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Fuel Switch founders, Adam Stenftenagel & Clay Dusel, give a private tour of Stephen Price’s Net Zero home. Learn about the emissions-free kitchen (and much improved indoor air quality), the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning systems, the roof-top solar panels powering the entire home, as well as the electric vehicle that plugs into the system!
Fuel Switch: A Carbon Savings source for a renewable energy home
Get a $50 discount on your initial home energy audit with the code: YONEARTH at GOFUELSWITCH.COM!
[thrive_link color=’green’ link=’https://yonearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Fuel-Switch-Infographic-Whitepaper-Report.pdf’ target=’_blank’ size=’big’ align=’aligncenter’]Download the Whitepaper Report[/thrive_link]
Transcript
(Automatically generated transcript for search engine optimization and reference purposes – grammatical and spelling errors may exist.)
Hi friends, welcome to the YonEarth Communities Stewardship and Sustainability Podcast
series.
Today we have such an exciting program for you.
I am here with my friend Adam Stenfinegal.
Hey Adam.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks for having me.
You bet.
Devoted the bulk of his professional career to helping stop runaway climate change,
specifically working with changes we can make in our own homes to reduce our carbon
footprints to reduce and eliminate our use of fossil fuels.
And Adam has co-founded several companies working on these efforts, including sustainably
built, snug home, snug pro.
And today we’re going to be talking about the work he’s doing with his colleagues and
partners at FuelSwitch.
And Adam, it’s such a pleasure to be with you today and I’m excited to have this conversation
with you.
Thanks me too.
So Adam, I want to ask you before we dive into some of the technical discussion and some
of the opportunities that we all have in our own homes, I just want to ask you, how did
you get into this work?
What drew you in this direction?
Well, long stories.
I’ll try to keep it somewhat concise.
But I’ve always known that I needed to be doing something good for the world throughout
my whole life.
And early on I ended up getting involved in political activism, just generally as an
activist and did a lot of work in the protest movement, but from a media perspective.
So we did a lot of media coverage and helped work on these media centers.
And we cropped Trump all over the world and we’d discover all kinds of struggle in social
justice, to environmental racism, so many different components of things that are going
on in genocide and, man, holy crap, there’s a lot of things that are really bad in the
world.
And so that was always an important piece that I was paying attention to.
But eventually, really decided that it’s great to be raising hell and screaming and
yelling.
And that’s really important.
But I just needed to see the change in my eyes, right?
And we’d actually be sure that I was doing something that affected change.
So I heard from my uncle, was really awesome, it was an inter-design firm in Chicago and
they do a lot of this green building stuff.
And he told me about this report from Edward Masria, this really architected these really
cool studies many years ago about the building industry and what its impact was on climate.
And they did this study that says that 48% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the United
States came from the building industry.
I’m like, wow, there’s one big thing that’s physical, that we can change, that I can
see the change on, I’m going to get involved in green building.
And so that took me down this huge path of all different kinds of circumstances that
came together and eventually started founding some businesses around that and went from
that.
Yeah.
So wonderful, wonderful.
So one of the things I love about the work you’re doing and the state of the world at
this very moment is that, yes, on the one hand, we have incredible challenges.
We are confronted by some of the most complex challenges we’ve ever faced as a species.
However, on the other hand, we have the tools and the expertise needed to resolve a lot
of these systemic challenges that we’re facing and with fuel switch, this is very much
at the core of what you guys are doing.
Can you just tell us a bit about the work you’re doing with fuel switch?
Sure.
So, the primary premise is that buildings, as I just said, use a ton of energy and have
a big carbon impact.
And that’s from the materials that we use to create the buildings, but mostly in the
energy that they consume over the course of their lifetime.
When you build a building, the idea is that building will last a hundred years.
So everything that you do when you do any kind of changes or especially new construction,
it’s likely going to be around for a hundred years.
And so that’s why it’s such a big impact in an important place to focus on.
So what we do with fuel switch is we come into the old homes.
We focus on existing homes and help those homes come up to these standards, modern day
building codes and things like that, but also go all the way to net zero.
So net zero, what is net zero?
So net zero energy means that the building will produce as much energy on site as it
consumes over the course of a year through renewables.
So the key components of that are one to use less energy, so energy efficiency.
So we insulate the walls, we insulate the attic, we’ll condition your crawl space or
do all the different kinds of insulation and air sealing in the house.
So that’s the number one piece and that brings the need for heat and the need for cooling
way low.
