E30_Turning a volume built house into a passive house

[00:00:00] Matt: me and you haven't done one of these, just us two for a while together now, It's just, we've had some pretty cool guests

[00:00:53] Hamish: So is this going to be our intro

[00:00:55] Matt: yeah, we just started. Hi Hamish.

[00:00:56] Hamish: on that? How are you?

[00:00:57] Matt: Nah, I'm okay today. , I've just got notification from my team that, , my place, we're digging the piers in the ground and Long story short, this soil test that we were given was completely faulty. , and they classified as a H1 site and it's, I looked at the soil and it's like, something's not right.

[00:01:13] Matt: Got another soil engineer out and it's actually a H2 site. So the design would have failed, not the engineer's fault. The engineers have been awesome and big shout out to Yasha and Orenic, who've been fucking sensational to deal with and have really helped me. And, we've had to dig another, I think, 26 board piers, but we hit a ton of rocks.

[00:01:30] Matt: So my team for the last three days have been literally like. following the topography of the rock to get it down to two and a half meters or two meters

[00:01:36] Hamish: you know what? This has kind of caught me off guard because this, this in itself is a time podcast

[00:01:41] Matt: can't talk too much about this one either, but we'll get to that in some time in the future. the reason for this podcast and I have been talking about doing some things differently. And one of the things I thought Hamish was talking about our projects, because we do have interesting projects.

[00:01:54] Matt: And they have their challenges and whilst you might see on our social medias about the cool stuff we're doing and how brilliant it looks like shit does hit the fan from time to time. So we're going to do a bit of a four part series on one of our projects each and my project we're going to talk about is our retrofit rifle passive house where we're converting a volume builder house that was built in about 1993.

[00:02:14] Matt: Through Burbank Homes, which we understand and we're turning that into a certified Passive House and to keep Cameron happy, we are targeting Passive House certification. We're not there yet. We are pretty certain we're going to get there. But we want to talk through sort of three main stages in a project, the pre construction, how we got there, because I think what's really important is so many people don't understand how to talk about passive house in the early stages of construction and educate clients and educate the market on how Passive House is important.

[00:02:42] Matt: So I think that's one thing that we can talk about and how we plan this project, who we got involved. And then we'll talk about the onsite things that we had that went right and what went wrong and our learnings from that. And then our client Shane is a listener to this podcast.

[00:02:55] Matt: We're going to get him on, which he's probably very excited about. I'm going to talk about post construction and their lived experience. So that's what I had in mind, Hamish. What do you think?

[00:03:03] Hamish: I love it. not only is it interesting , 'cause I know we've talked about their pre-construction process before, but actually relating it back to a real project, I think it's gonna have a huge amount of value to our listeners, particularly when you are targeting a certain level of performance.

[00:03:20] Hamish: I'm gonna throw the first question over to you and, and can you talk a little bit about how this project came about?

[00:03:26] Matt: Oh, this is a good question to get open with. So how do you think I found this client?

[00:03:29] Hamish: We've got no idea.

[00:03:30] Matt: You gave them to me. So this is the Glenline project

[00:03:34] Hamish: Oh,

[00:03:36] Matt: bought and they had prioritized to build this first because there's a few, few issues. Yeah, so you actually handled this project and

[00:03:43] Hamish: I handboard you the clients, not necessarily the project

[00:03:47] Matt: yeah, yeah, totally. Like, we've still got to do our thing and get them across the line. So we first started speaking to Shane and Sarah I would say June in 2023, maybe a bit earlier. Actually, probably a little bit earlier than that. And the clients are already educated in Passive House.

[00:04:01] Matt: So I'm already one step ahead in the sense of talking about Passive House because I can actually, I don't have to explain the basics of comfort and health and all these other things. And I think where a lot of people go wrong in talking about Passive House is they throw data And whilst data is awesome, and I froth data, so I'm the right person to throw data at, my brain's analytical, but some people aren't, and Shane is.

