Better Homes for Lower Cost Future Ready Matters

00:00:08:14 - 00:00:28:24
Mike Collignon: All right. Happy Thursday everyone. I think everyone knows what today is, right. It's National Knock Knock Jokes day. Yeah. That's right. I'm glad you remembered. Yeah. Hey, Sam, I've got a knocked out joke for you. Knock, knock.

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Sam Rashkin: Here. Mike.

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Mike Collignon: Sam. Raskin.

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Sam Rashkin: I knew I shouldn't do this. I knew I shouldn't do this.

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Mike Collignon: Go ahead, Sam Raskin.

00:00:45:21 - 00:01:09:13
Mike Collignon: Yeah. Sam Raskin who? I just wanted to get you to say that line that was actually really nice of Sam to play along with me. He had no knowledge predetermined if that set up. So I appreciate Sam playing along with me there. But hey, speaking of this seminar that we're doing, we're going to be talking about the future today and not just November, which starts tomorrow.

00:01:09:14 - 00:01:29:04
Mike Collignon: We're going to be covering smart homes, disaster resistance, future proofing, all of that. And we're going to be joined by J.D. Gill of Schneider Electric, which is doing Shiner Electric, doing a lot when it comes to smart home technology. And he's going to share a little bit more about that in just a little while. Now back to the aforementioned Sam Raskin.

00:01:29:04 - 00:01:53:15
Mike Collignon: He is the former chief architect at Doe's Building Technologies office, but now is created or focused on creating and teaching the content for the housing 2.0 program. That content is based largely on Sam's book housing 2.0 A Disruption Survival Guide. The full program was established to help empower you, our building professionals, to design and construct higher performance, healthier, more sustainable homes and a fraction of the cost.

00:01:53:18 - 00:02:13:21
Mike Collignon: Sam is going to lead today's seminar and also address your questions at the end. Now, before we get started, we have some sponsors that will probably make you smile more than even my bad knock knock jokes. And the first is Schneider Electric, who is driving the digital transformation of modern homes with smart and sustainable energy solutions for ultimate comfort and energy efficiency.

00:02:13:22 - 00:02:39:22
Mike Collignon: Their connected home ecosystem of smart energy management solutions provides digital control of energy use throughout a home from the grid, via their smart electrical panel to their connected wiring devices. Next, we have Jingo Solar. They are a leading PV module manufacturer and energy storage system integrator. The company has deployed more than 100GW of their Eagle modules in 160 countries globally, including more than 17GW right here in the United States.

00:02:39:25 - 00:03:24:03
Mike Collignon: Eagle storage brings together the best energy storage technology for turnkey hardware and energy storage services. We also have Panasonic Healthy Indoor Living Solutions. They are helping builders across the country differentiate themselves with powerful, code compliant and cost effective indoor air quality solutions that provide a safer environment for home buyers. And finally, our newest sponsor is LG. As a leading proponent of the electrification movement, LG is proud to pave the way with arguably the broadest portfolio of home electrification products from air to air and air to water heat pumps for water heaters, clothes dryers and washer dryer combos, all the way to advanced energy storage systems, EV chargers, and super efficient appliances, including the industry's first

00:03:24:03 - 00:03:48:12
Mike Collignon: Energy Star certified induction Cooktop. LG's innovation and technology will help us promote decarbonization and collectively create a better life for all. Now, during the course of today's presentation, you can submit questions for Sam and then later on JD as well. Simply use the questions box inside the Go to Webinar Control panel. I'm going to review those questions and pose those to Sam and Judy after their presentations.

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Mike Collignon: All right. Here's the man who knows who he is. It is Sam Raskin.

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Sam Rashkin: Just getting my mic on. Thank you very much, Mike. And great to be here like Mike. I'm incredibly grateful for our sponsors who make this unique content possible. This program is not kind of aligned with most building science and high performance home training, so their appreciation for how important it is to integrate the total user experience optimization with high performance is so much appreciated.

00:04:28:07 - 00:04:55:24
Sam Rashkin: So again, my thanks as well to Panasonic, Snyder Electric, Genco Solar, and LG Air Conditioning Technologies. Okay, I'm trying to get my there we go. One issue I'm having good I'm good to go. So today we're going to talk about future ready matters. This is the third session out of four in our seminar seminar series for this fall.

00:04:55:24 - 00:05:19:25
Sam Rashkin: And I'm going to begin with this quote. When we build, let us think that we build forever. My good buddy Mark La Liberté uses this famous quote from John Ruskin and all of his presentations, at least all that I've attended. And I'm going to put it at the beginning, because it's so powerful about what we're trying to do as a building industry.

00:05:19:26 - 00:05:40:18
Sam Rashkin: Who we are is what we leave behind. So finishing his quote, let it not be for the present delight, nor for the present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think as we lay stone on stone, that the time is to come when those stones will be held sacred, because our hands have touched them.

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Sam Rashkin: And that men will say, is, I look upon the labor wrought substance of them. See this our fathers did for us. And so this is such a great quote I know I Mark uses it every time. Buildings are truly an amazing endeavor. We, as I talk about all the time, are involved in where people spend 70% of their lives.

00:06:05:07 - 00:06:31:06
Sam Rashkin: So thinking about the future is really important. And what we're going to cover today is how to predict the visible future, prepare for the visible future. And then I got JD Gill from Schneider Electric with us. And very much a significant part of the future is getting to smart homes. And JD is going to be an incredible resource for how to do that so much more effectively and so much more statically.

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Sam Rashkin: So I'm really excited to have JD to wrap this up. And then we go into discussion at the end, as we do with all sessions. So let's talk about predicting the visible future, and I'll use a resource book by Daniel Burris called Flash Foresight. And it kind of states the obvious that we all know just our everyday lives.

00:06:49:08 - 00:07:22:20
Sam Rashkin: We're just confronted with just a sense of change. In fact, the accelerating rate of change is a certain as a sun rising in the East, it's going to sweep across a landscape like the technological technological tsunami. It is. It will disrupt catastrophically every aspect of our industry, except for those who see it coming and effectively housing two pornos about really helping the housing industry see what's coming and just be prepared to deliver better homes for lower cost.

00:07:22:23 - 00:07:47:14
Sam Rashkin: So this is this is the visible future reality that we're in and how do we prepare for the future. And so other key concepts from flash Foresight I think are great. You can predict the future accurately. You just all you have to do is just leave out the parts. You could be wrong about. That sounds like a joke, but it's true.

00:07:47:17 - 00:08:15:03
Sam Rashkin: The key is knowing how to distinguish between a soft trend from a hard trend. It's knowing how to recognize certainty. So, for example, granite counters could be a soft trend and we know there'll be something. Replace it. Quartz something else. Just like colors, just like many design trends, even locational preferences, preferences, many of those are soft trends. A hard trend is something that you know about with certainty.

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Sam Rashkin: And those are what I want to speak about today, because if we recognize them, we can be better preparing for the future. So let's look at three hard trends I think every builder has to recognize in every housing professional, in fact. And three trends are more disaster risk, more water shortages. And this transformation to all electrification and to be future ready, we simply respond to those hard trends and we're prepared.

00:08:44:21 - 00:09:13:18
Sam Rashkin: We're disaster ready, water ready and smart electric ready. And that involves appliances, equipment, solar, electric vehicles, batteries. All these are our future. So let's let's figure out today how to start preparing for the visible future. And let's start with disaster ready. And so normal housing 2.0 programs the full curriculum. When we get to disaster ready, we lay out these key best practices.

00:09:13:18 - 00:09:49:05
Sam Rashkin: And the left. No. Yeah. The first column is the high tier best practices to optimize disaster resistance and then optimize post-disaster occupancy. And then we have the more granular, detailed best practices for each. So disaster resistance is normally addressed with wildfire resistance flood resistance, wind impact resistance, hurricanes tornadoes earthquake resistance and severe winter weather resistance. And to be ready after disaster to stay in your homes safely and with comfort.

00:09:49:05 - 00:10:19:05
Sam Rashkin: We have high performance homes, have greater resilience, as do natural comfort homes. And then we have the various solo electric systems, solar hot water, battery storage, lots of ways that we can create persistence and our ability to stay in our homes. So these are this is the list. Let's talk more broadly about the imperative. So it's not so much a political reality.

00:10:19:07 - 00:10:44:19
Sam Rashkin: A lot of times disaster gets connected to climate. The lot of political debates about climate and human impacts on climate. I'm saying just to look at the science and look at the data. And we all know this. Any of us who've been around for the past few decades, we've just experienced it there. Extreme weather, resist risks. Disaster events have become more severe as the planet warms.

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Sam Rashkin: The last.

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Sam Rashkin: 19 most hottest years on record in the last 20 years, 2023 is on track to be the hottest year in record last year. So we know the hard trend. We know the planet is getting warmer. We know that that's directly correlated to lots of disasters. So we have this rapidly accelerating risk. The world hits record land sea temperatures.

