Rachel Rennard and Mike Bratina - Clay Brook Passive House Owners
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James: 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. your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by Rachel Rennard and Mike Bratina, who commissioned own and live in Clay Brook Passive House, the first final certified single family passive house in New Hampshire. and Mike, welcome to the show.

Rachel: Hi.

Mike: having us, James.

Rachel: Yeah, thanks for having us.

James: My pleasure. My first two people. Two, two guests episode. This is very exciting. Test testing the limits, the very limits.

Rachel: Hopefully we won't just be interrupting each other.

James: We'll see. 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 host journey?

Mike: Yeah. If you wanna lead off on.

James: I.

Rachel: sure. I'll speak for both of us saying that we're just regular citizens. We're not in the trades and, but we are in science and. Interesting. And that's how we we became did a lot of deep dive into passive house technology. But it actually started years ago in in Massachusetts.

Rachel: I was at a town meeting when someone was trying to get approval to build a house like it was in near wetland, so it was at a conservation commission. And he was describing a net zero house. And at the time I thought it was. Very fringe out there. But cool at the same time. And I tucked it away thinking, oh, we'll probably never build a house.

Rachel: But then years later, fast forward. And we did have this amazing opportunity to get land and to think about building on its, and we started researching Net Zero did a lot of research and then that led us into passive house. Because that was their a adjacent and at that time we did a lot of research and we found that it actually isn't very out there.

Rachel: It's not very fringe, but we just didn't know about it. And

Mike: and it shouldn't be fringe is, when you actually start digging into what passive house is, it's oh my gosh, this should be the standard, the

James: 100% agree.

Mike: builds. Yes.

James: Yeah. Yeah. I Often it comes if you, once you start researching almost no matter what variable you're researching along all roads, almost all roads lead to pacif effects. I think.

Mike: I, yeah. Yeah. And just the whole generally trying to make a, better, more energy efficient, cleaner home. Pretty surprising and eye-opening as, as we went through that early part of the journey to to understand what passive house was and what it means to build one and what it's about. Like we, we did a lot of research given our backgrounds in tech and science, that this opened up a whole warren of rabbit holes for us to go down and start to understand many books, many websites, a number of podcasts that we listen to, passive house accelerator, things like that, to just understand what all of this was about and yeah, just going down that and through that process, it, that it was. Every time we would learn a little bit more, we, there would, our conversations about would almost always end. Like, why are people not doing this on a regular basis? Why is this something that, that is not mainstream? It and the more we thought about it, the more it just made sense for us to go ahead and do passive house.

Rachel: But then the second challenge was actually once we decided to build a passive house we started researching, passive house builders in New Hampshire. And there aren't many. And then we, so we contacted a few people and we were trying to find someone who would wanna build it. And we we said we wanted to get the, get a certification.

Rachel: And then so maybe some builders that were saying, yes, I think we can build passive house for oh, that is. That's a heavy lift to get certified and maybe, so then I, we the, our options became very limited and then luckily we found Maine passive house and we were within their radius where they would build for us.

Rachel: Thank goodness. And then when we contacted them and told them what we were thinking and what we wanted and that we would like to get certified, they were very excited about that. So we were, we were in with them as long as they would have us, and luckily they taught, took us in

Mike: yes, great. A great group of people to work with and it is, it's that was one of the very fortunate turn, one of the many very fortunate turns we had throughout that process was running across such a great group of people to work with on this process. The project, the people who are actually gonna be. Building the house and doing all the work and making it from crazy ideas we had in our head into.

James: That's great. Before we move on from this moment, I'm really curious to know about what, what led you to decide to be certified? What drove that decision?

Rachel: I mean at first it was because we. I couldn't necessarily find someone that had built a passive house before in New Hampshire that was available at that time. And so what we were thinking is that would be a way to ensure that someone who built it was actually building it according to the standards.

Rachel: And we would have, pushing people to do it correctly. But but then the other side of that was we wanted to since there weren't many examples of passive house in New Hampshire, that we wanted to be an example and maybe use it as a educational opportunity for people.