It uses that mean for energy dramatically.
The second thing we do is we eliminate the natural gas in your house because natural
gas is a fossil fuel as much as they say.
It’s a clean fuel.
It’s not.
The only way of arguments that we can give is to why we need to get rid of natural gas
from being burned in our homes.
And it’s a fossil fuel and that means we’re producing carbon dioxide and that is causing
climate change.
So we’ve got to stop burning all fossil fuels.
So natural gas, we get rid of it.
Most people heat their homes through their spacing, the furnaces, the boilers, et cetera
with natural gas as well as their water heat.
We transform all of that.
We take out that equipment and we replace it with air source heat pumps for sometimes
geothermal.
And these systems now produce all that heat and you get the added benefit of cooling
in a place like Colorado where most people didn’t have cooling before.
Now we need it.
Thanks to climate change.
So it’s one of those things.
We can kill a lot of birds with one stone there.
So we’re electrifying, we’re insulating.
We’re then taking another big step and helping people get into electric vehicles.
Because that’s another massive energy use outside of that building industry space.
But the effects of that are huge.
And the economics around electric vehicles are really amazing, especially if you can
then power them with rooftop solar.
So that’s the fourth piece of our puzzle as we put enough solar on the roof to cover
all of those needs to cover the air source heat pumps, to cover your plug loads, to cover
all the electrical requirements.
It does your space heating, it does your water heating, and it does your cooling.
And that roof that solar system powers all of it.
Beautiful.
So at the course of the entire year your utility bill is ideally zero.
Yes.
So the four main elements of this sort of transformation and fuel switch would be to
reduce the load with the wrapping, the insulation, the ceiling to switch out basically your
appliances that are dealing with heating and cooling of air and water and so forth.
The PV, or excuse me, the rooftop PV, the electric generation, utilizing this incredibly
wonderful nuclear generator, we all have access to, called the Sun, right, 163,000 terawatts
of energy continually streaming onto our planet since the beginning of the human race and
long before that, there’s such an abundance of energy we can all be harvesting.
And so that harvesting with rooftop solar is a third and then the fourth.
Is that the electric vehicle?
Is that the fourth in the puzzle?
Wonderful.
And I was struck by this graphic that I know you guys have on your Facebook page, which
is fuel switch on the Facebook app.
And on here there’s a graphic, we’ll show it in our show notes.
But I am so struck that when we’re talking about things we can do at the individual
and household level, some of the standards that we grew up with like recycling are yes
important to do, but ultimately have really minuscule impact compared to the impact we
can have when we do the fuel switch that you’re describing.
And getting into electrical vehicles is another one that is potent and one of the things
I’m struck by as I still own and drive a fossil fuel, combusting vehicle, is that not
only am I continually paying for the fuel, but also for all of the fluids and lubricants
that are needed in that more complex and we could say less efficient in a sense more
primitive way of delivering power to the four wheels.
And boy, that gives expensive at times as well just that ongoing maintenance of that internal
combustion engine.
Yeah, and my favorite data point on that is an internal combustion engine has something
like 2,000 moving parts, an electric vehicle has 20.
So imagine the amount of maintenance and the costs that it is to maintain that gasoline
car, the internal combustion engine, it’s a totally different world with electric vehicles
and they’re really cool.
Yeah, it’s happening.
I love it.
Well, and I’m really excited that today we’re here in the home of Steve and Price, one
of your clients and friends and what we’re going to be able to do is take a tour with your
colleague Clay Doosel and look at some of the different components and technologies and
techniques that you guys have incorporated in this home, in this remodel project.
So hang tight will be getting to that tour that’s going to be a lot of fun.
And I think before we go there, one of the things I want to circle back on Adam is the
element of the indoor air quality as it relates to these issues and these opportunities.
Because I think one of the things that I know a lot of my friends and family may not realize
is that this actually making this fuel switch delivers incredible benefits that go actually
even beyond reducing our carbon footprint as it relates to climate change.
And some of these additional benefits are extraordinarily important in terms of our own
health and well being that of our kids and our pets and so forth.
So can you just tell us a little more about that?
Yeah, absolutely.
So we’ll come back to the economic side of things because that’s another, that’s kind
of icing on the cake as I like to put it.
But the indoor air quality is a huge piece that I learned many years ago in the green building
space.
The materials that we use in our home, off gas and put all kinds of toxic pollutants into
the air.
If you’re in an older home and existing home, we haven’t done much of that in a while.
