06 - Lloyd Alter - Carbon Upfront
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James: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Marketing Passive House, the podcast where we hear from architects, designers, builders, suppliers, owners, and other experts in the passive house and high performance building space. We'll be talking about what's working and what's needed when it comes to marketing buildings that meet or aspire to the passive house standard.

James: I'm your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by Lloyd Alter, editor, writer, adjunct professor, and reformed architect. Lloyd, welcome to the show.

Lloyd: Glad to be here.

James: So before we get into it, and for people who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you started on your passive house journey or,

Lloyd: started as an architect many years ago and uh, was frustrated by basically the quality of building. I then

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: an architect to becoming a real estate developer, going to work for my biggest client, and [00:01:00] again, would see how conventional buildings really did not perform. I was a, uh, student. I was a student and a young architect in those years, back in the seventies when the sort of hippies were all trying to do solar houses and earth houses and all kinds of things to use less energy. After the energy crisis of 1973, everybody was into this and it was all very. Complicated and ridiculous, and

Lloyd: pumps and screens and vats of water that you would heat up and things like that, and nothing really worked very well.

James: Right.

Lloyd: When passive house came along, I really liked the idea. I even thought at the time that the name actually made sense because we had been

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: for so long, people were doing things that had, you know, moving shutters and open it to catch the [00:02:00] sun and close it, to do this, and all of this stuff that we were trying to do in the seventies to figure it all out. And suddenly

James: Right.

Lloyd: here comes along a system that, you know, it basically just sits there and does it all with really good insulation. And I thought, this is a brilliant idea

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: now. So that's how I got interested. And at the time I got interested. I was a writer and I first wrote about it when a prominent Toronto architect did what he thought was a, called a passive house.

Lloyd: And what it was was a seventies thing that had lots of glass and a trim wall behind it, a big wall of concrete to get the heat. And I said, no, this isn't a passive house.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: oh, what's a passive house? And I started explaining it to him and then explaining it to other people. And before I knew, I was writing a great deal about it and getting to know the passive house world and all the people [00:03:00] in it really well, because as a writer, I've always had a way of making things, expressing them in a way that.

Lloyd: People can understand them. You know, no jargon

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: I don't write like an architect. Architects write so that nobody can understand them. And, uh, I don't do that. So that's where I came from with it. I was in the prefab world for a while and tried to do some prefab passive and, and, uh, now then I just, now I'm just a writer and a teacher.

James: Nice. So many directions to go from there.

Lloyd: Oh god, yes. Every 10 years. Let's try something else. Okay.

James: Earthships were what brought me, I, I was getting in into Earthships and thought, what a cool thing. And there was one being built in New Brunswick and I went to see it and I, I, I didn't get to go on a build day, but the owner was still building and building and building and I went to see it and I talked to a local guy in f Fredericton about it, and he just.

James: He wouldn't have it. He said, Nope, passive house. That's, that's the way. [00:04:00] And I've, that was I think 2012 or 13 or something. And I've been sort of hooked ever since then as a intellectual exercise.

Lloyd: Right.

James: Yeah. And so the, the name you, you mentioned the name, I think that's an important component of this whole thing.

James: Do you still think it's a good name for it?

Lloyd: No, it's a terrible name. It's an absolutely terrible name. I mean, like I said, I liked it as an intellectual comparison to what we were doing in the, uh, in the seventies, but it's not passive. It's, it's not a house.

James: That's right.

Lloyd: it's, it's neither of the things in its name. Passive is a term that, you know, especially in North America people don't like, uh, especially Americans

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: passive means weak.

James: Right.

Lloyd: you're passive. It's a negative. It's really got negative connotations for a lot of people.

James: Right,

Lloyd: so, uh, you know, they want something active and strong and, passive, I don't think plays well that way. And the fact of the matter is they're not passive. [00:05:00] They all have active ventilation systems in them

James: right.

Lloyd: Or they don't work. So I think it is a misnomer and I wish it could be changed, but it's too much water under that bridge, I think.

