 Good afternoon, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Sink Tech, Hawaii. Have I got an unusual and entrepreneurial guest for us today? This is Frank Rogers, president of the Cool Roof Store. If you are a habitue of baritannia, you have seen his store with these funny-looking, teeny little homes, one on the ground, one up on a stage. And that is him, and there's all kinds of implication. Of course, we're going to talk about the uses of a tiny home, all kinds of uses, and the construction of the home are near and dear to my heart, because they work as effectively as insulation in retarding the heat, getting into the space. But all it is is three-quarters ply with some stuff on the exterior and some stuff on the interior. Very fascinating stuff. So welcome to the show, Frank. Really pleasure to see you. And, you know, we've got so many slides, so much material. Why don't we just jump right in and show the first slide, and you can just take it away here. Okay, well, we'll do it. And again, thank you, Howard, so much for having me on the program. I really appreciate it. If you've gone down Barrett Tanya Street, you've probably seen us a couple of times at our store. And if you look up on the screen there, we have two tiny houses that are currently models. The one on the top floor, right above the Cool Roots store sign, which is where our building is, was decorated to kind of be kind of an upscale, you know, Kahala type of look with our tiny house. And it has a lot of faux finishes on it, so you can have whatever kind of roof you really want to have on it. You can have a tile roof or a shingle roof. And you can kind of see a couple different viewpoints. The lower house is kind of what I call the Kalapana one, because it's kind of arising from the ashes. And so we just decorated it different, and you'll see when we get down to the interior that the one on the bottom has a second-story loft, which you can either use for sleeping or for storage. Let's go to the second slide, because this slide has a story behind it. What in the world is going on here? So what motivated me to get in this market was my brother had done some container housing, and he'd been on and done some projects for the city and the state, and also consulted a little bit with the Sand Island project, you know? Yeah. And that was with container-type housing, Matson-type container housing. And for me, I found that it was very confining with the container housing. There were a lot of problems with it. There's a lot of strength with it too, and then my brother does sell a lot of them. So I started off from the ground, from the ground zero and decided, if I build a structure that was super durable, could be erected quickly, could be deconstructed quickly, could last over 30 years with minimal maintenance, and I didn't have to worry about the building department telling me what to do. How could I do that? And by the way, I'm not to compare myself at all to this, but I hear that Elon Musk, when he designs whatever, he uses a similar thing where he just says all rules are out, and then you decide it the way you want it to. So we wanted to be super strong, could be used even for the Coast Guard, the military emergency housing could be collapsed. And so the more I thought about it, the more I really simplified the construction of it so that we just ended up with a very simple but durable construction lightweight and could be easy to use. Why don't we go to the third slide to illustrate this. Wow, how portable can you get? That's the house. Yeah, I think that's the latest one we just cut, and that's all the sheets that you need to do all the roof walls, floors, and decks of the entire house. Now there's a aluminum framework which we'll show and some other things, but that is in essence the whole 10 by 12 foot structure. So we started with a 10 by 12, because it's 120 square feet, and that's a minimum, excuse me, the maximum amount you're allowed to build without having a building permit as long as you use it for storage. And so we tell our customers, that's for storage, you can do this, you don't need a permit. If you want to use it for anything else than a permit, you have to check with the building department. And we're hoping that some rules might be once we prove the integrity of our structure that maybe we can start to get some permitted projects on this too and to build out bigger than 120, because that's like a little Lego building block, you can put them together, it can be 120, 240, or 80, etc. and you can build in either direction to make it as big as you want. And let's look at the next slide, we're going through quickly, because there are a whole lot of slides and we have some go and tell here too. Yeah, so this is our panel, it's three quarter inch plywood, which is very strong, it has kind of a cross, you know, lamination on it, and both sides have a high pressure laminate, similar to the mica would be what you would think of on the skin. And this is our basic building block, three quarters plywood is really quite strong. And then we combine that with our aircraft aluminum framework, which I'll show you in a second. But here's how the panels, the wall panels slide together, we have an aluminum panel connector. Now this is industrial grade aluminum too. Yes, well the structural aluminum here that we use for the structure is a T6 and the alloy is called 6061, it's an aircraft in structural grade aluminum and it's put together with stainless steel brackets and 516 stainless bolts and it's nutted on all sides. So extremely strong aluminum, corrosion resistance, stainless steel, and then aluminum panel dividers. So in a marine environment you can put this right next to the ocean and it ain't going to corrode. You can, we would say don't submerge it for long periods of time in a salt tank. Next to the ocean. The reason I would say for long periods of time is I believe that if you have a flooding situation I think you have on Kauai and your house flooded all the way up and it was flooded for a day or two and then when the floods subside if you just dry it out all out you're not going to have any mold or mildew or any penetration into here because you don't have any exposed plywood panels once it's all encased it's sealed up with a sealant on all sides. So you have a waterproof, you know, Formica type surface, again not Formica but high pressure laminated HPL and all connected together. Now this is put together this is like, imagine this is a corner post here and so your sheeting or your siding would