It’s not as big a deal because you’ve already inhaled all that and it’s already, you know,
off gas, right?
But so there’s lots of things that we can do around that.
However, one of the big, big pieces that causes indoor air quality problems is cooking
with the gas cooktop.
And you know, people are like, oh, but I love my gas cooktop, the greatest things ever.
And I’m like, that’s fine.
It feels switch.
We don’t make you get rid of your gas cooktop.
Although it is really cool to cap a gas line and say, by buy utility, I don’t need gas
anymore.
We’re out of here.
So we’ve got plenty of customers who’ve done that.
But, but folks can keep their natural gas ranges if they do.
However, I’m going to give you a data point that’s really fascinating and Clay can talk
about this in a little bit.
He’s going to do this tour.
But Clay put in a food box.
We’ve got this, it’s an indoor air quality monitor.
What the heck is a food box?
It’s this little box that’s in your mantle of your house or whatever, just put it out
in the middle of your house.
And it hooks up to your cell phone and it tells you what the quality of your air is and
measures all different kinds of pollutants that are bad for your health.
And Clay can be sitting in his office looking at this phone and he can know when his kids
or his wife goes and puts on the tea kettle on the gas stove.
And immediately, just turning on that gas stove enough to boil some water, takes the indoor
air quality of his house above EPA’s recommended levels for health.
Wow.
That’s just good.
A sounding tea, right?
Yeah.
So we know that burning natural gas is just not a good thing.
We don’t need it.
There’s incredible technologies like Stephen has here.
We’ll show that when the tour in a minute, an induction cooktop.
This thing can boil a kettle of the huge kettle of water in two minutes.
Oh my God.
It’s so powerful and it’s very detailed control.
Most people who love to cook, when they use an induction cooktop, they’ll never go back
to gas.
So it’s just a neat feature and you get all these benefits of indoor air quality.
So we’re not at all talking about the old electric resistive coils that some of us
maybe remember growing up or what have you.
We’re talking about something that is the cutting edge really provides as much or greater
control as gas when we’re preparing meals for friends and loved ones and all that.
Absolutely.
That’s great.
I think with the indoor air quality thing, it’s particularly important as we know a lot
of research is showing that increased rates of childhood asthma and other respiratory
and health issues related to pollutants in our indoor air, the air in our homes, the
air in our offices, daycares and so on, is really impacting society in a big way.
And my gosh, this opportunity to kind of clean it up at home is really what a powerful
statement that becomes in terms of what we’re valuing as people.
That’s right.
And we don’t have to burn fossil fuels, you know.
It was a great invention.
It helped our economy.
It helped us grow.
It helped us do really neat things in society, but now we know the consequences and it’s
time to switch because we don’t need it.
It’s time to switch, indeed.
Well, I just want to mention a couple things, Adam, for our audience.
One is if you’re in the Metro Denver area, the front range of Colorado, fuel switch is providing
services ranging from the beginning energy audits of your home all the way through to the
design, looking at the financial modeling and helping with the installation of all these
different technologies and tools.
And for folks who would like to engage with fuel switch to get your initial energy audit
done, you can mention the Y Honors community podcast and get a $50 discount on that initial
energy audit.
And that’s a wonderful value.
Thank you for sharing that with us.
So outside of the Metro Denver area, we know that fuel switch is looking for additional
partners, contractors and others who do this kind of work in other communities.
And for folks who would like to engage with Adam and Clay on that front, hello at gofuelswitch.com
is a great way to connect in.
Again, I want to mention that on Facebook, you’ve got fuel switch, easy to find there.
There’s some great graphics there.
And I would like to mention as well that for any of you out there who would like to check
out any of our electronic or audiobook products at Y on Earth, use the code podcast to get
a discount on those as well.
So I just, I want to circle back Adam to the context.
Here we are.
Our world is changing.
The climate is destabilizing and that’s not a debate.
That’s happening.
We face incredible challenges with that reality.
And there are so many things right at our fingertips we can be doing in our own homes,
in our communities.
I want to ask you how, how does it feel when you’re waking up every day, getting
ready to work, and you know that A, on the one hand, you have so much to offer folks
to help mitigate these challenges that we’re facing.
And on the other hand, these are big, big, big challenges.
What’s that like for you?
It’s daunting, right?
Not for sure, but it is the reason I wake up every morning.
It is my purpose.
So all the businesses that I’m involved in, we’re really working hard to save carbon in
everything that we do.
And some of the businesses we can actually track the savings and we can tally up the numbers.
