Devel co-founder and chief innovation officer Brandon Weiss, joined by Gary Hohbach, explains how factory-built modular construction delivers healthier materials, precise quality control and self-powered homes. They describe the Transcend prototype home and the microgrid communities Devel is building around it.
00:00:03:10 - 00:00:25:02
Brandon Weiss: I'm Brandon Weiss, co-founder and chief innovation officer for Devel developer modular home company that's focused on creating a healthier, more sustainable, intelligent future by advancing the home experience for you and our planet. And we're here in beautiful Lake City on the banks of the Lake Fork River, here at a partnership with Green Builder Media Home. It's the transcend prototype home, really showcase home that we're building.
00:00:25:02 - 00:00:45:23
Brandon Weiss: And we're starting here with the Foundation system. Now was the time for prefab for so many reasons. One is the existing skilled workforce. I guess pre-COVID was aging very rapidly. Now a lot of the in a post-Covid world, a lot of those people have moved on to different industries or haven't come back to work in that industry. And so it's even harder for general contractors, which I came from.
00:00:45:23 - 00:01:23:03
Brandon Weiss: Before starting devel was the general contractor building stick those in the field, but at the high level of performance. So doing that today with the lack of subcontractors would be really hard and not a scalable business. And so with the well, we can actually produce thousands of these type of homes in a year, deliver them across the entire country, which is going to give the impact on reducing carbon in a really both an ecological and environmental impact, as well as providing really high quality housing to a greater number of consumers, which is really what's lacking in the American economy, is high quality, readily available homes.
00:01:23:05 - 00:01:37:13
Brandon Weiss: You just can't find them. And there's maybe a handful of builders, maybe less than 1% of homes built in the United States today actually achieve a higher level of performance than code minimum standards, which I think is a problem, but something we're trying to address and really scale a solution for.
00:01:37:16 - 00:02:00:17
Gary Hohbach: To me, it comes down a lot to precision and quality. In addition to speed, we're building in a controlled environment with really precise tolerances, so we're able to control the timelines in addition to the quality. And we have a full time quality control team that's basically monitoring that. Everything is to code and beyond code to the devil standard.
00:02:00:17 - 00:02:31:23
Gary Hohbach: And we're able to monitor this every step of the way inside of a factory controlled environment versus having your project sit out in the elements, especially somewhere like Lake City, where you get different elements coming at you every day. You can the weather can be very unpredictable and and there's no exposure to the outside elements we're going to because we're using steel, we're able to have a very non variable structural elements.
00:02:31:23 - 00:02:47:23
Gary Hohbach: And then when the the module modules arrive they're already fully dried in two days after set day. So we're not exposed to the elements at all. And we're able to hold to a very high quality standard because of that.
00:02:47:26 - 00:03:05:19
Brandon Weiss: Really what makes them unique and special is one they're a healthier home. We've paid a lot of attention to the materials that go into every component of the home, making sure we're using products that are healthier for families that are living in our homes. What that means is like less chemicals. We look for materials that have transparency documentation.
00:03:05:19 - 00:03:26:04
Brandon Weiss: So companies that have disclosed all the ingredients within their products now, that doesn't fully exist across the wide spectrum of everything that takes to build a home. So then we go to products that have gone and volunteered to put their products into testing chambers, making sure we know what's emitting from them before we design them into our building so that source control.
00:03:26:04 - 00:03:46:27
Brandon Weiss: And then when we get into the actual construction or the operation of the home, we have really good ventilation systems, filtration systems in the home that keep that indoor air quality really pure. We also leave space for water filtration, so we can also provide healthier water throughout the home, filtered water throughout the entire home. So develop you as our intelligence platform.
00:03:47:01 - 00:04:23:05
Brandon Weiss: It ties together all the censoring. So we have censoring in our buried in our walls, with our roof assemblies within our crawlspace assemblies, as well as controlling our ERV, controlling heating and cooling, controlling. We can show your lights, your your audio. It's basically a smart home system that goes a step or two further, and really making an intelligent home that ties it also ties together the renewable energy and the energy storage systems, so it knows when to when the house is island from the grid or connected to the grid when it wants to move stored energy from the batteries back to the grid to help the grid and be a grid asset in those realms,
00:04:23:07 - 00:04:40:14
Brandon Weiss: and then optimizing human health and comfort through that system as well. And then also we paid a lot of attention to privacy within that system. We view kind of privacy as part of our health and wellness protocols within Devils. So to make sure that data, we're not selling that data, anyone else or that they can try to harvest that data from our home.
00:04:40:14 - 00:05:09:24
Brandon Weiss: So it's a secure network as well. And then also devil homes are self-powered, meaning they they only consume the power that they produce. They can also store that energy to get through nighttime periods or grid outages and sustain longer term grid outages on their own. Now, that's the ability to kind of island or off grid mode or home, but really we can have a much larger impact is when we group these homes together and create these microgrids, where energy can be shared between these homes.
00:05:09:29 - 00:05:32:08
Brandon Weiss: Homes can have different facing solar arrays such that they kind of work together. But also what that community can do in other situations is move energy back to the grid. At times, where the grid is has dirtier energy, perhaps at peak power, where the peak power plants are fired up and reduce the overall emissions on the grid. And you can do that when you have hundreds of homes in a community.
00:05:32:08 - 00:05:34:16
Brandon Weiss: And that's what we're looking to do with transcendent communities.