Season 2, Ep. 2: Blower Door Testing, Global Standards & Airtightness at Scale

The HVAC industry talks about performance.
The UK enforces it.

In this episode of HVAC ADHD™, Jeremy Begley sits down with Barry Cope—CEO of the Cleaner Safer Group and a leader behind the UK’s airtightness testing infrastructure—to break down what happens when building performance becomes mandatory.

Barry oversees certification programs responsible for 90% of blower door testing in the UK, offering a rare look into what true large-scale performance tracking looks like.

This episode goes beyond tools—and into systems, enforcement, and the future of HVAC thinking.

We cover:
• How the UK standardized blower door testing across the entire country
• Why every new home is tested—and what that changes
• What billions of data points reveal about real building performance
• The relationship between airtightness, ventilation, and moisture
• Why tightening homes without system changes creates problems
• ADHD, leadership, and high-performance thinking in the trades

We also explore how HVAC professionals can move beyond equipment—and start thinking in terms of systems, performance, and long-term outcomes.

Barry's Links: 

Website: https://www.cleanersafergroup.co.uk/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cleaner-safer-group/posts/?feedView=all
 
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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hey everybody, welcome to the HEHC ADHD vodcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Begley. Today we've got Barry Cope, Chief Executive of the Cleaner Safer Group out of the UK, and this is gonna be a good one. These guys have received blower door testing for about 90% of the UK. So we're talking real data, real systems, and a completely different approach than what we deal with here in the United States. We're going to get into airtightness, ventilation, where things go wrong when you don't connect to dots, and we'll even hit on ADHD and how it plays into leadership and performance in this industry. Let's get into it. Hey everybody, welcome to the HVAC ADHD vodcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Begley. I'm here today with Barry Coop of the Cleaner Safer Group, and he is a very special guest. He's our first European guest. He joins us from the UK and is going to share a ton of great experience about blurred 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.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

Cool. Thanks for having me, Jeremy. I'm Barry Cope. I'm the chief executive of the Cleaner Safer Group. Within that group, the perhaps most well-known one or 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 with the UK version of what they do. The other big company we have is HeatAss. You'll see for those watching on my uh on my top here. We look after the quality of wood fuel, wood fuel burners, log burners, 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 companies I run, we have about 6,000 registrants or certificates that that we look after. We look after their competency, we look after their training. It's a decent sized organization.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Very, very cool. So before the show, you were telling me that you guys do blower door testing for about 90% of the UK, is that correct? Or you you manage that, I guess?

SPEAKER_02 2:04

Yeah, there's about 600 registered on our certification program. Uh so of all of the blower door testing that happens in the UK, about 90% or so comes through our certification program. So we and the rules are slightly different. So every single domestic residential property in the UK is blower door tested as part of the building codes, and every single commercial building is also blower door tested. We're we're the first in the world, I think we're the first in the world to do that. So we have it's been it'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 is tested. So that's that's pretty cool. And you need an army of people to test them. We're we're building I know in I know we're in America with small fry, but we build about 200 to 220,000 homes a year here. Every single one of those requires requires testing, so that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Are you guys requiring it on any retrofit situations, or is it just new construction, or how does that actually work?

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Just just new construction, but we there's there it's about to change so that we can do it with retrofit. One of the things 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 come to your house and they do what we call an energy performance certificate. So they look at your house and they say, was it built in the 70s? Do you have insulation? Do you have six inch, eight inch, 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 have 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 doesn'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 change some of those things, you can have insulation, air tightness is now going to be added, or blow door testing is going to be added into that mix so that you can go and get a blow door test done to prove that your house is nice and energy efficient. Whereas right now they they make an assumption. So that that is coming, existing homes is coming, and people do it privately.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