[00:04:21] Matt: But Sarah, it probably isn't as much like, I'd say Shane is me in relationship and my wife, Nicole is very similar I would, I was able to talk just more about health and comfort and the benefits of why we need healthy homes. The existing house, just to give it context it's a single story house, it's a brick veneer house in a estate in Williamstown.

[00:04:39] Matt: Called the Rifle Range. Now I've grown up in Williamstown. So this is an old, literally a rifle range of gun range back in the day. I remember as a kid you'd ride your bike around, you used to be able to find rifle shells, but estate went up in the early nineties. Built predominantly by volume builders and there was probably at that point no care for, I'm not going to, sustainability is not the word, but energy efficiency codes are only coming in.

[00:05:01] Matt: All right. So we could quite easily walk into this house, this deceased estate and you could get the feel, the muskiness in there. Like could tell that it was uncomfortable from the moment you walked in there. So talking to the client about essentially Passive House is very easy in this one.

[00:05:15] Matt: So we started just to educate them further on on how we could possibly get there. So, don't know how you find it, Hamish, but sometimes selling Passive House can be the easiest thing in the world or it's like, where do you start?

[00:05:27] Hamish: particularly with a retrofit. like passive house in many cases is not. Like it really needs to be thought about from the beginning when you're in that design phase, particularly around orientation. Now, you're in a situation where you have an existing home.

[00:05:45] Hamish: You have no say on which way the house is orientated. And. there's a whole other layer of considerations there and challenges that you would have if you were doing a home from the get go.

[00:05:57] Hamish: So, What was your approach from the get go? Did you do a site visit? you know, Cameron's involved in this project? Did you bring him out as well that initial, those initial stages?

[00:06:08] Matt: yeah. So I think, Passive House is, it should not be a bolt on. In this case, it is. All right. I'm going to say something very simple here and it might annoy people, but building a passive house as a new build is very easy. And there's really no excuse that it should not be designed to passive house standards, whether you get it certified or not is a whole different conversation.

[00:06:29] Matt: But every house should be designed to that standard. We want to take back control and get confident and also just make sure the clients that Holding us accountable for what we build. So, we'll separate that to new build where everything is easy. We get a fresh shot at clean slate. If you are given the task of building a new, build passive house, there's no reason why you should not achieve it.

[00:06:48] Matt: All right? The second part says now retrofits. I kind of classify retrofits into two situations. So, we have Enerphit, which is like the red renovation style of passive house. All right? And I would say that's when we, we have an old house and we're sort of extending, doing renovation, adding additions on.

[00:07:03] Matt: We have more sort of options to add in extra windows and get some better lighting. The reason I call this a retrofit is we have not changed anything from the external structure itself. We have kept the old roof tiles on and the old brick lighting. We haven't, the only thing we changed externally were the windows.

[00:07:17] Matt: All right. that adds some complications into the conversation. Now one of the conversations I had very early with Cam is that, hey, the bricks are in awesome condition. The roof tiles are in awesome condition. Why can't I just stay there? And granted that we knew that there's going to be some silver sarking behind the structure, and we, we sort of had a plan on how we're going to move that.

[00:07:35] Matt: And I'll talk about that when we get to the construction phase. But if we can't prove that we can't build this a into a passive house, If we can't do it on this project, it's not possible anywhere in a sense of a retrofit. So we sort of had this hypothesis of like, we need to prove to the market that this can be done without having to just.

[00:07:52] Matt: Strip everything back to its old structure, take out the bricks, take off the tiles. Like, is it possible to build a passive house by essentially just doing an interior fit out? Because at the end of the day for Erin, that doesn't really change anything from her perspective designing anything on the inside.

[00:08:04] Matt: She's it look sexy and cute and picking right healthy materials. So we got Cameron involved pretty early and he run his numbers and quickly we cut out. The fact that we couldn't achieve the basic standard passive house certification through standard methods and we had to go down the criteria of component method.

[00:08:21] Matt: All right, so there are two different things. We'll get Cam to talk about that some part in the future, because if I explain, I'm going to stuff up the terminology. But essentially, we had to look at all the components of the house and how could we get continuous insulation into every aspect of the house, but also air tightness.

