Brandon Weiss, co-founder and chief innovation officer of a modular home company, walks through the prefabricated light-gauge steel and magnesium oxide foundation system going in at a prototype home in Lake City, Colorado. He explains how the panelized assembly cuts embodied carbon by roughly 80% versus a code-built foundation while speeding installation to about a day.
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Brandon Weiss: Brandon Weiss, co-founder and chief innovation officer for devil, and we're a modular home company focusing on high performance, healthy, self-powered and modern design homes. So we're in beautiful Lake City, Colorado. We're on the the banks here of the cliff above the Lake Fork River. Beautiful spot, beautiful lot for a transcendental home. This home is a prototype home that we're going to be using as a showcase to show kind of a shift in our business philosophy from a direct to consumer to a business to business.
00:00:31:18 - 00:00:48:29
Brandon Weiss: So looking at a developer model, and this will be kind of one of the home types that we can offer through that transcend communities is going to be, like I said, 20, 30 or more unit communities that are focused on the same kind of things that develop holds near and dear with regards to sustainability, energy independence and healthy homes.
00:00:48:29 - 00:01:08:29
Brandon Weiss: And so this home is overlooking this beautiful view around me. And we're right now currently installing our first prototype foundation system. So this is the first time we've actually prefabricated our foundation system. We've done that for several reasons. One is the speed needs to take us a couple of weeks to get our foundations in on site. Would require partnerships with local contractors.
00:01:09:00 - 00:01:37:19
Brandon Weiss: Right now we have the footings prepared before we got here, and now we'll have these walls and the first one here probably two days, but after that it'll be about one day to set our foundations, which saves a significant amount of time, significant amount of money as well as reduces our embodied energy. So embodied energy reduction in this versus a code built foundation system, it's about 80% less global warming potential and 20% less than what we used to do on our previous version 1.0 wall, which was an ice wall.
00:01:37:22 - 00:02:11:26
Brandon Weiss: So living, living up to the standards of we've always been focused on the operational energy and been aware and trying to reduce our embodied energy. Now we're actually modeling it and taking steps with which to mitigate and reduce that additional carbon footprint of our homes. So this is a light gauge steel structural wall. And on the outside of that we have a magnesium oxide panel that gives us the structure in this year that is mechanically fastened both the wall together as well as to that sheathing on the outside, and then all the all the screw heads, as well as all the joints in the material, are sealed with a liquid applied membrane.
00:02:11:26 - 00:02:33:06
Brandon Weiss: And then the whole outside coating comes back and there's another liquid applied coating that goes on that, and that all gets protected by what's not on it yet, because we have to get it set. First will be exterior insulation. So this house is going to have 7.5in of exterior rock wall insulation on the exterior of it, followed by a gap drainage membrane.
00:02:33:06 - 00:02:53:27
Brandon Weiss: That'll be the primary weather barrier and and drainage membrane between the Earth and the foundation system and the insulation, so the insulation will also stay dry. Field does have a higher bodied energy than, for example, FSC certified wood. But we're not going to build a foundation system out of wood, nor would it be perfect and be a scalable for a business model.
00:02:53:27 - 00:03:11:01
Brandon Weiss: With us doing this, we can actually prefabricated these at our facilities, send them to site and they come and knock down panels. We can stumble really quickly and there's really no plumbing and things like that. And it's it's not slowing us up. Whereas like our modular is we don't build penalized. We build modular because we can fit all that mechanicals within it.
00:03:11:02 - 00:03:29:00
Brandon Weiss: Everything's like pretty much 90% complete in the factory. And then one day of actual set time, once we get this up and running. Now steel, it does have a high embodied energy compared to a lot of other products as well. But when you're comparing like structural products like this, really we're comparing concrete versus steel. And concrete has a higher embodied energy than steel.
00:03:29:03 - 00:03:52:07
Brandon Weiss: And plus the the cubic footage or cubic yardage of that concrete versus the actual amount of tons of steel. We're just using a lot less carbon intensive materials through that process. And we are using a recycled steel as well to further reduce that. And looking at a couple upcoming products that are coming online that aren't marketing yet. But eventually we'll get to Carbon Zero Steel, which will even further improve our delta between concrete and steel.
00:03:52:12 - 00:04:17:06
Brandon Weiss: The MgO board actually absorbs carbon dioxide as it's curing through its manufacturing process. So carbon negative material, which is great and has all the same shear values and things like that as a plywood wood. So we're getting the structural value. It's also impervious to insects. It also is vapor open. So that was vapor to flow through it, which in a crawl space like this will be a great advantage.
00:04:17:09 - 00:04:34:10
Brandon Weiss: The Rockwell on the outside is also vapor open. So we have some diffusion properties through this wall. That'll be pretty great. Another advantage of of this wall is that it's a mold mildew resistance. So mold can't grow on it. It's waterproof. And if it does get wet, water can sit within the product, but it dries out really rapidly.
00:04:34:10 - 00:04:52:14
Brandon Weiss: And because the whole assembly is diffusion open, it has that drying potential. But we have taken a lot of precautions to keep it dry from both directions here as well as from below ones. We put the insulation and the vapor barrier, which you see the yellow around here once. That's tape seams. That'll give complete vapor protection from sub slab and soil gases as well.
00:04:52:21 - 00:05:14:06
Brandon Weiss: So the next step we'll get all these walls up. We'll get embraced together. We'll remove these so we can do that sub slab work before the modules arrive. The modules will come land on top of the structure and get fastened with mechanical fasteners and hold downs. We'll be ready to make those cross connections and to really showcase this really innovative prototype home that we hope to build hundreds and thousands of across the country in the coming years.