Rachel: Because once, again, once we started looking in the passive house and we were thought it was then nuts that people weren't using this or doing this in a standard way that we thought we would need to spread the word.

James: I'm familiar with that feeling. Some people build houses, others start podcasts.

Rachel: We appreciate you, we.

James: It's mutual.

Mike: We actually incorporated the educational and aspect in our mi So we actually wrote a mission statement for what we were doing with the house.

James: Amazing.

Mike: and that was part of it in there too, was to try and, leverage this for just the spreading the word, education. Getting people to know that this is something that is doable and achievable. Yeah.

James: Nice. And have you now I know so. and I met at a conference at the Maine passive house conference, which, so for me in New Brunswick on the other side of Maine, it's the same sort of situation. There's actually just a guy starting up a passive house building company right now in f Fredericton. but there's definitely not much on the ground. There's no formalized association. So I joined Maine passive house because. It seemed like the most viable close, quote unquote, close option to me. But yeah, it's I know that a, after the conference you had a sort of showing or like an event at your house

Mike: Yeah.

James: How did that go? And is that, have you done more of those or?

Mike: We haven't yet. That was the first open house that we did here. And yeah, to the point of doing more, hopefully we will end up doing more. I was actually a little surprised at the turnout that we had given. So

James: Oh yeah.

Mike: Gorham is a little bit. It's in what is known as the North country and, very rural area.

Mike: Up here, I like the town of Gorham has 2000 people in it. The next biggest town, Berlin has a little over 9,000. So it's, and

James: wow.

Mike: a 15 minute drive up the road. We're situated at the northern tip of the presidential mountain range up here. Yeah we're a little bit out and out in the woods, but literally, I'm looking out the, my office window right now, and it's surrounded by woods. I was a little surprised at how many people we actually up for that. We had people driving up all the way from Portland

James: Nice.

Mike: Portland, Maine. We

James: Yeah.

Mike: coming up here. Yes. That would be amazing if we had somebody drive over from Portland, Oregon. Yeah, some people came up from Portland.

Mike: We had people coming up from Conway and other parts of New Hampshire as to check things out, which is about a, like a 45 minute drive away from our place. So it was pretty good. We even had an architectural student from just down the road in our neighborhood stop by too.

Mike: So

James: Nice.

Mike: to, make friends with some of the local here as well.

James: Great.

Rachel: And maybe recruited someone into the passive house space.

Mike: Yes. Yeah.

James: Excellent. Nice. When you were doing that, did you catch any glimpses of conversation or direct from people? Were there people in the house who had never been in a passive house before and were, did you feel any aha moments happening or people who couldn't believe this or couldn't believe that or anything like that?

Rachel: Oh, I can't remember if it was. At this open, we actually had another open house while the house was being built, and I can't remember if it was in the, that, that open house or the second one, but I remember someone asked, Jesper and Katrina from Maine Passive House. If the, if our house, it was waterproof, like it, if it would survive a flood, and and they said yes it should, it's sealed.

Rachel: And so that was interesting. That was aha for me. It seems obvious now, but it was something that, someone did ask and, I think other things people are asking is about the air quality and

Rachel: If we were, if we felt healthier there.

James: Do you,

Rachel: yes.

Mike: Yeah.

Rachel: Yes.

James: whew.

Mike: Again, back to being data nerds. One, one of the things that I did when we built this house was, made it so that it could be wired up with a lot of technology. Had a bunch of, I, I work in the tech space and, I had a bunch of data networking cabling run through the walls, and then we also planned to make this a smart house.

Mike: So we're collecting all kinds of sensor data on this, including, everything like pm one, pm 2.5 particle levels CO2, radon, these kinds of things. And, you, James, you probably saw some of that in that talk that I gave at

Mike: At the passive house Maine forum, just, we look at it on a weekly basis and it's yeah, we live in a pretty clean house.

Mike: I have more sensitive skin due to allergies and eczema and things like that. And I flare ups and things like that are definitely reduced and less, when they happen. And in that sense yeah, quality of health and life is definitely improved.

James: That's great to hear. I,

Mike: going back to our previous questionnaires about like aha moments and people feeling than we hosted Thanksgiving for our family last Thanksgiving, so this was a little over a year ago now.