00:11:09:24 - 00:11:41:07
Sam Rashkin: And so when the oceans 2 or 3 degrees warmer, I think the Gulf surface temperature, the Gulf of Mexico surface temperature last year was 100 degrees. You have to expect Elaine and Morton and all these hurricanes is just insane. Amount of greater moisture being absorbed into the atmosphere, greater gradients of temperature with just creating all the conditions for much, much more significant frequency magnitude and expensive disasters.

00:11:41:08 - 00:11:59:03
Sam Rashkin: And so this is just where we're headed. And we all know this. And so let's first talk about frequency. 5000 year reign events have struck the US in five weeks. Why? You know I love this quote from this film The Princess Bride.

00:11:59:06 - 00:12:21:10
Sam Rashkin: Inigo Montoya keeps listening to the guy say, that's inconceivable when things keep happening that he says are inconceivable. And the famous quote is, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. And I don't think we understand what the term a thousand year event means anymore. When you have five of them in five weeks.

00:12:21:10 - 00:12:49:23
Sam Rashkin: It's a stunning, almost just need for coming up with new ways to understand what is truly a thousand year event. We don't understand that term, it's just that much more severe what's happening. And so we have this accelerating frequency as well. Climate disasters daily. Welcome to the new normal. We had over four times greater frequency of billion dollar disasters.

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Sam Rashkin: Because when you control for inflation.

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Sam Rashkin: Then since billion dollar events were started to be recorded in 1980, the average time in 1980s between billion dollar events was 75 days. Between 2018 and 2022, the the frequency between billion dollar events, adjusted for inflation, was 18 days, four times plus greater frequency. This is just the world we live in. And on top of that, we have.

00:13:25:22 - 00:13:52:02
Sam Rashkin: The magnitude keeps getting greater. We have six times more billion dollar severe storms during 21 to 2022 than during the previous two decades. So this this is just the chart looking at the number of events and the exponential growth and the curve. But it's not just the magnitude of the cost, it's also the magnitude of the actual heat or storm or water surge.

00:13:52:03 - 00:14:26:07
Sam Rashkin: We used to get like 3 or 4ft water surges in hurricanes and think that was incredibly disastrous. And now we get 13, 14, 15ft walls of water coming at cities on the on the coast. And it just destroys all the, every, every place they go. That much water is devastating. And so this is the magnitude we're talking about three times faster sea level rise in the next 30 years compared to the past 100 years.

00:14:26:08 - 00:14:59:21
Sam Rashkin: And so we know all the sea level locations are so much greater risk. And then the expense is accelerating. Again, this is a curve. It shows six times more billion dollar disaster events in 2023 than any year since we started counting in 1980. And then the expense, of course, comes along for the ride. Just last week, we reported that Hurricane Milton caused more than 30 billion damage, and along with Hurricane Helene, it was $60 billion of estimated cost.

00:14:59:21 - 00:15:27:04
Sam Rashkin: And so that's just in one week, essentially just a matter of damage that's been done in expense, that's been imposed by disasters, and there's nowhere to hide the risk. Exposure is almost everywhere. When you look at basically where the billion dollar events have occurred and map them out, you can see for flooding, wildfires, severe local storms and droughts and heat waves and winter storms and cyclones.

00:15:27:04 - 00:15:58:13
Sam Rashkin: We're basically covering the entire country, and the net exposure is six point trillion dollars. Estimated market value for the 43% of counties in the US with high natural disaster risk. That's a huge amount that is nowhere near enough insurance and FEMA resources to cover the risk. And so we look at just more data. More than 2.6 million homes face risk of wildfire damage.

00:15:58:13 - 00:16:29:18
Sam Rashkin: Looking at just one disaster risk and $1.3 trillion is a potential cost for reconstruction. Again, we're blowing away the resources we have available to make people recover from disasters. And that's what I'd like to do is visualize what risk looks like just so we see it. So this is Boulder, Colorado, and it's located in mouth of a canyon in the valley of the Rocky Mountains, with a beautiful creek running through the middle of town.

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Sam Rashkin: And when I look a picture like this, I just say risk. So I'll just superimpose a funnel on this. You have all these, you know, massive rocky mountain slopes all kind of funneling into this one little town and to see it actualized. Of course, there was a flood in 2013. There has to be, over time, storms coming through the Rockies that could be melting a massive amount of snow in the spring, or just have a tremendous amount of just downfall.

00:17:02:12 - 00:17:27:29
Sam Rashkin: That's all being collected by those mountains. And like a gutter being drawn through that town, the creek is not even close to adequate capacity to carry the water that flows through. So, you know, you're living with greater risks. And as the insurance actuarial analysis quantifies at risk, of course, costs keep going higher and higher. So.

00:17:28:02 - 00:18:00:21
Sam Rashkin: That's one concern. The other concern is that the disparity of exposure to the risk is that disadvantaged communities, communities shoulder an outsize share. The economic burden one, they're often relegated to the lower value locations that have higher risk down at lower elevations near rivers and so forth. And often they're not able to finance the insurance cost.

00:18:00:23 - 00:18:03:27
Sam Rashkin: Needed to.

00:18:03:29 - 00:18:11:22
Sam Rashkin: Protect them from those higher risk of disaster. So when it comes to the.

00:18:11:24 - 00:18:42:15
Sam Rashkin: When it comes to the entire risk exposure, we really have just a crisis among lower income populations. And so the result is this increasing unpreparedness. I'm going to say they're unprepared for potential costs. 26% was the number I think that's actually low. Just the more I see how much how many properties are not covered after Helen and Milton and all these events go through.

00:18:42:15 - 00:19:11:13
Sam Rashkin: And some of it's because we're going through now are situations where these disasters are occurring in places that didn't really seem to have as much risk as I have now. The whole mountain Appalachian region of North Carolina was devastated. They never had a storm that go through it, as it did with Helen. And so the unpreparedness losses when you look at flooding just from Hurricane Ian, it was 10 to 17 billion.

00:19:11:15 - 00:19:43:04
Sam Rashkin: Wind was 23 to 35 billion of uninsured losses. That happened and again mostly impacting lower income households. And the net outcome, of course, is that property values take a hit. In this one article. Flooding risks knocked $7 billion off home values, and this is just going to continue to increase as the awareness keeps getting higher and higher where those risks are prevalent.

00:19:43:11 - 00:19:56:03
Sam Rashkin: $16 billion in home value appreciation lost a home value in the past 12 years just due to frequent tidal flooding.

00:19:56:06 - 00:20:23:07
Sam Rashkin: And the net outcome is a decrease willingness to buy in these high risk locations, 75 to 80% of survey respondents would hesitate to buy a home exposed to flood risk. High intensity of other natural disasters, extreme temperatures, rising sea levels. It's just now it's top of mind in terms where people are looking to move and where they'll filter out properties.

00:20:23:07 - 00:20:54:05
Sam Rashkin: And then the net impact, of course, is to reduce property values. And the net outcome also is places are now being exposed to situations where they can't even get insurance or the down to maybe just one insurance provider. And so the risk is that as we have rapidly growing exposure to risk, historic increases in cost and challenging reinsurance market that wants to back up insurance companies, insurance companies pull out.

00:20:54:05 - 00:21:25:09
Sam Rashkin: So try to get wildfire insurance in California, try to get flooding insurance in Florida. It's just it's just it's just kind of pile up into one massive crisis in terms of homeowners and just insurance. So the net course result is higher costs for insurance. Just North Carolina 40% increase was filed last year. And I'm sure after Hurricane Elaine just keep going up even higher and higher.

00:21:25:10 - 00:22:01:20
Sam Rashkin: It's just insurance companies don't have enough assets to manage the risk. And yet if we are more responsive, if we if we understand the hard trend, if we know we are confronted with more and more severe storms, we can substantially reduce the cost of insurance by addressing a risk. So these are these are a little bit old FEMA cost numbers for being at premium, for the premium, for being three feet above the base flood elevation at the flood base elevation four feet below.

00:22:01:20 - 00:22:33:08
Sam Rashkin: And you can see if I'm three feet above. My ten year cost is $4,200, $4,300. If I'm four feet below, it's 95,000. So if the developer builder doesn't prepare for the future and doesn't build at the right foot elevation, they just added almost $100,000 of cost for the occupants over ten years. And these are old numbers. I suspect disparity and the cost has gotten much greater.

00:22:33:10 - 00:23:10:17
Sam Rashkin: So we know what to do to manage these risks. If a wildfire we have best practices. We cover housing 2.0. First of all, we have vents burning and Bruce can enter through those events, ignite the structural framing, and set the house on fire. Obviously, noncombustible materials can be ignited, so we care about materials we use for roofing, walls, deck and fencing, heat resistant windows, getting rid of gutters that can collect debris that can ignite chimney spark and also harden parameters where you don't have plantings that can ignite and catch fire.

00:23:10:18 - 00:23:44:07
Sam Rashkin: We know the basics. And when we. You can see in this map on the upper left, all the areas are exposed to wildfire conditions. And when we look at what happens when we apply those best practices, we have, like in this case, a lone building standing after the Oakland Hills fire in 1991. And this building basically had noncombustible roof at that time in the 80s and 90s, almost every home in California was being built with would shake rooms, effectively kindling because of the esthetic preference.

