 Good afternoon. Howard Wig for Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. We're going to insulate you with insolitional talk today. Very, very, very, very relevant. It gives me great pleasure to introduce my guest of the day, Sonny Lisserie. He's the products manager or something like that. For Ed Moore, Hawaii, they supply all kinds of building materials, especially for residential. So welcome to the program. Thanks, Sonny. Thank you. We're going to focus today on insulation and we're going to do a video soon, but first let me address what is on most people's mind, namely building products and fire resistance. I was in New York during the Marco Polo fire and it made headlines literally in New York City. That's how serious this thing was. And of course we have the whole debate about to sprinkle or not to sprinkle. But what about some of the products that we will be talking about and their resistance to fire? Yeah, there are a bunch of different types of insulation that can help with the spread of fire. Depending on a bunch of different variables, whether it comes to cost or value things like that. But what's commonly used in homes, residential and also commercial is normally three types. There's a fiberglass, stone wool or mineral wool and then different types of foam composite boards. Out of the three stone wool or rock wool, mineral wool is probably the best when it comes to fire. That product is made out of basalt rock. What's interesting is that there was a chemist that visited the big island a hundred years ago. He saw a volcanic eruption and when the wind hits the lava it created Peli's hair and he saw Peli's hair all over the place. So on rocks and trees and everything else. And somehow he had a eureka moment and he went back to Poland and played around in his little garage slash laboratory and that's how we have what's called stone wool by a company called Rock Soul today. So it's interesting that a hundred years and it kind of comes full circle back to the islands. But that's one of the best ways to help protect yourself from fire and as you know minutes, seconds count. So with that stone wool product it doesn't really do anything until it gets over 2,300 degrees. Is that Fahrenheit or Celsius? It's pretty darn hot. It's extremely hot. Whereas other products will fail quicker, the stone wool product lasts up to 2,300 degrees. So it definitely helps in the case that there was a fire like there was at the Markleburg. You know that's probably a good segue. You have a video from that company. Why don't we roll that video because it talks about insulation in the wider context of global warming and certainly saving money on the mainland heating and cooling. Here we're just concerned with cooling. The energy consumer. You believe in short showers and keeping the lights off when they're not needed. Water and electricity may take a bite out of your budget but they're not even close to being the worst offender. That job belongs to heating and cooling. In fact keeping your building comfortable all year round makes up two-thirds of the typical energy bill. Insulation is what keeps temperatures stable and when installed properly it can cut a building's utilities bill in half or save the average family $750 a year. And there are plenty of federal tax credits on top of that too. Insulation starts working as soon as it's in place and it lasts for the lifetime of the building. But saving money on utilities is just the beginning. By making your home energy efficient you're making an indelible contribution to economic development and job creation. When you lower your energy costs you're able to spend that money elsewhere in the economy thus creating demand and jobs. Every dollar spent on efficiency programs generates between four and eight dollars of GDP. In 2011 it was found that certain industries saved more than 14 billion dollars with energy efficiency improvements which in turns led to more investment and more job growth. Each million dollars reinvested creates up to 57 job years that's one job for one year for 57 years. So make the commitment to save money and help the economy. Use the best solution for energy efficiency. Insulate your home and building properly. For more information please visit roxall.com. Back again apologies for no sound on that but I think the graphics were self oh there was sound on the video okay so the this gets right to the cockles of my heart namely energy efficiency when we reduce energy use in the first place we keep those energy dollars in our economy so that we can or in this case the homeowners who's saving hundreds and hundreds of dollars per year could even be thousands of dollars per year is keeping that money in his or her pocket and is able to reinvest it into the economy. That's absolutely correct and I think you know one of the things especially here in Hawaii is that until very recently our homes were you know single wall construction homes that weren't meant to be air conditioned and the company I work for is an HVAC distributor so knowing that I think it's very important that we try to help as much as possible to find ways to help insulate those homes that are not adequately insulated because whether they have insulation or not the homeowner or consumers not thinking about that they just are thinking about trying to get cooler yeah so they put in an air condition