[00:08:38] Matt: The thing that we had huge discussions on early was the windows, because they were the most critical part in the home. And to give you context, I think from a U Value we needed an average under 1. 25 U Value on average across the project. We got there with like 1. 24. Like, we are a bee's dick away from not being able to be certified.

[00:08:58] Matt: On the north next door, there's a big double storey house, which is blocking a lot of the light. So we don't have the ability to get much north light in from the start. And again, because I'm not touching the existing structure We can't just add in windows and take windows and make them bigger.

[00:09:10] Matt: Okay. That would mean underpinning of the existing slab and adding in structural steel, like that's expensive. So

[00:09:15] Hamish: just to confirm, Matty, sorry just to provide a bit of clarity around it. The windows were literally removed and replaced in the same openings.

[00:09:23] Matt: Yeah, same opening. So, slightly the same size. Now, one of the things, and again, I'll talk about this going in the future about the window insulation. This is one of our challenges because anyone that knows when you have a brick veneer house, the typical Australian construction will sit that window in with the brick, which means that glazing layer is outside our, our sort of insulation layer.

[00:09:42] Matt: in the, timber frame. So in passive house, that needs to be in one plane, which means that we needed to bring that back. So brick veneer has a cavity roughly about 40 mil. So now I had a 40 mil gap that I had to deal with. All right. So that was a conversation Cam and I had from the start. And because we were so tied on that number to get that to passive house standard already, we knew that that windows were going to have to shrink in size.

[00:10:02] Matt: Okay. Because I'd have to build up the bottom sill to get them to deal with water because again, I knew I wasn't able to get a new membrane on the inside of the house. So where am I going to shed my water to? How are we going to get that water tight? How are we going to get that air tight?

[00:10:15] Hamish: You couldn't get the membrane on the outside. Okay.

[00:10:17] Matt: no, I couldn't, we're not going to strip the bricks down. so that was a challenge. So it quickly become, hey, Passive House isn't a priority here. The priority is actually Water Kills Buildings, and we've spoken about this a number of times, and the idea that we had is that how do we actually protect water first?

[00:10:31] Matt: Because if we protect water first, the air and everything else should come. I had no problems about getting this building airtight. When we tested this to start the construction from memory, I knew we couldn't get a blower door reading when Drew came in the first day we had the site, we physically couldn't get the reading and we worked it out to be about 30 plus air exchanges from memory.

[00:10:48] Matt: I think I've got a photo

[00:10:50] Hamish: you threw a blower door on there, no matter and you just measured the, um, flow.

[00:10:54] Matt: Yeah, so that it, it, it auto calibrated to give you an idea of what it might be, but we couldn't get it up for 50 pascals. but going back, we had Cam involved very, very early and Cam's big on model early, model, often, and this is probably the true case on a retrofit where it becomes important.

[00:11:08] Matt: Now, the conversations we had with Cam were amazing. Again, I'll give him the biggest shout out ever. Like, he's the most important person you should have on a project very early. Just such a clever person and. everything came coming back to this water conversation of how do we deal with water?

[00:11:22] Matt: How do we deal with water? What are we going to do here? What are we going to do here? So there's a lot of information if you look into Europe specifically around UK and they're still working this out is these buildings were built to just chuck insulation in. And all of a sudden you have moisture issues, you're changing the drying capacity of the wall and Cam's an expert in that and I had a pretty good understanding of it.

[00:11:40] Matt: I'd actually just finished reading a book because we're doing this project and anyone that wants an Unreal book to read, it's called the Old Eco Handbook and it details how to retrofit a house. Okay and it goes through everything. You've got to understand that this is in the UK when they have all these buildings side by side, these cottages sort of like that Carlton in a Melbourne style Everything's boundary to boundary, but how do you insulate it? Cause if you put the wrong insulation, you're going to have rising damp and we're going to force a rising damp. And there's all these other things that you got to think about and what insulation. So one of the other conversations we had and we're concerned about is.

[00:12:10] Matt: Well, if we don't have a membrane on there, how to protect the insulation so we, we worked out to get some polyester insulation into those walls because we knew that they would be able to shed the water better than the glass wool they retain their structure, they're quite dense, and it was actually in this situation more cost effective than working with glass wool anyway, but that was one of the strategies we come up with.

