Healthy Spaces Podcast: Season 3 Episode 2: Homes of the Future

at the 1964 World Fair in New York Walt Disney and his imagineers unveiled the Carousel of Progress and attraction steeped both in Nostalgia and futurism celebrating how electricity and other technological advances changed the way we live and work in our homes and almost 80 years after the attractions Premiere many of the inventions imagined by Walt Disney's imagineers such as virtual reality Games and voice activated household appliances have actually become a reality so what's next in this healthy Spaces episode we talk to innovators in the manufacturing and construction industry about the future of homes what we want to do is produce a healthier and more sustainable intelligent future by continually advancing the home experience for your family and our planet so bringing that all together is really focusing on a great design that people feel great about connecting people from indoor Outdoors we want to try to make this world more sustainable right we want to leave it in a better position than than we found it sustainability is the backbone of our company and the foundation of who we are that's what the engineers are working very very diligently on when you're talking about 2040 that system that you buy today could be rounds okay so the impacts of the decisions that we make now will impact that future that we have in 2040 and how we experience that future especially for these durable goods that we interact with and that we have in our in our homes for a long time you just heard from Brandon Weiss co-founder and chief Innovation officer at DeVille as well as Katie Davis vice president of engineering and trained Technologies and Joel gouker director of innovation at train Technologies I'm Dominic Silva and you're listening to healthy spaces the podcast exploring how technology and Innovation are transforming the spaces where we live work and play in this week's episode we'll talk with engineers and entrepreneurs who are working relentlessly to develop and Advance new technologies which can make our homes smarter healthier and more sustainable we'll learn more about the modern approaches home builders are taking to create high quality durable structures we'll find out how Architects are designing homes that have a positive impact on people and nature as well as the Technologies enabling that we'll also learn the ways homeowners can make changes to their current spaces to improve air quality and finally we'll explore current Smart Home Technology features and the automation transformation happening in the home building industry that's combining arts and Engineering to create accessible and reliable healthy spaces my first guest is Brandon Weiss he's construction company devel specializes in offering modern prefab homes that combine sustainability with health and well-being devel Works to build healthy homes through their biophilic designs a concept used within the building industry to increase the connectivity between occupants and nature good air quality is achieved through the use of safe materials as well as Innovative sensory ventilation technology which uses automation to continuously optimize air quality in an energy efficient way Brandon and his team at devel have made great strides in assembling Healthy Home protocols but how do they tie sustainability into their work and where did their inspiration come from I started as a third generation Builder developer so I grew up on construction sites worked my way through all the trades and high school and college Summers and then after college ended up playing professional basketball over in the Netherlands in Germany and when I was there it was kind of a aha moment I realized that what I had seen him in accustomed to seeing especially the single family residential space we were like 10 to 15 years behind in the U.S market with what they were doing over there so a lot to do with sustainability Energy Efficiency was huge there and that kind of thing so when I came back from that stint and started my career uh building career back in in Chicagoland area I really wanted to focus on those areas and bring sustainability the Energy Efficiency I saw there and and then kind of fold in the health elements I was always into Health being an athlete so kind of melding these things together was kind of where I found my passion so as I dove into the Energy Efficiency side I started reading things on sick building syndrome and there was a project uh in Portland it was like two buildings side by side and one was built one way and one was built the other way and they found out some of the building methodologies were causing sickness of the people inside the building so that kind of heightened my awareness of that and then when I was getting into building my first passive house project and we started putting in uh or doing lab testing on the indoor air quality in that building we brought a third-party lab tested for vocs for mold Spore count for Radon particulate matter all these things before lead had that in their protocol so it was kind of early on and trying to just gather the data you know I felt like people could talk about building quality buildings but what is that unless you quantify it as I was you know wanting to Market more of the healthy building protocols I wanted to gather the data necessary to do that and so we started doing a third-party testing uh post-construction preoccupancy just to actually test the building that we were producing and then we got to do that over time we basically have done that ever since with my company in Chicago and then as we started develop we even Incorporated those same methodologies into develop fascinating story thank you for sharing your journey with us Brendan you mentioned the desire to create data-driven healthy building protocols but you've also brought up Energy Efficiency a few times so from your perspective how do these two things work together what is a healthy High performing sustainable home what we want to do is produce a healthier and more sustainable intelligent future by continually advancing the home experience for your family and our planet so bringing that all together is you know really focusing on a great design that people feel great about connecting people from indoor Outdoors so you have that kind of biophilic design