into home that's not necessarily meant for it and there's a lot of wasted energy which equals dollars and especially here in Hawaii that's important to very important yeah yeah I liken any home or building that permits the sun's heat to come in through the roof the walls the windows and air conditions to trying to cool an oven an oven that's on with an ice cube right yeah it's really really counterproductive and then you get into the health and the comfort aspect of things too where I've heard about people feeling the heat emanating in from the walls or the roof and the cold air blasting so you've got heat coming from here cold air from there and it's really a an unpleasant experience and if you're trying to enjoy yourself or the kids are trying to do homework not good now that I'm thinking about it a full air conditioning system that's full on is probably making noise also right and and so not only does insulation help with the comfort of the home that's a keyword that they use all the time in those scenarios like you said you have the hot coming through the the cold air with the air condition and you're not quite comfortable right yeah it's a little off but not only does insulation help with the comfort of your home but it also helps with acoustics as well so as you mentioned air conditioning can make noise depending on where it's out in the home there's different types of air conditioning units right split systems like the Fujitsu that we represent or other central AC systems and things like that but insulation helps in a variety of different areas and again depending on the type of insulation whether it's fiberglass stone wool or foam everyone has its own case to be made on why you would use one the most popular here locally is fiberglass we represent a company called Knoff but there are other fiberglass companies that make the product mostly out of recycled glass and sand and the process that it goes through helps with insulation it has I think a melting point about 1200 degrees so to a certain extent it does help with fire as well but that versus a stone wool tends to be a little bit more economical because of the freight getting it here as you know you know we pay freight dollars on apples like everything else so um what what you can do with fiberglass is kind of really condense it oh you can oh I I thought you couldn't I thought it once it was condensed it would not re-expand no so with fiberglass insulation what happened to the factory um is that they have it packed in individual bags and then what they'll do is they'll have four or five bags packed into a bundle and all of that is kind of vacuum packed so that you can fit um about three times as much fiberglass with the same r-value or thickness as you can with a stone wool so stone wool you know does a much better job when it has to do with fire protection um you know multi resident units things like that but fiberglass does tend to come in a little bit cheaper because you know we can fit three times the amount in a standard shipping container and when you unwrap it does it indeed expand back to its original dimensions yes and actually there's a test that um kind of talks about that but it does have the ability to expand once it's out of the bag and in fact if you go and see it installed in a home or a commercial building what tends to happen once you kind of cut through half of that bag it automatically kind of um explodes out of the bag okay um and comes to the minimum thickness that you need for depending on the r-value that's called um yeah and another for centrally air conditioned homes be be they new or retrofitted the battery the home is insulated in this case we're just talking about the roof and the walls number one the smaller you can size your air conditioning system and number two you can turn it down instead of being on high or whatever the setting is you can turn it down to low absolutely yeah and also we have uh we're kind of hard to believe right now because we're in the middle of the summer and we're feeling it but we do have nice winters if your home is nicely air conditioned it's very possible to keep it naturally cool you know we have good window space in our homes and you can simply not have the air conditioning on during during the winter right yeah yeah i think it's one of those things um where a lot of people myself included you know driving in my my car coming out of here um especially today today is a little warm so you know you crank the ac up and feel comfortable um a lot of times what happens is people get used to to just turning on the air conditioning because they have it right but sometimes going to work in a you know early morning it's nice and cool you know i have to think about just leaving it off open the windows and you know not having to worry so much so it's interesting how that works but yeah the um there are companies out there that are building homes that are using so the third type of insulation i mentioned earlier uh foam insulation spray foam insulation does a really good job of getting in all the kind of nooks and crannies that are in the home that are in the wall that's in the ceiling and by using that type of spray foam insulation you can downsize the unit like you mentioned earlier um so out on the everplane gentry homes there's a really good job of doing that and they brought you know the air