33 - Steve Hessler - New Energy Works
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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.

James: I'm your host, James Turner, and today I'm joined by Steve Hessler, certified passive house consultant, building systems specialist at New Energy Works, and visiting educator at McGill University through Holzraum System. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve: Thank you very much. It's really great to be here

James: Yeah, it's great to have you here. So before we get into it, and for people who are just meeting you for the first time, could you share a little bit more about who you are, what you do, and how you started on your passive house journey?

Steve: Yes, I can. I went to school for communications. I was a communication strategy major at Penn State. Came out, was in that field for a few years, was a little dismayed, and then found out about timber framing through a couple of friends of mine from Penn State that were-- had gone a different career direction than I.

Steve: Just was like, "Wait a minute, I can do that?" So I literally quit my job after seeing like photographs of what they were doing during the day, and I got an internship-- or not an internship, a, an apprenticeship with a restoration carpentry firm called 18th Century Restoration in kind of the Philadelphia area. And just got a total obsession with anything related to wood, which I still hold today. And did my six-year carpentry apprenticeship, and it got towards the end of that, I got into-- got really into modeling design for fabricating things, and I started doing some design work for the restoration company.

Steve: And then I got picked up eventually by also in the same area that bought the first five-axis CNC timber processing machine in the country. And they kinda knew that I was really into-- I was into joinery, I was into design, and I was a little bit into programming. Yeah, they hired me to run that machine, and then eventually I moved from there into, design for manufacturing and eventually led their design department. We had really a playground of machinery. We had three or four or five-axis machines. We had in-house steel fabrication. We were doing projects from as small as like a lamppost to like natatoriums. And so I learned a lot about engineering and load path through that over the many years. And there were times when I was back and forth between working for a fabricator and then back in the field.

Steve: So a lot of, stayed connected to all the trades and the carpentry and the home building. And, there's other parts of that story, but that's the beginnings of how I ended up getting into this. And then actually the pivotal point to Passive House was I was working for a company called Hugh Lofting Timber Frame, who is a great hand-cut timber framer. And they they gave me the opportunity and exposure to Passive House. And I-- so when I was with them, I got certified as a Passive House certified consultant through Phius. And I got-- I s-- I was like, "I think I need to take a break from designing timbers, timber frames." And I got really into enclosure design and then eventually panelization. And all of that led me to the, just the best job that I have, which is at New Energy Works, where I get to talk about all of those things and why this is the right path for really scaling up carbon and just improving building efficiency and the process of building and all that.

James: Nice. That sounds like a great match too. You came around to communications again.

Steve: I know. It's crazy. It is. So I think about that a lot, and And I'm happy about that. now I know what I'm talking about, and I guess maybe that was the problem back then. It's "I don't know anything. What do you want me to communicate about?"

Steve: So

James: Yeah, that makes perfect sense really, right? You learned the skills necessary, but didn't have the passion for anything in particular

James: At that time. Yeah.

Steve: yeah

James: Nice. So lucky that you got introed and certified Passive House on someone else's time and, h-how did that go? Like when they first suggested it to you, what was your impression? What was the aha moment for you? Or were you just forced to do it?

Steve: No, I wasn't at all for-- What happened was so former employer of mine was he was, he's in his eighties now, he was one of the first in our kind of Philadelphia area. He was one of the earliest PHIUS certified Passive House builders. And I watched him kind of struggle and go through all that testing and then when I was with them, we actually did-- we actually performed a couple, we built a couple Passive Houses, and so we were learning all together at the time, and I was like, this is insane. This is what I wanna do." So I actually went to him and I said, "Hugh this is what I wanna do, and I would really like to do it with you. I'd like to run your high performance CM, the construction management firm." I said, "I wanna go get certified." 2015, I did that, and soon as I started taking the modules in 2015, just the world changed. Everything that I had been doing and contributing to suddenly became not so great, I started really getting into not just the airtightness and Passive House and thermal bridging, but really I d- around the same time, I learned about wood fiber insulation and vapor open assemblies, which was actually in 2014, it kind of-- that came onto my radar from an associate, and I couldn't let go of that.

Steve: And, 'cause I'd been thinking about all the sips that we had put on for decades and, just not really thinking about vapor profiles in assemblies, and then suddenly when it was in front of me, I couldn't un- I couldn't unsee it, and I got really passionate. So we-- I think that really, at the same time, as I told Hugh, I wanna do this," I really, from the very beginning, even before I got my certification, I was very dedicated to biogenic materials.

