Hey everybody, welcome to the HAC ADHD vodcast. I'm your host Jeremy Begley.
0:055 secondsToday we've got Barry Cop, chief executive of the Cleaner, Safer Group out of the UK. And this is going to be a good one. These guys have received
0:1313 secondsblower door testing for about 90% of the UK. So we're talking real data, real systems, and a completely different
0:2020 secondsapproach than what we deal with here in the United States. We're going to get into air tightness, ventilation, where things go wrong when you don't connect
0:2828 secondsthe dots, and we'll even hit on ADHD and how it plays in the leadership and performance in this industry. Let's get
0:3636 secondsinto it. Hey everybody, welcome to the HVAC ADHD podcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Begley. I'm here today with Barry Coupe
0:4545 secondsof the Cleaner, Safer Group, and he is a very special guest. He's our first European guest. He joins us from the UK
0:5353 secondsand has is going to share a ton of great experience about blower door testing and other stuff. So, I'll let him go ahead and introduce himself and we'll get into the conversation. Barry, take it away.
1:031 minute, 3 secondsCool. Thanks for having me, Jeremy. I'm Barry Cop. I'm the chief executive of the Cleaner Safer Group. Within that group, the perhaps most well-known one
1:121 minute, 12 secondsor most well-known company is ATMA, the air tightness testing and measurement association. For those of you listening in America, we're quite close to the Air Barrier Association of America. ABBA
1:211 minute, 21 secondswith a UK version of what they do. The other big company we have is Heatas.
1:251 minute, 25 secondsYou'll see for those watching on my on my top here, we look after the quality of wood fuel, wood fuel burners, log
1:321 minute, 32 secondsburners you might call them. We have a laboratory that tests the quality of the quality of wood before it goes out into the marketplace. And between all the
1:391 minute, 39 secondscompanies I run, we have about 6,000 six 6,000 registrants or certificants that that we look after. We look after their
1:461 minute, 46 secondscompetency. We look after their training. Uh it's a it's decent sized organization.
1:541 minute, 54 secondsVery very cool. So before the show you were telling me that you guys do blower door testing for about 90% of the UK. Is
2:012 minutes, 1 secondthat correct? Or you you manage that I guess.
2:042 minutes, 4 secondsYeah. There's about 600 registered on our certification program. Uh so of all of the blow door testing that happens in
2:122 minutes, 12 secondsthe UK about 90% or so comes through our certification program. So we and and the rules are slightly different. So every
2:212 minutes, 21 secondssingle domestic residential property in the UK is blow tested as part of the building codes and every single
2:292 minutes, 29 secondscommercial building is also blowd dooror tested. Uh we're we're the first in the world I think we're the first in the world to do that. So, we have uh it's
2:392 minutes, 39 secondsit's been happening now for for 20 years, but we're the first to make it mandatory about 10 years ago, give or take, that every single building is uh is tested.
2:482 minutes, 48 secondsSo, that's that's pretty cool. And you need an army of people to test them.
2:512 minutes, 51 secondsWe're building I know I know in America we're small fry, but we build about 200 220,000 homes a year here. Every single one of those requires requires testing.
3:013 minutes, 1 secondSo, that's pretty cool. Are you guys requiring it on any uh retrofit situations or is it just new construction or how does that actually work?
3:083 minutes, 8 secondsJust just new construction but we uh there it's about to change so that we can do it with retrofit. Uh one of the
3:173 minutes, 17 secondsthings we have one of the weird nuances I don't know if you have it in the US is that when a new home when an existing home is sold you have to have somebody
3:253 minutes, 25 secondscome to your house and they do what we call an energy performance certificate.
3:293 minutes, 29 secondsSo, they look at your house and they say, "Was it built in the ' 70s? Do you have insulation? Do you have 6 in, 8 in?
3:363 minutes, 36 secondsUh, do you have blown insulation?" And they they do a big energy calculation and that determines the energy rating of your house. And they illegally have to
3:453 minutes, 45 secondshave that done before you can sell your property. So, you're telling the people you're buying how energy efficient the home is. And that in real world, it
3:543 minutes, 54 secondsdoesn't mean all that much because we have such a housing shortage. You just buy the house you can afford. But it kind of means something. So in order to
4:014 minutes, 1 secondchange some of those things, you can have insulation air tightness is now going to be added or blow testing is going to be added into that mix so that
4:094 minutes, 9 secondsyou can go and get a blow test done to prove that your house is nice and energy efficient whereas right now they they make an assumption. So that that is
4:164 minutes, 16 secondscoming. Existing homes is coming and people do it privately.
4:204 minutes, 20 secondsSo right now though you do have to have an energy inspection on on the sale of the home on every single home. We don't we don't have anything like that here. I
4:274 minutes, 27 secondsmean, there are programs state-tostate and depending on where you're at that may require something like that. Um, I've heard of different like Austin,
4:344 minutes, 34 secondsTexas at one time did. Um, but for the most part, like that's a pipe dream in America. We would love for that to happen and it would be nice to require
4:434 minutes, 43 secondsthat, but um, there would be a lot of people probably not selling their homes too if they had that done because they would be proving that their home is not
4:504 minutes, 50 secondsvery energy efficient. Um there's plenty of them that are but we um
4:574 minutes, 57 secondshere in the US like we you know we have great building codes but enforcement is an issue like they can do funny things
5:045 minutes, 4 secondslike it's municipality to municipality a lot of times depending on how the state looks at it. So to break it down for you for in in the US I don't know how
5:135 minutes, 13 secondsfamiliar you are with our code structure who may be vary but it starts in the government they say whatever the code is
5:195 minutes, 19 secondsthat they're adopting whatever the IECC IECC code is that they're adopting so like I think we're on 2021 or 2022 2024
5:295 minutes, 29 secondsjust got made I don't think it's adopted unilaterally yet and then once they are able to
5:385 minutes, 38 secondsum each state gets a hold of that and they decide what year they're going to adopt. So there's states from a statetost state standpoint some of them
5:465 minutes, 46 secondsare still on 2009 building international building code just depends on what they decided to do. Then under that each
5:545 minutes, 54 secondsdepending on how the state looks at it like some states say yeah that's it that's you know this is what everybody has to do and some states are like like where I live I live in Tennessee some
6:036 minutes, 3 secondsstates it's like Tennessee or municipality to municipality and this is even like local jurisdiction to local
6:106 minutes, 10 secondsjurisdiction where a little township can have totally different rules than a city and there's some that are unincorporated they don't have building code at all they choose not to go by building code
6:196 minutes, 19 secondsso like the enforcement in the United States is wild compared to like other places that you may have a very uniformed way like yep this is the way
6:276 minutes, 27 secondswe're going to do it let's create the army let's get out there because then commerce becomes all messed up for those type of services because some states you
6:356 minutes, 35 secondsneed it some states you don't you know so it's just becomes very like sporadic where you can even make money as a company that's doing inspections you
6:436 minutes, 43 secondsusually have to cover quite a different uh variety of regions to even make it make sense for you to be able to do that do that type of stuff there's some guys
6:516 minutes, 51 secondsBut it's also depends on what you're trying to do. If you're one guy with a blower door and you're in a state where they require blower door testing, you can probably make a pretty good living
7:007 minutesdoing blower door testing. But if you're a company that's trying to support 10 guys with blower doors, then you probably need to go in other states
7:087 minutes, 8 secondsbecause there's not going to be enough of that to go around because there's, you know, competition inside the state itself for that to begin with. So it's pretty weird. That's just that right out
7:167 minutes, 16 secondsright out of the gate. That's a pretty interesting nuance that we're dealing with there. So let me uh ask you this. Is there is it just a blower door test?