So right now, though, you do have to have an energy inspection on the cell of the home, on every single home. We don't we don't have anything like that here. I mean, there are programs state to state, and depending on where you're at, that may require something like that. And I've heard of different like Austin, Texas, at one time did. 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 that, but 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 very energy efficient. There's plenty of them that are, but we here in the US, like we, you know, we have great building codes, but enforcement is an issue. Like they can do funny things, like 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 familiar you are with our code structure, who maybe vary, but it starts in the government. They say whatever the code is that they're adopting, whatever the IECC, IECC code is that they're adopting. So like I think we're on 2021 or 2022, 2024 just got made. I don't think it's adopted if unilaterally yet. And then once they are able to each state gets a hold of that and they decide what year they're gonna adopt. So there's states from a state-to-state standpoint. Some of them are still on 2009 building, international building, it just depends on what they decided to do. Then under that, each depending on how the state looks at it, like some states say, ah, that's it. That's it, you know, this is what everybody has to do. And some states are like like where I live, I live in Tennessee. Some states, it's like Tennessee or municipality to municipality, and this is even like local jurisdiction to local jurisdiction, 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. So, 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 we're gonna do it. Let's create the army, let's get out there, because then commerce becomes all messed up for those types of services because some states you need 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 usually 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 that it 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 doing 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 because 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. It's pretty weird. That's just that's right 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? Is there a metric they have to meet? How is that number used once you do the testing? Like, what does it mean from there?

SPEAKER_02 7:23

It's an energy model that gets done. So I again I don't know how it happens in your world, but in our world, before you even build the building, you need to energy model and look at the government basically sets how much energy can be used per square foot of a building. It's a big, big complicated calculation. One of those numbers is the is the target blower door test number. So the lower the number you put into the calculation, you have to meet that number in order to pass and get your building building code sign off. So you it's a bit of a gamble. But you you kind of make a choice. You have you can put an extra six inches of insulation in, you can add an extra couple of solar panels on the roof, you can you can do a bunch of stuff. One of those things you can do to or make better is make a make your building much more airtight. So it's a it's a game that you play. It was never made a lot of different things. It's a performance model, so that's what it is.

SPEAKER_01 8:14

Trade-offs, it's a performance model with trade-offs. That's what you're what you're doing there. So US has a similar, I mean our code's written that way. It's just 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 state 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 different amendments where they're like one of the more common amendments is like International Energy Code says you have to have duct it returns. You cannot use wall cavity for returns. Like most states still allow that. They are gonna let you do wall cavity returns because it is the easier, more cost-effective thing for them to do, and they don't see the value and actually have abducted returns. Green building programs like LEED, Energy Energy Store actually has a pathway where you can do it. They discourage it, but they there is a pathway where you can use a wall cavity. But like a lot of the green NGBS, lead, those guys, a lot of the big green building programs 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 building code, doesn't allow you to do that, but energy code. But most states do, like even a state like in Ohio that I went 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 says 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 path what they call pathways. But 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 about, then it just goes exactly like you're got you're saying your code works, it's 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 a weird rafter system that doesn't let them do R49 in the attic, then they gotta do you know something a little better somewhere else. So like there is that system, but then we have 20 million other systems that people can choose to do too that you're not gonna get the true benefit of the performance modeling the way that it's intended to be used. So like this is like you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:24

So do you do you like lock that in? Do you have to lock it in when you submit the build-in planning? You can do the planning to lock it in. Yeah, this is how you're gonna do it, and it's different for it could be different for two neighbors. Yeah, two neighbors could pick up the page.

SPEAKER_01 10:38

Yeah, yeah, you could, yeah. Neighbor one, could you choose the state? And then and even inside the it's so crazy because even inside the state for Ohio anyway, like Tennessee is even wilder because theirs is just like wherever you go, it's different. But like Ohio, they uh they had one, two, three, four, four or five different path of their own pathways, these different little setups that 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 to, I guess, is it's the amended trade-off pathway. So, like in performance, you can do all these different paths, you know, all these different trade-offs depending on what 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 adopt one of those paths, whichever works best for you, you can adopt that pathway and do it.

SPEAKER_02 11:30

That's wild.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah, man. I think it it's a crazy game when you're messing with the the I you know, it's one of those things I wish they would get more uniform because it does suck when you're one of us guys trying to figure out what the thing is required to do though.

SPEAKER_02 11:44

Yeah, that's crazy. We I mean it is substantially simpler. We are just given a set of building codes and they're all letters and says A is this and B is this 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 stairs have to be a certain way. The and it it doesn't mean we create boring buildings, it just means all of the safety stuff we have to do the exact same, 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 a friend of mine, Bill Coltsay. He was saying, you know, you can have neighbors that sit across a small boundary and have completely different code requirements. It's not a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

You can 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 line. So you could have a neighbor literally right next 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 to.

SPEAKER_02 12:40

Yeah, that's that's that's pretty cool. So do you have polar door testing up in Tennessee? I was in Tennessee actually, not so a few months ago. I was out there.

