Wisconsin builder Tim O'Brien of Tim O'Brien Homes walks through the products and systems behind VISION House Sussex, from heat pump heating and water heating to low-flow fixtures, leak detection, solar plus battery storage, and durable recycled-content finishes.
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Tim O'Brien: My name is Tim O'Brien with Tim O'Brien homes or a homebuilder in the Wisconsin markets, two markets, Milwaukee and Madison. And since we started Tim O'Brien homes, we've been committed to every home that we built, has a independent certification for energy efficiency and green building. This project has been so special to us as a home builder, because we get to work with high performance manufacturers and their products and great people as well.
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Tim O'Brien: We've learned a lot from some of these cutting edge products that we're putting into the home, and we really hope to continue these relationships that we've had with these partners, because this has been such a great success. We decided to have the slogan for the vision House of Sussex to be sustainable and attainable. And the reason why we chose that is that the sustainable piece obviously aligns with our green building initiative that we have here at Tim Brian Homes.
00:00:54:20 - 00:01:20:28
Tim O'Brien: But the other part, the attainable part is really trying to make this more of a mainstream, accessible to a larger demographic than more of a niche market. We wanted to be able to cast this out to a greater group of home buyers, and so we really focus on value and really driving down the cost, but keeping the value of green, building energy efficiency, which is a component of it in the homes.
00:01:21:01 - 00:01:43:14
Tim O'Brien: This home is more efficient than the average home due to a lot of different products and systems that we've developed into the home. First, the carrier heat pump technology allows for less consumption for heating and cooling in the home than a traditional gas fired furnace. In addition to that, we've also brought in a hybrid water heater, which is also a heat pump.
00:01:43:16 - 00:02:07:26
Tim O'Brien: Both operate primarily on electricity. For going some of the fossil fuels that we get out of natural gas. This system will be able to heat the home up to about five degrees Fahrenheit, at which time the furnace gas furnace. This 96% condensing gas furnace will then kick in and provide the supplemental heat until the temperatures normalize, and then that heat pump will continue to kick in.
00:02:07:26 - 00:02:33:22
Tim O'Brien: What the heat pump does for us, though, is it really it focuses more on electricity to drive it, which is a cleaner fuel than natural gas can be. But what we found is that also electrical bills with this heat pump technology, the consumption, the bills have come down significantly for our customers. We also what we really like about the heat pump technology is that it's very quiet.
00:02:33:25 - 00:02:59:20
Tim O'Brien: So in the vision House, we've partnered with Koehler, who's been a partner of ours for over five years. At this point, Koehler brings in kind of a low flow EPA water sense certified fixtures for the home, which save up to 30% of water consumption in the home. Now, water is going to continually become more costly for consumers, not only just for the cleaning and sanitation of the of the water, but also the delivery of the water.
00:02:59:21 - 00:03:40:12
Tim O'Brien: Water requires a lot of electricity and a lot of pumps to move throughout the municipality. So that's going to continue to become more costly, and it's going to be considered the next kind of electrical utility in terms of what people are looking at for their payments, what they have to pay each month in each quarter for consumption. What fin is provided for this home is really leak detection and water waste, so it helps us notify the homeowner if there is some unusual flow in the home, whether it's just a trickle or something like maybe a faucets on, left on or toilet might be running.
00:03:40:12 - 00:04:06:20
Tim O'Brien: But more significantly, if there's actually a leak in the home or potentially even a frozen pipe at some point, fin provides that kind of more quick alert to the consumer. And through an app, I have a fin in my home. It's been a wonderful device to help me kind of manage water consumption, as well as also identify for any leaks or faucets that might be dripping.
00:04:06:22 - 00:04:33:20
Tim O'Brien: We really enjoy our partnership with James Hardie Siding, and the vision House is just another way for us to showcase what James Hardie has done for us in the home building industry and as well as for others that use the product. It's one of the premier cementitious product made of fiber cement, very durable, long lasting, even in a climate that we're in, which, you know, temperatures will get down well below zero in certain weeks of the year.