7:247 minutes, 24 secondsIs there a metric they have to meet? How is that number used once you do the testing? Like what does it mean from there?
7:307 minutes, 30 secondsIt's an energy model that gets done. So again, I don't know how it happens in your world, but in our world before you even build the building, you need to
7:377 minutes, 37 secondsenergy model and look at the government basically sets how much energy can be used per square foot of a building. It's
7:447 minutes, 44 secondsa big big complicated calculation. One of those numbers is the is the target blow door test number. So the lower the
7:527 minutes, 52 secondsnumber you put into the calculation, you have to meet that number in order to pass and get your building building code sign off. So it's a bit of a gamble, but
8:018 minutes, 1 secondyou you kind of make a choice. You have you can put an extra 6 in of insulation in. You can add an extra couple of solar panels on the roof. You can you can do a
8:098 minutes, 9 secondsbunch of stuff. One of those things you can do to or make it better is make a make your building much more airtight.
8:168 minutes, 16 secondsSo it's a it's a game that you play. It was never made.
8:198 minutes, 19 secondsIt's a performance model. So that's what it is. Trade-offs. It's a performance model with trade-offs. That's what what you're doing there. US has a similar I mean our code's written that way. It's
8:278 minutes, 27 secondsjust like the another weird thing about US code is like when it gets to the state level, they could say they're adopting 2021 and they'll be like with
8:358 minutes, 35 secondsstate amendments and then they amend like all these different things. So now it's not 2021 anymore. It's something called 2021 that has a bunch of
8:448 minutes, 44 secondsdifferent amendments where they're like one of the more common amendments is like international energy code says you have to have ducted returns. You cannot use wall cavity for returns. Like most
8:538 minutes, 53 secondsstates still allow that. They are going to let you do wall cavity returns because it is the easier more cost effective thing for them to do and they
9:019 minutes, 1 seconddon't see the value and actually have a ducted returns. Green building programs like lead energy energy store actually has a pathway where you can do it. they
9:099 minutes, 9 secondsdiscourage it but they there is a pathway where you can use a wall cavity but like a lot of the green build NGBS lead those guys a lot of green building
9:189 minutes, 18 secondsprograms in the US they don't allow you to do that because it is a bad practice but like building code also really doesn't allow you the adopted national
9:259 minutes, 25 secondsbuilding code doesn't allow you to do that but energy code but most states do like even a state like in Ohio that I
9:339 minutes, 33 secondswent uh where I used to live at they had adopted a stringent code but They roll it back. They do the same thing. They'll make make the blade blower door number
9:429 minutes, 42 secondssays three. They make theirs five. Uh wall cavities aren't allowed. You can do wall cavities like and then levels of insulation. But the one that is so then they create a p what they call pathways.
9:539 minutes, 53 secondsBut the model code which is the code that the whole entire program is modeled after. If you end up having to do that pathway, which is the performance trade-off code that you're talking
10:0110 minutes, 1 secondabout, then it just goes exactly like you got you're saying your code works.
10:0510 minutes, 5 secondsis the same exact way where they have to put do a performance model and they have to play with the trade-offs to try to get to where they want to go. If they do
10:1210 minutes, 12 secondsa weird rafter system that doesn't let them do R49 in the attic, then they got to do, you know, something a little better somewhere else. So, like there is
10:2010 minutes, 20 secondsthat system, but then we have 20 million other systems that people can choose to do too that that you're not going to get the true benefit of the performance
10:2710 minutes, 27 secondsmodeling uh the way that it's intended to be used. So, like the Yeah.
10:3210 minutes, 32 secondsSo, do you do you like lock that in? You have to lock it in when you submit the building planning. You get the plan to lock it in. Yeah.
10:4010 minutes, 40 secondsThis is how you're going to do it. And it's different for It could be different for two neighbors. The pathway. Yeah. Yeah. You could Yeah.
10:4710 minutes, 47 secondsNeighbor one could choose the state and then and even inside the It's so crazy because even inside the state for Ohio
10:5410 minutes, 54 secondsanyway, like Tennessee is even wilder because theirs is just like wherever you go it's different. But like um Ohio they
11:0311 minutes, 3 secondsthey had one, two, three, four, four or five different path of their own pathways. These different little setups
11:1111 minutes, 11 secondsthat they felt I don't know how they what math they used to get to each one of them, but like you know instead of what it actually ended up boiling down
11:1711 minutes, 17 secondsto I guess is the amended trade-off pathway. So like in performance you can do all these different path you know all these different trade-offs depending on
11:2511 minutes, 25 secondswhat the energy model said. They created four different pathways with their versions of the trade-offs in each one of the pathways so that then you can
11:3311 minutes, 33 secondsadopt one of those path whichever works best for you, you can adopt that pathway and do it. That's wild.
11:4011 minutes, 40 secondsYeah, man. It it's a crazy game when you're messing with the the you know, it's one of those things. I wish they would get more uniform because it does suck when you're
11:4911 minutes, 49 secondsone of us guys trying to figure out what the thing is required to do though.
11:5311 minutes, 53 secondsYeah, that's crazy. I mean it is substantially simpler. We are just given a set of building codes and they're all lettered and says A is this and B is
12:0112 minutes, 1 secondthis and C is this and these are the things you have to do and there's only there's very few choices. These are you can design any way you like but the
12:0812 minutes, 8 secondsstairs have to be a certain way. The and it doesn't mean we create boring buildings. It just means all of the safety stuff we have to do the exact
12:1512 minutes, 15 secondssame uh exact same way which makes it a lot easier. But yeah, when my experience from Texas was just and I remember first hearing about it from from a a friend of
12:2312 minutes, 23 secondsmine, Bill Culzer. He was saying uh you know, you can have neighbors that sit across a small boundary and have completely different code requirements.
12:3212 minutes, 32 secondsIt's not you have zero lot line. Like a lot of a lot of in Ohio, I mean there probably is in the UK too, but a lot of the buildings are zero lot lines. So you could have a neighbor literally right
12:4012 minutes, 40 secondsnext to you where you could probably stick your arm out the window and touch their building and it would still could be a different energy code than what your building was built in.
12:4912 minutes, 49 secondsYeah, that's that's that's pretty cool.
12:5112 minutes, 51 secondsSo did you have blow door testing up in Tennessee? I was in Tennessee actually. Not so few few months ago I was out.
12:5712 minutes, 57 secondsOh man, I wish I'd have known. I'd have got up with you.
12:5912 minutes, 59 secondsNo, not for I was on I was on holiday. I went to My aunt has a house in Nashville. So we went to Nashville for two weeks and my daughter lives over there. I'm
13:0713 minutes, 7 secondsactually in Knoxville, which is east of Nashville, but my daughter lives in Nashville, so I'm over there quite frequently. Where at? What part? Like what little neighborhood or whatever?
13:1613 minutes, 16 secondsOh, I think it was called Green Hills or Green Bay Hills. Like right right in the middle. Yeah, in the middle.
13:2313 minutes, 23 secondsAnyway, so you were So you had two hours of traffic everywhere you went.