Steve: I was-- I knew about it. I understood it. So we actually enacted it quite quickly at that company

James: Trayces

Steve: Went to Germany and I got... there was a few of us, 10 of us in the country that kind of had a real interest in wood fiber insulation. We already had the bug, and word got back to Steico in Germany, and so they sent 10 of us all paid to come out to Germany and tour their factories in Poland. the crazy story is, I've told this a lot of times, but my boss now, Eric Frazier, who does an amazing job running New Energy Works, was on that bus with me. So all the people that they could have picked, Eric and I actually met through that 10-day tour, driving around in a Mercedes bus between Polish Steico factories. And it was amazing. We would drive to the next factory, we'd go in for a factory tour, and then they'd stick us in a room with German building physicists, and we would have a little bit of building science, and then we'd move on to the next factory. we were in the, in that bus, we were both-- we were all, the 10 of us were just like...

Steve: And there was guys from Bensonwood were in there, were all just "Wow, this is a wall I wanna take back. This is a wall I wanna take back." And Eric and I each brought a wall back, and those two walls are what we're manufacturing at New Energy Works, which is pretty crazy. it's been a really wild ride, and that's another reason why I'm so-- I feel so at home with New Energy Works because they kind of-- we brought what we thought we should do to them.

Steve: They brought same back to, to, to the Holzraum system, and so now we're just really kind of-- we're really connected, and it's really good.

James: Nice. Yeah, I like that there's a-- I like your nested career, it sounds

Steve: yeah

James: sit within each other and play nicely.

Steve: They do. They really do, yeah

James: so a couple of questions. One thing I wanted to know if how would you, how do you talk about vapor-open assemblies to people who, to whom that means nothing at all?

James: Where do you start with people?

Steve: to th- and this is pretty funny, right? 'Cause my communications degree me that you can't really have a conversat- you can't start a conversation without points of stasis. So you need connectors. You need things you can agree on in the beginning, and it's really quite easy, actually.

Steve: And have-- I actually say these to not just people who don't know about it, but people who kind of poo-poo it in the Passive House community, there are a lot of people that have been building Passive Houses with vapor-closed assemblies of foam exterior insulation or whatever it is they're doing. And I say, we all can agree that we'd like to mitigate risk, and I can tell you right now, of the greatest risks we have is ignoring vapor performance in low-perm wall assemblies and roof assemblies. So like zip sheathing on the outside certainly need to have the right amount of insulation on the outside. But in points that they don't because people aren't perfect and, installations aren't always perfect, always, There's always some risk of having moisture that be trapped behind pieces of the assembly. And so for me, the, probably the number-- the two most important things that bring me back to vapor-open assemblies is rather than requiring perfect installation so that there are no passageways for air leakage to carry moisture into areas that they can't dry and then create the second thing, which would be...

Steve: So that's the risk part, mitigating that risk. And then the second part that's most important to me is that those risks don't necessarily mean building failure. But even in small doses in locations somewhere in the building, like typically on a north side where there's not a lot of like sun beating down to, to bake things out, those can definitely affect the quality of indoor air quality.

Steve: And so really the number one thing should be indoor health and wellness. And to me, they all just relate back. So it's the risk mitigation, it's the indoor air quality and health. And then you connect that with all of the mechanisms of Passive House, regardless of the vapor open, and they just really work together.

Steve: So at the end of that, if you look at all those through those lenses, it brings you right back to biogenic assemblies

James: Being the best.

Steve: really well.

James: And even more simply, vapor open. Could you just

Steve: Yeah.

James: give me your

Steve: yep.

James: layman's explanation?

Steve: on what, where, what your climate is, right? Most of our work and when we were looking at, thinking where would our wall be, right? We came back and we decided take this thing to what would our market be, right?

Steve: Where's the mo- where can we have the most impact with a wall that has some flexibility and nuance in like how thick the layers are, but essentially it's a targeted approach. And we decided that, Zones 4A, 5A, 6A, also across the country even into, 4B, 5B, 6B, those are heating-dominated climates.

Steve: And so they-- But they also have some challenges with mixed climate. They have a flip in summer. But when we look at the real risk of those, the real risk in those heating-dominated climates is and in, in the winter, in a vapor drive, where you have a higher humidity inside than outside, vapor wants to find its way into assemblies is looking for a condensation plane. And so that was That was main goal for us. A vapor open assembly, it's not just as simple as it means it can breathe in both directions. That's fundamentally what it is. It means that it's not-- there's no layer in the assembly that is blocking moisture transport. So there are many great buildings out there that are vapor-close assemblies. But all it takes is a single layer moisture down to less than like perm ten, let's say, more like perm five.