[00:12:28] Matt: Now, we originally had double glazing in the building And we run the numbers. We need a triple glazing. So we had decided to work with the team from Bink and work through their, the Aliplast UPVC profile to understand what we could possibly do, what coatings we could get on Shane threw a bit of a curveball at us very, very late and decided that he wanted to have a doggy door in, which means on a doggy door we were struggling to get low E coating on.

[00:12:52] Matt: So we had to go with a hard low E coating compared to a soft coating. that really pushed it very, very close to failure. So we also engaged Hit V Hype. So Marcus is the certifier on this project. And there has been a lot of conversations, which we'll get to during the construction phase about, is this okay?

[00:13:09] Matt: Is this okay? Are we going to be okay with that sort of thing?

[00:13:12] Hamish: stop you just for one second? When you say, is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay? You're referring to, any risks that might come up from a particular wall assembly or detail or something like that.

[00:13:23] Matt: So I'll sort of jump ahead. The big conversation that everyone was concerned about is because we don't have a membrane externally. How is the structure going to dry out? What is going to happen if water gets behind the bricks? The bricks are in awesome condition. There's no cracks. So that was a big conversation about is there enough ventilation in the cavity?

[00:13:38] Matt: Is there enough ventilation in the roof for it to dry out? And. I think Cam had to pull out his old physics notes or something from back in the day when he said you need to work out some flow rate of air in a cavity and smart stuff but going back to probably the conversation around cost. the budget did stretch a fair bit. But the budget didn't stretch for passive house reasons. But the budget wasn't blown out because this became a passive house. there was a lot of work that needed to be done.

[00:14:01] Matt: So we needed to completely rewire the whole place because the old wiring was non compliant and trying to work out how to join that all up and fix it all up was just not going to be possible. We thought it'd be cheaper to rewire it. Which mean all the old copper plumbing was just, it was rusting out.

[00:14:14] Matt: There was leaks. there's actually a fair bit of mold in the house because there was water leaks. So, we decided to completely rip that out. So, essentially, it became a whole, think of it of a project that once you finish your frame, you've got, some people would have their cladding and roof on.

[00:14:27] Matt: That's where we started, okay? So, just able to cut out that structural component of this, of the house. So what we actually did is the conversation had to stretch the budget. I think the contract ended up coming in around 660 K from memory.

[00:14:40] Hamish: I've got a question for you, Matt. With your electrical and plumbing rewire and replumb, is that something that you realized in the pre construction phase or is it something that you did during construction?

[00:14:54] Matt: I know a fair bit about electrical and plumbing, but I don't know everything. And they're the experts. So we just spoke to our plumber and our electrician. What do you think here?

[00:15:00] Matt: One of the challenges we were having is with the electrical, is where the mains were being in an older state. We couldn't find where the mains were coming in from the outside. And I, to be honest, we don't really still know where the power pole or anything like that is around there.

[00:15:12] Matt: There's no real guidance around that. We can't find it out. But what we sort of had the conversation. I said, like, can we keep the wires in place? One, how do we get the building then airtight? Because with all these cables and how we run our Intello, and we're only relying on our internal air barrier on this one to get us airtight.

[00:15:27] Matt: We have no external barrier. And then the plumbing, we just sort of thought, like, well, how do we insulate all the old hot water pipes where the hot lines are? Erin had slightly changed, she'd kept everything in the same location, but also it slightly changed. So we didn't want to be doing joining copper then onto some.

[00:15:42] Matt: Some Ozpex back to copper and it was just going to get messy. So we just thought it's going to be cheaper this way just to rip it out and start again. Upgrade the water line in, get a bigger line in where you're putting, everything was going electric too. So we had to worry about getting water for the heat pump.

[00:15:57] Matt: All these things, we just decided this was the smartest way to do it. So the conversation with them, obviously, we had Drew involved early talking about what, how many air cons and where the air cons should be located. And we didn't have space. So we decided on having one condenser unit outside.

