004 - How Curiosity Built a Retrofit Leader

And so, so I guess talking about Cooper and Four Elements, and so you'd done that, you had that Excel spreadsheet to kind of do your loading and kind of some work.

So did Cooper just come in to help with that CHBA certification or is he supporting you before? before they got into the net zero rentals labeling at CHBA.

And CHBA, they started looking into the net zero rentals, I believe, around 2020 in that range.

Yeah, that's about right.

I think when we did our

first...

Cooper, you know, do you remember when you first came and blordored my house?

I do.

I can tell you the date.

He's bringing up the file.

It was June 25th, 2020 was the day I tested your house.

Okay.

So it was several years later and it turns out that we were, you know, sub one and a half air changes at that point.

The EFIS really is a great product for that.

Like the liquid applied air barrier, super inspectable, hard to screw it up.

Yeah, and that's, I think that's one, to not go down too many rabbit trails, but that's one thing with retrofits, like one of the key things is improving the air tightness.

And when you're moving that air barrier to the surface of the sheeting system of the home or out, like somewhere outside of the exterior area, wall system and and not the interior poly or what is attempting to be a poly air vapor barrier on the inside like that's really hard to improve that air tightness layer where it is so we move it to the outside as part of retrofit work it it makes it work quite well so so i guess going down the four elements route a little bit so cooper verified that hey you did do great work Back in 2015, how was having Cooper and his team involved in your subsequent projects supported things? Were you still using that same Excel spreadsheet, Peter, or were you kind of passing some of that planning work off?

Yeah, the Excel spreadsheet has kind of gone the way of the wind, but Cooper helps us on most of the projects.

We kind of tried to sprinkle some projects around this last couple of years.

We've been so busy as they have, but they are really good and they've helped us on a bunch of projects.

And I think it kind of adds like a level of, you know, quality assurance that the homeowners are kind of getting what they expect and that, you know, it's not just me kind of spitting out numbers and eyeballing stuff.

There's, you know, theoretical math behind it.

Yeah, and I guess, so my mind is going in so many different ways right now.

So you did your house in 2015, and that was your first project where you're looking at significant energy improvements for a home.

And then it was after that, before CHBA got into net zero rentals, you started doing more, correct me where I'm wrong, but after that, you started offering that as a business service that you were doing.