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Oh man, I wish I'd have known, I'd have been got up with you.

SPEAKER_02 12:50

No, uh 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 five.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

My daughter lives over there. I'm actually 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? Oh, I think it was called Green Hills or Green Bay Hills, like right in the middle.

SPEAKER_02 13:12

In the middle.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Anyway, so you were so you had two hours of traffic everywhere you went.

SPEAKER_02 13:18

It was uh that was like ten minutes in the in the car, and you were in the main bit of Nashville.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

So we oh wow, so you're in like downtown right outside downtown.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Yeah, right downtown, yeah. We we park.

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Centennial park and all that.

SPEAKER_02 13:30

Yeah. It was real, real cool. Real pretty enjoyed it out there. That was hot.

SPEAKER_01 13:34

Yeah, so in Tennessee, like it depends. Like, there's a neighborhood club Farragut right down the road from me. They require every building to get blowdoor tested. There's a neighborhood here in Knox County prep proper, like where I live in the county of Knox, and Farragut is 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 testing and the duck leakage testing if you like choose to do that. And then the difference around like I have places all within an hour of me that all have 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 requirement. Like you had to, if you're building a new building, you have to do blower door requirement at five air changes. That's what they changed. They took it from three air changes and and and uh put it at five ACH 50. How do you guys look at what is your metric? Like how what how do you look at it over there? We we we the the common code here is ACH fifty.

SPEAKER_02 14:29

We use meters cube per hour per meter squared, so we we go real real British on it. But fundamentally, meters cube per hour per meter squared is almost the same as ACH fifty. We're it's super close. So within ten percent, the numbers of the target's the same. But generally the average the average target here is about five ACH, the average result is about four ACH. So Okay. We collect all the data, we have billions of data points. Because that's one of the other cool things that happens in the UK. Because we're a centralized system, everybody sends their notification 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. That certificate 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 send 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. So we have crazy, crazy amounts. There's more than a billion data points in our system.

SPEAKER_03 15:27

Holy crap!

SPEAKER_02 15:28

So 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, the address, the equipment they use, when it was calibrated. We have all of the data. So every single test has all of this data, and then some are doing positive and negative. So we we are able to take that data and then look at spread it across the country. We use Power BI as as a Microsoft program to analyze the data. It's super cool. So we can look at trends, we can look at when building codes change and and how that gets impacted. And we just have graphs and we have sometimes we don't actually know what to do with it because we get universities or colleges that will approach us to do projects because we're just 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 I can 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 stick-built houses versus you know, even actually pitch roof stick-built houses versus flat roof uh stick-built houses can be an average of different results. When you average them across a hundred thousand uh tests, you 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.

SPEAKER_01 16:45

What what's your most common construction type of house over there? Like what is what is the most common thing?

SPEAKER_02 16:51

Brick built. So most common here is uh the inner skin will be like a lightweight block, lightweight uh really lightweight block work, and then there'll be a cavity, normally uh six to eight inch cavity filled with insulation. And then on the outside we use we typically use brick, so you'll have uh just straight up brick. But stick stick built, so stick built's about 15% in Scotland. Stick built's like 70% or something, yeah. So what's the insulation type in those walls? The six to eight inches? Typically, it can either be uh a polyuretheme foam or it can be more of 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 of um we don't use blown-in. We never we never do that. We even in our even in the loft, it's just typically the roll, the stuff we'd roll out. Yeah. Yeah. So it's either that or foam. Battle foam. Yeah. Yeah. We never did as a country we went we went round, we had a national campaign maybe twenty-five years ago. And I r I remember getting it done on our property where they come and blow an insulation into your cavities in the walls. And it created so many problems, man, because they didn't they didn't understand the people that paid, you know, government paid huge amounts of money for all of these homes to be insulated, thinking they were doing the right thing. And they just caused damp and mould because all of the blown-in insulation reduced the air gap and stopped the bricks and blocks from drying out. And you just got huge amounts of mould in all of these in all of these homes that that would be.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

We get idiots wanting to do that here in the in the US too. They want to take we have this stuff called I forgot the name of it now. It's a certain kind of foam. It's basically poured 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 of foam you could ever use. I I've taken walls apart where the stuff degrades, like you they'll have think they filled the cavity up, and then there'll just be huge gaps in the cavity where the stuff just turned to dust and fell out of there. But we had an epidemic of that exact thing where they were coming in and pour taking the airspace in between bricks and telling people they can insulate their homes and then just pouring that foam down in the airspace, and the next thing you know, the bricks just crumbling around there and falling apart, you know, after a few years because they don't have the airspace to keep all the moisture and stuff and just builds up and builds up and builds up the wall, and pretty soon the whole entire wall is uh crumbling out of there. So, yeah, you gotta that's one thing about like all this insulating and energy conservation measures and stuff. You better know about the building too before you start just willy-nilly putting insulation and stuff like that in these buildings because we wind up with these problems that we see time and time again from these types of things.