[00:16:10] Matt: So the conversations early with trades is really important because again, it goes back to collaboration across the project. I probably should mention there's actually no architect involved or building designer involved in this project. So we have, Aaron, Cam and myself. Working together in a big combination to discuss what's happening.

[00:16:25] Matt: Again, it's just interior fit out really that we're bringing to Passive House standards.

[00:16:29] Hamish: Impressive. Mate, it sounds like a super interesting project. I'm just curious, how did your pre construction approach change or differ for this project to, say, a normal build?

[00:16:43] Matt: process. I think like, I get bored really quickly. So I want something that's going to challenge me. So this was like, Oh, this is new and shiny. Like this is not been done. This is fun. Like all the details I had to come up with were the ones that I'd never even thought of before.

[00:16:56] Matt: So, the process was the same. It was still the price in the ECR, like doing a quick build estimate. It was still working in collaboration with all the trades and everyone else, it's still exactly the same process. if anything, it's actually helped us refine our process more than ever, because we sort of found we can cut a lot of things out We just don't need to do going forward. So we've been actually really able to refine our process off a retrofit. Now I'd probably say retrofits when you're doing extensions And you're playing with existing structures and moving structures. Like we're looking at one at the moment in Northcote where we've got a, like the existing chimneys need to be propped up.

[00:17:28] Matt: That's when it starts to get complicated. Like they are, that is real complications. and that involves time. Like there's a lot of thinking in a sense of like how you get like the organization of trades.

[00:17:37] Hamish: And let me guess something. You're propping the existing chimneys up because they're a heritage consideration. You're not propping them up. So you're putting new, fireplaces in there.

[00:17:47] Matt: yeah, like definitely no new fireplaces, but also we don't want to have a crack at the heritage and town planning community in this podcast. They do a fantastic job. I think we will keep that for another chat. I don't want to go down a whole another rabbit hole and open my mouth.

[00:18:01] Matt: so, look, the one thing we didn't have to deal with in this house was heritage and town planning, which is brilliant.

[00:18:06] Hamish: didn't have to do heritage town planning and correct me if I'm wrong building approval either, because it was all a fit out.

[00:18:12] Matt: Yes, we have no building permit. We don't need to. I actually called a few buildings today and asked them, asked the VBA, we don't have a building permit for this one. We don't need to. We haven't touched anything structural inside. One of the things we did find when we'd opened up the building, that all the old cross bracing had been just cut in half.

[00:18:27] Matt: All the internal walls, like they were just cut, the bracing wasn't doing anything. So if anything, I've actually made this building like back to what it is or what it should have been or stronger than what it was originally because we've added cross bracing, not single bracing that had been cut.

[00:18:39] Hamish: I'm going to save a question for when we start talking about the construction because I do have some questions around that. So let's just bookmark the bracing side of things.

[00:18:47] Matt: Yeah, and look, the clients are awesome. Like, Shane was really involved. He also came down the rabbit hole with me on certain conversations around performance. And Timecam had to bring us back in online and be like, Hey, remember the goal of the project?

[00:18:58] Matt: We need to make this cost effective, but also viable. We need to give confidence to the market that at the moment there are million homes that don't meet current energy standards. And 8 million homes like this, it can be retrofitted but we don't have to knock them all down.

[00:19:10] Matt: And we can bring these up to a huge improvement in efficiency. And I think from memory, I'm going to, I'm going to find this. Cause I've, got the data here somewhere. And if you give me a minute, I can actually find. How much this house is really improving. So, obviously, Cam runs these numbers.

[00:19:24] Matt: He runs it through PHPP, which is a passive house planning package. And we've done a huge amount of, changes through that whole process and are we going to get this efficient? Like, do we need to insulate the cavities? The floor was the biggest conversation we were having at the time about how do we insulate the floor?

[00:19:38] Matt: Because that was one of the biggest heat factors for heat loss in the house. So what we'd actually had is well, how do we insulate it? We also need to understand that our ceiling heights were 2. 7 meters high and the conversation became around, well, what are we actually going to do here?