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: I always, for instance, I always use the German term for it. I always use the passivhaus, HAUS instead of passive house in two separate words. And I think, I think everybody should a lot of people don't like that because they say, oh, it. Becomes it's foreign, then they

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: like foreign things in the United States. It's too French, if you call it passive house. So anyhow, so it's, it's just a problem all round when, when passive house, uh, sort of split into the American version, which they call Phius, I thought this was a great opportunity that they should just. Use a separate name and

James: Right

Lloyd: a separate identity.

James: right.

Lloyd: they don't really, they still call it passive house.

James: Yeah. Yeah. [00:06:00] Yeah. It's uh, hard to change those things once they get going, as you know, from your upfront carbon battle. Right.

Lloyd: Another terrible, terrible, confusing term. The embodied carbon that everyone uses. Yes,

James: Yep.

Lloyd: So passive house, I, I think they just get off on the wrong foot right when you start, because of the name.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: and it makes it harder to market.

James: Yeah. So I'd love to hear if you have any experiences where you've cracked through to people easily or quickly and either explain the concept or, or anything.

Lloyd: I've given a lot of thought to it over the years about how you do market, passive house, which is why I'm so impressed that you're actually doing a podcast about that exact subject. The problem is, is that the things that the physicists in Dortmund came up with the reasons they came up with it were very clear to save energy in a time that it was an energy crisis

James: All right.

Lloyd: It does that very well. But in North [00:07:00] America in particular, energy has always been relatively cheap.

James: Mm.

Lloyd: Even in the crisis times, it's like costs much less than it does in, in Europe, for instance. It's

James: Right.

Lloyd: not the biggest expense that people have. So when you say, oh, we're gonna cost save you this much money every month on your heating, they say Yes, but how much extra is it gonna cost me to build this thing?

Lloyd: And what. Compromises am I gonna have, and I'm sorry. I'd rather, uh, spend the money on that and I'm not sure is this actually gonna work? And things like that

James: Right.

Lloyd: And my heating contractor says it's not gonna work. And everybody listens to their contractors instead of their, instead of their, uh, professionals.

Lloyd: And,

James: Right.

Lloyd: my architect doesn't understand it and he says, I can't have the big view that I want here, and I can't have this and I can't have that. None of which is true, but like there's so many misconceptions floating [00:08:00] around that it's sort of hard to cut through. And then you've got to figure out and answer the question really.

Lloyd: I go back to well, what do people actually want in a house? What do they want? If they're building a house, what drives them?

James: Right.

Lloyd: And energy conservation doesn't drive anyone and. Climate change maybe drives a few people. But there have been surveys, there have been many surveys that have been done. I particularly like the Shelton Group that's been looking into these kinds of things and they say it used to be comfort was the big driver that people wanted comfort Now. Of course people don't know what the hell comfort is. And you have to explain that. And in the last, in the last survey that Susan Shelton did, comfort was bumped from the top position and it was replaced with [00:09:00] security.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: when you put these words out, what do they want? Is, uh, security and interesting.

Lloyd: If you go back into history, the word. Comfort actually is derived from the Latin root for security. mean the same. They actually, in going back to the Latin, they mean the same thing. Because basically you couldn't be comfortable unless you were. Secure that you are gonna get through the night with.

Lloyd: So some animal eating you or somebody putting a sword through you. So

James: Yep.

Lloyd: comfort followed security, for the last couple of thousand years until more recently if you separate the term, when people thought, well, I don't need to worry as much about security. Everybody's

James: Right.

Lloyd: worried about security now. They're worried about security from the next wildfire or the next flood, or the next ICE agent showing up at their door, or,

James: Mm.[00:10:00]

Lloyd: you know, the things that we worry about and we're worried more than ever about stuff and, uh, you know, will our kids get safely to school and back and all of the things that we never used to worry about a few years ago.

Lloyd: And I think that, you know. There's a guy, when I was in the prefab business, I was essentially a salesman trying to sell modern prefabs. This was 20 years ago,

James: Right.