James: What is perm, like permeability?

Steve: is... Yeah, US perms is just a measure of measuring how much moisture can move through an assembly. And and so technically a vapor-open assembly is shooting for like around perm ten. It might be a little less, but if it gets down to a perm three or perm five in the wrong-- anywhere in the wall, means really that especially towards the outside, it means that you're blocking the drying to the outside. And a vapor-open assembly for us means that we'd like to not have constriction less than like perm seven to ten in the wall at all. And what we do is we think a lot about where like that constriction, where we'd like that retardance. So the vapor retardance would be you have five pieces in the wall, they all have typically some different permeability. We want the most permeability towards the outside where the risk is, where it's cold,

James: Right

Steve: content and condenses and then creates problems. So what we do is we have we have a wall assembly-- we have a closed wall assembly that is a little tighter on the inside, so it acts like a vapor retarder. And then whatever moisture still makes its way throughout the winter into the wall, can just dry out very quickly. So they're-- We're open.

James: That's cool. Thank you. Sorry if that was

Steve: Yeah.

James: you'd expected, but I

Steve: I'm, no, sorry that I probably took a deeper dive than you asked for, but it's

James: no.

Steve: hard not to

James: I think part of marketing Passive House is like getting people to think about what's actually happening with their houses, right? That's a huge... With build-- even people owning buildings, understanding what's happening with their buildings that they own. But also just at the sort of- Non-own-- I guess homeowners own their buildings, but it's I meant that feels different from developers, right?

James: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

James: Just knowing how things work

Steve: like this is a podcast which I love that you're doing about marketing passive house, right? And the thing about passive house is by the time you've got the skill set, the right labor, the right design, the right assemblies to achieve a passive house, talking about very high caliber team and materials and products. And so one of the ways to me that you sell passive house is through comfort, health. It's not just low ener-- it's not just reduced energy costs, 'cause reduced energy costs don't pencil for the premium that a typical passive house costs. It costs a bit more to build a really good building. Why are we building a really good building?

Steve: Obviously, we're building a really good building because we all believe we need to reduce operational carbon. But there's two other things, and we need to reduce embodied carbon, and that's where biogenic materials absolutely kicks butt. we-- the fact that the biogenic materials can actually improve indoor air quality because of this vapor open thing and removing the possibility to trap moisture, then to me, it's one of the biggest selling points is providing a passive house with all those benefits and then combining it with a vapor open profile that is literally having impact on indoor air quality.

Steve: And the other thing about biogenic materials is they hydrat- they hydrate buffer, so they, they can store and release moisture, so they can actually affect the indoor latent heating load during the summer. So we talked about their winter risk, but in the summer they can have quite a bit of impact. Timber, mass timber elements other elements that can hydrate buffer like masonry, those really can have effect, and they can help not only reduce the energy cost of cooling systems, but they actually can have a bigger impact than that to the feeling in the house.

Steve: And so that's sort of-- those are the things we talk about a lot with clients, 'cause not all of our clients are necessarily on board with spending their money, extra money a passive house achievement. They're not all bought in. And to me, you don't have to just drive... everyone knows.

Steve: A lot of people know this now, but the messaging of just carbon is really, you're preaching to the choir a bit. So it's import-- it's absolutely important. It's our mission. But as far as marketing goes I really don't talk about it that much, to be honest.

Steve: Unless I have the right audience, and then I'm like, "Yeah, let's talk about carbon." So I know that's probably not gonna be received well from people, but it's fact. I just know from being out there. I've sold all the projects that we've worked together, Holzraum through, the projects that I was involved with New Energy Works, I just know what people wanna hear. And, a lot of them would rather hear about like the longevity of the building because there's no trapped moisture and indoor air quality. So those are things we focus on

James: sense. It's the kind of thing I've been hearing again and again too, like a fa-

Steve: good to hear. That's good

James: yeah. Like they... People don't come to you and say, "Oh, I've got this carbon usage problem that I need you to solve." That's not how we experience life. It's a problem, but it's abstract and, not

Steve: I think it's important for it to be there. We're working on a really cool little benefits like a landing page that we're working on right now,

Steve: Be accessible for us to just send people to. And it looks at all the benefits of working with us and panelization and biogenic materials and all the things that we-- are in our DNA. And I think it's been really awesome to see, as we research these things to understand where those benefits lay. And the way we laid it out was that we know that not... we know there's different touch points for different people, right? That's just who we are. And so it so it's very easy.