00:23:44:07 - 00:24:07:26
Sam Rashkin: And this house had the tile roof and had an erratic, so the embers couldn't enter and had noncombustible decks, stucco instead of wood, and had noncombustible stucco walls, and it had hardened perimeter zone around the house and effectively in a sea of devastation from fire. You have one building standing. We know these best practices are really effective for wind and impact.

00:24:07:26 - 00:24:39:09
Sam Rashkin: That happens just through very serious wind events, tornadoes and hurricanes. We also know what to do. Design makes a big difference having square versus rectangular with long sides being almost effectively a sail. Trying to absorb all the force of the wind makes a big difference. Hit roofs are much more resistant to wind, deflecting it than gable roofs, and also the level of above base flood elevation roof details that are much more secure for fastening the roofing system.

00:24:39:13 - 00:25:01:10
Sam Rashkin: Optimizing impact resistance with certain wall assembly choices, and also having a very strong continuous load path from roof to walls to foundation. And again, you can see all the areas that are exposed. And what happens when we apply these best practices. Again, another case of a lone building standing this was Hurricane Harvey Mexico Beach, a famous famous picture.

00:25:01:10 - 00:25:25:21
Sam Rashkin: But essentially we had a spray foam unbent attic. So and you notice there was also a hip versus a gable. And so essentially when you add spray foam, you like double the strength of the roof structure. Plus you don't have vents to let wind in and pressurize the attic and basically kind of destroy the structure. So the spray foam into that was a huge factor.

00:25:25:21 - 00:25:50:19
Sam Rashkin: And then the hip roof we mentioned and then the impact resistant materials. This house is built with insulated concrete form. So it's basically you pour concrete in the voids of these styrofoam blocks and create like a waffle concrete structure for your wall that's incredibly, incredibly strong and resistant. And then you had to raise first floor way above the flood elevation.

00:25:50:19 - 00:26:20:02
Sam Rashkin: So the big surge, six seven feet of water, the house is able to withstand it. And the foundation had a incredibly strong design for the continuous load path and the foundations with these thick concrete pilings that were incredibly strong and able to support the building. So you have a building standing. So this building should pay massively lower insurance costs, and the insurance system has to figure out how to do that.

00:26:20:05 - 00:26:45:09
Sam Rashkin: And then flood risk is so pervasive in the central of the country and the coastal areas and north, particularly on Rocky Mountains going east. So we really have to look at the locations that we decide to build buildings, get the level again to clear the flood elevation. But with the new flood maps that recognize a much, much greater severe risk of flooding.

00:26:45:09 - 00:27:12:27
Sam Rashkin: And then we have various choices how to build with drive flood proofing and what flood proofing, drive flood proofing. I'll show you. Here is where you basically build the lower level of material that can absorb the water and dry out and still be reusable so your structure stays intact. And then for is above, the second floor can be built with conventional framing.

00:27:13:00 - 00:27:36:15
Sam Rashkin: What flood thing is when you would do things like build with framing but knowing it's going to get wet, install the drywall met vertically four by eight, but horizontally. So if you get flooding in space, you can remove the bottom half of the drywall, address the drying procedures, and then put back the drywall at the bottom and not have to take out the drywall at the top.

00:27:36:17 - 00:28:06:22
Sam Rashkin: Obviously, dry flood proofing is much more effective than wet flood proofing and makes a big difference. And then earthquake resistance is really critical on the western seaboard, almost from California to Washington and certain other concentrated areas. And we know how to do this model. Stiffness and strength, regularity and movement. Redundancy allows different pathways for the lateral stresses imposed by the earthquake to be absorbed, strong, secure foundations and again, a continuous load path.

00:28:06:24 - 00:28:38:18
Sam Rashkin: And as we know how to apply this, you know, just by design, we can radically improve the earthquake resistance of a building having a much stronger base and flimsy foundations and posts at the bottom, having a continue continuity in the in the shear plane. So instead of having windows that are not stacked, you stack the windows and having the shear walls line ups instead of having step designs, all the shear walls top to bottom can transfer the loads.

00:28:38:18 - 00:29:06:08
Sam Rashkin: So we can design for earthquakes and have much, much lower risk. And then winter storms. The big damages from either the weight of the snow that can cause structural damage, or if warm temperatures warm enough to start melting, the snow accumulating on the roof allow it to melt them. Freeze. After it gets to the edge, you have the risk of ice damming and all the damage that that can do.

00:29:06:10 - 00:29:35:10
Sam Rashkin: So the best practices are heavy membrane moisture barriers at eaves and valleys. If we have addicts like SIP routes, you want a vapor diffusion port at the ridge, potentially near gap between the surface of the static sheathing and and then the sheathing for the roofing material itself. That allows cool temperatures to flow beneath the roofing so that the snow accumulating doesn't melt.

00:29:35:11 - 00:29:57:25
Sam Rashkin: And then vented addicts, no heating equipment and ducts in the attic, minimizing reset slides that can let heat get up into the attic and create melting, insulated, sealed access doors and panels that we minimize heat flow to the attic and insulation above plumbing to protect it from freezing. So basic stuff we know that's tried and true. And after the event, no.

00:29:57:26 - 00:30:25:22
Sam Rashkin: Essentially we have best practices for how we could stay in our home. The first is resilient comfort. We talk about natural comfort and high performance homes in housing 2.0. They basically reduce heat gain, heat losses. Some buildings float and stay more comfortable. And then after an event. What do you can do for power so renewable on site and microgrids batteries having panels that would break up.

00:30:25:22 - 00:30:48:06
Sam Rashkin: So you have loads that can help you stay in the home and not have to serve all the loads. And also being grid interactive so you can shut off when you need to and everything works. JD will cover this at the end of this session today. And lastly, what I want to say about resilience is we can make choices that complement our conflicts.

00:30:48:06 - 00:31:20:09
Sam Rashkin: So for wildfires, we talk about on vented addicts, on vintage crawl spaces, noncombustible materials versus vent attics, vented crawl spaces, combustible materials. I don't want to go through this entire chart. It's in housing 2.0 book. But what I want to highlight is that for wildfires, high wind, and floods, virtually all frame construction, conventional frame construction, wood and invented, addicts and cross invented.

00:31:20:11 - 00:31:53:10
Sam Rashkin: And wood frame walls are much, much higher risk compared to concrete construction. So what one's up happening is here's a company, Onyx, that makes these automated, well advanced manufactured wall assemblies. It's a double concrete wall sandwich around insulation. And it is so disaster resistant. In Florida they self-insured. So it winds up that their customers save thousands of dollars a year and have access to insurance.

00:31:53:10 - 00:32:31:06
Sam Rashkin: But a huge advantage. And they generate five, six, $7,000 a year of income per home in in perpetuity after the home because the homeowners are are paying them the insurance on an incredibly low risk product. So it's incredibly profitable to build any an appropriate, high resilient design solution. So we talk about them and we have sessions on housing 2.0 applied and how profitable it is to builders, but essentially just optimizing resilience.

00:32:31:13 - 00:33:07:00
Sam Rashkin: That's amazing business outcomes for this particular off site builder. And again I want to close just by saying this just came up on my I found this last week that I'll Geo now has a web tool where you go in and put in your county. I put in my county Fairfax, Virginia, and you can see how much risk you have and virtually very low risk for hurricanes and wildfires, low risk for coastal flooding and drought, medium risk for heat and high risk for inland flooding.

00:33:07:00 - 00:33:30:28
Sam Rashkin: So what I did to manage my risk is I chose a very flood resistant location. You'd have to have a 40ft rise in water to even come close to to impact in my house. But basically this will inform consumers. The impact in the article covering this new resource set is buyers and sellers wake up to risks on a hot planet.

00:33:30:29 - 00:34:03:28
Sam Rashkin: Millions of homeowners throughout the country could face a slow and almost imperceptible repricing of many people's biggest asset. So hopefully many of you will get the point. Disaster resistance is not extra credit. It's a must have today. It's it's it's the future. We know with certainty. Next future ready is water efficient. And so again I'm going to start with parsing in 2.0.

00:34:03:29 - 00:34:33:06
Sam Rashkin: Best practices for how do we truly optimize water efficient homes. And the high tier best practices optimize water use indoors or outdoors, and also water harvesting. And so indoors? It's about water fishing fixtures and appliances and hot water distribution. Outdoors it's about irrigation and irrigation controls. Or what are harvesting has two options great water recovery and roof water collection systems.

00:34:33:06 - 00:35:04:22
Sam Rashkin: So this quote from Ben Franklin back in 1770s has only gotten exponentially more relevant. We will all know the value of water when the well runs dry, and suggests that maybe the well is running dry. This new study suggests 71% of the nearly 1900 aquifer systems globally had declining groundwater levels between 2000 and 2022. So this is a global issue.

00:35:04:22 - 00:35:31:08
Sam Rashkin: And as we were marching towards 9 billion people by 2050, 11 billion people on the planet by 2100, and water demands keep getting greater. Saltwater intrusion keeps getting greater. Contamination of water aquifers keeps getting greater. It is just a tsunami effect waiting to happen. Water is just going to be one of the most major issues of our lifetimes.