Lloyd: I was on the road a lot going all over Ontario because in fact, the only people who were buying prefabs were people way out in the country who had a lot and couldn't find a contractor.

Lloyd: So they could buy a prefab. And I would listen to all of these motivational tapes. The experts in sales and the greatest expert of all was this guy named Zig Ziglar,

James: Right.

Lloyd: he, and he started, he started with pots and pans and sold more pots and pans than you can imagine. And. Basically, he always said people don't buy for [00:11:00] logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons,

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: he went on and said, people are the same in the world over. Everybody wants the same things to be happy, to be healthy, to be reasonably prosperous, and to be secure.

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: we can't do much to help them in the reasonably prosperous, but we can hit all those other buttons about being healthy

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: about being, uh, secure.

Lloyd: And I think helping, being happy. You know, I always think any discussion that we have should be going along these points. Now, let's start with comfort. For instance, the biggest thing about comfort and the biggest problem with comfort is people don't understand it. They think if you buy the right size furnace or the right size air conditioner, that you know you can deliver comfort and people build glass boxes and. They put these furnaces and air conditioners in and they don't [00:12:00] understand why they're not comfortable, and I learned all about this from a Calgary, a brilliant Calgary engineer named Robert Bean, who has a website that is rebuilding right now called healthy heating dot com.

James: Okay.

Lloyd: Robert explains that about half of our understanding of comfort, our feeling of comfort comes from, uh, the mean radiant temperature,

James: Right.

Lloyd: and the mean radiant temperature means that basically our bodies have 250,000 sensors in our skin and. If the wall over there is colder than our skin, then the heat is moving from our skin to the wall and we feel cold. And if that wall is warmer than our skin, then the heat is moving to us and we feel

James: Hmm,

Lloyd: hot. And it's the temperature of these surrounding surfaces that determine whether we're [00:13:00] comfortable and twisting a thermostat isn't gonna make any difference in that.

James: huh.

Lloyd: If you are in a house with crappy walls, you can put in the best furnace and the best, and you can put in the Eco B intelligent thermostat connected to sensors all over your house, and you're not going to be comfortable because you're losing heat to the walls.

James: Right.

Lloyd: to the windows. If you're in a glass box, you're losing heat to the windows. So once you get the fact that mean radiant temperature, MRT is so important that you realize, you know, you want really thick walls, you want windows that are as warm inside as the air inside which you get with the triple glazed windows in a passivhaus because

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: you are never more than a few degrees different. From the interior air temperature to the wall temperature. So you set your thermostat and that's what the air is and that's what the wall is. And if it's a thing that makes a temperature that you're comfortable in, [00:14:00] you will be comfortable in that dwelling. And passive house delivers MRT comfort better than any other system going.

Lloyd: In fact, it's probably the only system that really does. And people don't understand it. You talk to a lot of mechanical engineers and they don't understand it, and you can believe me, the guys who are sizing your furnace, who come in with their rule of thumb saying it's this much square feet they don't understand it.

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: And yet it's like half of everything is MRT. And so that's why, uh, passive house, I think is so important. The other thing that's becoming more and more important all over the is, is of course air quality,

James: Yes.

Lloyd: oh, it's summertime. I'll just open the windows and let the air blow through, and nobody needs air conditioning or anything like that because we've got natural ventilation.

Lloyd: Well, two things are wrong with that in this day and age one, everything is hot. is hotter

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: you know, [00:15:00] Vancouver where nobody ever had air conditioning, it was unheard of now is to put air conditioning in every new unit because they're getting heat waves.

James: Right.

Lloyd: sitting right now in, what is it?

Lloyd: It's 27 degrees Celsius. What is that for our, uh, American listeners?

James: I don't know.

Lloyd: It's hot and it's thick. I'm very lucky. I'm spending the summer in a cabin by the lake, which I can jump into 12 times a day. But my

James: Right.

Lloyd: kids in the city are dying right now in like over 30 degree. That feels like 40 degree heat.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: And so if we start just throwing air conditioners in everything, which we're going to have to, what happens is that, you know, the power peaks so high and all the gas-fired

James: Right.

