000 - Renewing Homes Trailer

Ben: Welcome to Renewing Homes, the Residential Retrofit podcast. I'm your host, Hildebrandt. This episode ⁓ kind of giving an introduction into ⁓ on earth you're getting yourself into in listening to or watching this podcast ⁓ what the intent is behind it. ⁓ show explores how we can improve the existing housing stock across North America through retrofits, providing more comfortable, healthy, and energy-efficient homes. ⁓ Retrofits are complex. Houses are complex systems all on their own. Anybody who's explored the house as a system principle knows that with new construction. But when we're retrofitting homes, it makes it that much more complex when we're considering all the different aspects of a home, the different systems, the building envelope, but not just as a whole, the walls, the roof assemblies, the foundations, and the different components within that and the mechanical systems, ventilation, heating, cooling, hot water. How does all that work together and provide comfort? How does it provide efficient energy use? How does it provide healthy conditions for the occupants? How do we address durability, affordability, climate resilience? What I've seen in the industry is that conversations currently in the retrofit industry across North America, and I have more experience directly within Canada, but conversations are fragmented and siloed, not well connected. There's so many people that are passionate and knowledgeable in this industry, but there just isn't a venue to get the word out there. We have a conference here and a conference there. And people are sharing the information they have. But if you don't attend that conference, you're not really hearing about it. There's a webinar here, webinar there that if you know about great. And I guess this might be equivalent to another webinar floating out there or series of webinars for people to go and watch. But I also want to make it more accessible. So this is a video podcast available on YouTube, but also an audio podcast available for download. So you can access it, whichever format works best for you. And I'm gonna make sure the conversations are favorable enough that. If you're just listening, you're not missing out on anything as well. But let me take a step back and build a bit more of a foundation for what I'm hoping to achieve ⁓ with this podcast and a bit more about my background. I'm architectural technologist by training. I have almost 15 years now working in the building science space. And a lot of that ⁓ with the green building or sustainable building focus of that. In the past four or five years, a lot of my work, the vast majority of my work on the side, has been focused ⁓ residential retrofits and developing guidebooks, helping develop training programs, working to review and publish information to have publicly accessible case studies on residential retrofits. And in all this time, I've had many conversations, as I mentioned before, so many conversations I've been involved with ⁓ are Amazing conversations. I've walked away from a few wishing like, you know, I wish we could have recorded that to share it with others. So that's what's led to the creation of this podcast is to have great conversations, have them recorded and have a platform for sharing them so everyone can join in on those conversations, learn more about what's happening. We can break down some silos and do great work around retrofits collectively. So what can you expect in this podcast? My goal is to have the vast majority of the episodes of this podcast be those conversations that I've been blessed to be part of. But I want to curate more and bring in different perspectives together with people doing the work, contractors, building science professionals, energy advisors. Home energy raters in the United States, researchers, policymakers, people just passionate about retrofits, even homeowners that have done their own DIY retrofits or have gone through a good or maybe a bad retrofit experience with a contractor on their own home. What can we learn? What can we share? How can we bring those different experiences together? So the focus of this podcast is gonna be looking at real projects, real decisions, real challenges, what the retrofit industry is going through right now. How can we make it better from techniques on site, different ways to design and plan, go through the workflow of a retrofit project. But also I want to take a step back further even discuss planning and policy. What are the different programs that we can put in place? How can we make things better than what they are now to help boost and help grow this industry across North America? And one of the key things, the big conversational aspect of it too, is I want to change the focus from a lot of podcasts that are straight interview based where I would just be asking a person a series of questions, getting the response. We have the ⁓ banter throughout. Those episodes are great. Those types of podcasts are great. But I really want to look at the different perspectives we can bring on. So my goal on as many episodes as possible is to bring multiple guests on to discuss a single topic. And each of those guests having a different perspective that they can bring together and and have a good conversation about that's informative to everybody that is is viewing or listening to that episode of the podcast. So what I hope to be able to provide to you as a viewer or a listener of this podcast going forward ⁓ is better understanding of residential retrofits, how to make decisions in real projects, how they've been made, how you can make them on your projects. I hope to help you understand why things are working or not working in retrofits. My goal overall is to help you receive information that you can use to apply to your work to help you make better decisions and gain better insight. So this podcast is for people working across the residential retrofit industry, whether you're a contractor on site, whether you're a designer, energy advisor, home energy rater, engineer, architect, or if you're involved on the policy or research side, there are conversations and perspectives that I hope to bring to this podcast that will be very valuable to you and will help inform. your work and help you understand the different nuances and complexities of retrofits and understand what else is happening in the industry. So get ready for a lot of great conversations happening from across the residential retrofit industry, bringing different disciplines together, bringing different insights the view ⁓ and most people drawing on their actual experience and being willing to share that. With others. So in closing, I hope this has provided a great understanding to you of what to expect for this podcast. I hope you are as excited as I am about what's to come. So if you're curious, subscribe on whatever platform you're consuming this on, and I hope to see you in the coming episodes. Thank you.