13:2713 minutes, 27 secondsIt was uh No, it was like 10 minutes in the in the car and you were in the main bit of Nashville. So we Oh, wow. So you're in like down right outside downtown.
13:3613 minutes, 36 secondsYeah, right downtown. Yeah, we we party.
13:3813 minutes, 38 secondsCentennial Park and all that. Yeah, it was real real cool. Real pretty really enjoyed out there and it was hot.
13:4313 minutes, 43 secondsYeah. So in Tennessee like it depends like there's a neighborhood called Farragut right down the road from me.
13:4913 minutes, 49 secondsThey require every building to get blown or tested. There's a neighborhood here in Knox County Prep proper like where I live in the county of Knox and Farragut
13:5713 minutes, 57 secondsis too, but they're their own little municipality. But the county has adopted the code, but they you there's a pathway to get out of doing the blower door
14:0414 minutes, 4 secondstesting and the duck leakage testing if you like choose to do that. And then there different surround like I have places all within an hour of me that all
14:1214 minutes, 12 secondshave different requirements depending on where they are. Like it's really really really crazy in Tennessee. In Ohio, they at least kept the blower door
14:2014 minutes, 20 secondsrequirement. Like you had to if you're building a new building, you have to do blower door requirement at um five air changes. That's what they changed. They
14:2714 minutes, 27 secondstook it from three air changes and and uh put it at five AC50. How do you guys look at what is your metric like what how do you look at it over there? We look the common code here is ACH50.
14:3914 minutes, 39 secondsWe use meters cube per hour per meter squared. So we we go real real British on it but uh fundamentally me cube per hour per meter squared is almost the
14:4714 minutes, 47 secondssame as AC50. We it's super close. So okay within 10% the numbers and the targets the same but generally the average the
14:5614 minutes, 56 secondsaverage target here is about 5 AC the average result is about 4 AC a so okay that's we collect we collect all the data we
15:0415 minutes, 4 secondshave billions of data points uh because that's one of the other cool things that happens in the UK because we're a centralized system everybody sends their
15:1215 minutes, 12 secondsnotification data that whenever they do a test they send it to us and we get a copy of the test file and in return we give them a certificate and that
15:1915 minutes, 19 secondscertificate is what the building inspector looks for to make sure the test is registered. So in order to get that certificate, you need to send us hundreds of data points. You need to
15:2715 minutes, 27 secondssend us your test file. And if you send us your test file, then we get to check that data. We get to analyze that data.
15:3315 minutes, 33 secondsSo we have crazy crazy amounts. There's more than a billion data points in our system. Holy crap.
15:3815 minutes, 38 secondsSo we can look at you think every single every single individual test has, you know, 10 readings. It has temperatures before and after, barometric pressure,
15:4615 minutes, 46 secondsthe address, the equipment they use, when it was calibrated. uh we have all of the data. So every single test has all of this data and then some are doing
15:5415 minutes, 54 secondspositive and negative. So we we are able to take that data and then look at spread it across the country. We use PowerBI as a as a Microsoft program to
16:0216 minutes, 2 secondsto analyze the data. It's super cool. So we can look at trends. We can look at when building codes change and how that gets impacted. and we just have graphs
16:1116 minutes, 11 secondsand we have sometimes we don't actually know what to do with it because we get universities at colleges that will approach us to do projects because we're
16:1916 minutes, 19 secondsjust ordinary guys here. We're we're normal construction people. We don't know what to do with the data. So people will submit requests and and look at how
16:2716 minutes, 27 secondscan I use that data or I've got a theory about something about a particular building type or a construction type. So they can look at the results of uh
16:3516 minutes, 35 secondsstickuilt houses versus uh you know even actually pitched roof stickuilt houses versus flat roof stick bill houses can
16:4316 minutes, 43 secondsbe an average of different results when you average them across a 100,000 tests.
16:4816 minutes, 48 secondsYou can see the uh you can see the differences and you can see that one is always slightly better than the other for whatever reason.
16:5616 minutes, 56 secondsWhat what's your most common construction type of house over there?
16:5916 minutes, 59 secondsLike what is what is the most common thing? brick built. So most common here is the inner skin will be like a
17:0617 minutes, 6 secondslightweight block lightweight really lightweight block work and then there'll be a cavity normally uh 6 to 8 in cavity
17:1417 minutes, 14 secondsfilled with insulation and then on the outside we use we typically use brick so you'll have uh just straight up brick
17:2217 minutes, 22 secondsbut stick built stick built about 15% in Scotland stick built like 70% or something 75%.
17:2917 minutes, 29 secondsWhat's the insulation type in those walls? the 6 to8 in.
17:3317 minutes, 33 secondsTypically, it can either be a polyurethane foam or it can be uh more
17:4017 minutes, 40 secondsof a it could be any any of the insulation types. Any of the the big stuff like blown in or you guys use any kind
17:4717 minutes, 47 secondsof um we don't use blown in. We never we never do that even in our even in the loft.
17:5217 minutes, 52 secondsIt's just typically the roll the stuff we would roll the bat. Yeah. Yeah.
17:5717 minutes, 57 secondsSo, it's either bat or foam. Battle foam. Yeah.
18:0118 minutes, 1 secondYeah. Yeah, we we in we did as a country we went we went round we had a national campaign maybe 25 years ago and I I
18:0818 minutes, 8 secondsremember getting it done on our property where they come and blown insulation into your cavities in the walls and it created so many problems man because
18:1518 minutes, 15 secondsthey didn't they didn't understand the people that paid you government paid huge amounts of money for all of these homes to be insulated thinking they were
18:2318 minutes, 23 secondsdoing the right thing and they just caused dampened mold because all of the blown in insulation reduced the air gap and stopped the bricks and blocks from
18:3018 minutes, 30 secondsdrying. out and you just got huge amounts of mold in all of these uh in all of these homes. That that was We get idiots wanting to do that here in
18:3818 minutes, 38 secondsthe in the US, too. They want to take We have this stuff called um I forgot the name of it now. It's a certain kind of foam. It's basically
18:4618 minutes, 46 secondspoured in foam. It doesn't really expand at all. It just comes out of a tube and they pour it in and it fills the cavity up. It's the worst It's the worst type
18:5418 minutes, 54 secondsof foam you could ever use. I've took walls apart where the stuff degrade like you they'll have think they filled the cavity up and then be huge gaps in the
19:0219 minutes, 2 secondscavity where the stuff just turned to dust and fell out of there. Um, but we hit an epidemic of that exact thing where they were coming in and pour
19:1019 minutes, 10 secondstaking the airspace in between bricks and telling people they can insulate their homes and then just pouring that foam down in the airspace and then next thing you know the bricks just crumbling
19:1919 minutes, 19 secondsaround there and falling apart, you know, after a few years because they don't have the air space to keep all the moisture and stuff and just builds up and builds up and builds up the wall and
19:2719 minutes, 27 secondspretty soon the whole entire wall is uh crumbling out of there. So yeah, you got to that's one thing about like all this insulating and energy conservation
19:3619 minutes, 36 secondsmeasures and stuff. You better know about the building too before you start just willy-nilly putting um insulation and stuff like that in these buildings
19:4419 minutes, 44 secondsbecause we wind up with these problems that we see time and time again from these types things.