Lloyd: Peaker plants go on and all the coal plants have to go on, and the pollution and the air quality and everything deteriorates even more. Whereas, if you're in a passive house, first of all, it doesn't get nearly [00:16:00] so hot, but even they now often need air conditioning. But it can be sized to be really small and it can be.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: Turned on for much less time and it could be run at night to cool the house down and get the cheap, cheap, cheap overnight electricity rates where utilities are giving it away. And, um, so that, you know, you can adapt so much easier to that. And if the power does go out, which is going to start happening more and more often as our grids get oversupplied. The thing is, is that the passive house acts like a thermal battery so that it lose, it gains heat much, much more slowly than a normal house's.

Lloyd: Especially if you've been smart and put external, external shading on it

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: like that and designed it really well not to overheat from solar gain, then you know, you can seal up your passive house and you can go for days and days and days before it's [00:17:00] uncomfortably hot. And the reverse is true in winter.

Lloyd: You can go days and days through polar vortexes. I've seen graphs showing the inside of the passive house, the, you know, that people don't turn on the heat until like the fourth or fifth day. So that's comfort, but that's also security.

James: Yep.

Lloyd: just designed a system that keeps you safe in heat waves and power outages in all of these situations that a normal building, like my house in Toronto is a 1913 brick house with no insulation.

Lloyd: And I can tell you that when. The power goes out, uh, the house just drops in temperature almost instantly.

James: Right.

Lloyd: an example because until recently I had a combined hot water and and. Boiler system, gas boiler system for my radiators, and it always gave the hot water priority to my [00:18:00] radiators.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: my had one of her two hour showers and emptied the hot water tank, then the radiators would turn off

James: Oh my.

Lloyd: the gas where hot water was going through the hot water tank, and you could just feel the house cool down.

Lloyd: So that mid-winter, I had to say to her. Emma, short showers. We can't afford to do this. We can't do this.

James: Wow.

Lloyd: these are all things that, you know, this is comfort and security actually are the same thing

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: that you know, the systems that deliver comfort, deliver security. And people have to start thinking about that though.

Lloyd: I just, you know, I, I always show pictures of a passive house in Hereford, England, uh, that's actually built of straw. And the, the George's

James: This is Old Holloway?

Lloyd: In the chair.

James: Holloway.

Lloyd: George's dog is just sitting in the chair looking so happy.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: And, you know, I have a lot of pictures from visiting [00:19:00] that house, but I still always use that one.

James: Yeah. I've,

Lloyd: thing that's really, really important that people are getting more and more. Sure about is, is quiet. we live, if you live in cities, they can be really noisy, and noise

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: is linked to heart disease, to high blood pressure. It affects the ability of children to learn.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: I was in a passive house in Brooklyn on a fairly busy street, we're in the passive house and there are about 10 of us in here taking a tour and. Dump trucks are going by and buses are going by and everything is going by and you can't hear a sound. It's just unbelievable and it evidently just the passive house wall just drops the sound transmission down by half, which makes a huge difference.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: And, uh, you [00:20:00] know, Michael Ingui, the architect of all these passive house renovations in New York City,

James: Yep.

Lloyd: never even often doesn't even tell his clients that he's doing a passive house. He because they don't understand what it is or they think it's too hippie or they think it's this or that, but they have money, lots of money in these Brooklyn townhouses that he's redoing, and he tells them what he's giving them isn't anything called passive house, and he doesn't even mention how little it'll cost to heat or cool. He basically says, I giving you quiet. I'm giving you comfort and I'm giving you no bugs because everybody lives in

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: and the bugs go through the wall if you've got, neighbor has bugs,

James: Yep. Yep.

Lloyd: get through the ceiling done for passive house. he says, actually the no bugs thing is one of the things people loves more than anything else.

James: Makes sense.

Lloyd: So. The, the, and the, and the final thing now, [00:21:00] you know, is I think healthy home people. Never used to think about this very much. I've got a great picture I use of an architect who built his own house, that he's actually got an indoor barbecue and you can see them all in this fifties. Pictures with cigarettes hanging outta their mouth and they're barbecuing in a steaks in the middle of the house.