And it’s really fun to be like, wow, this business just saved 500,000 metric tons of carbon
through what we were doing.
So those types of things are like, okay, take a deep breath.
You know, Trump might screw up this country and by taking this out of the Paris Accords
and the entire world by doing this, but what’s really amazing is that people are stepping
up.
So a great example of that is through the US Sustainability Directors Network.
This, you know, when Trump said, we’re out of the Paris Climate Accords, we don’t care
about climate, a group of cities representing 40% of the nation’s population stepped up
and said, we’re going to do the Paris Climate Accords, and we’re going to pre-desivate,
and we’re going to meet those goals.
So we can do this.
So government governments are ready, the people want it.
There’s another study that I just read from Vox just recently that was really fascinating
about what do consumers want, and it was about the utility industry and how to do consumers
care about renewable energy, 75% of US utility bill payers said that they want their electricity
to be 100% renewable.
Yes.
75%.
51% of those people said they would gladly pay a 30% premium to get it.
Wow.
That’s big.
Things are changing.
People want this stuff.
They get it.
We know it.
And regardless of what our federal government is doing, the cities, the states, and the utilities
are starting to step up and say, okay, we can do this.
Yes.
This is so powerful.
You know, it strikes me that if you look around in the media currently, there’s not that
much.
You’re going to find 75% of Americans agreeing on apparently.
And we have so many friends in the Green Faith community, for example, who have a variety
of different political persuasions, but this very issue is galvanizing us throughout society.
And to me, it’s one of the greatest sources of hope being out there in various communities
seeing that people from a variety of backgrounds and walks are engaged in this issue and engaging
in what can be done.
And I think that with a resource like what you guys are providing through fuel switch,
it just puts so many more tools in the tool chest of us, folks, and communities all over.
And I’m so excited to be able to share this with our audience and really encourage the
audience to check out fuel switch, get involved, get engaged, get that energy audit done for
your home, and it’s amazing how much change we can make so quickly with these approaches.
That’s right.
So we’re probably about ready to do a tour, Adam.
Is there anything before we get to kind of look around the house here that you want
to make sure to mention?
I think that’s really it.
It’s going to be fun to walk through Steven’s house and see a lot of the different pieces
that we’ve put together here.
There’s lots of new technology that’s out there.
This isn’t your father’s house, mobile anymore.
The reason we’re able to do fuel switching on existing homes and make it cost effective
today with today’s technologies is because of all this new stuff that’s come out in recent
days, as well as the incredibly regularly decreasing price of solar.
Right.
Amazing.
So we’re dropping the prices and so all of this is now well affordable for all of us.
One of the things that I discovered doing research when I was writing Why on Earth is that
our fossil energy prices generally are bouncing along a band of price ranges that behave like
commodities.
They are commodities, right?
Meanwhile, our renewable energy technologies which are harvesting a virtually limitless
source of energy from the sun are following a very different price behavior, a price curve
similar to Moore’s law as it relates to computing technology.
We know that with computing technology, for example, we get to double the capacity and
speed of processors at half the price every 18 months or so.
That’s been the experience over several decades.
There’s a very similar pricing dynamic occurring with solar in particular now in well over
30 states in the United States.
For example, it is cheaper to install, this is at utility scale, to install renewable generating
capacity than it is to install the fossil generating capacity.
This is just to me another example of what an amazingly hopeful moment we’re in right
now and not that dynamic really just kicked in in the last couple of years.
We face these big challenges, but we actually have so many solutions right at our fingertips.
Cool.
Should we give folks a tour?
All right.
Sounds good.
Friends, if you’re listening to the podcast, maybe you’re driving in your electric vehicle
or in the comfort of your renewable powered home, we’re going to now switch and go on
a tour here of Steven’s home.
And so just want to invite you that if you’re engaging right now through audio and you would
like to check out the tour, you can go to yonder.org, the podcast page, and get to the video
portion of this and join us in this tour today.
Friends, so we’re getting ready now to go on the tour of Steven Price’s home.
And Clay Ducel is going to lead us through this tour.
Clay, you were the brains behind a lot of the renovations and retrofits that were done
here in Steven’s home.
Tell us just what that framework is and how you kind of approached working with Steven
on this project.
Well, that’s great.
Thanks.
You know, we had a neat opportunity here.
Steven bought a house that was in bad need of a full renovation.
This house was pretty rough.
So Steven was in a position where he had to upgrade this house.
He needed new windows.
He needed new heating cooling system.