conditioning from what i believe was a four to five ton down to a ton ton and a half i mean that's a that's a considerable amount of energy savings yeah yeah but but you're you're toting the competition here well it's one of those things to where um you know we originally we had uh just fiber glass and stone wool we now have a line of uh spray foam insulation as well um and part of the reason for that was you know in in sales um you want to be able to get yeah uh what the customer wants yeah right you have kind of ideas uh on what you think might work best um but sometimes um and especially in the case with uh the guys out in gentry bob and the kibben you know they're uh on the forefront of kind of looking at the newest latest greatest thing and they were able to kind of um ask us to see if there was some other things out there and and we found the spray foam that works very well for them now we need to take a break but let's uh resume the conversation on on foam perfect over there so this is think tech hawaii howard wig cold green sunny lessery of ad more hvac back in a moment welcome again howard wig cold green my guest today is sunny lessery of ad more hvac and we are talking insulation who would have known that insulation could be so fascinating so we broke off the last conversation about talking about foam foam spray and i'll just relate my own experience i was out on a building site in the ever plains it was a few years ago and i remember it like it was yesterday the walls are open the exterior wall has been put in and then there are the studs or the beams going and the wall and the technician has this big bottle of something or rather in a nozzle and he sprays it in the cavity between the beams and it starts out just maybe a half inch thick and if the guy is really good say the beam is three and a half inches thick that foam will expand to exactly three and a half inches because he's got the touch right and he wins the approval of his supervisor because that foam is not cheap yes and you don't want to be spraying or cutting off excess foam right yeah as you pointed out foam does get to all the little nooks and crannies and it does do a better job of insulating the other side of the coin is that it is more expensive right i think um what's interesting is that with you know the different types of insulation um and especially uh you know up until recently insulation has been one of those things that the guy that's laid on the job or the guy that is uh low on the totem pole has to go deal with the itchy stuff um there's been a lot of advances in the technology um changing the binders for example so originally they would have patrolling base binders and the binder is the glue that holds the fibers together back in the day fiberglass uh was very tough to work with itchy dusty um probably not good for the health of the worker either and what happened recently is that they changed over to a biobase binder um where it's a derivative of corn uh with conoff insulation and others have followed conoffs uh i guess um stance to want to change that technology and uh what they didn't know was going to happen but what what did happen was it became much less itchy much less dusty and so much easier to work with but to your point with the spray foam insulation because it's able to kind of fit into the nooks and crannies it does a a much better job of keeping that envelope of the home tight and as you know with the different building codes uh iacc 2015 i think um has talked about doing blower door tests which is not something that we're used to here in hawaii and i think what's going to happen at least through kind of the initial stages is that um the contractors that are doing the installation of just typical fiberglass insulation they're going to um realize that it's not just trying to stuff things in the wall there's a certain means and methods that should be done um and just to give you an example if you have a one inch gap with fiberglass insulation you cut the r value in half so it's very important that it's done the right way spray foam allows you to do a really good job of keeping that envelope tight but it is um price prohibitive for most guys to get into yeah uh so fiberglass and stonewall is another good option it just has to be done right yeah there's a grade one grade two grade three of fiberglass installers right yeah yeah and i think the energy code used to prohibit grade one because grade one the worst i think or i think uh well i think grade one is is the best so grade three is probably what they and they permitted grade uh two and now i was just i just got back from an energy codes conference and for the next line of codes they're going to prohibit grade two also you must get that fiberglass in there right yeah yeah and i think it's important because you know when we're talking about energy savings right once you put up a home it's there yep and and it's not like you're going to be taking off the wall to redo the insulation so um i think it's important that we get the insulation done correctly um and it's good that you know with the new energy code coming on board it'll have some checks and balances to make sure that things are done and kept to a certain standard absolutely and time is leading away very rapidly why don't we run the second video on on fiberglass insulation and take a look at that increasing