James: Amazing.

Lloyd: I now fight. With everybody just, you know about gas stoves in your house. Do you know what this is putting out in particulates

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: And do you know what this is putting out in terms of nitrous oxides? And people are beginning to get this, they're beginning to understand health. I think the pandemic helped a great deal to make people aware

James: Yep.

Lloyd: I know a lot of people who have CO2 meters in their homes and they say, wow, the CO2 level in our. Bedroom got up to like over a thousand at night because you know, people close the windows and you got two people sleeping in a relatively small room.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: this is why [00:22:00] you need good ventilation. You need all this stuff. And we're really. In an era where I think more and more people are concerned about living in healthy homes. You know, 15, 10 years ago, LEED was the big thing in commercial buildings.

James: Yeah,

Lloyd: We want LEED buildings. We want now I think health is really becoming something people care about. And that means not just passivhaus with the filters, with the HEPA filters or the whatever filters it has, but you know, the right.

Lloyd: Paints the right plasters,

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: flooring materials, the right appliances. People care about it all now, and whoever is doing a passive house has to be caring, caring about it all.

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: people are even, you know, this is why the well do, you know, the WELL certification system for commercial buildings. It's an alternative

James: No.

Lloyd: circulation system that looks at issues of health air [00:23:00] quality, dust lighting and even circadian rhythms, the change of light throughout the

James: Oh, really?

Lloyd: day It's growing like mad, while LEED is going nowhere because people really care about health and they wanna be in a building that's healthy. And I think combining sort of passive house with sort of wellness thinking is the most important combination that we could possibly do. we not only know how to make your house. The bones of the house by going passivhaus naturally healthy. You know, you can't, for instance, in Canada. Keep your humidity level where you want it to be for best health, which is between 30 and 50%. in most Canadian cities, if you have the humidity as high as 30% in winter, you're going to start getting condensation [00:24:00] on the windows

James: Yep.

Lloyd: start getting mold.

James: Yep.

Lloyd: most of our Canadian houses are down at around 20%, and we spend so much time in the house and at 20% your sort of mucus membranes all dry out

James: Yep.

Lloyd: can't breathe as well and you're not comfortable and your eyes may get itchy and things like that. But we don't have a choice because the walls and the windows just won't let you get the humidity up that high.

Lloyd: Whereas in passive house, we can. Because the walls are warm enough that nothing ever condenses on them. I've been in passive houses where I, where the condensation happens on the outside, you know, which I'd never even

James: Right,

Lloyd: heard of. But it was just a situation that, you know, I was in in a passive house in Portugal where this was happening, where it just got these odd conditions that it was more humid. the outer surface of the window was colder than the inner surface. I don't know. I can't remember exactly what, but weird things [00:25:00] happen.

James: right.

Lloyd: So you total it all up, we've got like comfort, we've got air quality, we've got quiet, we've got security. We've got what Ted Kesik, the Canadian Ontario engineer calls. Passive habitability that you can, your building is habitable and comfortable even when none of these systems are going. This is why in some ways I come around again, liking passive in the term, even though I hated it forever. There are things that you want to be passive, you that just work while they're sitting there.

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: And luxury. This is the other thing, like again, Michael Ingui in New York does these multimillion dollar townhouses by selling people on the luxury of it that, well, how do you define luxury? It's like, this is

James: Absolutely.

Lloyd: just really nice and comfortable and all those [00:26:00] other things add up to luxury

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: and, uh, toss on healthy. I think you've got so many marketing points. That you don't even have to say, oh, by the way, your energy's gonna cost nothing. I mean,

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: really, when it comes down to it, you know, it's not that important to them. I always, when I was in development, I mean, people would always rather pay for a granite counter than for a little more insulation.

Lloyd: Every customer I ever had

James: Mm.