elements brought into the building and then looking at source control of all the different materials that go into the building it's taken a ton of research over a decade to look at Best in Class materials you know we started that there wasn't a lot of information out there and and now through things like declare label and some other transparency labels you know you're able to give more data on you know what's in these various products that we're putting into a building it was interesting when I started that research you would talk to manufacturers specifically and they actually didn't know their supply chain enough to know all the various chemicals and components and all the materials that they were producing so it kind of raised awareness not only in the public domain in the building industry but also getting manufacturers to actually do a little bit more due diligence into what they're putting in their materials that they're selling to people so that's been great it's coming a long way over the past 10 years for sure um yeah so that's incorporated into you know the materials we specify and then it's about great ventilation and putting on ventilation systems that tie back to Those sensors I was talking about such that it can without occupants having to like go press buttons and make changes themselves once certain elements are reached within the indoor space that ventilation system can ramp up and do what it needs to do or or not do depending on outdoor air quality and indoor air quality in various parts of the house so let's talk a little bit more about Technologies and Innovation can you talk to us specifically right about some of the technologies that you're using in devel homes today so I guess starting with kind of the everyday occupiable spaces we have sensors that tie back to our software platform develiq that kind of gives the occupants a sense of where they're at in terms of air quality to be able to see changes over time and how different behaviors affect that but then also make those decisions for people as well in terms of ramping up ventilation speeds and and that kind of thing and then going deeper into that from also dealing with health and healthy spaces we have sensors built into the walls throughout the assembly so different locations have sensors at different depths of the wall there so that we can see also in the roof in the crawl space such that we can see temperature humidity moisture and like risk of dew point so we've modeled all this very intricately all of our assemblies across all different climate zones and then we're able to extrapolate that and look at okay how these buildings performing in the real world in that environment we can be proactive on that and it's not waiting years and years until it's this massive mold problem behind a wall or some kind of rot Decay type of thing happening on the wall but it becomes known kind of instantaneously so we've talked extensively about monitoring and censoring technology um let's talk a little bit about how these homes are being efficiently and sustainably cooled and heated so what kind of Technologies are you using there we're currently using uh heat pumps so we we went all electric from the very beginning such that our homes could actually be self-powered so homes can produce all their own energy store that energy and use it in the night time and do that on a long data basis in case of a power outage or a grid failure so we went all electric so that we could actually do true Net Zero or net positive homes which you can't do if you have gas so then using that as a baseline we have been using heat pumps since the very beginning so we've done fully ducted heat pumps we've done ductless mini splits and we're also right now doing a couple pilot projects where we're using air to water heat pumps that feed hydronic fan coils inside of the home so we can get really reduce the amount of refrigerant that is needed to operate our homes that's interesting to hear that you're um where you started using heat pumps from the start I know later in this episode we'll be hearing from the engineering director from train residential Katie Davis who will talk a lot about the innovations that train is doing in the heat pump space especially from an operating map perspective because early on one of the limitations of the heat pump technology was its inability to perform reliably and efficiently at very low temperatures right so that's sort of where today companies like train are really pushing the boundaries of the operating map same as what devel is building today with all of our insulation the outsides we don't have the thermal bridging you don't have the conductive heat losses happening and that kind of thing exactly let's switch topics a little so we've talked briefly about Net Zero homes but there's also a lot of attention being given as to how we can build resilient homes all over the world extreme weather events like heat waves and floods are becoming more frequent and more intense in your View Brandon how can we make homes more resilient you know we started we we kind of were looking at all these things and like looking at Tesla uh the model S like they were the best in class and in Battery Technology safest car produced and I don't know how many years before that healthiest indoor air quality I think the list could go on and on so it's like all right this company started as a startup was able to produce a car that was Best in Class and more than one just thing a lot of people just focus on one topic so so we wanted okay yeah Design Energy Efficiency self-powered healthy these are the prerequisites but then also resiliency like Energy Efficiency solar Plus Battery that has a lot of effect on resiliency and being able to be powered and Empower your home and live a normal lifestyle in a great outage scenario right so that's one element of resiliency and wildfires can cause grid outages or Now power companies just cutting power to reduce risk of wildfires and windy times so just being having the ability to just Island yourself if the grid goes out is is great from resiliency perspective but then also fire resiliency so we're building in California we were looking at that very early on we want to make sure we're building a robust uh envelope that was more resilient to fire than the codes required so we were doing that again earthquakes