Mike: Thanksgiving, and, during Thanksgiving day, a snowstorm hit here and we got what, maybe about a foot and a half of snow dropped. Our niece was running around the yard making massive snowmen. She was totally excited about that. But one of the, one of the guests she was sitting right next to these big.

Mike: Windows that we have in the great room in a chair over there. And she commented that like she can't believe how warm the house feels on the inside and that, she didn't need to wear a sweater or anything and just how comfortable the environment was given that, it was just nuking snow outside.

Mike: So yeah.

James: perfect. Yeah. Yeah. The shirt sleeves by the window on a cold day. Picture seems to be the only sort of tangible oh yeah, that's not normal,

Mike: Yeah.

James: Yeah.

Rachel: It's true. The other thing is so we have our flooring is, cement concrete, sorry, polished concrete flooring.

Rachel: And I thought that was gonna be very cold in the wintertime before we moved in. But it's not, it's like we can walk around barefoot and not feel any cold.

James: Wow, that's nice. Mean radiant temperature.

Mike: Yeah.

James: game. The name of the game. That's cool. Another question that I had about earlier that I didn't ask and maybe this is not. It may be something, it may be nothing, I'm not sure, but do you remember who, which of the two of you Rachel you first, I, it sounds like you started the passive house journey. Do you happen to remember in when you were convincing Mike or just telling him about it? Or do you remember like a point where the penny dropped in that regard? Were you aligned or might be Mike, you remember

Mike: so my, one of my

James: oh, sorry.

Mike: moments was the house that we lived in previously down in Massachusetts the, it's been, it was added onto over the years, but the core of it was built in like 1883 and, and then there was another section that was added on in the nineties The house did have air conditioning central air, and I remember standing outside doing some gardening work next to the side of the house out there. This was like August on a super hot, 90 degree day or something like that. And I could feel. The cold con, the cold air conditioned air just leaking through the wall of the house. It was like a jet coming out some hole in the wall over there. And this was during that time when we were talking about building a house and trying to understand what passive house was about. And it, that was just like a light bulb moment for me. I'm like, oh, I get it now. All that air that you condition that you. Cool in the summer and heat in the winter stays in the house and it's not just outside, and the follow on thought that I had was like, oh, that's like when your parents yelled at you when you're a kid not to leave the door open.

Mike: That's kind what you're doing with the passive house is making it so that the, yeah the door's not open constantly and you're just keeping all that in there. That, that for me was one, one of the big moments.

James: Nice. This, I'm sorry, Rachel, I was asking you in the last second I

Rachel: He answered. That's fine. I agree. I can't remember exactly, but I as soon as we started researching it, it's like what you learn. You can't unknow so.

Rachel: You can't just learn that and see the benefit of it and then say, I'm gonna not build a passive house. So I think that's probably not a great answer, but for us, we were convinced.

Rachel: I think that it, so we thought, okay, this is accessible for us. But I can see the limitation though, for some people because of, finding builders. And that, that could be, so it's not true that everyone in the US or in Canada can build a passive house 'cause they may not have qualified builders.

Rachel: So that's one thing. But we did think that it was accessible to us once we found a builder

Rachel: So out there that we couldn't do it. But we did need to find a builder to, that would do it for us.

James: No, that makes sense. And yeah, I think the, we, like wife and I research all kinds of, like having kids. We've researched things through our lives when we've made decisions, we always try to find the best information. And then with the internet and like the explosion of information, it became easier and harder all at once.

James: But with, I remember specifically with, trying to find what food, the right food to feed. Oh no, you don't wanna ruin our child's life by giving them the wrong food. And then you start going down that rabbit hole and then you're like why are we eating?

Rachel: Exactly.

James: Like, why is it okay for us? Like that sort of thing. The un you can't take it

Rachel: No, you can't unknow, and we're spreadsheet people whenever we make decisions, there's big spreadsheets involved and.

James: I definitely feel like there's probably a Venn diagram, a very. Like large overlap of spreadsheet people and passive house

Mike: I, I would imagine so.