Lloyd: was, gimme the granite, and I said, really? You want the fiberglass? You want? no, gimme the granite. And um, and that's where we are in the world. You know, people in some ways are superficial. And you know, there was a thing concept that came up with when people started in the energy conservation thing, when it became popular and trendy to be green, uh, they called it [00:27:00] conspicuous conservation.

Lloyd: It was sort of a twist on conspicuous

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: consumption where people go out and buy fancy cars to show how rich they are.

Lloyd: Conspicuous conservation was people who wanted solar panels on their house so people could see I've got like solar panels

James: Yes.

Lloyd: on the roof. And one, one solar installer said these people really wanted it on the, the north side of the house, face to street.

Lloyd: And so they wanted the north, the solar panels on the north side of the house so their neighbors could see it. And the contractor said, but they don't do any. Good there, said it doesn't matter. That's where we want them. And he finally said, what, how about if I sell you twice as many and I put 'em in the north and the south side of the house?

Lloyd: And they said, fine, we'll go for that. So, you know, that's conspicuous conservation

James: Yeah. Yeah.

Lloyd: the other thing that's, that's with passive house that I think is prob is changing. The passive house architect, Bronwyn Barry, has a very funny game that she would play on Google Earth, Google Maps, which has spot [00:28:00] the passive house because

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: you know, she would look at an area of very wealthy houses in California and that, and the normal houses are all sort of funny shapes, and the roofs are very complex and they go all over the place and then you see the passive house and it's a box.

Lloyd: It's a simple

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: rectangle. And it may be just as big as those other houses, but you know, the architects have convinced the owners that, you know, really, a house doesn't have to have jogs and bay windows and bumps and this and that. If we keep the form relatively simple, we can save all kinds of money and all kinds of energy and meet the passivhaus standard.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: And, uh, it's, you know, you play this spot, the passive house game, and it's, it's quite funny. And took a tour in Colorado of a whole marshal. After the marshal fire. They rebuilt

James: Right.

Lloyd: hundreds of houses and a lot of them put on solar panels. you just [00:29:00] see all the roofs broken up by gables and dormers

James: Mm.

Lloyd: things that, you know, you know, you're gonna make a solar. A house with solar PA panels on the roof, wouldn't you accept a simple roof so you don't need to make all the panels, deke around all the dormers

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: and cost you more and not work as well? And you know, we really have to sort of change our aesthetic sense to value simplicity.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: And, you know, elegant simplicity is what we've gotta do in our designs to make passive house actually affordable because you can make anything, a passive house, if you keep adding more insulation and you keep twisting the knobs on the whole, uh, spreadsheet and you know, oh, I've got a more thermal bridge

James: right.

Lloyd: Let's just put more insulation under the slab until it's like three feet thick. You can manipulate it that way, or you can keep it simple, or you can [00:30:00] decide how big a window do I really need in this world? Is it designed to look gorgeous from the outside to show that I can afford a two story high window,

James: Mm.

Lloyd: it to gimme a nice view? can I frame a view like a picture and get as much window as I need to do the job?

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: become really hot lately on understanding circadian rhythms and the. Quality of light that we need through our windows. And a lot of the high tech windows that we're putting in our houses have these solar control films on them to basically keep out

James: Right.

Lloyd: certain frequencies of light that cause heat. And so people can make bigger windows. Whereas some of the reading I've been recently doing saying, no, we actually need a full spectrum

James: We need that light. Yeah.

Lloyd: of light getting into our eyes. our, our eyes sense this, and if you don't have blue light hitting your eyes in the [00:31:00] daytime, you've got a problem. And if you do have blue light hitting your eyes at the nighttime, you got a problem.

Lloyd: Your body has to see this change red

James: Yep.

Lloyd: to blue to red through the course of the day for all of our hormones and everything else. So people who say, oh, I'm gonna do a giant window and cover it with all these high tech films are cutting all that blue out.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: And so suddenly I'm saying, you know, we've gotta get back to making windows that are smaller, but that are actually clear glass.