big thing in California so we have a structural engineering team in-house that designs all of our homes for the site-specific you know seismic activity that could occur and so we're building earthquake resiliency that way all these things that can really make a building last through a powerful storm we've definitely wanted to be best in class in that dude and have these homes that one our goal is to make a home that lasts over 100 years again taking some inspiration from the European side that's kind of the expectation they build there but the American Consumer is like okay if they buy a house in the windows league and two or three years it's like oh just put some caulk on to call the Builder put some caulk on it you know caulk is not going to solve the issue so in your view how can healthy and high performing homes actually become more accessible that's kind of what we were looking at from the very beginning too is how can we do that and we had to start with a product that performed really well we were able to collect the data make those improvements early on while we were producing less and be able to Tinker with things but now we've really defined what we're building we've detailed it in such a way with our software that you know each individual component like piping elbows and the length of pipes all these things can be spit out so we basically we call it Bim to bomb we can take our our Bim model and spit out our bill of materials such as easy to buy and then easy to break down into the different work breakdown cells within the factory so as we do that and then we build larger factories that have more output we're going to have more buying power on the materials we're buying so that'll bring down our price point and then being able to build things faster and increase the productivity right now we have one continuous straight line in our our kind of pilot Factory but the next one will have at least three lines going uh in parallel so we can have greater output and with that we'll come more economy of scale and bring down our price points such that we can't hit that missing middle so yeah that's that's a lot of you know looking at how can we do developments of these homes make those available so we can actually make a true impact on all the things we want to in terms of the housing crisis the climate crisis we can kind of bring these things together and actually saw be a solution for this a big solution for it so we're looking at you know factories being able to produce anywhere between 1200 modules to some of the robotics engineers we're designing with they're saying up to 7 000 modules uh in a year for each Factory so that's that's significant wow I'm just excited to see where this industry goes in general like just looking at like where the wellness real estate there's a ton of room for growth in this industry specifically is focusing on healthy buildings so really excited to see where that goes and see the industry improve that and making healthier buildings available to more people and again we're feel like we're an awesome solution to make that happen Brandon's work to Source cleaner materials and Implement biophilic design in home construction has made an impact on how and where homes are built while this helps us preserve the states of new homes existing infrastructures can still struggle with maintaining air quality and Energy Efficiency so what are some of the Innovations happening in the housing market that can help solve these issues for existing homes answer these questions I spoke with Katie Davis the vice president of engineering and Technology with trains residential business across our product portfolio in residential we have really been working on first and foremost Improvement and efficiency so we want all of our products to be as efficient as possible and how that translates to the homeowner is your energy bill is cheaper right so what energy you put in you get way more energy out that actually has to go into the system so that's really what we pride ourselves on in the residential business is really making sure our units are more efficient the second piece I think from a sustainability perspective is we really are very hyper focused on change and refrigerant so utilizing a Next Generation refrigerant that has a lower global warming potential than the current refrigerant that's in most HVAC or heating ventilating and air conditioning when we think about refrigerants you know in our systems we want to try to make this world more sustainable right we want to leave it in a better position than than we found it our refrigerants right have this what we've as we mentioned global warming potential right so when we utilize refrigerants that have a negative impact on the environment or more negative impact than they should or could then our goal is really to move toward a refrigerant that has a much lower potential of actually causing this global warming right and so it's really important to us and sustainability is the backbone of our company and the foundation of who we are it's a big effort really across our whole business and certainly in residential um that's what the engineers are working very very diligently on if we think about electrification of heating right moving away from fossil fuels as well we're also working on the cold climate heat pump and we've got one actually operating in a place just outside of Boise Idaho it's actually running and it's part of the Department of Energy's cold climate heat pump Challenge and very excited about the data that's coming into us from this first field trial season in the winter of 22. we've heard and actually talked quite a bit about heat pumps what are heat pumps exactly how are they electrifying heat how are they different from electric heaters okay so heat pumps a lot of people think he pumps our new technology they are not they've been around actually since the 1800s the reason they're called a heat pump is because they actually move Heat you might say Okay butchers operated at minus 23 degrees how in the world can you get heat out of -23 degrees well believe it or not there's heat still in the air so at minus 23 degrees we can still get the refrigerant to boil if you can believe it so then it turns into a hotter gas it goes in to the indoor unit in the house runs through a coil air blows across the coil the coil