He needed new hot water heating.
And we said, let’s think about doing this a little bit differently.
Make your house more comfortable and save you a lot of money in the long term.
So he listened to our advice and we’ve got a really good house now.
So maybe Steven, you can tell us from the standpoint of being a homeowner and acquiring a project
house.
What was it about the work that Clay and Adam do with fuel switch that compelled you to
work with them on the project?
Well, I know Adam personally before and we had sat down and talked about it and Clay
hit on the big point, which is I had to do everything.
But when you sit around and you think about the economics of it, we’re talking about
Delta’s, a normal standard historical furnace that people put in versus an air source heat
pump.
It’s not the focus of the air source heat pump.
It’s what’s that Delta.
And that’s what I had to keep coming back to and with all being electric and then having
the solar, there’s a payback period.
So from an economic standpoint, it made a lot of sense.
And then from doing what’s right for the world standpoint, I believe it made a lot of sense
so because I do believe in climate change and I believe that every little bit helps
especially.
I’m one house out of thousands and thousands in the area, but you guys start somewhere.
And these guys were a conduit to allowing me to open my eyes to see that I could be one
of the first to do that net energy neutral and start that process.
Well, tell you, I want to first of all thank you for inviting us into your home and sharing
this with our community and our audience.
And I’m really struck.
I can just tell talking with you that what you’ve been able to do here, what you’ve been
able to create here feels wonderful.
And it’s a great space to be inside of.
It’s so comfortable.
And I’m curious, you were barefoot earlier when we got here.
It’s obviously a very comfortable space.
Can you just share with us a little bit about that experience you have?
Yeah, I mean, there’s the physical comfort, obviously, of this stuff works.
The technology’s there.
And when it’s cold out, I can be warm in here and when it’s warm out, I got air conditioning
in here that I didn’t think I was going to get through the air source heat pump.
But it does.
There’s that physical feeling.
But there’s also, at my other house where I used to live, I had a furnace.
And every time I’d walk into the winter and be warm, it maybe it’s me, but I had a little
bit of a guilt.
I’m like, because I know why it’s hot.
It doesn’t burn any combustion.
I’ve got combustion.
I have a fossil fuel that are burning.
That’s not good for the environment.
I don’t have that guilt here as much at all.
I come in and it’s like, it’s hot.
It’s like, oh yeah, all that solar energy during the day that I collected is now heating
my house at night so I can sit down and watch it on movie.
I love this.
So in a sense, we could say that with fuel switch, you too can feel good about feeling good.
Right?
It’s a fabulous change.
The way I use energy, the solar tubes I was talking about, they have LED lights.
And I don’t turn the lights on in those rooms at night because these night lights are bright
and they’re not powered each day.
They charge back up.
When I make it to silent to make for dinner, a lot of times I’m like, ah, pasta, I got
to boil the water and it’s going to take so long and I’m like, oh wait, it’s induction.
It’s like a microwave.
The water is going to boil that quick and I’m going to be eating faster than I can make
a sandwich, but I’m going to be making pasta.
I mean, it changes the way I think and the way I use it.
That’s fabulous.
That’s fabulous.
And Clay, I want to ask you, before we go on this tour and I understand we’re going
to be getting down in the crawl space underneath, I want to share with us what’s your background
and how did you get to where you’re at now today helping folks make the fuel switch?
That’s great.
Thanks.
My background is construction.
I’ve been a general contractor for years doing high-end home remodels, kitchens, bathrooms,
new construction.
I always was trying to emphasize energy efficiency in all of those projects, but again, I realize
that I think there’s something more that we can do.
And when we started this company, I connected with Adam and we decided to launch this company
and everything did very well together.
Adam has the experience with building science, with software development, with energy modeling
and I’ve actually been in the trenches pulling building permits and crawling on roofs and
building things.
It was a real fun symbiosis.
So now we’re really focused on getting people off of fossil fuels and by having a general
contractor type experience, we can look at the whole house as a system rather than the
individual components and come up with the right solution for each house.
And I got to tell you, it’s really fun and it feels really good.
That’s fabulous.
That’s fabulous.
So I guess we’re going outside first, right?
Let’s go underneath the house.
That’s where it all happens.
That sounds fun.
All right.
Great.
Thanks.
All right.
So Clay, here we are, we’re about to go down into the crawl space and there’s a lot of
magic happening down there that wouldn’t otherwise be obvious.
You know, it’s a part of the house that a lot of people don’t think about very much,
but it’s actually really important for energy and for comfort.