Lloyd: And I'm still at the stage where people are saying, I'm nuts that this is your, that this is not possibly something we should be worried about. But 10 years ago, if you even talked about circadian rhythms, they thought you were a hippie. You might as well talk about pyramids and crystals

James: Right.

Lloyd: It's the science is there.

Lloyd: Our bodies need this.

James: Yep.

Lloyd: And so that's why I think people who design passive house have to be so on top of all of the health aspects [00:32:00] as well

James: Yep.

Lloyd: We're not just giving you an efficient house, we're giving you a healthy house. We're giving you a comfortable house, and we're giving you a safe house.

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: Am I repeating myself or just making the point?

James: Repetition works. Repetition works. Yeah, I, it made me think that there's trends of like those blue blocker glasses, like people knew about that side of thing. And there's also, you know, getting light exposure in the morning. There's, there's all these micro. One, one issue trends, but it feels like passive house if you can convince people.

Lloyd: blue blo, blue blocking, and I started reading this book. I said, no, no, you

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: do

James: Yeah. And just, just don't

Lloyd: le

James: work on your computer at night. Right. Just

Lloyd: exactly, exactly. After the last book that I read

James: I,

Lloyd: actually go outside and take my glasses off

James: yes.

Lloyd: for a minute or two out there just to let my eyes get in some of that full spectrum light that even just regular glasses will cut out.

Lloyd: And that's really the answer that we [00:33:00] should all just get outside for a few minutes every day.

James: Well, that's, yeah. Yeah.

Lloyd: What else? Any other questions? Anything on your list? Any further thoughts?

James: That was amazing. No, I loved, I loved that the taking through the whole journey of, of the different aspects. And I, I think it's really interesting that that luxury, which I, you know, everyone would want like at least. At least subconsciously, even if they were sort of hardcore against what the rich whatever.

James: At the end of the day, I think it's interesting that if you just ask people what they wanted and went through it one by one by one, you'd end up basically probably building them what would amount to a passive house

Lloyd: Yeah, I think so.

James: Like it's, it would be that, the answer to probably what anyone said, you know, with the exception of two story windows, which could work anyway, like you say too, so.

Lloyd: The other thing that people haven't been thinking about, and we have to start thinking about much more are the upfront carbon or, [00:34:00] or what's commonly called embodied carbon

James: Yep.

Lloyd: the materials we build with. And one of the problems the biggest problem in the biggest source of upfront carbon emissions, the emissions from building materials are is uh, concrete. And almost every building has a concrete foundation and passivhaus. Because you look for the form factor to be minimized, often will have less of a foundation, a smaller, a squarer, a simpler foundation. Passivhaus often are designed as two story buildings because that reduces the form factor even more than a bungalow. That's basically a one story building that's like all roof. So some of the

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: nicest ones you see, if you look at. There's one that maybe you can show a picture of that, uh, Evelyn Bouchard did in Quebec, her own passivhaus.

Lloyd: And to me it's like the model passive house. It's [00:35:00] a beautiful design, very simple form. The windows

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: are not like you normally see where they follow a regular Palladian pattern, but they're almost looking random because she designed the windows from the inside

James: From the inside. Yeah.

Lloyd: it has to do rather than the outside. It's this beautiful little red box sitting in the snow in Quebec. And she did an analysis of what would happen if she built the house to the building code standard in Quebec.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: Uh, if she built it to passive house standard with fiberglass insulation. I. And if she built it to passivhaus standard with cellulose insulation, which is made from newsprint or wood fiber.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: And what she found was that if you look, because Quebec's electricity is so clean and so she's putting out no operating emissions, she's putting out no carbon from having a gas furnace or from using dirty electricity. [00:36:00] What she found was that the code minimum house. Had an over its lifetime lower carbon footprint than the passive house because the insulation had such a high embodied carbon value. So that we all have to start thinking that if we're serious about climate and we're serious about that part of the passivhaus story, which most

James: Right.

Lloyd: customers have, I said are not. But if you are, you have to start thinking that the materials we build with are incredibly important

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: we have to. Build we have to build with, with sort of more natural materials like cellulose. And cellulose is getting harder and harder to find because nobody reads newspapers

James: Yeah.