Steve: We broke them into eight benefits and they can unfold the benefit to a nice paragraph. But if they want to go insane, they can go into a very technical deep dive with just a click and they can see it all.

James: Brilliant

Steve: really cool to-- And I think so like we don't at all ignore the carbon side, but we basically have it out there for the people who are gonna respond to that touch point.

Steve: I think that's key

James: Excellent. Yeah, that's that's always my advice, like from a marketing perspective is like highlight the top level things, but let people follow their nose, right?

Steve: Yeah,

James: follow their interest. Yeah. Don't force them to be interested in this, or this,

Steve: Yeah.

James: But leave it up to them. Brilliant.

James: Switching gears a little bit, I'm really curious to hear about your visiting professorship, your, instru-instructing at McGill

Steve: sure. My wife is an actual professor. I'm not sure if I can use professorship. I don't really know. But,

James: Small B.

Steve: so we are-- So I still am part of the design company that led me to working with New Energy Works now.

James: Right

Steve: fully dedicated and absolutely love working with my partner, Ilka Cassidy, at Holzraum System. what we decide, we're really in the design space between Like design intent then all the stuff that happens in the middle, which is integrated design for manufacturing and assembly, and then, all the outputs that kind of get buildings done. So what we would do is we would bring projects to factories like New Energy Works. We'd bring the clients, we'd bring the projects, and we would do that piece in the middle that now-- then and now, New Energy Works does a brilliant job at without me. But we would do all that, like a lot of crazy modeling and kinda hand-holding on people that haven't done passive house and like really trying to create a team and an integrated approach.

Steve: And we would-- And at New Energy Works, we don't just model just the timber frame or just the as-assembly, the roof and walls. We really like dial into load path, even if we're not providing it like steel structures. MEP, we bring in MEP models, and we really do a very kind of fine level of clash detection. And so what happened was when Ilka and I decided in 2024 that we were going to stop being that company that was providing that IDFMA service, and w- but we absolutely were dedicated to teaching others. And a lot of people had reached out to us about teaching, including PHIUS actually at one point, and we've done some workshops at PHIUS Con.

Steve: And so we were like, "Yeah, we just-- We-- we were together working on projects starting from build smart projects all the way to these panels that we're doing now with New Energy Works." And we're like, "There's a lot of stuff we can teach people here, and we can try to connect." The whole point of this process that we created, we actually call this process single integrated manufacturing model.

Steve: And the whole point was that if you... the way we have to manufacture to create a building, especially a building that has all the layers of the high-performance wall assembly, roof assembly, the structural components coordinated with the mechanical and engineering or mechanical, electrical, and plumbing components many times, and any kind of other perspectives that are relevant to the project.

Steve: We end up creating and bringing in all this content, vetting it to see what makes sense, what's-- what has value and what doesn't. And then end-- we do, we end up with this model that is just a lot different than a BIM model. A BIM model is brilliant and meant for kind of coordination, but, you're not-- without all the parts that we have because we have to manufacture them.

Steve: We have every stud. Many times, we literally have five thousand fasteners in our models. They're insane, right? They're-- And they're dead accurate. So the way Ilka and I saw this opportunity starting around twenty 16 really, was we have this model that it's the only model in the whole project team, 'cause there's BIM models and then there's these independent kind of CAD/CAM models, but this thing has like so much in it.

Steve: Why not, why don't we bring in more content and really encourage more con- collaboration and contribution and then make it allowable and make it available to the team? And so that's what we started doing. And PhiusCon did a, they did a session in November of, my like two years ago when they did Philly Greenbuild and then they gave us diehard Passive House of people. They're like, "We know you guys-" Went to Greenbuild, but Greenbuild was a little bit-- It was, it was a much larger like non-Passive House audience they were reaching out, which was great. But they threw us a bone and gave us this really awesome, little-- Three hundred people came, and we taught-- we did a little like a half-day lecture with GoLogic there. And head of the architecture department at McGill was in the audience. He-- I think he had met Ilka before, up to us afterwards, and he's like: "We wanna do-- This is exactly-- We have a grant we're writing to do this integrated design for manufacturing assembly. We love what you're doing.