come down on the sides and then it's bolted through bolted all the way across and that gives it a lot of structural integrity as well between the two. Really quite a heavy corner piece. So this is the structure of the unit I think you'll see that in some of the slides coming up how we put it together so it's a very lightweight structure but only a couple thousand pounds so it can be collapsed down in a very small amount into a pile like we saw about two to three feet big and so our idea was that if say the Red Cross hopefully or emergency services had maybe a dozen or two dozen of these in a warehouse if you had an emergency like the flooding on a quai or a hurricane or a fire or whatever you had or a lava flow you could quickly put these on a helicopter and then fly them to the site say to Pahoa and you know, obviously in less than a day just load them up, just pork lift them in there and then it can be put together with just kind of like if one or two people are like a good what I call an expert handy person with things they don't have to be a contractor but kind of like a big IKEA set you're putting together and you're bolting it all together because everything is screwed or bolted nothing is nailed together it all comes in panels so we say that two people in two or three days can assemble it or disassemble it so let's say that you had a situation where the village was wiped out you have a lot of willing labor right there all you need is one or two instructors you know, we could do it but other people could do it as well and come in and they can teach people relatively untrained people how to assemble all these and you would have a village within just a couple days through a week whereas in normal disasters we're talking people especially mothers and children kind of out in the elements for days and days and days right and this will be completely waterproof, completely rust proof completely termite proof there's a termicide inside all the wood panels but it's safely discounted and you're for my covering and you'll see that we can fit a small family of you know three to five people if needed in just one of these units five people would get pretty cozy but what the heck it's a whole lot better than being outdoors when we show the interiors I'll show you how you can do it five is stretching it I was thinking a husband wife and two little kids three little kids you could do it three medium sized kids you could do it but after that you're pushing it why don't we go to the next slide what we have offering oh yeah here's your construction so here's how it's all just screwed together now you're seeing that we have a built-in gutter in essence and it collects the water all down there it hits the gutter so it doesn't go into the flash you when you come out the door but you can collect all that water in your water collection system on the side of the the place there and the coatings that we use the heat reflective coatings that are integral to the cooling of this building have also been approved for a potable water drinkable water collection and that's kind of unusual because we looked around for certification for potable water even prior to us getting this coating that we have and we didn't find very much for that so you can collect the water on the big island or quay or wherever you can collect the water and you can drink it and know that it's safe to drink beautiful that calls for the next slide so what makes it one of the problems we thought was okay we need to be cool you're the energy energies are as it were we need to make sure that the house is going to be cool and yet we didn't want to just have a lot of white boxes one of the things we pride ourselves on is what it's all done it's a blank canvas it is literally a white blank canvas and you can paint on it whatever you want to so we've made some stencils that people can easily spray or sponge on or you can hire an artist or bring out the artist in yourself and you can make your house look like whatever you want to if you want an expensive looking tile roof you can do that if you like it looking like brick we can do that if you just want to have local patterns or tribal patterns or information graphics you know in a disaster medical center things you know cafeteria things like that it's very easy just to put it on our flat surface but the heat reflective paint is what allows us to be nice and cool and so you start off with this high pressure laminate board which has a matte finish almost like a flat finish you can paint right on top of it and so we put our waterproof primers on here on the outside and then we put our NXP paints it's a special paint that has special heat reflective coatings and that means that the that works on the reflectance factor and how much will bounce off and the reflectance factor goes all the way if this was charcoal it would be 26% so this was black black this is 26% reflectivity it doesn't sound like too much reflectivity higher numbers are better the white the white coating is about 90 to 91% which is right about the upper range of what you can get down to 26 but substantially more if that same black charcoal paint didn't have our UV reflectance it would reflect less than one half of the statistics for that whereas ours is 26% and then you get into the 50 and 60% reflectivity when you get into kind of these mid-beige colors 50, 60% and as you get lighter into the pastels and you get to 70, 80% anything over 70% is considered a certified by the Cool Roof Council those 70 plus is good so the pure white is 90, 91% but if you just don't want a white cube you can at least paint the sides of your building different all sorts of colors you have really dark colors if you want to so this here is to keep the heat out before it even thinks about penetrating through that's the first line of defense and the best line of defense so that's reflectance on the outside now on the inside we need to take a break why don't we take a break before we get into that because that's absolutely fascinating so how would we Cool Roof Rating Council no between Hawaii rank rogers president we will be back in a minute Aloha and welcome to at the crossroads I'm your host Tisha King you can catch me every Wednesday alive at five I'll see you there Aloha this is Winston Welch I am your host of Out and About where every other week we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation and world and events, organizations the people that fuel them it's a really interesting show we welcome you to tune in and we welcome