19:5019 minutes, 50 secondsI always quote you Einstein said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction and that is so true with buildings. You can't just insulate a
19:5819 minutes, 58 secondsbuilding. You can't just And air tightness is the thing I've made my career on. I've been doing it for for 20 years. You can't just make a building
20:0620 minutes, 6 secondsairtight and not adjust the ventilation and the flow and the air around the building. Everything you do needs to have a an appropriate opposite measure.
20:1520 minutes, 15 secondsAnd we just as a country keep getting that wrong. We highly insulate our buildings. We've made our buildings super airtight because of the code. But
20:2320 minutes, 23 secondsthen the ventilation code fell behind because they didn't update the ventilation code for all these airtight buildings. We everything we do we just
20:3120 minutes, 31 secondsseem to not do it as a whole. And actually the building code in the UK just changed like two days ago but I don't know how long it would take you to
20:3920 minutes, 39 secondsrelease this but it was it was just happened and they finally for the first time started making the codes really talk to each other and say if you do
20:4620 minutes, 46 secondsthis then you must do this. And we've really needed that for a for a long time. But you you'll see it, man. You can't just go and spray stuff onto
20:5420 minutes, 54 secondsbuildings and you can't just go and do you know people close up their brick.
20:5820 minutes, 58 secondsThey spray the waterproofing on the outside of the building and all of that moisture and air just can't get through where it used to and the buildings rot so quickly. So quickly.
21:0921 minutes, 9 secondsYeah. Uh what is the when you guys do do ventilation over like a what is the requirement for ventilation in residential homes um that are getting
21:1721 minutes, 17 secondsblowed dooror tested and b what's the most common type of ventilation you're seeing installed or is it a single type?
21:2321 minutes, 23 secondsUh we have the data on that. So one of the things we collect with blow door is that we collect the ventilation strategy. So they have to declare that.
21:2921 minutes, 29 secondsSo it's really changed in the last couple of years. It's now continuous mechanical ventilation is about 70% of new build homes in this country. I would
21:3821 minutes, 38 secondssay 99% of existing homes have an extractor fan in the bathroom and an extractor fan in the kitchen, normally the cooker hood, and that's the only
21:4721 minutes, 47 secondsventilation they have. But because they're not airtight buildings and they're really inefficient, there's enough air that gets in and around that
21:5521 minutes, 55 secondsdoes its uh that does the job of just moving fresh air into the building or I would fresh air is maybe the wrong word.
22:0122 minutes, 1 secondYou're moving stale air around a building, but you're moving air. So, you're not getting the buildup and the mold and the damp, but it is cold. Uh,
22:0822 minutes, 8 secondsso in any modern building, it's now continuous mechanical. So, that that can be uh we're starting to get pretty good at ducted systems. So that's having duct
22:1622 minutes, 16 secondsrun to the wet rooms, the bathrooms, the kitchens, uh if you have maybe a laundry room, we're continuously pulling very
22:2322 minutes, 23 secondssmall amounts of air, but it's normally only anywhere between 6 and 10 L a second out of each of those out of each
22:3022 minutes, 30 secondsof those rooms continuously 24/7, which is which does a does a good enough job.
22:3522 minutes, 35 secondsAbout 20% of new homes now, we're using heat recovery ventilation. It's about 20%. And th those systems are super cool because they're filled with sensors,
22:4422 minutes, 44 secondsPM2.5. They've got uh CO2 sensors, humidity sensors, and they're just adjusting constantly for the for the house. You have a party and
22:5322 minutes, 53 secondsit knows that the humidity levels gone up and the CO2 levels gone up, so it adjusts itself for you. We're getting real good at real good at that stuff. Uh
23:0223 minutes, 2 secondsso that's about 20% of new construction and only only maybe 10% of new construction is using the old method which is just having a bathroom fan and
23:1023 minutes, 10 secondsa kitchen fan. But they're they're the that in you know next year that will be gone completely.
23:1523 minutes, 15 secondsSo next year they'll be doing all HRVs or is there a different strategy that you use instead of HRV cheaper?
23:2323 minutes, 23 secondsYes. Yeah. It won't be HRV just kind of just straight up uh extract continuous extract and Okay. Same thing strategy. Got it. Yeah.
23:3323 minutes, 33 secondsSo they do something like that. I guess a few things. One, you guys don't have a humidity problem really, right? You're not worried about that so to speak or are you?
23:4223 minutes, 42 secondsNot at all. I mean it rain it rains a lot where where we live but it in terms of humidity inside our buildings. No, not really.
23:5023 minutes, 50 secondsNot really.
23:5123 minutes, 51 secondsSo here exhaust in most climates exhaust ventilation is probably the worst as you guys call it e extract. It's probably
23:5823 minutes, 58 secondsthe worst ventilation you can do because it just lets air come back in willy-nilly through the cracks and crevices of the building. Even though it's exhausting from one known port, um
24:0724 minutes, 7 secondsit's still letting air come back in through the cracks and crevices of the building. And in the worst times of the year, you know, the high estimate times of the year, it can really cause
24:1524 minutes, 15 secondsproblems in the house where you got air constantly getting dragged in through these, you know, once you seal a building up. It only has so many places that can come in and it's going to come
24:2424 minutes, 24 secondsin those places over and over and over and over again. You're just going to be dragging water, dragging water, dragging water, dragging water until pretty soon you got wetting on the ceiling or
24:3224 minutes, 32 secondswetting in the area and then mold back there probably way before you even see the wedding. So, you know, it's a bunch of bad stuff going on with exhaust
24:4024 minutes, 40 secondsventilation. So, we really try to steer up north. It's not too bad because you're getting a little less humidity and a little more, you know, drier climate. Um, it's still not probably the
24:4924 minutes, 49 secondsoptimal thing to do, but it's way more forgiving up north, but you get down south below the Bible belt where there's like a lot of humidity pretty much all
24:5824 minutes, 58 secondsthe time, then it's not a viable solution at all. you have to go to something like supply only or even you know ideally like you said an ERV in our
25:0725 minutes, 7 secondsworld HRV your world is really probably the most ideal strategy and then here like as a design professional myself I
25:1425 minutes, 14 secondstry to live in the world of ventilating dehumidifier so that I can get a two for one bang bang for your buck so that we're dehumidifying the air and also
25:2325 minutes, 23 secondsproviding the fresh air ventilation supply only and you know cause no harm to the building and stuff like that. So like that's sort of the world.
25:3025 minutes, 30 secondsKeep that keep that humidity at optimum. That's the cool thing about that technology is we don't we just don't do that. But you can choose your humidity level
25:3925 minutes, 39 secondsbecause you can take it from 70 80 90 down to down to your 50s and 60s y down to your 40s or 30s if you really want to. But yeah, we we don't air
25:4725 minutes, 47 secondscondition our buildings. I mean we do some of our hotels, some of our offices, uh but we in our homes Oh my god. We
25:5625 minutes, 56 secondsrarely we rarely do it. So it's it's you'll find British people hanging around in supermarkets when uh when it gets really hot. We just hang around.
26:0426 minutes, 4 secondsI mean that's Yeah. Back in the day you'd see that a lot too. Before there was air conditioning everywhere here. Now everybody has uh air conditioning.