00:35:31:08 - 00:35:58:16
Sam Rashkin: And so we start seeing the impacts just when we look around us. The feds call for water cutbacks to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the Colorado River. There's a 23 year drought that's been drying up the river, and it's been attributed to extreme heat, low precipitation from climate change, not from we don't care if it's human impacts. We don't care if we believe in climate change.

00:35:58:16 - 00:36:27:07
Sam Rashkin: We care about it's hard data. And there's been 20 years of heat and drought, and we have to prepare for that to hard trend. And so when you look at the map of the country, you see that the water imperative, imperative is kind of regional. You have massive amount of water resources just from the from the east of the Rockies all the way to the coast.

00:36:27:08 - 00:36:58:29
Sam Rashkin: You have all these, you know, abundant water flow systems that are being tapped for water supplies not withstanding. Again, some of the issues with contamination that we keep imposing on this, on this water supply. But when you go west of the Rockies, it gets pretty scary. There's virtually no from Oregon, down from southern Oregon, down virtually. It is that Colorado River that has to bear the brunt of getting water to so many people.

00:36:59:03 - 00:37:32:27
Sam Rashkin: You have the San Joaquin River up in California, but by and by, it's the water that's stored every year up in the Sierra mountains that that California relies on for ever growing demand for water. And of course, you see, so many times California goes into six, eight, ten year droughts. And that key supply system is not reliable. So you look at the water risk everywhere, wrestler Rocky and you realize this is where we're building homes, you know, California and Nevada, Arizona, Texas.

00:37:32:27 - 00:38:02:11
Sam Rashkin: And then you look at where the risk is getting worse and worse in the country, the water risk by 2015, in the areas that will have extreme risk, are that same area that has so little water resources. On top of that, Florida has this big risk because of so much salt water intrusion into the aquifers and so many forces that are also just due to growth, that are really putting a strain on their water supply infrastructure.

00:38:02:14 - 00:38:30:01
Sam Rashkin: Consider this one example of just how much risk we have $40,000 a door just to have the right to water to build in Colorado. At this I forget which location that was, but it's just really a major issue that I don't think enough people spend enough time with. And these solutions are so simple. Indoors, everyone should be using water sense fixtures, showers, faucets, toilets.

00:38:30:01 - 00:38:55:12
Sam Rashkin: They keep getting better and better and they perform great. That should be a no brainer. And then Energy Star appliances also use significantly less water. You know, dishwasher is enclosed washers, so that should be an easy no brainer. Every builder should be using any water sense fixtures and any star appliances that have dramatically lower water needs. But then comes water distribution, hot water distribution.

00:38:55:12 - 00:39:18:12
Sam Rashkin: And if we look at the amount of copper piping just in a fairly small house with a fairly small layout, it's basically it's about 1.6 gallons and you have to wait at the ends of the system up to almost two minutes to get hot water. So all the water running being wasted as we wait for hot water is a huge impact on water use.

00:39:18:12 - 00:39:41:02
Sam Rashkin: So what can we do to improve hot water distribution so we can have a core layout or manifold that worked fairly similarly from the hot water heater having direct runs to the fixtures. This is what a manifold device is, is just how the plumbing is getting set up. Or we can do compact plumbing where we get the fixtures much closer, closer to the hot water heater, sometimes with a wet wall.

00:39:41:02 - 00:39:59:22
Sam Rashkin: Or we can have demand initiated recirculation with something called structured plumbing. I kind of walk you through these one at a time. So manifold systems, pretty simple. Within ten feet of the hot water heater you set up a manifold. So you do home runs each fixture. So each fixture you're not waiting for water to go through the whole system.

00:39:59:27 - 00:40:26:05
Sam Rashkin: When you get to the outer fixtures, you kind of have a direct run and use a lot less hot water. The other thing you can do is compact layouts. Here's non-compact layouts that you commonly see. My good friend Gary Klein developed this system, compact plumbing, which is great. It's something I kind of spent a lot of time with early in my career as an architect, and I really love to see him just bring this to the forefront.

00:40:26:05 - 00:40:51:05
Sam Rashkin: But you can see in a typical house this might be bedrooms, two bathrooms, maybe 1500 square feet with a water heater in the garage and fixtures on this wall and fixtures out here and fixtures out here. This square that you would draw to cover the area responsible or area that requires plumbing. The house, it would be 67% in this case.

00:40:51:05 - 00:41:15:18
Sam Rashkin: And this little bigger design that's about 1800 square feet. Again, with the water heater in the garage, plumbing on the extremities all around. What I draw a rectangle around all the plumbing needs. It's 81% of the house. Very uncommon packed. My recommendation is to build on Gary's work, but suggests maybe we don't need to worry about, for instance, the kitchen and laundry.

00:41:15:20 - 00:41:35:28
Sam Rashkin: Because when we go to wash dishes and turn on the hot water, we have plenty to do to rinse the dishes and we can. It's not an issue. We're not sitting there waiting for hot water. We're really using the water for full purpose. Just cleaning and scrubbing the dishes or laundry machines will get hot enough when they first draw the water, and eventually get hot water into the load.

00:41:35:28 - 00:41:56:22
Sam Rashkin: And so I recommend, for instance, you just come in this, right? This is all the bedrooms. I should be worried about getting this water heater closer to this location while the bedrooms are, because that's where you tend to really run the water in the morning, waiting for the shower to get hot with the sink to get hot so you can shave or wash.

00:41:56:26 - 00:42:27:08
Sam Rashkin: So I would, I would say the 8020 rule worry about the the 20%. That gives you 80% of the outcome. Just the bedrooms are the most important to me. And so when I look at this project that Gary did, where you had a habitat for humanity home that was about 1300 square foot and. Right. And he asked a good water expert friend of his to make this more water efficient, to see if you can improve on this 79% compact plumbing square.

00:42:27:09 - 00:42:50:14
Sam Rashkin: He got it down to about 2.5%. He put bathrooms back to back in the kitchen and that was pretty impressive, but not to me. Look at how compromised this house got compared to the first. The kitchen is a horrible, less effective kitchen with a very limited access to the backyard. Now for the kitchen set of for the main living space.

00:42:50:17 - 00:43:13:26
Sam Rashkin: The bathroom has no access to daylight. You have all this wasted space here. I don't know what you do with when you come in. It's just such a less quality design for the user experience. You can't do all that and take out the plumbing. So I go back to the first layout and I just move the water heater to this closet.

00:43:13:27 - 00:43:39:00
Sam Rashkin: I'll go back here, this closet here, and I can basically get an 8%. So again, you want a much more simple approaches. I'm not worried about the sink in the kitchen. Here's the layout I did before Gary invented compact plumbing. I was working on a project in 1984, but I just, I just I added water efficiency just to my list of criteria for good design.

00:43:39:00 - 00:44:06:03
Sam Rashkin: And you can see I was able to get the master bath and the hall bath, the laundry and the kitchen all in this one wet wall. So it was amazing. About 5% was the plumbing square. Note this back in here I wouldn't even put hot water there. I just put an instantaneous heater at a laboratory because it's used so infrequently, and mine will just have a small little heater in the cabinet below.

00:44:06:03 - 00:44:47:12
Sam Rashkin: So again you think about these but recognize Gary quantifies you can get up to $2,000 savings with in plumbing installation of materials by going from very uncommon pack to compact. And when you see a wall then effectively you can see why you know all the plumbing is in this one wall. You can get it done with so much less labor material in in the case of systems built offsite homes, it'd be amazing that you can ship a whole corps, build this in a plant and ship it and have your plumbing and bathrooms all done, the plant at much lower cost, and you get some really substantial savings.

00:44:47:15 - 00:45:11:26
Sam Rashkin: High efficient water heating on demand is where you run structured plumbing from a water heater, which means you go in sequence to all the fixtures and showers and everything in the house. And once you go in sequence, then you add a dedicated return from the last, most remote fixture back to the water heater, and it goes through a receiver and a demand pump that are activated by control.

00:45:11:26 - 00:45:38:00
Sam Rashkin: So when you need hot water, any fixture in the house, it activates the receiver, picks up the signal, the pump activates 10 to 15 20s when you turn on the fixture. Yet instant hot water and no waste. So another way to go out outboard outdoor is water. Efficiency can be done with efficient landscapes. Irrigation and reuse recapture.

00:45:38:03 - 00:46:07:06
Sam Rashkin: That's up to 50% outdoor water loss due to inefficient irrigation. About 30 plus percent of total water uses attributed to outdoor water use, but in arid climates at California, Arizona, Texas, it's up to 60%. So for landscape design, we have to think more about zero scaping and low water native plants, minimizing turf, mulching, planting beds so they trap them Worcester vegetated slopes to minimize runoff.

00:46:07:08 - 00:46:33:19
Sam Rashkin: A lot of solutions. A really good, efficient landscape designs. Irrigation is drip irrigation, weather based irrigation controllers and soil based irrigation controllers that send some noise. And we talked about greywater and rainwater harvesting. So gray water basically takes the water from tubs, sinks and clothes washes, collects it in surge tank. And you can meet about 50% of your properties water needs with great water.