your suggestions for shows you got a lot of them out there and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well so I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics and a lot you're going to come away inspired like I do, so I'll see you every other week here at three o'clock on Monday afternoon Aloha good afternoon again Howard Wig cold green we have Frank Rogers president of the Cool Roof store we're talking about a combination of tiny homes plus what I would call extreme reflectivity where you build a whole of barrier against the penetration of the sun's heat into a home and it's a beautiful combination of technology so why don't we get into how you're doing what I would call super reflectance here and keeping that heat out so beautifully so again as we were saying on the outside where imagine this is your roof the sun is going to come and it's going to reflect off so that's called total solar reflectance and the higher numbers will be 90, 80, 70 anything above 70 is considered a cool roof but numbers below that also make a big difference and on your sidewall as we talked about you might want to have some other colors other than white you might want to decorate it and that's perfectly fine because with the NXT cool coat which comes with your which comes with the house that will reflect the heat and will last a lot longer than ordinary paint now on the underside on the underside if you have extra protection you can paint a silver codon we can spray a silver codon and it acts like a radiant barrier it acts like the old foil heat radiant barriers that people wrap put up in the rafters so besides the reflectance on the white surface of up to 90% you also have what do we call you keep the solar emitance not the reflectivity but the emitance is the heat that wants to come through your roof radiated as heat but the foil on the backside just like on the foil houses will take that heat and send it right back up through the roof so it rejects after the 90% that you get on your white roof whatever wants to come through will be rejected by the 76% of it will be the heat will be sent back up so you kind of have a double layer there you have an exterior and interior thing in between the two that in certain cases we won't won't have to have a double wall construction with typically fiberglass bath insulation and things like that because that would kind of destroy the purpose on the construction of our the bath would be 3-4 inches and when you have a tiny home that 3-4 inches all around the perimeter that makes a heck of a lot of difference we've also noticed that wet climates let's say Pahoa, Kauai anywhere people don't like double wall construction when I grew up I came here in 1960 and we lived in a single wall construction house in Kailua I think it was redwood, single wall you know, tongue and groove but with double wall while it sounds really good in wet climates you have a lot of mold and mill that grow back there you're not sure how bugs get in or where the leaks is and where you can track them 100% waterproof even with high winds but if we didn't caulk a joint properly which has happened we'll see a little drip come down we know exactly where it is it literally takes one or two minutes to go up there with caulking and just hit that one little part of the joint that you did so we claim, our claim is that you have minimal maintenance for 30 years plus on this because you have basically indestructible aluminum and metal type elements in here and all you have to do is maybe caulk and paint it every 10 to 15 years use your maintenance it's even sealed on the underside so moisture can't get from underneath the board we can use the underside why don't we go to the next slide here here is a moneer tile roof, now this is not for my tiny house here but this is just an example of what we do commercially a lot of times you'll see the old ceramic, the old moneer concrete tiles are weathered so we clean them and we put on our heat reflective coatings and that keeps it cooler and also lets you recycle so those moneer tiles can last a long, long time even after 30 or 40 years we recode them at least one or two a week and we keep them out of that the same principle acts with the tiny and the less heat any material absorbs the longer it's life exactly, less expansion contraction so let's go to the next slide that's the underside of the concrete tile the moneer tile painted with the silver one of the best applications too is metal buildings and warehouses and it not only helps keep your thermal emittance down by 76% but it's really easy to access from the underside with a sprayer so if you have a metal building that is hot but also that you don't want to rust because a lot of times you see the rust forms on the underside that ruins that expensive metal roof so if you spray the zinc coating that's a zinc coating it preserves the underside of your metal roof as well as keeping it nice and cool and that calls for yet the next slide that's just the story they did on Hawaii renovation and that's an idea of this is my office, I actually work out of this every day it has a 13 foot high ceiling and we wanted to show that you could fit even in a fancy neighborhood you could stick this and it wouldn't look out of place we didn't want our thing to look like sometimes it's not in my neighborhood for tiny houses for homeless or emergency housing but we feel if you can make it look attractive you can either blend in with the neighborhood or you can decide to even uplift the neighborhood by having a really nice looking look and I know that was one of the big concerns when we talked to the city about the projects out in Makaha and it doesn't matter where you are nobody wants to have a homeless village next to you our feeling is that you have to really sell the neighborhood on this is going to be the nicest looking one that there is and also the other thing we found out oddly enough is that you also have to sell the homeless on having a place to live to because a lot of times there are certain restrictions variety and pets and other things that come up so it's nice to have a place that they really like and we really desire it our hope is that we can kind of have them train them to kind of keep the place up and help clean and even pick up around and the more that you can get people to kind of take care of stuff perhaps they get their own unit they don't have to share we'd love to see what can be done to kind of rehabilitate and retrain people and that's what we do my other company Leakmaster