Steve: Let's talk." And then took us about six months to kinda iron out the details. But it's fabulous. We-- I think we're like we have a three-year contract or something with them, and hopefully it will go further. And the idea is that we go up every summer for two weeks, Ilka and I, and we teach to a-- there's a group of masters of arch students McGill in Montreal, they're part of this program, and they're like research assistants and students. So the idea is that we're building the curriculum. We start-- we have a starter curriculum that we've been using with them, but the idea is eventually that the students become, if they want to stay on, they'll be instructors. So we're trying to build a culture a da-- and a knowledge base of kind of around-- it's around our work, but also bigger than just our work. Canada has invest-- they promised to invest a lot of money into new and high-performance home building to meet their housing demand. So we were like, "This is a perfect fit." So we'll see. It's, it-- We've only been doing it for a year. We're heading back up in-- at the end of May for our next second... We've been up a bunch of times, but this is our s- our first year after a year to go up, and we have a new batch of students, which is really exciting. So there's five or seven new students that we haven't met yet. and then so we do that in the summer, and then during the year, we do kinda after-work sessions with them to help, fill in the blanks, and so we meet a couple times a month. And they just put together their first set of drawings that they're sending out to a panel company, a couple panel companies. They have a real live project that they're doing. It's like a two-story cool building on top of an existing building, and they're doing biogenic vapor open, really beautiful assemblies, and they are using Cadwork, which is what I've been designing with for thirty years. they got Cadwork licenses, so Cadwork is in Montreal, and it's very supportive. I just saw their drawing package, and I was like I cr-- I kinda wanted to cry. I was like: "Oh, my God, this is so amazing," 'cause I don't see, I don't see a set of architecturals has that much manufacturing logic in, woven into the set.

Steve: It's just, it's what we want. We think that-- we think more architects should be more connected with manufacturing. That's the-- that's actually a mission of me with New Energy Works, but also in Holzraum System. It's what we think is the right thing to do, and that's the way it happens in Europe. There's a lot of architects that just feed so much logic in their stuff to the factories, so the factories don't really... They don't necessarily act as designers as much, and so we think that's a good way to go

James: It strikes me it, it comes up again and again how much of making it success is communication between all the different people involved and the integrated design component.

Steve: assembly, yeah

James: Yeah, that's-- an-the analogy that comes to my mind is a gearbox where the inputs and the outputs are different, but someone has to take all the different inputs and turn them into what we want the output to be and tell people if you wanna do this, that's gonna change this, and that's gonna change this.

James: So you, these other people, what do you think of changing this part of your thing?" And is that kind of how...

Steve: It's so-- That's a great analogy. It's a

James: Yeah.

Steve: analogy, and it-- we call those, the, those different things that people different audiences have to think about on a single project, we call them perspectives. Perspectives, the standard perspectives that a single model process, should think about structure and operational carbon performance, thermal bulk water management, vapor management, airtightness. But then it be-- when you move into panelized, then you also have all the logistics of fabrication, w-well, actually starting at ordering and acquisition. like, a lot of times we'll actually tweak things that we think can save us money, that can deliver better quality and cost less money for the factory so that we can just be more and more competitive.

Steve: Like getting continuous lengths of two-by-six that are finger-jointed. There's just things that-- It's amazing, and that's where New Energy Works, it just shines. They-- Brian Bleier is He runs the enclosure department. He's a, he's my counterpart. We talk about 50 times a day, which he would probably like that to be, like, three. And he is just constantly-- it's crazy. He just never stops thinking of where are there new opportunities for efficiency because we need to, and he understands it. We need to make this more and more affordable and also more commonplace. different perspectives can extend beyond just passive house, the structural, the mechanical. also be things like I have this really cool interior set of built-ins, and so is there a block-- is there some special, s-special blocking or something like that needs to be done? Or, um, the timber framing component is a whole beautiful perspective at New Energy Works because we've been doing timber frames for forty years.

Steve: We also are-- We're really embedded. We were the first company to build the first all-CLT building in New York State. That's-- And it's on our campus. So we are fully committed, and actually, we're doing a four-story, CLT building in Syracuse right now. It's gonna be going up very soon. So yeah, they-- All the things, like I said, they fit back into our our groupthink of addiction to wood and the properties and beauties of wood. but the-- all those different perspectives and multiple perspectives. There's perspectives we talk about, Ilka and I really talk about, that we hope we get to haven't mentioned, like circular economy, right? Being able to deconstruct Wood really does that well. It offers opps-- instead of gluing and nailing, you can be using screws and that kind of unlock. and, Yeah, there's just, there's so many different perspectives that we don't at all burden a project with perspectives that don't have value to the project. But there's the basics, and then, you look at the project and decide if there's some additional value that while we're in there, let's do this.