00:46:33:21 - 00:46:49:13
Sam Rashkin: The water used for kitchens and toilets goes right into the sewer outlets, but essentially you're capturing the other gray water that is good enough quality to use for irrigation and getting all that use out of it. In the case of.

00:46:49:15 - 00:46:52:03
Sam Rashkin: Heat.

00:46:52:05 - 00:46:58:21
Sam Rashkin: Water harvesting, this is wrong. Title on the slide.

00:46:58:23 - 00:47:05:08
Sam Rashkin: Oh never mind, I'm at a sequence.

00:47:05:11 - 00:47:36:27
Sam Rashkin: I want to talk about water harvesting first. Water harvesting is when you use your roof as a roof design to collect the water most efficiently, and then you put it in a tank so you wind up with everything is better because instead of hard water, which is endemic to so many locations, you have 100% soft water for source minerals, treatment, chemicals and pharmaceuticals found in municipal water, groundwater and surface water.

00:47:36:27 - 00:47:58:08
Sam Rashkin: So it's amazingly high quality, high quality water. And you can collect 620 gallons for every inch of rain. So let's say you get 20in of rain a year. That's that's 3000 gallons of water. And if you have 2000ft² of roof, that's 6000 gallons of water. So.

00:47:58:10 - 00:48:30:27
Sam Rashkin: You know, it's it's it's it's a lot of water you can collect. And then you have now you have to treat it. So basically there are a whole bunch of components. You have filters and diverter and a little bit of and meters and and ways of just really controlling and making it high quality water. Going back, want to just get back to this concept that not only is water use using a very.

00:48:31:00 - 00:48:59:13
Sam Rashkin: Very short availability resource. I mean, water is declining so much in terms of blue water, that's really high quality enough for portability, but on top of a material resources in such decline, it also is a significant energy consumer. We all know about using water for heating and hot water, and so we use less hot water. We heat less hot water.

00:48:59:13 - 00:49:21:09
Sam Rashkin: But also this energy used to extract water from a resource, from an aquifer, from a lake, a river or reservoir. Then you have to convey the water from that source to a water treatment location. You have to spend energy to treat the water, then spend energy often to pump the water throughout the local municipality to get it to each of the homes and distribute it.

00:49:21:09 - 00:49:41:11
Sam Rashkin: And then you have to collect the water after choosing a house and often pump it back to a water treatment plant, and the treatment plant use energy to do the treatment before its release back into a river of stream, wherever it may be. And there's all this energy being used. So EPA calculations suggest water conservation is the cheapest source of energy savings.

00:49:41:11 - 00:49:51:20
Sam Rashkin: Insulation, air tightness this is per dollar spent, supposed to be the lowest cost of energy efficiency.

00:49:51:23 - 00:50:28:11
Sam Rashkin: Okay, onto the last module. And we're going into smart all electric is the future. And again the housing 2.0 best practices for smart efficient homes are shown here. Again the high tier best practices are optimizing comfort water heating components, smart capabilities and electric ready. And again, the more granular solutions for comfort are efficient smart equipment along with design and installation for water heating, sufficient smart water heater, plus proper water heater installation for components.

00:50:28:11 - 00:50:52:14
Sam Rashkin: It's the appliances, lighting and fans for smart, it's smart home integration and then for electric ready. Looking at our gas oil devices, if we choose to still use those and make them ready to transition to electric in the future by providing high amp outlets instead of 15, maybe 2030 amp outlet at the location to avoid disruption and costs in the future.

00:50:52:16 - 00:51:20:28
Sam Rashkin: If you want to go from a gas cooktop to an induction cooktop, for instance, and solar ready, we'll talk about in a few slides, electric ready as well, battery ready and grid integration. So it's really great to get efficient appliances and with Energy Star, but you should always look when you buy these appliances to make sure the smart ready is well, that can integrate with smart systems and controls so you can manage them more effectively.

00:51:21:01 - 00:51:50:21
Sam Rashkin: Here's examples of also some amazing innovation that's happening with high, high performance appliances. This is a vacuum insulated panel refrigerator. A vacuum insulated panel might be our 10 to 30 per inch, compared to 3 or 4 per inch or five per inch. It's incredibly more effective, so it's 50% more efficient, but it has 66% thinner walls, so you have 25% more capacity per same size refrigerator.

00:51:50:21 - 00:52:20:29
Sam Rashkin: So it's amazing how grating application this is for vacuum selected panels. Originally they're being focused on for cladding homes and a retrofit. So without any lot of thickness you can make an existing home much more insulated closer to what we currently do with the latest codes. But this is a great application for vacuum insulated panels because you don't have to worry about penetrations, and that could undermine the performance of the vacuum itself.

00:52:21:01 - 00:52:42:28
Sam Rashkin: On top of that, heat pump water heaters are a great new innovation. Ducted heat pump water heaters now give you away to put them indoors with less impact. Having to manage the waste cooling. They're particularly great hot, humid climates where the waste cooling can be useful. And then as you get colder and colder climates, ducting can be a huge solution.

00:52:43:01 - 00:53:10:21
Sam Rashkin: In absence of ducting, you need a lot of volume to allow the unit to shed the waste cooling that comes off it, and you're using more backup electric heating. In these colder climates, the water's coming in which colder and which be on the periods where backup heating will be more necessary. And in cold climates, you have to worry about the additional penetrations through the wall with the venting.

00:53:10:25 - 00:53:40:28
Sam Rashkin: Do create thermal holes in the assembly. He pump, washer, dryer, or an exciting new innovation. So one appliance give both the clothes washer and the clothes dryer and you have no vent because the way the dryer dries is all the water is exchange and dumped through the same event that the closed wash event goes through. So it's a elegant technology.

00:53:40:29 - 00:54:07:20
Sam Rashkin: There's no necessary user requirement to take the clothes from the clothes washer and put them into clothes dryer, so it's a huge benefit to the occupant. That's event less drying because again, it tries without exhausting the humidity, but exchanging it and exhausting it through a drain half the space because you don't need a washer and dryer, about 50% cent energy savings and really large capacity loads.

00:54:07:20 - 00:54:36:27
Sam Rashkin: So this is a really exciting new device at Save Space. It works better. It's an amazing innovation. And then there's induction cooktops I mentioned earlier. They use magnetic induction with ferrous iron cookware to transfer heat without heating the surface itself. The cooktop but the but the cooking vessel the first iron cookware and it's an amazing cooking. It's a precise it's faster than gas for boiling water and heating.

00:54:37:00 - 00:55:04:10
Sam Rashkin: It's really just safer. It's every way it's a better user experience. So these are the current way. Induction cooktops work in cabinets, but you don't really need a cooktop surface when you have, let's say like granite counters or stone counters, you can just put the cookware directly on top of the counter and have the abduction.

00:55:04:12 - 00:55:31:29
Sam Rashkin: Devices below the counter to transfer the magnetic current and heat the vessel. So you wind up with all this extra counter space because you don't need a cooktop surface anymore. Just this place for the controls. Again, it's really elegant. Also, the one device that people worry about what they do without gas is fireplaces. And it's say, look at some of these new electric fireplaces are pretty impressive.

00:55:32:00 - 00:56:02:05
Sam Rashkin: This is a holographic fireplace that just really has a great way to replicate a traditional fireplace. This is one that's done with moisture to create a again, mimic a fireplace look and feel. So you have lots of options for how you can integrate fireplaces that will increase over time. And then again, smart components like exhaust fans that know what to do, incense Royster and people, and just work more efficiently.

00:56:02:05 - 00:56:25:02
Sam Rashkin: This is our good friends from Panasonic. And then this brings us to smart homes in general. Why we do them. And it's because it's such a great user experience and it's a rising expectation among home buyers. They want all the convenience. I want all the protection. They want the they want ability to operate more effectively, all their equipment and access all the entertainment.

00:56:25:02 - 00:56:58:05
Sam Rashkin: I'm not going to go through all these, but you can see essentially there's a lot of chefs, incredibly enhanced ability to use all facets of your home with a comprehensive approach to smart homes. And so basically, what I show you first is a definition, since a lot of people aren't sure what a smart home is, it's a whole new incorporates automation systems to provide inhabitants with often and often the utility company with sophisticated monitor and control over the building's functions.

00:56:58:11 - 00:57:34:09
Sam Rashkin: And so that includes energy management, lighting, glass breakage, entry, motion detection, alarm activation, professional monitoring, keyless entry, live video streaming to monitor your home, blinds and control on all the window blinds, temperature controls, remote control of appliances you have just like massive, greater ability to use all facets of your home. And so to get there, basically we have to think of integrating a lot more components in our home.

00:57:34:10 - 00:58:00:04
Sam Rashkin: We need a portal that's smart and can take all the signals and then make everything operate properly. You need to have integrated devices that receive signals. I mentioned the appliances and equipment and components need it at cameras, sensors, controls. I need a dashboard for the homeowners, which often can be the smartphone, and you need a special app for getting everything to operate effectively.