is warm and it sends it into the home so you're taking heat from outside you're magnifying it and then you're sending it in the home the opposite happens in the summertime so you're pulling heat out of the house you're sending it backwards through the vapor compression cycle and you're sending it out through the outdoor unit so that's how they work they just move heat from one way to the other let's talk a little bit about air quality in our homes right how do we make these spaces um healthy as well and maybe just to bridge the gap there with what we've been discussing around heat pumps so I haven't very interesting home Dynamic I guess I can say so we are big dog lovers in my family and we are proud owners of nine beautiful Siberian Huskies that's a lot of fur for folks who are listening if you have ever been around the Husky and so one of the things that we did and it's a great example that I use with a lot of folks who asked actually asked me about indoor air quality if they're going to upgrade is we have a trained clean effects air filtration device on our system both upstairs and downstairs so it keeps down on pet dander it keeps down on the fur it really helps to keep my home super clean if you can imagine that with nine Huskies so that the clean effects it really plays a big role in our home right so not only would I say hey if you want to upgrade an efficiency I would definitely move toward a variable speed system and then I would also maybe add some ear filtration like the train clean effects product to your portfolio and your home right because it cuts down on Dust has really cut down dusting in our home at least 15 percent of the time which is significant again considering the fur balls that live in my house so Katie I'd love to hear from you what you see happening in this space and what has you excited about how we're going to bring sort of data information and actionable insights together we find that you know our customers like with everything else want to be connected right they want to see their units they want to be able to understand can I adjust my thermostat on my phone do I know what the humidity is in my house and so we've been working on a number of different programs to really advance that across our portfolio one of the most recent Innovative products that we've released is a product we called link and so link is pretty fantastic for our dealers and it's really fantastic for our homeowners as well it's a good system actually it uses Bluetooth for a technician or a dealer to be able to come into a home or even can sit in your driveway obviously you have to allow them to connect right they can't just do it but they can see your systems you have an indoor system in your attic or under your house and then you have an outdoor system and they can actually see these systems on an app on their phone and they can read all the appropriate temperatures pressures they can understand what your system is doing they can understand airflow if you have dampers that are open or closed they can see all that so really one it helps the technician out that they can actually see this information without having to go um you know climb in your attic and go under your house where they can stand in your living room and do it which is really awesome but what's really nice about it is our dealers can sit in their office or your your technician they can sit in their office they can see your system online they can read all the information and from that information they can determine if you have a problem or if you don't and then other times they can see what's wrong ahead of time and so before they even come to your house and you have to pay the 125 fee or whatever it is for the technician to shut up they have your part so they you're they already know right so those types of connections are really really important to our customers because you know nobody wants their heating or cooling to be down so Katie as vice presidents of engineering for an HVAC company I imagine you spend a lot of time thinking about what homes will look like in the future and how technology can help make our lives just a little bit easier can you offer us a glimpse into the future in the future it'd be great to not have to worry about your HVAC or your unit your heat pump furnace it would be great not to have to worry about it at all right so you could go on vacation if something were happening to it while you were gone your technician or dealer is going to know about it you know ahead of time they're going to have the part shipped automatically to your home they're going to be there and able to fix it either right when you get back if they need to get in the home that's one thing if they don't and they're able to fix it without you being home that's an even better thing maybe that your thermostat disappears from your wall right you don't really need a thermostat on the wall you can see everything on your phone or tablet or whatever maybe even your TV you've got a system that's smart enough to adjust and partnership with you know a local dealer installer that really enables you to to get what you need out of it I mean a lot of people have swimming pools right especially in the South and a lot of people don't have to worry about them at all because they have company that takes care of the bowl if it needs to be filtering to be changed or companies whatever the case may be it just happens and so from an HVAC perspective that's what I see because most people don't care about their HVAC system until it's too hot or too cold right inside and so wouldn't it be great if we had a world where we didn't have to worry about it you know it was smart enough to do what we needed Katie's work is helping homeowners understand how small changes to their traditional home ventilation methods can be upgraded through Modern software and Technologies these Technologies also bridge the gap between identifying air quality indoors and Outdoors not only do these devices help ease the consumer experience but their accessibility will improve overall sustainability my next guest is working to improve these smart home devices by developing solutions that incorporate artificial intelligence Joel gouker tells us how these Technologies automate Smart Homes to manage the indoor outdoor relationship of heating cooling and ventilation but first I asked