SPEAKER_02 19:35

Yeah, I always quote Einstein said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And that is so true with buildings. If you can't just insulate a building, you can't just and airtightness 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 airtight and not adjust the ventilation and the flow and the air around the building. Everything you do needs to have an appropriate opposite measure. And 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 then the ventilation code fell behind because they didn't update the ventilation code for all these airtight buildings. We everything we do, we just seem 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 release 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 we do this, then you must do this. And we've really needed that for a for a long time. But you say, man, you can't just go and spray stuff onto buildings, and you can't just go and do people close up their brick, they 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 rock so quickly. So quickly.

SPEAKER_01 20:54

Yeah. Oh, what is the when you guys do you do ventilation, like A, what is the requirement for ventilation in residential homes that are getting blowdoor tested? And B, what's the most common type of ventilation you're seeing installed, or is it a single type?

SPEAKER_02 21:08

Oh, 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. So it's really changed in the last couple of years. It's now continuous mechanical ventilation, is about 70% of new built homes in this country. I would say 99% of existing homes have an extractor fan in the bathroom and an extractor fan in the kitchen, normally the cookerhood. And that's the only ventilation they have. But because they're not airtight buildings and they're really inefficient, there's enough air that gets in and around that does its uh that does the job of just moving fresh air into the building. Or I would fresh air is maybe the wrong word. Well, you're moving stale air around a building, but you're moving air. So you're not getting the build up and the mold and the damp, but it is cold. So i in any modern building it's now continuous mechanical, so that that can be we're starting to get pretty good adducted systems. So that's having ducks run to the wet rooms, the bathrooms, the kitchens. If you have maybe a laundry room. We're continuously pulling very small amounts of air, but it's normally anywhere anywhere between six and ten litres a second out of each of those out of each of those rooms continuously twenty-four-seven, which is which does a does a good enough job. About twenty percent of new homes now we're using heat recovery ventilation. It's about twenty percent. And th those systems are super cool because they're filled with sensors, PM 2.5, they've got CO2 sensors, humidity sensors, and they're just adjusting constantly for the for the house. You have a party and it knows that the humidity level's 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. So that's about 20% of new construction, and only only maybe 10% of new construction is used in the old method, which is just having a bathroom fan and a kitchen fan. But they're they're the that what in you know next year that will be gone completely.

SPEAKER_01 22:59

So next year they'll be doing all HRVs, or is there a different strategy that you use instead of HRV, cheaper?

SPEAKER_02 23:06

Uh it's yeah, it won't be HRV, just kind of just straight up extract, continuous extract it, and then okay, sending all strategy.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

Got it.

SPEAKER_02 23:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

So 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? Not at all.

SPEAKER_02 23:26

I mean it rain it rains a lot where where we live, but in terms of humidity inside our buildings, no, not really.

SPEAKER_01 23:32

Not really. So here, exhaust in most climates, exhaust ventilation is probably the worst, as you guys call it, extract. It's probably the 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, it'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 highest, most humid times of the year can really cause problems 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 it can come in, and it's gonna come in those places over and over and over and over again, and you're just gonna be dragging water, dragging water, dragging water, dragging water until pretty soon you got a wetting on the ceiling or wetting in the area, and then mold back there, probably way before you even see the wetting. So, you know, it's a bunch of bad stuff going on with the exhaust ventilation. 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. It's still not probably the optimal thing to do, but uh 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 the 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 world, HRV, your world is really probably the most ideal strategy. And then here, like as a design professional myself, I try 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 providing the fresh air ventilation supply only and you know cause no harm to the building and stuff like that. So like that's for the world.