00:04:33:22 - 00:05:04:25
Tim O'Brien: We found great durability in this product. We also bring in their pre finishing system, which adds just another layer of durability to protect the home's exterior from water penetration and deterioration. This paint paint process that they use last significantly longer than a site finished product. Lift master has been a partner of ours since our first day of building homes, and Lift master has been a wonderful innovator and technology advanced in our industry.
00:05:05:00 - 00:05:36:01
Tim O'Brien: What we really enjoy in this particular home, we have an ultra quiet, belt driven lift master door operator and in addition to that, Lift master is just come out with this keypad video called Mike video, which provides a little bit more peace of mind for a consumer to know what is going on. It's a video that will provide access to the entire driveway or whatever area you want to cover that you can from your keypad, and give you alerts when people are coming up into your driveway, somebody's coming home, whatever it might be.
00:05:36:03 - 00:05:58:06
Tim O'Brien: You also have the opportunity for video storage, so you can go back and kind of see what has happened over the day, over the week at your home as it relates. So it's a great security and peace of mind, peace. The Windsor doors, we really enjoy and excited about this particular door in the house, because this particular door contains up to 75% of recycled steel content.
00:05:58:06 - 00:06:39:28
Tim O'Brien: In addition to embedding a well rounded insulation system inside the door that provides a much more comfortable garage when temperatures are extreme, steel prices have been just crazy over over the last few years here really helped to provide more sustainable garage door at a much more value based price. Organized living is provided us some beautiful closets. The product that we have in the home is the view and the freedom rail, and what that provides is great flexibility for our customers to move shelving around or change up the configuration based on their needs.
00:06:39:28 - 00:07:06:11
Tim O'Brien: It also has a significant amount of weight capacity that it can take on much more than you would get in traditional shelving products. Genco solar has provided the solar array, which about 12.6kW and a battery backup system for the vision House of Sussex. This has been really an exciting new thing for me to learn about the battery backup system, and we're excited to be in this relationship.
00:07:06:11 - 00:07:33:19
Tim O'Brien: For the vision House with Genco, the battery system will be charging during the day through the solar array, and be able to store electrical capacity for the home at night, whether we want to distribute it throughout the home at night or whether we want to use it in case of some electrical power failure that affects the community, we can provide resources for our homeowners in their home.
00:07:33:22 - 00:08:03:26
Tim O'Brien: So Mohawk has provided their ever strand product and their rev wood product for the vision House of Sussex here. And the Ever strand product is made from recycled content. That's our carpet. And the fibers actually have the dye in the fiber, so it makes it much more stain resistant and much more durable, fade resistant as well. So this product is going to last a long time, and it's going to be much more sustainable for just for our industry in general and for our customers in the home.
00:08:03:26 - 00:08:41:22
Tim O'Brien: So that durability is going to come there. The Rev wood product provides a waterproof component that makes it more durable. It prevents water from being able to get down into the subfloor. So like in a in a wet area, when you come in out of the garage or you coming out of the foyer or out of your front door, especially in our climate where we have snow and a fair amount of seasonal rain, this product is going to provide much more durability and water resistance than than most laminate products that we have with dull tile, some beautiful tile in this home we have in our kitchen backsplash, in our rear foyer, coming off the garage,
00:08:41:22 - 00:09:13:03
Tim O'Brien: in our in our bathrooms. Dull tile just provides a really nice elegance and beauty to really helps accentuate the vision. House of Sussex and all of the other homes that we've built in our partnership with tile over the years, it's been a great journey to this point. We're really hoping to continue these relationships because real excited about a lot of these new products that we've been exposed to, and we really hope to continue to have an opportunity to put these products in our homes going forward because they're they've been fantastic partners to work with.
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Tim O'Brien: And we've got some great testing performance metrics out of some of the things that we put in the home.