00:58:00:07 - 00:58:29:05
Sam Rashkin: And then you have to start somewhere. And most people are overwhelmed when I think about going smart. So there are very steps of getting more and more convenience and control, partial integration or devices that have inherent connectivity. A lot of times, do it yourself abilities for people on the home just to set up lights or ring doorbell so they can see who's coming to the house or operate a light switch conveniently.

00:58:29:05 - 00:58:53:23
Sam Rashkin: So it's just kind of getting your foot in the water with just some smart capabilities. And then you go to limited integration where the devices are set up, the much more effective controls, fully integrated and professionals are install them so everything works much more seamlessly. And with one integrated system, full integrated integrations, we have remote access available to all your devices.

00:58:53:25 - 00:59:20:13
Sam Rashkin: Multiple devices are integrated in one platform, and that a ring doorbell and a separate device for your lighting switches, and a separate one for the heating cooling system. Everything's integrated and it's a full featured smart home, and in the future, we'll get more predictive and proactive automation, where homes can learn and automated way really anticipate and function at a higher level.

00:59:20:13 - 00:59:54:18
Sam Rashkin: So we have all these capabilities and then we're smart for now to be electric. Ready to go through this list one more time for gas and all devices, high amp outlets, things like gas cooktops, ovens, closed dryers, furnaces and water heaters just have those higher amp outlets there so you can contribute transition to to electric if you don't want to make the house all electric now solar rating I'm going to show you a diagram that's more detailed.

00:59:54:20 - 01:00:01:27
Sam Rashkin: Same with well every is having a high amp.

01:00:01:29 - 01:00:24:24
Sam Rashkin: Conduit for high amp outlet and a level two ready outlet. Batteries is a bus bar for the key priority loads, backup power circuits, transfer switches and sub panels, and grid integrations of smart meter meter. Why we do all this is because this is the future. We look at a solar ready. We know the cost of solar keep coming down.

01:00:24:24 - 01:00:55:10
Sam Rashkin: Let's make it so. Without disruption or cost penalty, we can add all these newer, better, higher efficient solar systems that are coming. Here's one innovation that promises 1000 x greater efficiency cells using new materials. We'll see if that comes around or not. Here's how you make a house solar ready. It's so simple. You can do this for hundreds of dollars and avoid thousands of dollars of cost of costs for installing solar in the future without disruption.

01:00:55:10 - 01:01:19:26
Sam Rashkin: So the first thing you want to do is make sure you have the documentation that the roof trust system or framing system can handle the 6 pounds per square foot additional load of the solar collectors. So just give the homeowner the structural certified drawing that says the roof can do this, and it saves them all the costs of getting engineer and going through the burden of getting this to the building department.

01:01:20:00 - 01:01:44:28
Sam Rashkin: Then have conduit from the attic most often to someplace near the circuit board. Have a dedicated area next to the circuit breaker in case you need to have a separate inverter. A set of micro inverters have a circuit breaker with extra circuits for the solar system they need to go, and then a conduit from that circuit breaker to that extra dedicated area for the inverter.

01:01:44:28 - 01:02:22:23
Sam Rashkin: And it's so low cost at these extra components, the electric ready, battery ready home. In addition to the solar inverter, you have the main panel and you have the backup gateway for prioritize loads. And also working with the utility meter and the battery storage can then go and take care of the priority loads when you need it. And with all the switching, JT is going to do a much better job than me laying out basically how to get your house with an elegant solution that's so much more static and just having all these individual components.

01:02:22:25 - 01:02:45:10
Sam Rashkin: And in the end, this is the certain future. It's smart, it's solar ready, it's battery, it's EVs. We know we're going to this. These homes will look like in the future. Let's be ready for it. And I'll wrap up with this final comment. Every time I think about the times and the stress, it's always because I believe I'm not prepared.

01:02:45:11 - 01:03:17:27
Sam Rashkin: I don't know my speech. I don't know how to do work with that app to get to do what I wanted to do. Whatever it is. What's driving stress is what I'm not prepared. So I'm going to suggest futurity recommendations, prepare for accelerating, disastrous. Prepare for accelerating water crisis in the locations that are the greatest risk, and prepare for accelerating smart all electric expectations because they deliver such a superior user experience.

01:03:17:27 - 01:03:43:06
Sam Rashkin: And I'll wrap up by saying, and people will say is a look upon their homes that stand the test of time. See this are builders did for us. So hopefully this makes sense. And I'm so happy to hand off to JD Gill because it does a great job with some amazing solutions for elegantly making your houses smart. Thank you so much.

01:03:43:08 - 01:03:46:16
JD Gill: Thanks, Sam. All right. Thank you.

01:03:46:18 - 01:03:48:02
Mike Collignon: On over to JT.

01:03:48:05 - 01:03:52:19
JD Gill: All right. Let me see.

01:03:52:21 - 01:03:54:06
JD Gill: Looking good.

01:03:54:08 - 01:03:56:14
JD Gill: You can see my presentation.

01:03:56:16 - 01:03:57:19
Mike Collignon: Yes.

01:03:57:21 - 01:04:24:19
JD Gill: All right. Perfect. All right. Good morning everyone. My name is JD Gill. I'm with Schneider Electric. And if you don't know who Schneider is, you know, we specialize in digital automation and energy management. In terms of the residential space, we are in four out of ten homes. So it's possible that you're likely using us today already, right? So we often go by the name of square brand name of square D.

01:04:24:22 - 01:04:44:02
JD Gill: And today we'll be talking about and kind of going off of what Sam was talking about. Right. In terms of future ready defining what smart energy is. And Sam was touching on some of those key points, especially as we move into this new energy landscape. So first I just want to define what what smart energy is just level set us right.

01:04:44:04 - 01:05:05:01
JD Gill: Because really this is going to be that that gateway to being future ready. So first part is home electrification. And again Sam was touching on this stealing some of my thunder. Right. But moving from your traditional gas appliances to to all electric. So your stove tops to induction stove top, your water heaters to electric heap and water heaters.

01:05:05:01 - 01:05:33:21
JD Gill: Right. So really moving to all electric getting rid of that that those gas resources next step is battery energy storage systems or best systems. So battery you know there's a couple of different ways you can use this. So one is you know reliance. And that is a key point in Sam's discussion too right. Wildfires in California. We have the hurricanes out East Texas had that crazy winter storm a few years ago.

01:05:33:23 - 01:05:54:27
JD Gill: These these traditional black swan events are are not becoming you know, they're becoming more and more common. So they're not really those those black swan events anymore. So resiliency is becoming more and more of a priority and a need for for home builders, for home builders as well as homeowners. And then the other side of batteries is the cost effectiveness, right.

01:05:54:28 - 01:06:15:19
JD Gill: So you can use your battery store, especially when it's paired with solar and or just charging from the grid during times when the rates are low and then selling that battery back to the grid when you know when you're on. Maybe time of use rates from 4 to 9 p.m., for example, and or using that battery during those times when rates are high.

01:06:15:23 - 01:06:40:05
JD Gill: So that way you're not paying those exorbitant fees. So a lot of flexibility there. Last piece here is home energy management systems or HEMS. So really this is kind of taking all of your home's electrical parts and pieces from grid all the way down to the plug and simplifying it, helping the homeowner automate it. This can be done using monitoring control, right?

01:06:40:08 - 01:07:04:26
JD Gill: Really trying to view what that home is consuming versus producing and maximize savings with the local utility and and their rates and all that. So let's talk about ways you as a as a home builder can satisfy this demand of smart energy. Right. So we're going to start all the way from just kind of your basic, you know, smart ready homes all the way up to community microgrids.

01:07:04:26 - 01:07:32:17
JD Gill: So when we're talking about a basic smart ready home, you know, Sam was mentioning some of this, right. And you guys might be building this already if you're putting in a square panel and even most panels these days there are solar already, right? So your electrical panel is ready for solar. So if the homeowner wants to add solar later or if you're offering it as an option, they could they get at it there, you know, relatively easily.

01:07:32:20 - 01:08:00:29
JD Gill: Next we have how do we become battery already. So typically you know when you have one battery on a home, it's not necessarily enough capacity for one battery to to outlast a multiple day outage or multiple day storm. Right. One battery typically will you know, they say, you know, one battery is about ten kilowatt hours, which is about one third of your day's worth of energy comes in consumption on average, right?

01:08:01:01 - 01:08:24:29
JD Gill: So obviously the homeowner can add more batteries, but just level set with them in terms of expectations. But how do you become battery ready? Typically you have your main panel and then you can have a critical loads panel right next to it. So essentially in order to preserve that battery and have it last longer than that typical day, you can just have your major loads like your lighting, refrigeration, internet.

01:08:25:00 - 01:08:49:05
JD Gill: Right. Things like that that are truly essential for home comfort and put those loads in that critical panel and then all the other loads in the main panel again for ever. Already. Right. Wire conduit coming out of the panel. If you want to include that 5060 amp breaker in the panel as well, your home can be designated as EV ready as well.