Roofing retraining through Laumaca we have some prisoners some of our best people that we've gotten back into the mix and I also have a feeling that a lot of the homeless once they get into a nice secure situation some of them have real building talent and other talent and so if they can store their tools someplace safely and they're not sleeping underneath a freeway because nobody can go to work after keeping under a freeway and be very effective if we can get them stabilized get them off the wrong chemicals and maybe even have their meds adjusted in the correct way I would like to see the able-bodied homeless come back into the workforce and make some good money and have a stable life and that's kind of my longer goal for that and another possibility would be ADU's accessory drilling unit stick this in in your backyard and you're off and running yeah so we're hoping that we can get some free approvals from the building department and they'll say as long as you're going with this unit and it is modular since it is a known quantity that once it's approved it will be easier for it to go through the building permit process and they'll say okay well we know the structure of this and as long as you abide by I guess the setbacks and all the other building regulations that it would be a quicker stamp on the permit is what we're hoping for us and for the building department. A partial solution to the headlines every day in the paper need homes need homes especially we need affordable homes and I think we've got one or two more slides oh yes this is how you mount the homes you don't just put them on the ground right so to let you know so what we do is we sell this as a kit so everything you need in the kit for the basic unit and it's $12,850 and we charge $950 to assemble it on your level lot on Oahu now the foundation is going to be up to the owners now in this particular case this owner had a contractor put down 12 of these 100 pound blocks and those blocks will be buried you see them on top for placement those will be buried in the ground and cemented with quick treat and then aligned there and if you really want a lot of wind up resistance we put 16 blocks on there another row of four on there and then those blocks are cemented buried in the ground and you'll see the metal strap that comes up through the block and then our metal framework as you see there fits right on the corner block and if you look at the very bottom you'll see a strap that's coming up from underneath the block that's the strap that's cemented into the concrete and then we drill through and through bolted on all of these and bolted through so imagine that you don't have the weakest link in a chain the old saying the weakest link in a chain because all of these are through bolted to each other and then further the plywood three quarters plywood is through bolted through all of these it's all or nothing the structure is all going to go on to one big piece you're not going to have the shingles fly off which opens up and you have all the flooding you're not going to have a fascia board and then the wind captures and pulls that off it's all one great big unit that's inextricably connected together and then cemented down on the on the footing so if you have good footings and you put them down there you also don't have a big eave the eave is where the wind will come underneath the the wind will come underneath your eave and capture it on a house and pull it up but we have such a what we call a 12-12 slope a 90 degree slope we only have an 8 inch eave on the bottom side so the wind is more apt to go off the roof here it doesn't get much purchase here and this is bolted by so many different stainless steel bolts and clips that it's not going to pull off anyway so we're thinking that we have a really good wind profile for that and particularly when you bolt them together in multiple units that that's even a stronger and we've got one or two more slides left here you see it being erected it gives you a good idea and that aluminum is what we call key 6 aluminum the alloy is 6061 it's used in aircraft, it's used for structural building it's a very well known quantity by the building department and you see it's all kind of bolted together with our brackets and our panel connectors and it's just starting to go up there so you can see it all goes together, two people can put that together in two or three days just handy people and just an A frame ladder no special tools, a little drill bit that sort of thing and I think we've got maybe one more this is a cute one if you look at our model down below this is a loft, that's a 5 foot ceiling and it's 10 feet from left to right so as I like to say James is up there, because LeBron is not quite 10 feet as far as I know on the other side you'll see another one just the same size so you could put one kid on that side even a big kid, you could put a certainly an adult, any adults up there and then the middle one we just kind of have decked out for personal things but in a pinch you could put a third kid you know on the middle section or even a third adult in the middle section too if we're talking an emergency situation all the villages are down there's a lot of bugs and centipedes it's dark, you want shelter you can get three above and then down below I think we should show another slide you'll see that we have this doesn't show the bed because I'm kind of sitting on the bed when I take the picture but you see just the corner of the bed on the left but here we imagine that if you had to in this 10 by 12 foot area you could have a toilet and what you don't see in this picture behind the toilet is a shower head so you can actually take a shower there and there's shower curtains that draw the kitchen, you see tables microwave and then you can put a double inflatable bed which is where I was taking the picture from so you could have two adults or down below you could have three kids up above I think that would be a reasonable expectation and again it's a little bit on the cramp side but if you're in an emergency situation this is absolute luxury exactly so a lot of people are going to be using it for like a grandma unit and we're trying to get that approval from the building department so that if we follow all the right rules so we can get that absolutely and on that cherry note we have more to cover but we don't have any time to cover it on Frank Rogers thank you so much this is our great great program and that does it for today's think tech Hawaii Howard we'll see you next time