Rachel: There is, but the I think the umbrella needs to be I guess it we need to bring in everyone though. So I think that's one thing is as far as marketing passive house, it may feel intimidating. We're science nerds, so we did go down rabbit holes. But maybe that's not of interest.

Rachel: Or maybe people, won't go down that, that route. So I think, would benefit from having some easy way to describe it and name it and describe what it is and make it very more accessible for people.

James: Yeah.

Rachel: I think that's one of the problems and it may not just be for people that want to build Mike and I were talking that it's also possibly builders that don't know about it.

James: Yeah. From the talks I've had with people in the course of this podcast that's come up again and again as the architects spend years and years in school it just naturally comes into their. Part of their training. Whereas the builders are generally training doing,

Mike: Yeah.

James: they're out on the front lines doing the work and it's not, there's less time to pontificate and.

Mike: We, when. The inspector who came in to look at the house for our mortgage that, came down from the bank. We, we were building this house and talking to the bank, we were like, look, this is, passive house, very energy efficient, all that other stuff. So they were like, okay, we're gonna send the inspector down.

Mike: Who's able to quantify all that stuff? He gets here and I'm like, explaining the house to him, passive house. And he is he didn't know what that was. He understood lead, he understood the hers rating, but he had no idea what. I'm just

Rachel: But that's not surprising because either did we had never. Or heard of him? Yeah.

Mike: You would think like the person who's doing the inspection for the whole thing would, for the mortgage would understand what that is about. But, to, to that point about builders not knowing it's not just. It's, I think a lot of people who are related to the building industry just don't understand it.

James: Yet.

Mike: and then also explaining that difference between lead and passive house too. The

Mike: Between, performance base and prescriptive base building something that took me a little bit to wrap my head around too.

Mike: So it's that with passive house, you do a test, there's fail sort of moment in there. With lead, you can, just build up these points for things. And if you get, if you're a little under one level, then you can, I don't know, go back and do something to add a few more points.

Mike: If

Mike: Your blower door test, that's, a little bit of a different thing oh, I'll, I don't know. Yeah,

James: Triple the insulation.

Mike: or, it's different than saying oh, I'll add a couple more wild flowers to the garden, or, whatever.

Mike: It's, that's you're gonna get points from with with lead. I'm not familiar with the standards, so I probably just said something very ungraceful there,

James: But the point is made, right? Like you can't find some other area to offset and still get

Mike: Yeah,

James: by.

Mike: Yeah. So it's, and yes, we, there were a lot of fingers and toes crossed when we were doing the final blower.

Rachel: So when I describe our house to people, I usually just say net zero or net positive, because it's just easier. And and I wonder I think this has been on your podcast before about the possibility of rebranding Passive House to make it more maybe a descriptive name

Rachel: And how that might help marketing it to people and making it more accessible and understood.

James: Yeah,

Rachel: don't have any suggestions on that, but I,

James: but, so it's interesting you found Net zero be a way that lands with people, right?

Rachel: I think people understand that. Yes, or net positive. I think people understand what that means.

Mike: You get that it's, just in that phrase, net zero, you get that,

James: true.

Mike: energy usage is probably well

James: Yeah.

Mike: there too, right?

Mike: Yeah, and it's not that it's harder to describe what a pa, what passive house is because. Once I say passive house, and can usually tell when you're talking to somebody, you get that sort of confused look on their face where they're like, I think I need to know what this is, but I don't.

Mike: And I don't wanna admit that I don't

James: Yeah.

Mike: it's,

James: Yeah.

Mike: and then you just and then I'm like, it's a highly energy efficient house. Lots of insulation, triple glazed windows, good, envelope that a good sealed envelope to keep all the conditioned air in, keep. Moisture levels where you want it at air circulation through, through an HRV system, these kinds of things. When you talk through that, people are like, oh, okay. I get that concept now. I just, it's like you, you need a short catchphrase to summarize it all

Rachel: Or in a

Rachel: Elevator speech that people would latch onto. Yeah.

Mike: I'm not enough of a wordsmith to figure that one.