Joel to explain to us what it is that he does exactly I am a corporate director of innovation for train Technologies I know a lot of people are familiar with the term entrepreneur and I like to think of myself as an entrepreneur entrepreneurs start external businesses and come up with unique ideas to help Serve customer needs but I look for various different business opportunities and different Technologies either both externally created or internally created to help meet those customer needs and start new businesses I wanted to do guys but every day I start my morning with saying good morning to a little machine on my wall and this little machine says good morning Dominique it tells me exactly what the weather is tells me exactly what the traffic is like it could tell me exactly what the temperature is in in my home and artificial intelligence in the way is really transforming what we expect in the spaces where we work and we live so Joel I know you've been doing a lot of work and research in this area and I'd love to hear from you how you think Technologies like Automation and artificial intelligence are changing the way that we build and operate our homes historically right homeowners are setting a schedule of desired temperature in their home throughout the day and they're trying to balance both their comfort and energy costs in order to do this the air conditioning and heating systems are basically looking at the difference of the internal actual home temperature and then the the schedule temperature and then the system will react to try to maintain the homeowner Comfort while balancing the energy costs and by and large these systems do a good job of making the decisions based on the information that they have about what's going on in the home at that time I think above and beyond that like anecdotally we know what goes on outside of the house changes what happens in the house everybody intuitively understands if it's a bright sunny day or a cold rainy day this is going to change how it feels in the house as well as what the heating ventilation air conditioning system does and reacts but what people less commonly think about is that external aircraft quality factors also impacts what goes on in the home so how does this tie into artificial intelligence right you know in order to make better decisions our systems need more knowledge of both what's going on outside the home as well as going on inside the home and this more data comes in the form of external weather and external air quality predictions and these range from cloud cover over their house to ultraviolet radiation indexes to particulate matter to things like wildfire smoke and really leveraging this abundance of data is very challenging using traditional methods and this is where artificial intelligence comes in the artificial intelligence is very good at looking at a whole wide range of different data sources and different data types and this enables us to really fully leverage all of these data sources both present conditions historical information and then what we predict is going to happen in the future to make better decisions about that balance between comfort and Energy Efficiency I think in the future the way that we're going to interact with the air conditioning and heating systems in order to explain the homeowners goals is also going to change instead of you know having to program something in manually or something using a computer interface and we can talk more to the heating ventilation and air conditioning system in the future in a conversational style to explain why I don't feel comfortable or how I feel and then this the systems will basically be able to self-program themselves to meet your goals that were explained in you know less engineering terms and less rigid formats so to connect this to what you were saying Joel we've got so much data right everything is monitoring everything it's really how do we help homeowners to become better at making decisions by intelligently interpreting that data and providing them things that they can actionably do that will improve the health and the efficiency of their homes on the topic of technology and Technology Evolution and especially when it comes to our discussions about artificial intelligence we're already applying this technology in like the commercial space when you're thinking about what kind of a system to buy think about what you want it to do in the future sometimes too because a lot of these capabilities and upgrades could be software-based upgrades you wouldn't just get a new feature or technology when you buy a new air conditioning system so think of trying to buy maybe some of the more Advanced Technologies because the capabilities are continuing to increase with new software applications to stay on top of them to be able to fully leverage in the future makes sense to consider that when making your decisions about what to do and will expect so it's 20 40 right how do you imagine the home of the future in 2040 how would you like your home to look like for one I mean the first thing that comes to my head is sustainability right if we don't have a focus on sustainability we're not going to be around you know very long or it's not going to be a very pleasant future so thinking about sustainability but that's that's in in terms of obviously CO2 uh reductions but it's greater than that you mentioned circularity how we think about and plan for for Technologies especially things with durable goods that last for you know a decade when you're talking about 2040 that system that you buy today could be rounds in 2040. okay so the impacts of the decisions that we make now will impact that future that we have in 2040 and how we experience that future especially for these durable goods that we interact with and that we have in our in our homes for a long time thank you to Brandon Katie and Joel for joining me on today's episode to discuss homes of the future and thank you for listening if you want to find out more information on our conversation today make sure you check out the show notes and remember to rate and review healthy spaces in your favorite podcast app join us next time when we'll be taking a look at the Technologies helping us grow and move healthy food in a more sustainable way

2023-07-03 13:47

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