26:1226 minutes, 12 secondsWhat um do you do any kind of like just as far as like beyond the you know the required ventilation? Is there any whole
26:1926 minutes, 19 secondshouse fan strategies people um employ over there or is that not a thing either? Like here in the US, like some of the drier climates where they don't
26:2726 minutes, 27 secondsneed as like uh San Diego and Seattle, some places where you don't really need air conditioning, where we have a drier
26:3426 minutes, 34 secondsclimate, you can a lot of people will get away with what we call a whole house fan where it's like a fan that goes up in the attic and then you have to like
26:4226 minutes, 42 secondsopen your windows and it like sucks air and it basically just circulates air through the whole entire house using a giant fan. Um you guys ever see anything like that?
26:5226 minutes, 52 secondsNo, definitely definitely not. I mean to some extent the extract only ventilation is kind of doing that but yeah we we
27:0027 minutesdon't we don't need to. The actual strategy that the government will tell you to do for for when it's really uh uh when it's really hot outside is actually
27:0827 minutes, 8 secondsjust close your windows, close your curtains or close your blinds and open your loft hatch. Most of our buildings have uh an attic that's uh that's
27:1727 minutes, 17 secondsventilated. So that enables the the warm air that's in your house to go up and into that into that loft space. That that's the best we have. It's kind of
27:2527 minutes, 25 secondsthe same thing, but it happens more naturally. And then by by 3 p.m. it's too hot and nothing nothing go get in your car. Yeah.
27:3427 minutes, 34 secondsGet in your car. Pretty good.
27:3627 minutes, 36 secondsSo um what is what do you guys you don't like as far as HVAC systems go? Do you is it you do you see any duck work at
27:4527 minutes, 45 secondsall or is it mostly duckless or what's the mix over there?
27:4927 minutes, 49 secondsI would say in the last for in residential I would say in the last two years it's become real common place now to duct our
27:5727 minutes, 57 secondshouses with the for ventilation only. Uh in terms of commercial buildings we we we have it's completely as we would say
28:0528 minutes, 5 secondschalk and cheese. There's a nice British statement for you. Uh in our commercial buildings we duck all the time. I'm sitting in my office now, duck work running above the ceiling. It's
28:1428 minutes, 14 secondscompletely normal in our in the residential world.
28:1728 minutes, 17 secondsNothing. It's so rare. And we now in the last two years have started doing it because the codes are requiring us to to have ducted ventilation uh to operate
28:2628 minutes, 26 secondsnice and nice and efficiently. But yeah, in in offices, in our supermarkets, uh some of our shops, you you'll see duct
28:3328 minutes, 33 secondsducting. And there's a whole industry out there in the commercial world uh that's just super good and super efficient. But yeah, it's just two
28:4128 minutes, 41 secondsdifferent worlds. Two our homes and our businesses, two different worlds.
28:4528 minutes, 45 secondsDo you how what's the common heating source for the houses?
28:4828 minutes, 48 secondsThe home mo mostly gas. So we'll have a gas central heating or gas boiler that heats water that's pumped around the house. Radiators.
28:5628 minutes, 56 secondsUh that's that's the most common. In my house, we have electric heating. We just have and they look like radiators. They're just electric electric radios.
29:0429 minutes, 4 secondsThat's becoming quite popular because most of our houses now the rules just changed. So in the next couple of years, every single home in the UK, every new
29:1329 minutes, 13 secondshome is going to be fitted with solar panels. So electric heating is becoming super popular.
29:1829 minutes, 18 secondsAre you is there you see a lot of air to water heat pumps.
29:2129 minutes, 21 secondsThey're becoming real popular. So the government the government have made it very clear to to the construction industry in the next couple of years.
29:2829 minutes, 28 secondsThese are going to be they've actually said you can't install gas boilers after I want to say either 2030 or 2035. It's one of them. So, they're getting rid of gas in this country. We're It's gone.
29:3929 minutes, 39 secondsThe gas network will eventually be replaced for a hydrogen network. So, they'll just pump hydrogen through the same lines and there's businesses that are based nearby us that have been doing
29:4729 minutes, 47 secondsa lot of the uh conversion testing and local neighborhood testing. But I think you got a lot of hydrogen vehicles over there.
29:5629 minutes, 56 secondsNo. None. No, hydrogen vehicles are interesting because if you if you're one of the people that thinks green and
30:0430 minutes, 4 secondsyou're going to save the planet and you're really into that. I talked to a lot of people that really both sides of the fence. If you hydrogen is the
30:1130 minutes, 11 secondssolution to that problem, but it's such a painful thing. You'd have to convert all of the gas stations into hydrogen
30:2030 minutes, 20 secondsstations. But actually, it's if you're going to do it properly, that's the one you do. But we have electric in all of our homes. You'll have electric on your
30:2730 minutes, 27 secondshomes. You have a driveway. Fitting and having an electric car is so easy. We have a charging station here in our in our work. So, you can
30:3530 minutes, 35 secondsjust charge your car. So, charging electric cars is easy just because we have the fuel stations, mini fuel stations at all of our homes and all of our offices. But there's nothing that
30:4430 minutes, 44 secondsbeats the sound of a V8. I don't know about you, but whenever I go I drive electric cars here, but whenever I go to America, always always get something because we don't we can't have
30:5330 minutes, 53 secondsit here. You talk about fuel prices where you guys are just now. I've seen your fuel prices going crazy.
30:5830 minutes, 58 secondsWe uh the fuel prices here, you're still like half the cost even when you're most expensive. People don't realize how crazy.
31:0531 minutes, 5 secondsYeah. People don't get it. And here over here, they don't understand how cheap stuff is here compared especially like gas and stuff like that compared to
31:1231 minutes, 12 secondsother places. Like um even though we feel like we're playing a lot paying a lot, it's usually still a lot more than the rest of the world is paying for um
31:2131 minutes, 21 secondsfuel and stuff like that. Um, I have seen some Go ahead. I was just trying to do a comparison.
31:2731 minutes, 27 secondsSo, seven, we would pay £720 a gallon, which in your money is about six bucks a gallon.
31:3731 minutes, 37 secondsWe're not there yet, but we're headed that way if this keeps going.
31:4131 minutes, 41 secondsI remember when I first was coming to Texas, it $2 a gallon. That was That was cool.
31:4631 minutes, 46 secondsI can remember when it was 89 cents a gallon. And you can fill up your my I used to have a pickup truck, a little um forbanger pickup truck. You fill it up
31:5431 minutes, 54 secondsfor five 10 bucks, you know, fill the whole thing up and be good for a week or something like that. Like you're definitely not doing that anymore.
32:0332 minutes, 3 secondsI've seen that's cool.
32:0432 minutes, 4 secondsI've seen some hydrogen cars out in California and there's there's a little pockets of people, you know, that are trying to push that over in the US and
32:1232 minutes, 12 secondsthey're figuring out the gas stations and stuff like that. But by and large, EV was the thing, but we don't have the infrastructure like you guys do yet over here like as far as charging stations.
32:2232 minutes, 22 secondsThere are a lot lot more of them because near the end of the Biden era they started you know installing them and there was a lot of incentives and stuff
32:3032 minutes, 30 secondslike that but those all got clawed back so a lot of that production has stopped now that Trump's in office and we're not seeing
32:3832 minutes, 38 secondsum the uptake of the infrastructure building that we were electric cars and trucks are cool if you don't travel you know if you just stay
32:4732 minutes, 47 secondslocal if you don't ever really leave the town that you're in. They work so well.