James: Yeah. And it all depends about what people want, like what their perception is. If you said airtight, some people might run

Rachel: Think that's bad. A bad

Rachel: Thing? Yes.

James: all gonna die. no air.

Mike: no I actually do remember that like when we were Earl researching this, there were some articles saying that, a super airtight house is bad. Because houses need to breathe. One of the things that those articles didn't take into consideration is that when you build a super airtight house, like with a passive house and you have all and all the, all the joints and everything are taped up.

Mike: Is that you? Putting an air handler in into the house to move air around. So it's yeah, sure. A house built in 1883 is breathing. Probably a little too much.

James: Yeah.

Mike: It's just, with passive house, you're controlling the breathing and may, and doing it in a way that is, is not creating jet streams of your air conditioning leaking out of your bedroom.

James: That's right. Yeah. The opening the Windows thing, that's another thing that has come up a couple times is just of the objections is that. I'd like to be able to open my windows. And so do you open your windows?

Rachel: Oh yeah, absolutely. We always have our windows open.

Mike: Totally

Mike: Of it whenever we can.

James: Nice. One thing, so this is, now, this is pure curiosity and I haven't yet thought of asking anyone this, but you're in the position to answer. So the building's airtight, so you control the flow of air mechanically, right?

James: But when the power goes out. Then do you have to open the windows so that the air doesn't stagnate?

Mike: Knock on wood, we haven't really had any power outages ma, major long-term power outages here yet. We had one that lasted for, what was that? Maybe like about three hours or so.

Mike: So it hasn't really become an issue. Yeah, if we were to lose power like over a multi-day period, we probably would need something. Do, do air handling to move that? Yeah. Our house we did design it where we have a generator hookup we can do that. Obviously it's not the, it's a fossil fuel generator, gasoline generator. Not the cleanest thing on the planet, but

James: right.

Mike: knock on wood, we haven't really had to use it at all.

James: Yeah.

Mike: which we do find a little surprising where we live, just living at the foot of a mountain range and getting

Rachel: Lots of wind.

Mike: that blows off of Washington

James: Right.

Mike: would be losing power every other day.

James: You have a, an interesting statistical anomaly, don't you with regard to your location.

James: I remember that.

Mike: yes. So we ended up with a hers rating of 18 for the house, and that is before solar panels are, were put on the house. So when a house was inspected and the inspector came by to, did all to do all that stuff, the house did not have solar panels on it. It was just like any other, vanilla generic building and that we were getting our electricity from the street. And we had a hers rating of 18, which it turned out at least at that point, was the lowest in the country in the United States. there's a little bit of an asterisk next to

James: Yeah. Yeah. This is the.

Mike: As I like to say next to like much like Barry Bonds batting career. There's a little bit of an asterisk there. The way the hers certification works is that they take a point to reference for weather data. And these are usually, someplace that has weather collecting instruments that are fed into the na, into noaa, into the national and into the National Weather Service and,

Mike: And systems like that.

Mike: It's not just gonna be some guys, thermometer in, in their backyard that

James: Right.

Mike: for that stuff. The thermo the data point that is the reference for all of this is the summit of Mount Washington. Now, for anybody who's not from New England, Mount Washington is just like this totally weird convergence of weather patterns up there.

Mike: I'm, we've gone hiking up there where we've left the valley and, had it where it's like. 80 degrees in the valley, and then you get up to the summit of Mount Washington and it's barely above freezing. So it's,

James: Wow.

Mike: It's just this

James: I.

Mike: weird I don't wanna say anomalous because obviously it's through like jet streams and things like that.

Mike: You can explain why the weather is the way it is up there.

James: Right.

Mike: And Mount Washington is, I think, like eight miles from a house as the crow flies. We're pretty close to it. That said, there's still a huge difference between what goes on at the top of Mount Washington and what happens

James: and your house. Yeah.

Mike: not, it's still it, the, I don't wanna detract from the house and say, that we didn't. Get this highly energy efficient house and

James: of course.