01:08:49:08 - 01:09:11:09
JD Gill: And then from there, you know, we have other options of, you know, adding energy monitoring. So really giving the homeowner a view into how they're using their energy, when they're using their energy, and how they could really maximize their efficiencies, especially when you tie in the utility rates into that energy monitoring. Folks can see, hey, my my water bill or my water heater.

01:09:11:12 - 01:09:34:10
JD Gill: You know, maybe I shouldn't take showers at 5 p.m. when, you know my water heater is going. So you can either shift your usage into a different time of the day and or, you know, rely on on the battery backup or even using control via both at the panel level and at the room level. So control via controllable relays at the panel.

01:09:34:10 - 01:09:57:07
JD Gill: So, you know, switching that water heater off from 4 to 9 p.m. and or just controlling the lights, the receptacles, right, the switches, dimmers, things like that, all that can be connected as well. So yeah, kind of what that looks like. You know sub panels your breakers for EV. And again that those smart pieces via energy monitoring and control.

01:09:57:09 - 01:10:18:11
JD Gill: So next step is a full smart home. So we take kind of all what we talked about in that basic smart ready home and packaging it into into really almost one enclosure. So you have your, you know, critical loads panel, backup panel. You have your backup control switch. Right. So this is what's going to detect if your utility is there.

01:10:18:12 - 01:10:52:11
JD Gill: Switch it over to your battery backup. Right. All these parts of the pieces are combined. And essentially creating a nano grid in the home right. So this is kind of one of our solutions, you know, many other solutions outside of this. But this is our new Schneider Home suite of products. But this is the pulse panel. Again this is going to be your critical loads panel as well as your backup loads, including that energy monitoring including the surge protection, those connected relays, anything that you need for that home to be to be smart.

01:10:52:14 - 01:11:15:08
JD Gill: Lastly here taking it a step further. Right. So each home could be a grid. But now how do we you know, we're building communities typically as builders right. So how do we make that community more energy resilient. So, you know, you could have a community battery. You could have a community solar, right. So with this, instead of outlasting for maybe a day or so in a single family home as a community.

01:11:15:09 - 01:11:37:25
JD Gill: You know, having a community battery solar, you can outlast these outages for, you know, day. Not not just days, but up to weeks, right. So the community batteries are going to have, you know, powered not only through the homes but through that community solar as well. And on the other side, there's a revenue generating options for these communities as well.

01:11:37:27 - 01:12:01:16
JD Gill: Right. So VPC programs, virtual power plants, what that stands for. So essentially the the community can sell off their excess power during the day to the utility and or when the utilities have that demand for peak power. You know, usually in the afternoon times when, when folks are running their their ACS. Right. So community microgrids are often thought about like, oh, hey, that's just way too expensive to implement.

01:12:01:16 - 01:12:23:19
JD Gill: But there's a lot of things that we can put in place with Schneider Electric to, to offset a lot of those costs. And just a quick view on what that would look like. Right. So here on the left side you have your renewable energy sources like solar, wind, perhaps even a generator for, you know, that extra backup. Then on the right side you have your traditional utility.

01:12:23:23 - 01:12:44:01
JD Gill: You can have energy storage for that community, right? The load here is the community itself. And then EV, EV vehicles is an interesting one, right? Traditionally when we think of EVs, we think about charging the EVs and driving driving them around. But now we have bidirectional charging as well. Right? So meaning taking that big battery from the EV, right.

01:12:44:01 - 01:13:04:25
JD Gill: Which is usually about ten x, what, what a home battery would be, and using that as a backup to your home. So kind of that's why we call it bidirectional. So you can not only charge the EVs but send that EV power to the home as well. And really in the center of everything, right. The controls and services of Schneider Electric, that's going to help operate all these parts and pieces together.

01:13:04:25 - 01:13:21:13
JD Gill: So that's largely what I had today. You know, please feel free to reach out to me with any questions if you're interested in any of these products. I work with the home builders nationally, so just want to help you guys, you know, in any way we can.

01:13:21:15 - 01:13:50:02
Mike Collignon: Thanks, Judy. Appreciate it much. And if you do have questions, please send them in to the chat box for JD or for Sam. JD, I've got a couple that have been on my mind since I last got a chance to talk with you. On the community battery that you just talked about. Is there like a limit as to how much can be pulled out of that during an outage per user or subscriber?

01:13:50:02 - 01:14:02:21
Mike Collignon: Because I could see a situation where all is an outage and I'm just going to let you know my house keep running as normal and stuck a ton of power out of that battery versus others. It might be like, well, I'm just going to go to critical load only.

01:14:02:23 - 01:14:26:18
JD Gill: Yeah, that's a great question. I think when, you know, when we're designing these communities, you know, we can put those measures in place so that one person isn't hogging all the energy, so to speak. Right. So, you know, we've we've built our first community microgrid out in Menifee, California with, with KB home. So kind of what we're doing there is, you know, this panel that we're we showed here today on the presentation.

01:14:26:18 - 01:14:46:19
JD Gill: There was a predecessor for that panel. It still had that kind of split bus. Right. So we the critical loads the backed up loads right. For the home. Those are essentially the same for for all those community members. Right. So there wasn't, you know, one person that had their hot tub on, on, on that on the backup or anything like that.

01:14:46:20 - 01:15:07:17
JD Gill: Right. So it's just again, your essential load so that in in need of a true emergency, you have lights, you know, you have refrigeration, you have your internet right. Your core essential needs. So yeah. So we could definitely implement that in ways not only just by where we place the breakers in the panel, but also using those controllable relays that I talked about.

01:15:07:18 - 01:15:32:11
JD Gill: We can use those relays to from the back end, turn off those relays. So if they do have let's say maybe their AC on, they're on their backup. Right. And you know the community battery just won't allow for everybody to have their AC on at that time. Those controls and systems that I was talking about, they could actually just turn off the relays from the back end so that that way everybody's kind of on a level playing field.

01:15:32:14 - 01:15:42:23
Mike Collignon: Okay. Okay. Good. The other question that I had was I'm just curious as to how the system knows there is an outage.

01:15:42:25 - 01:15:44:25
JD Gill: Yeah. So I mean that.

01:15:44:28 - 01:15:59:10
Mike Collignon: Utilities today and they were telling me about how they can they can send me a notification by email. And I was like, okay, that makes sense. But I'm assuming the system doesn't get emails. So I'm just curious how it works.

01:15:59:15 - 01:15:59:22
JD Gill: Yeah.

01:15:59:22 - 01:16:22:17
JD Gill: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, sure, we definitely get emails if there's going to be a known outage, right? So we can we can plan and prep for that. But again, when there's wildfires or hurricanes rolling through, you know, that power may or may not be there. We just don't know. Right. So the community, one can just have that battery charge up fully, especially if they, you know, see that that storm coming in for example.

01:16:22:19 - 01:16:44:21
JD Gill: But how does it know. So it's just really the, the the systems that are in place. So like we call it you can call it an automatic transfer switch. The, the the device that's detecting that utility power that's coming in. It can sense in milliseconds. Right. If that utility power cuts off and then it can immediately switch over to that to that backup.

01:16:44:21 - 01:16:56:05
JD Gill: So there's smaller eights like I showed like that fit in this small panel in your home. Or there's, you know, larger sizes that would work for a community as well. So varying sizes of automatic transfer.

01:16:56:07 - 01:17:26:23
Mike Collignon: And then one follow up to that is let's say you have a PV system on your home that it's a nice day out. So you wouldn't normally expect to have an outage on this day, but you have a nice, nice day out and your system is maybe producing slightly more power than you're consuming. It's still able to detect a inflow of power from the grid, even though the property is technically not pulling any power off the grid in that scenario.

01:17:26:26 - 01:17:46:24
JD Gill: Yeah, so the way a lot of the solar systems work is, they're usually called grid tied systems. So yeah, solar, if it's producing extra, it's going to pump it out to the, to the grid and or your, your battery to, to store it for later. But because it is grid tied, that system is constantly looking at that utility power to see if it's there.

01:17:46:25 - 01:18:06:26
JD Gill: Because because, you know, traditional solar is just not going to work on its own if there's no grade. That's the true meaning of grid tied solar. That's why when you have that add that backup controller or backup ATS, that's going to be the true piece that's going to detect if or true piece that's going to allow you to switch over to that battery backup okay.

01:18:06:28 - 01:18:28:27
Mike Collignon: All right. And we did have a question come in from our friend Zoran who's up in Canada. He was expressing dismay and frustration with apparently the Canadian Homebuilders Association has just removed the energy monitoring requirement for their net zero home program. Are you aware of that, JD?

01:18:29:00 - 01:18:37:14
JD Gill: I'm not. I don't deal with Canada too much, but I do have counterparts that I can definitely put them in touch with, but I have not heard of that myself.

01:18:37:16 - 01:19:11:14
Mike Collignon: Okay, okay. That's that's a little bit surprising there, but I wanted to get to a couple of other questions that came in. And this one I think really is germane to both Sam and JD. So I'll ask it kind of to both of you came in from Brenda and she wants to know how to renters make the necessary changes for water or energy savings if they can't control the items in the house.

01:19:11:17 - 01:19:12:24
JD Gill: Do you want to go?