32:5032 minutes, 50 secondsThey're so cheap. But if you, you know, second you need to do long journeys, they just become, and people talk about range anxiety. It's true. It does
32:5932 minutes, 59 secondshappen. So, if you're somebody that works on construction, you may be called to another construction site and then to a third construction site cuz you
33:0633 minutes, 6 secondssomething going wrong, that's when it becomes real. It's just not as fun. But, but if you know, if you know every job you do is within 20 miles of your home, they're they're pretty cool.
33:1633 minutes, 16 secondsIt takes quite a bit of mapping still.
33:1833 minutes, 18 secondsYou're right. Like I have a I have a um my daughter's brother um by a different marriage.
33:2733 minutes, 27 secondsShe he came home from the military and he's like, "Oh, I'll rent one of these electric cars." Well, he was driving from Cincinnati down to Nashville and a
33:3633 minutes, 36 secondstrip that should have took him three hours ended up taking six because he didn't, you know, he didn't map anything out. He all of a sudden was running out of fuel. He couldn't find somewhere. had
33:4433 minutes, 44 secondsto pull over at a truck station and recharge the thing and he had to wait.
33:4833 minutes, 48 secondsIt just was like a nightmare situation for him. So, I think it's all about like like you said like hey if you if you understand what
33:5633 minutes, 56 secondsyou're in for and everything's close to you and that's the way you're going to use the vehicle I think yeah you're fine but like the minute you got to go on a
34:0434 minutes, 4 secondsjourney like you're saying or go from city to city or location to location or something like that then you better have the stuff mapped out. Now, I do know
34:1134 minutes, 11 secondsthough that they are there's long road truckers that are all electric now. They really been trying that out. So, like they're building it into the truck
34:1934 minutes, 19 secondsstations where they stop at so they can charge the trucks and stuff like that.
34:2334 minutes, 23 secondsSo, there is a whole entire like also autonomy is becoming a thing with truck drivers too. I was just reading about electric autonomous trucks are really
34:3134 minutes, 31 secondsstarting like there's way more of them on the road than we even realize right now and they're, you know, they're really starting to push that technology.
34:3834 minutes, 38 secondsI mean, at what point does it become a train though, dude? I mean, you what point does it an autonomous electric truck and
34:4634 minutes, 46 secondsyou just say, "Hey, why don't you just take a train and take it from across America, man? It's it's another pipe dream, man. We've been
34:5434 minutes, 54 secondswanting to train across America for as long as I can remember. Hell, they wanted a train across Cincinnati and couldn't even get it." like they they basically were like, "Yeah, we're going
35:0235 minutes, 2 secondsto do this uh trolley train and we're going to do all this funding and it's going to go downtown. It's going to go up into all the college towns and come back around and do all this stuff."
35:1035 minutes, 10 secondsWell, guess what it does? It just goes around downtown. It does not go anywhere else outside of town. They never completed the thing. I find I find it
35:1935 minutes, 19 secondsamazing how how America is just so such a big cool country just never nailed train travel because of the because if
35:2635 minutes, 26 secondsyou had a high-speed you know network it would be uh it would be cool. I mean I could I could leave this office where I am now and I could be in Paris in less than four hours.
35:3635 minutes, 36 secondsSo cool. Like they've never nailed mass transportation period man. It's all it's just like everything else. It's because of the way the United States is set up
35:4435 minutes, 44 secondshow free commerce works. like you always are just going to have all these different factions doing their own thing. So, it's just a hard uh nut to
35:5235 minutes, 52 secondscrack when it comes to uh yeah, anything together, I guess.
35:5935 minutes, 59 secondsAnd the longer it's left, the harder it becomes because you now need to go through people's land and you need to go I guess a lot of a lot of our train stuff many many years
36:0836 minutes, 8 secondsago is it's a lot easier when you did it in the 1800s because they didn't give it I mean to be fair we have the infrastructure the tracks exist they
36:1636 minutes, 16 secondsjust need to create the thing that can ride on them and also too like they need to to because at one time that is how you got across the United States was train travel. So, the tracks are there.
36:2536 minutes, 25 secondsI mean, there we have BNO railroads and like all these different other um railroads and then there's like um I forgot the name of it. It used to be there used to be a stop in Cincinnati.
36:3536 minutes, 35 secondsThey took it out a few years ago, but forever Amtrak, that's what I'm trying to think. Amtrak train is a commercial passenger train that used at one time it
36:4336 minutes, 43 secondsdid ran ran through the whole entire United States. But I, you know, I think they're moving back towards that way.
36:4936 minutes, 49 secondsBut like we need, like you said, like the highowered, high-speed train. Like Miami, the state of Florida has one that goes all up and down the coast. Man,
36:5636 minutes, 56 secondsthat thing's like it's like you're in a freaking tunnel. And I know, speaking of Nashville, they're trying to build one from Nashville to Knoxville that goes
37:0437 minutes, 4 secondscompletely underground. Highspeed train that that is underground, completely from Knoxville to Nashville. They're looking at that right now, starting at the airport and stopping at the other airport. So, they're thinking that way.
37:1437 minutes, 14 secondsIt just needs to be like the whole country instead of just this, you know, this place, this place. Cuz the other thing like you were just alluding to, you got all these little fractions like
37:2337 minutes, 23 secondshow are they going to connect them all if they're not thinking about connecting them all in the first place? You know, even if everybody did get their own version of highspeed, like the
37:3137 minutes, 31 secondsconnectivity probably still would not exist. So, it's weird, man. Little little different nuances from here here to there.
37:3837 minutes, 38 secondsIt's a it's a big place as well. You know, we're talking highspeed rail across the UK. It's a big place, America.
37:4337 minutes, 43 secondsYeah. Oh, yeah. A state is a country here. That's why I always say like basically our states are the size of most of your guys countries. It is a little bit like three three and a half UKs going to Texas. Something like that.
37:5437 minutes, 54 secondsIt sounds I don't know that that sounds about right.
37:5737 minutes, 57 secondsSpeaking of Texas, that's what I was going to bring up. So tell me what were you doing? Like tell me about your experience in blower door testing. Who were you training? That's really uh interesting that we have someone from
38:0538 minutes, 5 secondsthe UK coming over and training guys in Texas. So tell me a little bit about that.
38:0938 minutes, 9 secondsOh, it happened a while ago. So there's a the thing we were doing here the the certification body we're looking to
38:1738 minutes, 17 secondsbring to the US. We've been looking for a long time. We've kind of we got to the point COVID happened so it never quite never quite kicked off but we got a
38:2538 minutes, 25 secondsbunch of guys together from one of the ABBA conferences and we met up and and they were like we want to do what you're doing in the UK. We we want to make this
38:3238 minutes, 32 secondshappen. And for various reasons it never quite happened. But one of the guys I stayed super friendly with, Bill Coulson down down in uh down in Galveston,
38:4138 minutes, 41 secondsTexas. He'll be happy I've shouted him out.