Mike: built with a lot of quality and care and to high standards because it certainly is. It's just, the weather that may be happening here we might be reading in the winter, may be outside of somewhere around let's say 20, 25 degrees The summit of Mount Washington may be, down more around like the ten five area or something like that. Here, if they're blowing at 30, 35 miles an hour on the summit of Mount Washington, it may be blowing closer around like 50, 60 miles an hour. So that's the differences that you're getting there. And architects like Hans would understand that a lot better. But yeah it's,

James: Yeah.

Mike: Still a little bit of a, an asterisk.

James: Yeah I think it's, I loved that I remember it in the presentation. I love the, it's just, it points out something about what we rely on. Like the lived, your lived experience

Mike: yeah.

James: a more reliable

Mike: Yeah.

James: guide or whatever,

James: That numbers are just numbers and here's an example of. I love it. And that's, the house with the worst hers rating probably has a story

James: Right? Like

Rachel: Our last.

James: yeah. Oh, nice. Hans, the architect that I didn't know in the origin story, we talked about getting to Maine passive house, but did you then separately seek out an architect or did. Was it through the builders that you got one? I'm

James: That too.

Rachel: how did we find.

Mike: We got it. We got them through Maine passive house. So we, when we went down, the, this pathway of building a house there, there were a couple different iterations and we up until we, we started to work with Maine passive house on developing this. When we didn't really engage an architect, we had thought about it.

Mike: We had talked to a couple, but we never really took that step. And we had done some design work on our own. But after we started talking to Maine Passive House, they were like, yeah, it may be a good idea to have one we can re recommend somebody. And, at that point we were like, yeah I think that's probably what we need to do.

Mike: And Hans is also another fantastic. Person to work with and in his field. He's certainly very knowledgeable absolutely knew what he was doing. And then also just as far as, a person to go through this process with, and work with ideas off of and help guide you through it all.

Mike: He.

James: Nice. Nice. if you were going to do it again, would no, not the inevitably. I was gonna get to a question like this, but so if you had advice for someone who is, at the point where you are, when you very started what would you say or what were some things to look out for?

Rachel: I think one thing is as far as building any kind of. Effort you can make towards creating more efficiency is worthwhile. It, if not everyone can go full passive house, but any little step you can take it is definitely worthwhile. And Mike and I were talking about this. He Mike you say that people should build at least above co code, right?

Rachel: What's your saying?

Mike: Yeah. I, that was another thing that, realized is, there, there's building codes, right? And then you hear, everything is built to code, it never occurs to a person that you can go beyond code, right? Code specifies like there has to be a certain amount of insulation in the attic.

Mike: There has to be a certain amount of insulation in the walls. the builder is gonna meet those numbers because it has to meet the housing inspection, it has to meet the code, right?

Mike: Nothing stopping you from putting more insulation in the wall, and it, that was another one of those light bulb moments that it's oh, can do that. And yeah. So if you are gonna build something, don't look at. Look at code as the bare minimum, not the that's the floor you have to meet. You have to get above that bar, but don't look at it as the constraining

Rachel: The bar. Yeah.

Mike: You can't go beyond, yeah.

James: That's good. Yeah. far as the process goes, do you have any advice that way? I was curious about finding to find an architect first, find a builder first, find land first, find that sort of a swirl. I feel like if I was doing it, I'd be, I'd spend some time going around in circles trying to decide which was the sensible place to start. Is there one or is it.

Rachel: I think the land is important because then you are constrained by direction, right? Because you want something south facing. I guess it doesn't need to be the front of the house that's south facing, but

Rachel: But still, you might be constrained there and you might be constrained by the landscape around you, maybe with trees or mountains that might obscure some something.

Rachel: That's one thing. So I think that the, that we were lucky that our property was in the right facing direction. But yeah, don't you thank Mike with that, the land first.

Mike: I think land and so what we did in our processes is, yeah, I mean we started talking about this of building There was also, building was not the only thing we talked about. We did talk about possibly buying something in retrofitting it. At

Mike: Were looking at a 55 acre.

James: That's a world of difference.

Mike: a slightly different thing.

Rachel: It was the pandemic. People had crazy ideas.

James: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: I, I think, give yourself space to work through all that stuff first. Don't I think don't just, say, oh, I'm gonna build a house and then the following week jump into something.