[00:19:51] Matt: We don't want to add 50, a hundred mil of XPS on top and lose our ceiling height. That was something that both of us are a bit like, Oh, what do we do here? So, chatting with a few other people I know, and then had a good chat with Dylan from Olin Projects about what products are actually out there.

[00:20:05] Matt: And he put me onto this product it was a cork product. Now. We'll talk about this one as mull in construction because this is probably the most stressful part of the job, probably the most stressful thing I've ever had to deal with in building, period. That's something that really, really stressed me out.

[00:20:21] Matt: But what we ended up deciding on was using a cork screed that was coming from Italy to fill on top of the slab to get 50 mil that was going to give us a thermal layer on top of that slab. And that's practically where we ended up with that. So we, that was one of the conversations we had and we'd work through it.

[00:20:37] Matt: It looked cost effective at the time. I can tell you it wasn't at the end. But that was the conversation we were sort of having So Cam's original testing method on this house, is that came in at 163 kilowatt hours a square meter.

[00:20:51] Matt: That's the original number.

[00:20:52] Hamish: Hundred and sixty three kilowatt hours per square meter.

[00:20:57] Matt: square meter site. So that is 29, 340 kilowatt hours a year. We times that by 30 cents. That's telling us that's about 8, 802 per year that it was going to cost to run it. All

[00:21:10] Matt: right. That's just heating demand.

[00:21:11] Hamish: So, just for clarity. That's to keep it at a constant, comfortable temperature. It's probably not how it would have been heated because no one would be able to afford to do that. But yeah, carry on.

[00:21:22] Matt: No, yeah. So, that's it. Electricity price is not, running your hydronic gas heating

[00:21:25] Matt: system for two months and costing 1, 600.

[00:21:28] Matt: we got it down to 30 and for some reason I think it actually got a little bit lower, but let's just run with this for a minute.

[00:21:32] Matt: So 30 times the same amount, which means we're now only using 5, 400. Kilowatt hours a year, we times that by 0. 3 and that's now, roughly it's going to cost 1600 a year to run the heating, They also have solar panels now, so that should be a lot less, but both of them assume no solar panels or anything like that.

[00:21:50] Matt: So there, there's nearly a 7000 saving straight off on, on just heating. That's it. Nothing else, no cooling, no conversations around that, just heating. All right, so let's also add back in the thermal comfort. Everyone also talks about thermal stuff at the time, but we also need to understand that like the triple glazing is a huge comfort thing on the noise outside.

[00:22:07] Matt: So that's a big change that they're getting in that estate. There's a lot of kids outside playing. So, it does offer that little comfort inside. It's also the odor. like they do live near the sea. So you like near the water in Williamstown. So you do get nice sea breeze coming through sometimes, but also it can get quite stinky at times down there from all the refineries.

[00:22:22] Matt: So they are blocking out that from there and that's another big thing that sort of was a big driver to get that comfort level was up to what we would consider acceptable. So, it was very open dialogue from the start. and then obviously we just went through our pricing.

[00:22:34] Matt: did a bit of value management which we do on every project. Like it's, I don't know about you Hayne, but if you ever had even a final project where you find on your final estimate, there's always value management past that point. Like I've never had a project coming at the final estimate.

[00:22:46] Matt: They go, yes, we're ready to go.

[00:22:48] Hamish: No, in fact, we've got a cost presentation today for a project that it is actually the closest to the budget. That I've had in about three years.

[00:22:58] Matt: and how good would it be if it just, it's just like, yep, sweet, we're ready, and you're like, oh, but there's always something, there's always something you want to like, hey, can we squeeze something out of it? Can we make this more

[00:23:05] Matt: efficient?

[00:23:07] Hamish: something. Yeah, 100%.

[00:23:08] Hamish: what I'm really keen to hear about, and I know we're going, we're going to get Shane on is to hear about the lived experience too, because I know we've talked about the health and we've talked about the running costs and stuff like that, but have you got some, I guess, anecdotal experience or past experience of them actually living in the house before?

