kind of other gas and it's you can get up to I think the windows go up to an R22 which is extraordinary for a window like if you get an R12 R15 that's like amazing that's like astonishing and they can get up to R22 so I'm really curious underscore to hear how your experiment goes because this is really cool I love it so listeners what do you think about all this I think that for me I would like to stay in this hotel I am don't have a reason to go to Connecticut and stay overnight but if I ever do I think that this would be the hotel I would pick what do you all think are there other things other technologies that you think would benefit from being in the public eye more so that they would just become part of how people assume our days are going and become more available and accepted by the public in our attempts to improve Energy Efficiency let us know in the comments you can do that on YouTube just by going to the comments below the video or you can reach out to us directly through the contact information in the podcast description don't forget whether you're on YouTube or getting this podcast via Apple Google Spotify or anywhere else leave a review leave a like And subscribe share this with your friends all that really does help support the channel you can also go to stilltbd.fm click on the become a supporter button which allows you to throw coins at our heads and we appreciate the welts and don't forget on YouTube you can do the same thing just by clicking the join button thank you so much everybody for listening or watching and we'll talk to you next time [Music]

2022-11-11 20:33

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