Steve: So

James: On the passive house side, have you found do the students in McGill is that part of their education now? Are they all aware of passive house standard and

Steve: We've taught maybe 12, so it's

James: So they are.

Steve: so I'm gonna answer for all of them. 12 that we-- And also remember, Michael Jemtrud the-- he's the, he's the connector to us. He's what brought us into it, and he is brilliant. He, he's-- Passive House is absolutely woven into his teaching pedagogy for sure,

James: Nice

Steve: And was really a strong...

Steve: Already before we came in, it was a strong thread in the grants that we saw that he was putting together anyway and his team. it's definitely there. So maybe that's-- it's a little biased 'cause that-- those people that we're interfacing with already knew it. But I will say one of the great things about having Ilka Cassidy at Holzraum System is she's just, she's this amazing energy modeler. She's a German architect came over 20 years ago, met her husband and had a family here. But she's-- was one of the early-- I think she got certified in 2014 with Phius. She's amazing, and that's part of the reason why she's pod-- she's so connected to the podcast accelerator because she's knows what the hell she's talking about, and she knows talent when she sees it. But yeah, having her it's really me focused more on the DFMA and Ilka focused on how the Passive House principles work when you're thinking-- like thinking about them always in the back of your mind when you're thinking about, "I need an assembly that's gonna work for this project in Montreal." Everything is always back. So her bringing home a much deeper foundation for the students in the Passive House principles is gigantic. But she also, at this point, with me at Holzraum, has just been ma-- And she's an architect that has done now three really significant certified Passive Houses, 10,000 square foot, 5,000 square foot, 7,000 square foot, very high complexity. So she knows as the architect and also the Passive House consultant, she knows-- she's-- there's a perspective there that I couldn't touch. So it's a good combination.

James: Have you found having the more, I guess it's obvious, but that having a portfolio, having a sort of projects you can show people or even bring people to is a really good way to show rather than tell

Steve: It's hilarious that you ask that question because I-- we have-- think because our projects, because we model so deeply, and we also have been very blessed to have pretty crazy projects that are just really complex, sometimes 20,000 parts in our models, is that I honestly think we've probably gotten, Ilka and I anyway, have probably gotten a lot more attention what we do not from finished, completed pictures of our projects, although they're beautiful which is typically the case.

Steve: The completed pictures are the best sale. think honestly, people are-- have-- we've grabbed people's attentions for the last ten years through the design process and the modeling the outputs. And to me, that's the part I think is actually the most fun too. I love what you can generate. If you really think about it, you have to think about it from a marketing perspective. And I actually, my s-- I tell our students this, it's pretty hilarious. They're, like, masters of Arch students. prepared this incredible set of plans, we're talking about pages where there's some exploded assemblies. And I'll be like, "Guys, look, first of all, we need to think about the graphics." And they're like, "What?" 'Cause they're so used to just kind of axonometric, standard, mechanical drawing. I'm like no. This thing has to have drama. We're gonna tune up the perspective. gonna make sure the shadowing is really good, and we're gonna think about this like a photographer when we render our stills." they did, and I was so excited. I'm like, "You nailed it. You absolutely nailed it." And that's what I've been doing, I think 'cause I just like... I really dig aesthetics, and to me not just mine, but anytime I see a really cool 3D model of a building or a machine or something that's in process, I just think that really... I don't know. It somehow communicates to me, and I hope it does to other people.

James: Does it go across? Is that-- I wonder if that's a really good one for a specific type of potential client or customer or,

Steve: yeah.

James: collaborator

Steve: clients that are just like, "Steve's just wasting our time and showing off." I guarantee you those clients are out there. I will say that I... It's funny I meet with a lot of architects, right? 'Cause we're trying to, to get the message out about what we're doing, and who we are, and what we could do potentially with them, and it is hilarious how many times people they'll open up our brochure, or they'll look at something, and they'll be like, "Oh, my God, that's such a great, that's such a great graphic." I'm like, "That's just a CADwork model that has stuff that we built. That's all it is." There's nothing crazy about it, but we try to be a little bit thoughtful about... there's good ones and not as good ones. I do think, I don't know. Who doesn't like good illustration, right?