38:4338 minutes, 43 secondsHe uh he we just got talking and he ended up taking on uh the business that would it got created and then they kind
38:5138 minutes, 51 secondsof fell out, but he he took on the business said, "Hey, we're going to train people. I'm going to train my competitors and I'm going to train my
38:5838 minutes, 58 secondssuppliers and I'm going to train the construction crews that we're working with on how to be better and how to find the problems before they exist. So, he
39:0639 minutes, 6 secondstook a business model of I make money from, you know, people doing it slightly wrong uh to, you know, let's actually
39:1539 minutes, 15 secondsstop them doing it wrong and I'm going to make my my money in a slightly different way. So he just started training uh all of the construction
39:2239 minutes, 22 secondscrews he was working with on how to spot problems before they become big problems and and they loved it. So part of that was blow a door. So we started he phoned
39:3039 minutes, 30 secondsme and was like come over I want to train my guys how to do blow a door. We they already did it. They're already accredited to do it but I want to train
39:3739 minutes, 37 secondsall of my guys how to do it. Uh and then we just hit it off, man. We had so much fun. Uh we we trained a bunch of people and from that we started training some
39:4639 minutes, 46 secondsof the construction crews on uh on detailing. Uh we started merging the course and now now it's become quite a
39:5339 minutes, 53 secondsbig thing. He sells sells out the course every time. There's 20 or so people that go on it and uh I helped train some of the people that work there so that they
40:0240 minutes, 2 secondscould deliver the course because it wasn't viable coming over from the UK every time. Sure.
40:0640 minutes, 6 secondsAnd uh yeah, now they they run these super cool diplomas. So you you sit you sit these courses every time. I think it's like you can either do you know
40:1540 minutes, 15 secondsevery few weeks you can do one day every few weeks or just do it as a as a five day fiveday course. You get BM certified building I should know that risk
40:2340 minutes, 23 secondsmanagement building envelope risk management certified and it just they do it as part of construction to help you
40:3140 minutes, 31 secondsunderstand what looks wrong and not not necessarily the detail. You can't become an architect in four days, but know when to put your hand up and say, "This is
40:3940 minutes, 39 secondswrong, man. This is I need to tell someone. I need to tell the commissioning crew that this is this I've seen this thing." And it just
40:4640 minutes, 46 secondschanged the game. So, ended up just going out and hanging out with these guys. Uh, and then we we got involved
40:5440 minutes, 54 secondswith Texas A&M University. They had a private partnership so we could use their facilities to train people. Uh, and they've taken that on. They helped
41:0141 minutes, 1 secondtrain some of the uh some of the college students there in construction and and looking at the new modern ways of uh
41:0941 minutes, 9 secondsmodern ways of building. Yeah, I go to the ABAB conferences quite a lot. So, I was out in Denver, I'll probably be out in this one in
41:1741 minutes, 17 secondsMinneapolis, although Minneapolis for me is a real pain in the backside to get to from the UK. So, really, whoever organized whoever organized that
41:2441 minutes, 24 secondsfrom ABBA gets a slap on the wrist from me. Let's let's keep it near international airports, please. I hear that
41:3241 minutes, 32 secondsit's so much easier to get to Chicago or to uh New York or somewhere, but to get to uh to get to Minneapolis for me is
41:3941 minutes, 39 secondslike three flights. It's it's a bit of a pain. Three flights crazy work. I man I I love I love it down in Texas.
41:4741 minutes, 47 secondsI love the heat. I love the the food. I love hanging out. I love the culture.
41:5241 minutes, 52 secondsThey they have a work hard, play hard culture. They Hell yeah. There ain't no doubt about that.
41:5741 minutes, 57 secondsAnd it's just just my people. and maybe one day I'll I'll go and uh I'll take a job. And I actually told our chair the
42:0442 minutes, 4 secondschairman of our group, the only way you'll lose me is uh you know, I'm I'm here for life. I'm doing doing what we do. I have a great job. We have a great team.
42:1242 minutes, 12 secondsSure.
42:1342 minutes, 13 secondsThe only way you'll lose me is when I one day retire off to Texas and I I'll just go out and do construction uh construction commissioning out in Texas
42:2042 minutes, 20 secondsbecause that's the dream. But now we have we have so much fun. We have good fun here doing what we do. I didn't even talk about one of one of the cool
42:2842 minutes, 28 secondsthings we have here is the building performance hub. So I'm the building I'm in now. We have a 10,000 foot warehouse.
42:3442 minutes, 34 secondsWe built an 800 ft house like the other side of the wall next to me here. Oh man, we need to see that sometime.
42:4042 minutes, 40 secondsYou'll have to send me some send me some footage. We'll throw it up when we talk about this. I'll throw the footage up while we're talking about it and we'll we'll just, you know, roll it in.
42:4942 minutes, 49 secondsWe've built a whole house and we've installed wood burners. We have a commercialrade MVHR. We use it for blow
42:5642 minutes, 56 secondsa door. We we decided here and that this is kind of actually the beginning of how we got into uh there's my ADHD kicking
43:0443 minutes, 4 secondsoff. That's actually the beginning of how we got involved with uh with the crew down in Texas. It was we created a training center that was doing it
43:1243 minutes, 12 secondsdifferently. That was hands-on training, not classroom based training or theory based training. We said if we're going to teach you how to do something, we're
43:1943 minutes, 19 secondsgoing to teach you how to do it. you know, we you're going to walk into a house and you're going to knock down part of a wall and you're going to, you know, whatever it is we do in in all the
43:2843 minutes, 28 secondstraining here, you actually physically do it. And we we changed the game to some extent doing that. And that was then how we got in touch of all of the
43:3643 minutes, 36 secondsuh the people from uh from the ABBA. So, that was uh that was great fun uh great fun doing that. But that's I I'll send you some pictures. I'll send you some footage you can you can chop in.
43:4643 minutes, 46 secondsI think it'll be really cool for people to be able to see it. Um, you brought up your ADHD. We're running out of time, but I did want to touch on that really quick. So, ADHD, tell me like what's
43:5443 minutes, 54 secondsyour coping mechanisms? How do you use it to your advantage? Like to put it out there.
43:5943 minutes, 59 secondsI guess I it was only not so long, well, not so long ago. I in terms of coping
44:0644 minutes, 6 secondsmechanisms and triggers, I look back on when I was a kid and I I used to never do my homework. And it wasn't because I didn't do my homework. I used to do it
44:1544 minutes, 15 secondsseconds before it was due in. And uh back then there was a lot of time I never handed in my homework. I didn't I didn't get good grades at school. I
44:2444 minutes, 24 secondsdidn't do particularly well. Uh and you look back now and go, "Yeah, that's grade ADHD." You know, you are really ticking all of the boxes. Hyperactivity.
44:3344 minutes, 33 secondsYou were couldn't concentrate, but then you would have the intense hyperfocusing to the point you would not eat and not
44:4044 minutes, 40 secondsdrink and uh and cause yourself all the problems. I was as a kid, it was it was crazy. But back then, I mean, that was
44:4744 minutes, 47 secondsonly, how old am I now? You know, I was 30 years ago. And it wasn't a thing. It wasn't recognized. And as an adult, I
44:5644 minutes, 56 secondsrealized uh, you know, it got talked about a lot more. And I was like, this is this is all of the things I do. These are the
45:0345 minutes, 3 secondshyperfocusing, the uh, you know, the the chronic inability to start a project, to
45:1045 minutes, 10 secondsstart doing something, just sitting at your desk and not being able to to manage that. Now, I think to some extent
45:1745 minutes, 17 secondsthe the hyperfocus is what helped me get to where I've got. You know, I'm the chief executive. We have 100 employees.
45:2345 minutes, 23 secondsWe have offices all over the UK. I've traveled I've traveled to more countries than I could ever dreamed of. And I credit my ADHD to that. I don't let it
45:3145 minutes, 31 secondsrule my life. I say because I'm able to to manage those symptoms, I'm able to get out into the big wide world. I'm
45:3845 minutes, 38 secondsable to to use it as a strength. But coping mechanisms, man, I'm the same.