So let me show you what we did here.
Great.
Good thing I’m doing some yoga.
Yeah.
So Clay, here we are under the house in the crawl space and what are we looking at?
Well, again, what Adam was saying earlier, the first step is energy efficiency, which
we talk about insulation and air sealing.
There are two different things.
They work very well together.
The insulation we like to say is like a wool sweater, keeps you nice and warm, but if
you’re outside with the wool sweater and the wind blows, you’re going to feel cold.
Air sealing would be like that windbreaker that goes over the top of your wool sweater.
And if you wearing both the windbreaker and the wool sweater, you’re going to feel warm,
same thing with your house.
That makes a ton of sense.
So, crawl spaces are generally quite leaky, especially in older houses.
So what we’ve done here is we’ve wrapped the whole perimeter of the crawl space with a
foil-based insulation that seals air from getting in and out as well as has a thermal barrier
to it with the insulation.
We’ve also used quite a bit of expanding foam to seal any holes in the house.
And then what we’ve done down here is we’ve got a vapor barrier, a vapor and moisture barrier
on the floor.
In addition to making this space as pleasant as a crawl space to be, works to keep moisture
from the ground from getting into the space, keeping this dry, keeping mold down.
And in Colorado, radon is a big issue.
So in this house, we have a radon mitigation system that is drawing air from underneath
the barrier to remove radon and prevent radon from getting into the house.
Wow.
That’s great.
So with a few very simple pieces of technology here, you’re accomplishing quite a lot.
It’s really quite simple.
We call this the low-hanging fruit.
We apply these same concepts to the walls and the attic above, not as easy to show in
a video podcast, but it works great.
And this space stays warm now, and that keeps the floors of stairs warm.
So when Steven gets out of bed in the morning with his bare feet, he’s going to be stepping
on to much warmer floors than this house used to have before all this work was done.
Which, like he was saying earlier, is just really pleasant.
Right, yeah, we know there’s a sort of psychosomatic aspect to our experience of comfort in
a home, and that the temperature of the floor is actually a huge driver of that, isn’t it?
It’s a big driver, and a lot of people wake up and feel cold feet, and they might turn
their thermostat up.
Right, right, right.
But really, they just need to seal and condition their crawl space.
Oh, it’s so easy.
Love it.
Yeah.
Cool.
Thanks, Clay.
So Clay, here we are in the kitchen now, and I see there are some interesting appliances
tell us what’s going on.
That’s great.
Well, for the heart of the heating and cooling system for a house like this, we have a
duckless mini split system.
This is an air source heat pump.
There’s a condenser that sits outside that extracts heat from the air.
I’ll show you that in a little bit.
And basically, with this lower remote control, it provides all the heating and cooling for
the house.
Wow.
They’re extremely effective.
I’ll stary the details and the technology, but they keep the heat really even throughout
the house.
Another feature here that’s not very interesting to look at, but it’s fascinating, is what we
have an energy recovery ventilator.
So we are extracting air from this house constantly and bringing in fresh air from the outside
and conditioning it, and it comes in right here.
And so that’s bringing fresh outdoor air in.
Again, the concept of indoor air quality by constantly changing the air in the side of
your house in a controlled way.
You can have Stephen breathing fresh, clean air all the time.
Yeah.
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
Another fun thing in this kitchen is an induction stove top.
And I understand Stephen’s quite a cook, is that right?
Yes.
Stephen’s not your average guy.
Stephen likes to cook.
He does a job.
Yeah.
Working with Stephen for a long time, I can verify for this.
He’s always eating a good lunch.
Cool.
And he likes it.
People love it.
Aesthetically, they’re really clean, they’re easy to clean, and people, once they make
the switch from gas, really tend to love these induction cooktops.
In fact, some of the really high-end cooks, the fancy cooks who are, you know, on TV,
are moving towards induction stoves off of gas because of the added level of control.
Oh, that’s fascinating.
You get even more control this way.
That’s what they tell.
Beautiful.
Beautiful.
All right.
So where are we headed now?
Let me show you the water here.
Great.
That’s the thing that people don’t think about a whole lot, but it’s really important.
Yes, it is.
For this house, we’re using a product called Sandan.
It’s a Japanese product.
It’s been around for a long time.
It’s a super high-efficiency, air-source heat pump water heater.
In this case, the heat pump actually sits outside.
I’ll show you that in just a second.
But this is a tank, just like any other tank, that stores hot water.
It’s oversized.