insulation in both residential commercial buildings a very effective way to lower co2 emissions and do it at a cost savings many industries are beginning to look at not only the products that they deliver to a consumer in this case delivering a product that can save energy but looking at what is required to make that material is there an opportunity by using recycled content to lower both the energy cost in producing the material and but almost equally importantly the amount of waste that you save we have increased our recycle content to levels we were told that were technically impossible over 50 percent recycled content from the streets of major metros delivered by train and minimize transportation impacts we're very proud of that every step to lower the amount of waste that we produce and lower the amount of energy associated with creating a product and then creating a product that saves energy has a sort of a win-win-win sort of opportunity associated with it so using recycled content in those cases where you save production energy and lower the landfill burden has this opportunity to save money and save energy in multiple ways ecos of binder technology that we've implemented actually improves our our emissions from our stacks from our manufacturing facilities dramatically it's a bio-based product it doesn't contain petroleum derivatives therefore it's uh it's renewable insulation is hugely important with regard to tackling climate change from the standpoint it's an existing technology we know it has a huge impact there are several independent studies that are shown that insulation is the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon talk about resource efficiency both the previous product and this made out of not maybe not 100 percent recycled material but making very very very good use of glass and is this product also bound with the the corn yeah so um bio-based they call it a bio-based product it's a derivative of corn and as you know corn syrup can be kind of sticky to the touch oh yes so um they were able to create this binder that is much more efficient it takes out the formaldehyde and the phenols and the artificial colors um acrylics and and just makes it much more sustainable um the other thing that's nice is that when you talk about you know resource efficiency and recycled content and things of that nature um it's important to kind of look at pre-consumer post-consumer absolutely and what's nice with uh canoff is they source most of their recycled content as post-consumer so what that means is bottles of beer or wine that would have normally gone into the landfill is used in their manufacturing process so they they actually got to a bottleneck where they cannot source enough a bottleneck a recycle a bottleneck so that brings up something very important as we all know we have a bottle recycling law here but as i understand that those bottles are just they're crushed and they're creating huge mountains of crushed glass somewhere out in the the evo planes why and you have a manufacturing plant in california why don't we just put it on a barge and ship it over there the answer is that the glass as i understand it is worth about twenty dollars a ton and shipping costs about twenty dollars a ton but if they've got a bottleneck of supply what the heck let's let's feed it yeah it couldn't it couldn't hurt asking right i mean i think that's a great idea and and just being able to use the resources um you know here in hawaii people uh like to have their pa paohana uh drink or two um so we probably have a decent amount of recycled uh oh glass sitting out there as i understand it we we've got mountains of the stuff i will definitely check on it and uh in the video i saw the workers working without masks and you'd generally associate fiberglass with the itchy and not so healthy stuff i mean that really is glass and there's really fibers there and i think those were the old days and you'd hear about the workers in the fiberglass plants getting you know some serious long issues but i think that comes under the broader heading of iaq indoor air quality yeah yeah and that's interesting that you um saw that on the video um a lot of people might not have kind of seen that um in the uh khanof shelbyville plant um which is out in indiana it's actually the the world's largest fiberglass manufacturing facility and what's interesting is that um not only do they not need uh respiratory um but they actually can work in short sleeve shirts and i believe they can go to uh to work with shorts as well and what change really was that binder system again with that petroleum-based binder it had a lot of the bad stuff in it right it's a petroleum-based binder um it's got formaldehyde and a lot of other stuff that you don't necessarily want around so changing to this bio-based binder that is a natural product has really changed things for the better and what's interesting is that it wasn't something that they were going after it just kind of happened as a good circumstance positive unintended consequence and then i would circle that back to iaq in better indoor air quality for the home glower and unfortunately on that cheery note we must bid fond adieu sunny lessory of edmore hvac thank you so much and who could have known that insulation would be so fascinating this is howard wig cold green sink tech hawaii see you next time