[00:23:28] Hamish: To

[00:23:29] Matt: oh no, this was a deceased estate, no one's lived in this house for a few years, all right, but it's a typical Australian uncomfortable house, like it's a tent,

[00:23:36] Matt: like

[00:23:36] Matt: you would be pretty,

[00:23:38] Matt: cold,

[00:23:39] Hamish: pretty rad to get some pre construction and post construction. I mean, We've actually got a project that we've just completed, coincidentally, also with Aaron in Warrandyte. Look, it never stood out to be a high performance home.

[00:23:50] Hamish: It was just a renovation. But we've stripped it all, stripped all the cladding off, wrapped it really well, insulated it really well, made it airtight. the clients are really good friends of mine. And he called me up the other day and said, I've got a, I've got a problem at the house and I'm like, what's that?

[00:24:07] Hamish: And he's like, well, I'm working down in my studio out the back and it's because the house is so warm and comfortable. I've had to go and move back into the home because it's freezing out here. So, you I'd imagine that your, projects can be exactly the same as that.

[00:24:20] Matt: I had one of my clients, a Westbridge grade client, Aaron has also been interior design on this. We didn't touch the existing part of the house. We built the extension at the back and to a high performance level, HRP, everything. It's airtight they are like, it is so much more comfortable at that back part.

[00:24:34] Matt: And so they actually have to, like, it's, it can be quite challenging moving from section to section. So just to give you a bit of idea of how comfortable this has been we know the inside conditions are sitting around 16 degrees at the moment inside, during the construction site.

[00:24:47] Matt: We've had a number of trades come through. Actually, one of my best mates, his dad's done some of the rendering on the sills outside and he was, he actually took him to the footy the other night, the Bulldogs and Hawthorne. game and he's a Bulldog supporter and he was just saying that how when he went in that house the comfort levels of the project.

[00:25:07] Matt: Is insane on how comfortable and beautiful is inside and they're not even finished. My painter loves working on our projects. He's like, my paint dries quick so I can get a second coat on because I don't have to run the heaters. It's just comfortable and consistent. So going off track here a little bit, but we've been going back to the pre con stuff.

[00:25:22] Matt: Like it was just a very open conversation. And the biggest thing about this, that no one's ego got in the way. champion was the project. We had a hypothesis that we wanted to test and we're testing it. And we know where it's going to go. We're pretty certain. But that every conversation was based around how do we make this the most healthy, comfortable house and how do we prove to the market that this is possible?

[00:25:45] Matt: And the contract is about 650 or something K from memory. that in today's market is quite affordable. Now, building is expensive. Unfortunately, that's just the way it's gone over the last few years. I'm not saying that that's what it should cost to build a house. I'm just saying at the moment, 660K is affordable for full retrofit to get you to passive house.

[00:26:04] Matt: I believe

[00:26:05] Matt: it's a value for money.

[00:26:06] Matt: So,

[00:26:06] Hamish: I totally agree. And I've seeing the design play out on Instagram, there is value for money there. 100%. And if you look at, even if you look at the savings, you know,

[00:26:15] Hamish: from a year on year

[00:26:17] Matt: 000 a year pretty much.

[00:26:19] Hamish: not to say that, you know, it's gonna pay back that investment, but it's gonna help.

[00:26:23] Hamish: Plus you've capital improved the property.

[00:26:25] Matt: Yes, I actually did some sneaky stuff in the pre construction side of things and I actually sent all the window package off to a number of aluminium window supplies to test. I was like, hypothetically, if I just also ran my own little mini study, I was like, hypothetically, what if this was just going to be a retrofit?

[00:26:40] Matt: I've not passive house standards. There's interior strip out, add it all back in. I can tell you, I sent off to about five or six window companies that are aluminum, not one of them listened to the spec that I asked them for on the glazing. And all I asked for them was some double glazing with low E because I knew they couldn't compare with what we're asking for.

[00:26:57] Matt: So I was like, you know what, I'm just going to be basic for them. Just double glaze, low E coating. Not one of them come back with actually asked quoting that half of them come back, just quoting me at single glaze windows to make it look cost effective until I had to push them. By the end of it, we had worked out that our, if we were to compare the double glazed, like for like UPVC windows from BINC.