For this house, we are actually using it for some supplemental inflow heating in this
particular case because we have an opportunity to heat some floors with this water.
I’ll show you the heat pump that’s outside.
But also in this room, we have a solitude.
It’s pretty natural lighting.
There’s no artificial lighting.
There’s no lights on in this room, and it’s just a laundry room.
And otherwise, it would be fairly dark, but this is bringing in a great amount of light
during the day.
That’s beautiful.
It’s a nice quality of light, too.
Come on.
Let me show you the outside stuff.
All right, Clay.
So it looks like we’ve got several components here on the wall.
We do.
We do.
So again, custom to each house.
There were some space constraints here, Stephen wants to use this area to park a vehicle.
So we didn’t want to keep anything down low, so we lifted everything up high.
The air source heat pump water heater that I was showing you before, the actual condenser
is sits right up there.
Again, that extracts heat from the surrounding air and puts it into the hot water.
That’s amazing.
In this case, we have a west facing to catch that late afternoon sun, so the area around
here is nice and warm.
Yeah.
We lifted it up high, so you can still park a car here.
Yep.
The other component here that makes the whole thing work is the solar photovoltaic system.
Okay, so this is dealing with the energy that’s being captured on the roof by the solar
panels, is that right?
That’s exactly right.
So the solar panels produce electricity in DC power, like a battery.
That’s direct current.
Direct current.
So this is what’s called an inverter, so it comes to this point here and gets inverted
to AC.
So that’s the alternating current most of our household appliances and phones and everything
you’re looking to run out.
The standard household plug will be alternating current, so it inverts it to that.
And then this is where it interacts with the utility power that comes in.
And when there’s excess power being generated, it is sent back to the grid, and this meter
is keeping track of the dollars and cents of what’s going where.
And the power that is needed inside the house, rather than coming from the grid, will come
straight from the solar panels and power everything with the sun.
Wow, that’s so beautiful.
So there are times when there’s more energy being produced by this home than is being used.
And so it’s actually creating a surplus that others in the community can use.
That’s exactly right.
The power will go out here through this meter.
The utility company is effectively buying it from Stephen and then selling it back to him
at night is how the net metering concept works.
Okay, that’s fabulous.
Well great.
And where do we go next?
What are we looking at next?
Let me show you the air source heat pump outside for the mini-split.
And one more thing I’m really excited to show you.
Okay, super.
So Clay, now we’re on the other side of the house and I see a couple of additional components
here, what’s going on?
That’s right.
So this is the condenser for the mini-split heat pump that I was showing you in the kitchen.
And this is the unit that is extracting heat from the air and putting it into the house.
It looks like a basic air conditioner, but it does heating and cooling.
And they work great.
This technology has actually been around for a long time.
So it’s not brand new technology.
It just keeps getting better.
And my favorite part of this house is again visually not that interesting.
But the utility company has put a lock on Stephen’s gas meter.
This is where the gas will normally come into the house.
Well, Stephen doesn’t use any gas in his house.
So they have put a lock on this meter.
These dials never spin and he doesn’t pay for any gas or any monthly service fees that
are associated with having a gas connection.
Oh, that’s fabulous.
His connection to fossil fuels has been cut off.
Oh, that’s wonderful.
Stuck in time.
These dials aren’t they?
So Clay, we’ve seen several different components and I understand each of these is in the neighborhood
of a few thousand dollars to several thousand dollars.
Seems like that could be really expensive if somebody were paying out a pocket right
away for that.
But I understand that’s not necessarily what needs to happen.
Well, that’s true.
That’s a great point.
Yes, like a lot of efficiency and renewable energy, there’s a high upfront cost and a very
low long-term cost.
What’s amazing is that there’s a lot of really innovative financing packages out there
for these sorts of improvements.
Stephen took advantage of quite a few of them.
Local incentives, federal incentives, loan programs where he was able to finance these
components outside of his traditional remodel and allowing him more capital to do the remodel
itself or the other things like flooring and lighting and this sort of things.
But also, those financing packages aren’t necessarily available for conventional fossil fuel
powered equipment.
So it really allowed him to access a lot more money to do this whole project and really
keep his monthly expenses really low and not have to do a large initial cash outlay.
Because most of us don’t have thousands of dollars just sitting in the bank that you
can spend.
But we’re already spending money every month on utilities so rather than giving the money
to the utilities, we can own our own systems and pay off our loans and come out ahead on
the whole deal.
Yeah, that’s so beautiful.