01:19:12:26 - 01:19:42:17
Sam Rashkin: Yeah, I'll take it. Essentially, renters are not in control of the physical structure. They live in their renting as is, and so all they can do is basically put requests into the building owner, whoever owns a home or apartment to, to make improvements. So, but you know, as, as a renter, you can choose it behaviors that reduce energy use in the home.

01:19:42:17 - 01:20:04:28
Sam Rashkin: You could use LED lighting instead. You could switch your your uses to off peak to degree. There's off peak power. There's things you can do, but you have very limited options if you're renting to improve the property because you're not going to benefit from the physical improvements, the assets owned by somebody else.

01:20:05:01 - 01:20:29:26
JD Gill: Yeah, that's a great point, Sam. And I think it depends on if we're talking about existing buildings versus built to rent. Right. So if we're talking about build to rent, obviously we can incorporate a lot of these energy monitoring tactics right at the time of build, even if it is for renters. You know, we have fleet management type of programs that can you can the owners of that facility can look at break down the electrical usage of each tenant.

01:20:29:27 - 01:20:53:05
JD Gill: But yeah, in a retrofit style or sense, it is a lot more limited, obviously, because the the owners may not allow any major infrastructural changes. Right. But if they do, the owners want to make some changes for the betterment of their renters. You know, janitor has some aftermarket programs. I know there's aftermarket parts and pieces that other companies do as well.

01:20:53:05 - 01:20:59:16
JD Gill: So it's not to say that it can't be done, but it has to be kind of willed on by the by the owners of that place.

01:20:59:18 - 01:21:01:18
JD Gill: Yeah.

01:21:01:20 - 01:21:27:28
Mike Collignon: And then one other question for the both of you is came in from, from Zoran. And so it's a little bit of a you get to share your philosophical prediction. And our view into the future is, is the transition to all electric going to happen in our lifetime? Is there enough electricity to replace fossil fuels for cars and homes?

01:21:27:28 - 01:21:32:08
Mike Collignon: So Sam, you went first last time. Will let JD go first this time.

01:21:32:10 - 01:21:32:20
JD Gill: Yeah.

01:21:32:21 - 01:21:53:21
JD Gill: No, I think we're definitely seeing that right. So especially I'm living here in California. So we're seeing that trend to to all electric. It's not completely you know switched over but it's happening especially like those induction stove tops we talked about. Right. People always say, oh you know I'm going to miss gas for my cooking. But those induction stovetop are equally as good.

01:21:53:22 - 01:22:21:23
JD Gill: Right. So I think just the mind the mind block of of homeowners switching. You know, I think that's we're eventually going to get over that. To address the second part of that question. You know, do we have enough electricity. Right. I think as we adopt more solar, which, you know, again, in California, every new home solar is mandated on right to help with the the increasing energy needs that we're going to have all the way up into 2050, even into 2100.

01:22:21:24 - 01:22:45:25
JD Gill: Right? So I think our policies need to change as well. As, you know, our building policies need to change as we electrify more, you know, having solar standard maybe across, you know, certain states where you know that that solar energy is, is, you know, abundant, right? So I think I think we do have enough and and it's really the when we use our energy is going to be really key.

01:22:45:26 - 01:23:07:05
JD Gill: Right? So maybe we're all charging our EVs at night and then maybe pumping that same energy that we charge our EVs with if we're working from home into our home during the day. So I think there's a lot of tricks and things that we could do. But yeah, there's definitely a need for more solar generation, whether it's via solar or wind or other renewable sources.

01:23:07:07 - 01:23:35:19
Sam Rashkin: Yeah, that's I think it's a great answer if I would just build on it just a little bit. I believe all electrics for new construction is, well, well within the next decade. And the reason for that is because everyone who knows me from my, housing 2.0 program and other work, I'm just driven by the belief that a better, better user experience at lower costs will triumph.

01:23:35:24 - 01:24:01:29
Sam Rashkin: And when you look at the cost of having to build the infrastructure to get gas to all these locations and then have devices that work faster, better, cheaper that are electric, it just to me, eventually sanity takes hold and people just make the choices. So again we can go device by device, but induction cooktop is faster better safer safer.

01:24:02:01 - 01:24:33:01
Sam Rashkin: It's precise control. It boils water faster it when you pull the vessel off the surface. If anyone touches the surface, it's safe to touch because it's only the vessel that's hot and it just cooks more evenly. And you have less emissions in your house. There's no you know, it's I know we can put vents for stoves and but we just don't vent as a, as a housing public out there adequately.

01:24:33:02 - 01:25:04:11
Sam Rashkin: Emissions are a real issue from cooking. And I just I think we want all those benefits. And so we're going to go to induction induction cooktops just because it's a better experience. The same thing with fireplaces. They're drafts. They create holes to the outside. They disrupt comfort of the room. And if we can create devices that are precise, have more visual capabilities and choices and and convenient and don't have emissions, it's just a better experience.

01:25:04:11 - 01:25:30:26
Sam Rashkin: So all these things, we can go device by device. And then because of smart systems now, all these devices can now be more effectively used than any gas device like, because they can be hooked up to our smart integrated system. So yeah, because of that cost savings and everything else. And then, you know, there are bigger issues people worry about with gas infrastructure and safety and so forth.

01:25:30:28 - 01:25:51:15
Sam Rashkin: So that's the first part of the question. The second part, of course, is that we can use our resources and assets so much more efficiently. We know, particularly if we start making batteries standard in homes and use off peak hours to charge them. And then we start adding, as J.D. said, more and more renewable capacity to the grid.

01:25:51:18 - 01:26:17:16
Sam Rashkin: No, it's just there's no nothing I've read that suggests there's a shortage of electrical resource. I can't manage this all electric future. So we have plenty of resources and even we can build up some of the natural gas plants that might feel as a transition is more and more interest in nuclear non emission plans also Department of Energy.

01:26:17:17 - 01:26:29:23
Sam Rashkin: So we'll see how it plays out. But I think in both cases innovation will rule the day and we're going all electric.

01:26:29:25 - 01:26:54:07
Mike Collignon: Sam I wanted to reinforce one thing you talked about earlier in the water section when you were talking about Gary's compact plumbing. Two other things to add on. That would be one you were talking about in the kitchen sink. Pot filling is another one. So you're washing dishes, Bill. So when you're filling pots, it doesn't have to be instantly hot right away.

01:26:54:09 - 01:27:08:25
Mike Collignon: We'll get there. Plus you're going to heat it up anyway. And then in the laundry, you know, there's a lot of detergents that are now being designed to be used as cold water. So again, another reason why you don't have to have the instant hot water for the washer. And then the.

01:27:08:25 - 01:27:11:13
JD Gill: Final thing I want.

01:27:11:15 - 01:27:11:19
Sam Rashkin: Hey.

01:27:11:21 - 01:27:12:14
JD Gill: I agree.

01:27:12:15 - 01:27:14:02
Sam Rashkin: That's a good point.

01:27:14:04 - 01:27:14:13
JD Gill: Yeah.

01:27:14:14 - 01:27:38:24
Mike Collignon: And then the final thing I wanted to share with our audience was a free resource that is available through it, Mo. It's called the Water Demand Calculator. And this is a tool again, it's free. Anybody can download this in the app stores. I believe it might also be on their website, but it's a tool that helps you to right size the pipe coming in from the main to the house and just right sizing.

01:27:38:24 - 01:27:53:13
Mike Collignon: That alone can save you a few hundred dollars on a single family project. If you're doing any multifamily, it can actually save you thousands and thousands of dollars, so make sure to check that out. From the water side of things.

01:27:53:19 - 01:28:16:00
Sam Rashkin: We should also mention a lot of codes are out of date. Require piping inside the home larger than necessary, and their older codes and we can make the piping smaller. Lower costs less again with less time getting to the fixture. You know, some of the things are regulatory as well as you're suggesting that need to be fixed. Yeah, yeah.

01:28:16:01 - 01:28:36:14
Mike Collignon: And JD, you and I saw each other at Eva a few weeks back and Gary Klein gave a presentation at eBay and he talked exactly about that. Same about, you know, we can make some of these pipes inside the building smaller to get hot water there faster. So. All right, I don't see any other questions right now. So I'm going to go ahead and wrap this one up for today.

01:28:36:14 - 01:28:56:12
Mike Collignon: But hey we've got one seminar left. It's going to take place next Thursday, November 7th at 12 p.m. eastern time. We're going to be talking about community and design, and that's a great concluding topic. I hope you're able to join us. There's always a high demand session. So great topic, great discussions that come out of that as well.

01:28:56:15 - 01:29:17:03
Mike Collignon: But thank all of you so much for attending today. Thank you once again to JD for joining us for Schneider Electric, Genco Solar and Panasonic Healthy Indoor Living Solutions and LG Mack for their generous sponsorships. Hey, don't forget to change your clocks back this weekend. We fall back one hour and unless you're in Arizona or parts of Indiana.

01:29:17:03 - 01:29:24:10
Mike Collignon: But other than that, yes, fallback. So in the meantime, please stay safe, stay healthy, and take care everyone. So long.