[00:27:16] Matt: Compared to just a standard double glaze with low E from the aluminium window suppliers, about half the time bink were cheaper, but also if they weren't cheaper, they're within a, thousand dollars across the project. So what I learned from that, there's a huge misconception in our industry.

[00:27:32] Matt: The high performance windows cost more. I can tell you they don't, okay? the quality you're also getting out of these windows is so far superior compared to what the other market, the other suppliers are offering. by the way, that also didn't include asking them for firmly broken aluminium because I was like, that's just going to blow it out and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

[00:27:52] Matt: Alright, so U values that we're comparing in these windows were not even comparable. Now, the other thing I did, I was like, well, hypothetically, what if we had to add in a heating and cooling system and stuff into this house? Got hydronic heating priced up, and the hydronic heating price was more expensive than the HRV, and then I'd still need to add in the cooling anyway.

[00:28:10] Matt: So the cooling is a like for like, and actually, if it wasn't a passive house, I'd probably need more cooling than I need now. But I would also then go to say the heating and cooling. On this project is cheaper because it's a passive house now granted.

[00:28:21] Matt: Yes, we did their tightness and we had to do some things around that. There's an expense to that. No doubt about that. I'm not going to argue there. I would go as far as saying that if this wasn't a passive house. almost costs the same for the level of fit out and amount

[00:28:34] Matt: of work we've gone into it.

[00:28:36] Hamish: Thinking about the budget. I think it's incredible value for money. And I, just want to confirm or clarify for all our listeners that we aren't sponsored by Bink. Although Bink has been dropped a number of times on this podcast. But Andre and Michelle, if you are listening happy to have a chat about sponsorship opportunities for the podcast moving forward.

[00:28:54] Matt: But just on that, like, don't care. Name dropping brands that we work with that like we have great relationships with these people and they produce good stuff And I'm going to give them a shout out because they're putting their ass on the line at the moment and they're having to create a market in the UPVC industry that are quality windows, all right, that actually care about performance.

[00:29:10] Matt: They're not just whipping together some windows and like, oh, we're now high performance. They care about this stuff. So, there was some discussions that we did originally look like, do we have the discussion of bringing the windows in from Europe here?

[00:29:20] Matt: issue that I was worried about was the whole house. Like at one point of the house and the laundry to the back door. Which isn't far away, it's 110ml at a level, alright? So I was too scared to order these windows from Europe because we didn't know. what sizes they're going to be, it took multiple measurements on site to be like, are these going to fit with, because if we order those windows from Europe, they all would have been thrown out because we wouldn't, they wouldn't have fit because we had to make so many small changes to fit them in because the bricks, if you followed that same plane as the house on the angle, any window that was on that same plane, it was also on our out of skewed,

[00:29:51] Matt: All right, so we also then had to like try shrink and make it all work.

[00:29:55] Matt: And sometimes these challenges, you can think about them early. Sometimes I also run with the theory of like, you know, I'm just going to work it out later. Like what's the point of trying to work that out right now?

[00:30:02] Hamish: I'm

[00:30:02] Hamish: sure there's going to be.

[00:30:03] Matt: whole conversation.

[00:30:05] Hamish: And I'm sure there's going to be a lot of, these. Conversation as we move into construction. Matt, this is like a super interesting project and I can't wait to hear about, some of the challenges that you, come across and how you've resolved them during construction, and thanks, for sharing me

[00:30:21] Matt: Oh, there was tears. I can tell you that. AirPods died. So what we'll do is we're going to tie this off now. But what we'll do in the stage, we'll probably talk about the construction period from start to finish and we'll run you through everything from the moment we got on site, what we found behind the walls to making decisions on the fly.

[00:30:36] Matt: probably be over two episodes and then we'll talk through it and then talk about lived experience, but we'll keep that for another day. Hamish's headphones are dead he just can't talk right now because he can't, his microphone is not working.

[00:30:45] Matt: So we'll just leave it at that for the podcast, but yeah, the next episode will probably come out in maybe a month or so around this construction part one of it. So stay tuned.