And I understand that in terms of thinking about your ongoing monthly expenditures, yes,
you may have some more debt to service if that’s how you finance the install on these
components.
But at the same time, your operating costs generally have declined substantially, especially
in this case to zero when it comes to gas, right?
Your monthly utilities to various utility suppliers are going to be much lower in this kind
of a scenario.
Drastically reduced, in this case, they’re going to get zero.
Something that people forget is that we are in debt to the power company.
We need to write them a check every month just to keep our house going.
Electricity, gas, gasoline, those are bills that we have no matter what.
So rather than paying somebody else every month before to pay off our own debt and pay off
our own debt and own our system.
Love it.
That’s so beautiful.
Well, I am just thrilled that we have the opportunity to see all of this and thank you
for walking us through this.
You know, I gather that with some of the different incentive and rebate programs out there, some
of the different loan packages out there that can really vary state-to-state municipality
to municipality utility to utility.
And it seems to me that’s just another additional good reason to engage with a company like yours
fuel switch to help navigate that for optimal benefit and efficiency in that entire process.
That’s a really good point.
Keeping track of what is available for rebates, sometimes they vary monthly, quarterly.
It’s actually quite a task for us to stay on top of it.
We have good partners with the city, the Boulder here that helps us keep track of all of that.
And yeah, you know, having those rebates can really help tip the scales towards some of
these renewable energy technologies.
And in a lot of cases, make them cost neutral plus savings.
Yeah.
It ends up being a really good deal for a lot of people.
That’s wonderful.
Thanks, Clay.
So I know we’ve got something else to check out now.
What is it?
I want to show you the solar panels and an electric car.
Cool.
All right.
Okay, so Clay, as Adam was explaining earlier with the fuel switch framework, we basically
have four major steps to take.
One is the installation and ceiling.
That’s the efficiency part.
We saw that down in the crawl space.
The second is the renewable heating and cooling.
We just saw a lot of the different appliances that provide those services.
The third is the energy generation, the solar that we see on the rooftop here.
That’s correct.
And the fourth is integrating an electric vehicle.
So right now we have next to us and behind us two of the four pieces of the strategy.
That’s correct.
Right here is a Nissan Leaf.
An electric vehicle that’s been around for quite a few years has a good solid track record.
Not incredibly expensive.
Electric vehicles can be used by everybody.
If you want to buy a Tesla, go for it.
Have fun.
They’re awesome vehicles, but you don’t have to spend that kind of money to drive an electric
car.
And with solar panels on and roof, you can have a car that runs off sunshine.
And driving this car every day and knowing that it’s powered by sunshine really feels
good.
I absolutely love this.
And here we are standing in the sun.
I feel it feels good.
That local star of ours is putting off more energy than we need by a long shot.
I recently came across some information that suggests that the entire biosphere, primarily
in the form of photosynthesis, the plants converting that energy into sugars and so forth,
is utilizing only about 1% of that solar radiation.
Our entire human system, the entire economy, is utilizing something in the range of one-ten
thousandth of what the sun puts off.
Of course, a lot of that up until now has been in the form of fossil fuels.
And it’s just so exciting to me, Clay, to know that with professionals like yourself and
so many others doing incredible work around the world, we are literally in the process
of transforming to a solar-based society and economy in my gosh what an exciting time
to be doing that.
It’s really fun.
And what’s amazing is that this technology, electric vehicles, solar, rooftop solar,
has been around for a while.
It’s proven.
We don’t have to wait for some new technology to come in.
We can do it today.
We can do it economically.
We can power your house and your vehicle with the sun.
And it works.
And it’s really nice to do.
Absolutely.
Well, Clay, hey, thanks so much.
I’m so glad you could join us on the podcast.
And just to remind our viewers and audience that they can find fuel switch on Facebook,
fuel switch is on Facebook under that name.
And if folks would like to engage with fuel switch, mention the Why On Earth Community
Podcast and you’ll get a discount on your initial home energy audit, a great savings.
Thank you so much for providing that.
That’s available to our friends and colleagues in the Metro Denver area.
And as you guys are expanding your reach, networking with other professionals, contractors,
et cetera, in other municipalities around the country, I understand that you’re in
the process of connecting with others to help expand that network.
And so I want to encourage the contractors and professionals to get in touch with Clay
or Adam on that front.
And my gosh, it’s such an exciting time knowing we have these solutions right at our fingertips.
And Clay, thanks so much for the work you’re doing.
Thank you.
Thank you very much for having us.
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