45:4345 minutes, 43 secondsJust because I'm a chief executive, it doesn't mean I don't struggle sometimes, it doesn't mean I struggle to walk, but I use it to my advantage. So part of my
45:5145 minutes, 51 secondsjob is leadership and and inspiring people, inspiring our employees or fixing problems. So when I'm struggling to start a a particular project or I'm
46:0046 minuteshaving that blank, you you'll know all about it. You just can't move. I go and make a cup of coffee.
46:0546 minutes, 5 secondsI'm a doom scroller. I'll sit there scroll on my phone. scroll on my phone instead of doing I'll have the thing up on the computer screen right in front of me and be sitting there scrolling on my phone.
46:1446 minutes, 14 secondsSo yeah. Oh, it's so bad. So So one of the cool things I get to do is as part of my job is actually just go walk around the office. Just go and talk to people.
46:2346 minutes, 23 secondsThat's awesome.
46:2346 minutes, 23 secondsNorm normally something will happen that will inspire me. So I'll talk to someone and they'll go, "Hey, have you read this uh the latest version of this manual?
46:3146 minutes, 31 secondsYou know, I need" and my team know they know how to play me. They you know, I told them straight away. They'll say to me, "I need this in like the next 15 minutes. You have to read this document.
46:4146 minutes, 41 secondsI need this back. We're being chased on it." And whatever work it works, my brain goes, "There's there's an urgency.
46:4746 minutes, 47 secondsI get the dopamine hit to to go and do it." So, my team my team play on that sometimes. They they know how to get the best out of me and and I know
46:5546 minutes, 55 secondsThat's awesome, though, man. I'm glad that they do. Like, I my team's learning that. They're I haven't worked with them probably as long as you have. some of
47:0247 minutes, 2 secondsyour people like my my right-hand um person Karina, she probably knows that about me by now, but like that is a very
47:0947 minutes, 9 secondsval if people know how you work, man, that that makes things a lot easier to manage for sure.
47:1647 minutes, 16 secondsIt's good and it's needed. It's it's helpful to have good people, good people around you. I I talk about it openly as well with with the staff. I
47:2447 minutes, 24 secondstalk about uh it's okay. You know, um I say to people sometimes I would much rather you just go home if you're sitting at your desk at 4 p.m. and
47:3347 minutes, 33 secondsyou'll know you'll know the burnout that happens when you when you're over stimulated, when you are overcommitted, you feel like you've done two days work in one day because you've just had a
47:4147 minutes, 41 secondshyperfocus session. I say to my staff, just go home. Stand up at 4 p.m. 3 p.m.
47:4647 minutes, 46 secondsGo home. Because you're no use to me at that point.
47:4947 minutes, 49 secondsYou're more used going and doing something in your house.
47:5147 minutes, 51 secondsCome in tomorrow early. come in tomorrow when you are ready and you you've got over that. You've had a sleep. Uh so I can get the best out of you as a as a
47:5947 minutes, 59 secondsboss. You're no use to me sitting, you know, when I walk in the room, stop doom scrolling and and pretending you're doing something. Just go home, man. Just
48:0848 minutes, 8 secondsthat is you just It's so funny. Like ADHD people know exactly what you just said there because like there comes a point in time where it don't matter what
48:1648 minutes, 16 secondsyou're doing. It's not what you think you're doing and you might as well just go home and do something different because you're already doing it anyway. Hi.
48:2248 minutes, 22 secondsWe we joke we joke in the office here, we call it window time. So, we're we're up on the third floor and we can oversee quite a lot of stuff on on that side of the building
48:3048 minutes, 30 secondsand you'll find me just standing staring out the window. It's just window time. Window time is isn't a waste. It's me.
48:3548 minutes, 35 secondsIt's my brain resetting and saying, "Right, you've done a big task. You you've got that dopamine hit. You need to calm down. You need to get ready for the next task." And you're right, people
48:4448 minutes, 44 secondswithout ADHD, people that don't understand or know just will struggle.
48:4848 minutes, 48 secondsPeople that have it know exactly what you're doing. you're resetting, you're calming down, you're finding the inspiration to do the next task.
48:5548 minutes, 55 secondsAnd you just hit a wall at some point. I mean, when you have it, like you can get hyperfocused and then at some point in time, you're out of it. And you don't even realize that you're out of the focus and into something else unless you
49:0449 minutes, 4 secondsreally understand yourself and what's going on. I'm the same about the like cut off. When I when I realize that that's going on, I'm like, "All right, I'm hanging it up, man. It don't matter
49:1249 minutes, 12 secondswhat. I could sit here in front of this computer and probably get another hour of work done in three hours if I if that's, you know, what I wanted to But
49:2049 minutes, 20 secondsthat is will be the struggle from there on out. Like it's going to be, you know, me peeling myself away from something else to go back to something that my brain already shut off.
49:2949 minutes, 29 secondsYeah. And I think B, you know, if you're an employer, if you're a boss of somebody uh that has ADHD, learn my my
49:3649 minutes, 36 secondsbest advice, learn their symptoms, learn when they've hit the wall, and learn when they're hyperfocusing. And if you can figure those things out, you you're
49:4549 minutes, 45 secondsyou're a great boss. Don't be afraid of it. Embrace it. If somebody at 3 PM is sitting doom scrolling and they're not doing anything, send them home. It's the
49:5349 minutes, 53 secondsbest thing you can do because you're gonna get a better employee tomorrow morning.
49:5749 minutes, 57 secondsYeah. They learned how to harness it, which is what you're basically saying.
50:0050 minutesIf they learn how to harness it, they instead of like try to resist it. Like there is a way to maximize and optimize that person and get a lot of performance
50:0850 minutes, 8 secondsout of them that you probably won't get out of somebody else if you know how to dial them in the right way. If your phone if your phone runs out of charge, you got to put it on charge and it takes a while.
50:1850 minutes, 18 secondsYep. 100%. That is a great analogy. I love it. All right, we're we're up on our time here, but one thing I always do at the end of the show is I ask
50:2550 minutes, 25 secondseverybody um if the world ended today and you had to write one piece of advice on the wall for the world that came after it to to read, what would that piece of advice be?
50:3550 minutes, 35 secondsOh, that's a great question. I would say uh just never
50:4450 minutes, 44 secondsnever care too much what people around you that don't mean anything to you think. So, uh to expand on that, just
50:5150 minutes, 51 secondsever so slightly only care what your immediate family thinks, man. And by your immediate family, I mean your wife, your kids, and
50:5950 minutes, 59 secondsthat's it. And maybe maybe your sister-in-law, maybe maybe your mom, but maybe not. Your immediate family is everything and their opinion
51:0851 minutes, 8 secondsmatters, not the outside world. And you draw the circle where the outside world is.
51:1451 minutes, 14 secondsBut if your family is your family, care what they think. Don't care what anybody else thinks. And that goes from when you're a teenager, when you're at school, when you're an adult, and when
51:2251 minutes, 22 secondsyou're retired, man, your family is the only thing that matters.
51:2751 minutes, 27 secondsThat is awesome, man. I love it. Thank you so much. Uh, thanks for being a guest today, man. and I'd love to have lunch with you or something like that.
51:3551 minutes, 35 secondsCool. Sounds good, man.
51:3651 minutes, 36 secondsAll right, Barry. Thank you. I'll talk to you, man. Thank you.