Lloyd: and Amazon needs lots of cardboard boxes, so you don't get that many. But they've started converting paper mills like they did in Maine, and I think we're getting it in Canada soon

James: Hmm.

Lloyd: to make wood [00:37:00] fiber insulation.

James: Right.

Lloyd: And this has been available in Europe for a while and imported from Steico, but now we're getting it in the States and they will be exporting to Canada and they'll be making it in Canada soon.

James: Nice.

Lloyd: this is very important that we have to think for the architects, if not for the customers, we have to think about the whole life carbon emissions of our buildings.

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: And that means being very careful about the materials we built it with.

James: Yep. Yep. I'm a big fan of straw. I, I've.

Lloyd: Oh, yes. And absolutely I, how could I forget that? I think that having been in in George George's house, Old Holloway house and what he's done and this whole EcoCocon system that they built in Europe

James: Mm-hmm.

Lloyd: that they actually, they're now building a couple of hundred thousand square foot factory.

Lloyd: Warehouse out of it. Uh, they're building in Malmo, Sweden. They're building [00:38:00] a 12 story apartment building out of it. This is all a prefabricated straw system that's absolutely fantastic. And when I was in New Zealand last fall, I saw like all kinds of people setting up, small companies to make these panels.

James: Mm,

Lloyd: the panels are filled with straw and they're lined with natural clays. Uh, instead of drywall, so that you're

James: wonderful.

Lloyd: finished with natural finishes and they're hitting all of the health low carbon passive house buttons. Beautifully,

James: Yeah. Yeah. I, I like that blending of the, the future. In the past, sort of, we, we had, we had the stuff, but we just didn't know how to do it quite right. And now we can do it well and go back to using that stuff and not have to use the,

Lloyd: And I've

James: hmm.

Lloyd: they're even using straw now and they're grinding up really fine, and they're like blowing it into walls much the way they do with cellulose

James: Right.

Lloyd: or with [00:39:00] fiberglass, which changes everything. If you can use the same equipment and the same people who are trained to blow stuff into walls,

James: Yeah,

Lloyd: they can do it with straw, then you know, why not use it?

James: yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. This has been. Fantastic. One, one note I wanted to say before we went is that going back to the very start of this conversation, the, the marketing passivhaus using the German name in the podcast title was directly a result of your article, your most recent article.

James: Saying that it should be this, not that. I had, I had bought the domain, passive marketing, passive house, like, you know, the english words.com, and I'd gone, started going down that road, and then I, when I read the article, like, I was like, no, it's completely right. And

Lloyd: right.

James: so I, I luckily was able to buy the German spelling domain as well.

James: And so,

Lloyd: Well,

James: you.

Lloyd: I, I love that you're doing this. If you want to take, my favorite article about it was the one that I wrote for Tree Hugger. How do you [00:40:00] sell the idea of Passive House?

James: Okay.

Lloyd: if you wanna actually take that, I don't know if you have a website obviously too.

James: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I mean the,

Lloyd: and link to it or republish it in your site.

James: Okay.

Lloyd: happy to have you do that.

James: I would be delighted.

Lloyd: anytime I can be of service or help or talk to you again, again, I love the idea. I think it's great that

James: Wonderful.

Lloyd: this.

James: Thank you. So I guess just before we wrap up the podcast part where's the best place for people to find you online?

Lloyd: Oh, the best place to find me online is lloyd alter dot com, which will take you to my substack.

James: Excellent, Substack.

Lloyd: uh, the substack. I write three day, three times a week about anything that I wanna write about actually often. Uh, yesterday I was writing about typewriters, so

James: Yes,

Lloyd: it's all over the place.

James: and it's excellent. I, I can say that too. I've learned more about toilets and bathrooms than I ever thought I would, and [00:41:00] I'm eager for more. Well, thanks so much. Thanks for joining me today. I.

Lloyd: a pleasure.

James: And you've been listening to Marketing Passive House, I'm James Turner, and I hope you'll join me again next time.

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