Mike: We spent a lot of time talking about is this, do we really want to do this?

Mike: And you get those sort of, key infl, I guess inflection points throughout the process. Let's say right before you sign, paperwork for the sale about of land, if you're gonna buy land, you look at it, you go through all that other stuff, get the, your real estate agent to help you with all of that. And then there's that moment where you're sitting there with the pen in hand am I really gonna do this? Before we, right at those moments we, Rachel and I would have some, long conversations about do we really wanna do this? Is this something that, that we want? And being willing to back out at any point if we were like, we've thought about this and this is not something we wanna do. Find good partners to work with on this. So I think, the thing that made this really a success was having Maine passive house and Hans and the kind of people that we did. And it's not just them because Maine passive house brought in some fantastic subcontractors.

Mike: Our plumber who. Did the work here, Lisa, she was a wonderful person. Did, did fantastic work. The electric, the electricians who we had in here. we installed a DC lighting system in the house,

Mike: Certainly not a normal thing they were willing to put up with, working through that and getting it installed and deployed, they were willing to, put up with me saying, I want, cable pulled through the, and our duct tubing. So that can replace all that stuff at, future point when new technologies come out. just, yeah, have, having good partners in the project is key. And work, work towards finding those 'cause that's gonna make it a success. And like when we started off, building this house, like we tried to put everything in it. You sit down, you get a blank sheet of paper, you get your box of crayons and you start drawing a house and you're like, oh, I want this room, I want that room. Like we put down, at one point I think we had three guest rooms

Rachel: Yeah. What was.

Mike: and and then we realized as time. Went on that, it's wait a second. We're not gonna have people up there, coming up and visiting us that frequently, that three guest rooms are gonna be used on a regular basis.

James: Right.

Mike: when we do get that many people, on, on those rare moments, then it's like hotels nearby, and just do that.

James: Yeah.

Mike: you whittle it down to one guest room that has since actually become a multifunction room. And where I'm going is, just be willing to you, you're gonna have to cut things out. It's a trade off. It's the

Mike: Of, what you're doing.

Mike: And yeah, just be willing

Rachel: but that's not specific for passive house. That's,

Mike: yeah.

Rachel: For any build. Yeah. You start big and then you start.

Mike: yeah.

James: Yeah. But I suppose with the passive house certainly adds more need for more time to plan things through, to find the right people

Mike: Yeah.

James: the, the precis, the precision required and the, it's has to work as a whole.

Mike: Yeah.

James: you can't have.

Mike: After we got the hers rating, Katrina, Hans and I had a couple conversations about this. As I, I asked that question like, why did we get such low numbers, because we got. So really low numbers on the hers and other, blower door tests and other scores like that. And what Hans was coming back with is a lot of it does have to do with the design, right? The house is it's that classic New England box design. And which. You something about New Englanders. Before that they knew that building a box design house is gonna be pretty energy efficient turns out it is. That is part of that design process that's I think a little bit more focused on passive houses that you're gonna have to make considerations in the design to achieve passive house and achieve energy savings and off.

James: Yeah. Nice. This has been great. Thank you so much for coming on to share all of your experiences. And before we go, where's a good place people can go to find out more about your house online? I know there's some articles and.

Mike: There's the passive house listing, and as we were talking about here, earlier that there there's an article that's coming out in, green and Healthy Maine Homes, the Winter 20 25, 20 26 issue.

James: Right.

Mike: there, there's one in there. yeah those are the biggest. Places right now.

Rachel: May.

James: Great.

Mike: have a separate website or anything up

Rachel: No. And also the the Maine passive house website. I think our house is on there.

James: Of course.

Rachel: I believe it is.

James: I'll link to all of those in the in the show notes and yeah, thanks so much for coming on.

Rachel: Thank you for having us,

Mike: Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Appreciate it.

Rachel: thank you for your efforts in spreading the word. We really appreciate that

James: Thanks for saying

Rachel: and we think it's very important. Any way we can help in that in your efforts, let us know.

James: Okay. Sounds good. We'll do a live version in in, from your living room sometime

Rachel: Perfect. We're in.

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