Tell us the story of the first time you used it.

Yeah, 2009, first passive house that we did, probably the third passive house in America.

at the time where Passive House was...

I mean, I didn't even know it when the client came and requested a Passive House.

You were like, oh, yeah, I can do that.

I had to go look it up and figure it out.

But yeah, Huber Zip was the new kid on the block, and it made sense to me, but we didn't know enough about it.

I mean, they're not wrong, it's enhanced.

Yep

And something gets through or by it, what problems does it cause? And I think, you know, Joe, one of the things that I loved about working with Joe is the wisdom to understand what questions to ask, not, you know, necessarily the solutions.

Like it's real easy to say, "Oh, we'll just put in vinyl wallpaper, or we'll put carpeting down on there." But not having the in- the wisdom to ask the question of what if it stops, or if it holds back all of that moisture in the case of vinyl wallpaper, right? Then what, what is happening there?

It was an aesthetic choice by a designer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, the pro- one of the problems are too is, you know, in building science, when you change the dynamics of the space that you live in, but you don't change or try and, um, relate that change to the materials that you're using, like we've put carpeting in buildings forever, but we've never air conditioned them.

Like this year is probably Austin's worst year of air conditioning.

But if we're using more modern materials, more broken-down materials, things like, uh, drywall instead of plaster, uh, maybe even manmade studs compared to, uh, an original OG stud like this, uh, fi- this fir two-by-six which is behind you right here, uh, those things have more potential, the fir stud does, to soak up moisture and to also soak up some of that humidity as well in the house.

I have a, a, a real world rate, um, example that, uh, I think, uh, i- i- is a good example of this.

So I investigated a building once that it was, I don't know, like 150, 175-year-old building.

From the time that we had gotten the phone call to go and investigate it, they had remodeled it about three years earlier, five years earlier, something like that.

So 150-year-old building, that's lasting a very long time.

Now someone gets the bright idea, "Hey, let's remodel it." They go and they insert insulation, they're putting plastic on the walls, and they're doing all this, and they think they're doing something.

But what they're really doing is they're messing with the rate equation.

Mm-hmm.