Structural insulated panel

Yeah.

We're looking through U.S. Department of Energy remodeling guides, some historical HVAC research from the late 1980s, building science white papers, and some structural engineering studies on advanced airtight materials, specifically something called structural insulated panels, or SIPs.

And when you synthesize all of that, you know, the thermodynamics, the fluid dynamics of the HVAC systems and just the structural realities of wood framing.

Which we'll get into.

But, you know, for existing homes, that sounds like an incredibly intense retrofitting process.

What if you are building a new house from scratch? How do you avoid this entire nightmare of shrinking wood and leaky cavities from day one?

Well, for new builds, the structural engineering sources point to an ultimate fix, which is structural insulated panels or SIPs.

The Northeast SIPs white paper breaks down the performance data.

So I think, you know, Sherry, you and I have both worked on projects with any number of these different technologies.

We built SIP homes.

We built ICF homes.

We built modular homes like we built or masonry or whatever.

Mm-hmm.

Because if you don't, then you're paying for their learning curve and you might not get a design that works really well with that construction type.

I've built with SIPs before, I've built with ICS, I've built, you know, all these different, panelized, modular, all these things.

And each of these systems has a different sort of set of design rules around it.

And, and so over, you know, the next period, you know, we really started to think more broadly about our mission and our goals and our values and, and this idea of developing a better way to build for the industry So we were kind of migrating, not away from timber framing, it still was a core of, of what we have done and our skill, but including kind of many other things that were, you know, were and are important to our objectives.

So we, as we were timber framing, you know, we were adding SIPs to our frames, um, for, for many years.

That's all-

Would you guys call them stress-skin panels back then? It's-- I remember hearing that as a youth.

Stress-skin panels.

Yeah.

And a little tidbit about stress-skin panels or SIPs, um, I think the first one was tested in our workshop in Alstead, New Hampshire, um, because Amos Winter and I had glued it up [laughs] and tested it.

Then Amos went into the business and, um, that became Winter Panel, which was big, you know, many years ago.