James: Yeah. And it's showing the thinking behind the thing, not just the thing, right? It's like showing your work doing a math problem instead of just presenting the correct answer at the end, right? Like

Steve: And you can do things, you can visualize things, right? Like you can-- You've never literally bought a piece of material for the project, and yet you have everything in it, and you can do things like you can create sections obviously, but you can take... We have-- We devised a little API for CAD work.

Steve: My brother actually designed it for us, and we can like create, take a cube and size cube, any sort of shape, doesn't have to be a square cube, we'll stick it on the building, and we can stick as many as we want. And then whatever the size of that thing is, it clones the inside of that-- all, everything inside of that cube, it creates a copy up in space.

Steve: And then you end up with this thing we call a nugget, and you can turn this thing around, you can shoot it out as a viewer file to architects and engineers and clients. Through those kinds of things. The other thing you can do in a model ahead of time is you can like change transparencies on layers so you can really see context that is really difficult to draw in just a CAD program, and it's really difficult to do it on site. And so we do it. We use a lot of transparencies for certain layers. We also do this thing where-- and I tell the McGill kids this, is like context and focus, right? So like people wanna know the context, but they really wanna-- they want the things that are the most critical to what you're trying to think about at the moment

Steve: The focus.

Steve: And so we do a lot of that work where we'll have focus parts that are in a sort of white contextual background, a lot of little tricks. It's taken only thirty years to figure these out, so

James: A, a little definitely off topic or a little beside topic, but do you enjoy a good Lego instruction book? A well-designed

Steve: I I definitely look at IKEA manuals and Lego instruction books, yeah, differently than most people I'm sure.

James: Yeah,

Steve: And I

James: the

Steve: learned, there's been times from the silliest instruction book. Actually, I have this cool thing my brother sent me. It's one of those, like it's a complex little laser cut wooden structure.

Steve: It's a Japanese like structure that you put on the side of your plant and it overhangs out, has like pr- I'm looking at it right now. It's got like maybe 60 or 70 parts. Beautiful. And the instruction booklet was just insane and I took pictures of it and I was like, "I need to do that in my drawings." Yeah. Yeah. It's I definitely I totally get off on cool instruction manuals when I see them. Yeah. And those go back to the Audel's. My grandfather was a cabinet maker on the side, and my other grandfather was a bricklayer. And the original kind of illustrated construction books are the Audel set.

Steve: You gotta check 'em out. They're, I think it's A-U-D-E-L. And those were hand-drawn illustrative of "Okay, we're gonna tell you now what it looks like to frame a floor system into a wall system." It's all hand illustrated. Those things grabbed me way before I knew how to use computer. I was really into those.

Steve: This stuff is not necessarily new, it's just evolving

James: Awesome. Look, I'm conscious of time. This has been absolutely great. I feel like we could probably nerd out on instruction booklets for a little while longer, but we'll save that for offline perhaps.

Steve: Okay, great

James: where can people go online to find out more about you or connect with you?

Steve: They can go to see us at newenergyworks.com. I think that is correct. I think it's newenergyworks.com. And yeah, we're-- I would love for them to come visit. They can check out all the both timber projects and enclosure projects that we're doing. ways for them to reach out to me very easily. And they can also visit Holzraum System to learn a little bit more about the education stuff that Ilka's really heading up. she also does offer ener- energy modeling consulting. She's actually I'm pretty psyched. She's worked-- we've worked on a bunch of projects with New Energy Works, and now we just, I think we-- she just contracted with a really cool project. Homeowner came to us from Holzraum. They knew about Holzraum. I think they talked to Ilka, and then now they are, they're signing up with New Energy Works, so they have do all the design for the building. And then have timber frame components.

Steve: It'll have our high-performance enclosures, and Ilka is the certified Passive House consultant the energy modeler on the project. So it's bringing everything back to partnership. So we'd love to, we'd love to do more of that and include Ilka, really. Anytime you have somebody that can just run a WUFI model and tell you where your cost benefit is it's magic.

Steve: There's no-- you can't underestimate the power of that. So

James: Sweet. I'll definitely point to Holzraum as well as New Energy in the show notes. Yeah, thanks so much for joining me today

Steve: Yeah. Thank you. It's just really a pleasure. Thank you for having me

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