SPEAKER_02 25:13

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 because you can take it from 70, 80, 90 down to down to your 50s and 60s, yep. Or down to your 40s or 30s if you really want to. But yeah, we we don't air condition our buildings. I mean, we do some of our hotels, some of our offices, but we just in our homes, oh my god, we rarely 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.

SPEAKER_01 25:46

I 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 air conditioning. What um do you do any kind of like just as far as like beyond the uh you know the required ventilation, is there uh any whole house fan strategies people 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 need as like San Diego and Seattle, some places where you don't really need air conditioning, where we have a drier climate, 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 open your windows and it like sucks air and it basically just circulates air through the whole entire house using a giant fan. You guys ever see anything like that?

SPEAKER_02 26:31

No, definitely, definitely not. I mean, to some extent the extract-only ventilation is kind of doing that, but yeah, we we don't we don't need to the actual strategy that the government will tell you to do for for when it's really when it's really hot outside is actually just close your windows, close your curtains, uh close your blinds, and open your loft hatch. Most of our buildings have an attic that's that's ventilated, so that enables the the warm air that's in your house to go up and into that into that loft space. That's the best we have. It's kind of the same thing, but it happens more naturally. And then by by 3 p.m. it's too hot and nothing wants to get in. Go get in your car. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Pretty good. So what is what you guys you don't like as far as HAC systems go, do you is it you do you see any dock work at all, or is it mostly dockless or what's the mix over there?

SPEAKER_02 27:27

I would say in the last for in residential, I would say in the last two years it's become real commonplace now to duct our houses with the for ventilation only. Uh in terms of commercial buildings, we we we have it's completely, as we would say, chalk and cheese. There's a nice British statement for you. Uh in our commercial buildings, we duct all the time. I'm sitting in my office now, ductwork running above the ceiling. It's completely normal. In our in the residential world, nothing. It's so rare. And we now in the last two years have started doing it because the codes are requiring us to have ducted ventilation to operate nice and nice and efficiently. But yeah, in in offices in our supermarkets, uh some of our shops you you'll see duct ducting, and there's a whole industry out there in the commercial world that's just super good and super efficient. But yeah, it's it's just two different worlds. Two our homes and our businesses, two different worlds.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

Do you how what's the common heating source for the houses? The homes.

SPEAKER_02 28:26

Uh mostly gas. So we'll have a gas central heating or gas boiler that heats water that's pumped around the house. Right radiators. Uh 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 radiators. That's becoming quite popular because most of our houses now the the rules just changed. So it in the next couple of years, every single home in the UK, every new home is going to be fitted with solar panels. So electric heating is becoming super popular.

SPEAKER_01 28:55

Are you is there you see a lot of air to water heat pumps? They're becoming real popular.

SPEAKER_02 29:00

So the government the government have made it very clear to to the construction industry in the next couple of years these are going to be they've actually said you can't install gas boilers after I want to say either 2030 or 2035 is one of them. So they're getting rid of gas in this country with it's gone. Uh the 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 a lot of the conversion testing and local neighborhood testing.

SPEAKER_01 29:29

But I think you guys got a lot of hydrogen vehicles over there?

SPEAKER_02 29:33

No, none. No. Hydrogen vehicles are interesting because i if you if you're one of the people that thinks green and then you're gonna save the planet and you're really into that, so I talk to a lot of people that have really both sides of the fence. If you hydrogen is the solution to that problem, but it's such a painful thing. You'd have to convert all of the gas stations into hydrogen stations. But actually, it's if you're gonna do it properly, that's the one you do. But we have electric in all of our homes. You have electric on your homes, 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 just 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 beats 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, I always always get something of a V8. We can't have it here. You talk about fuel prices where you guys are just now. I've seen your fuel prices going crazy. We uh the fuel prices here, you you're still like half the cost, even when you're the most expensive. People don't realize how crazy.

SPEAKER_01 30:42

Yeah, people don't get it in here over here. They don't understand how cheap stuff is here compared, especially like gas and stuff like that, compared to other places. Like 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 fuel and stuff like that. I have seen some Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 31:01

I was just trying to do a comparison. So seven we would pay£7.20 a gallon, which in your money is about six bucks a gallon for your tape.

SPEAKER_01 31:12

We're not there yet, but we're headed that way if this keeps going.

SPEAKER_02 31:16

I remember when I first was coming to Texas, it was two dollars a gallon. That was that was cool.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

I can remember when it was 89 cents a gallon. And you can fill up your I used to have a pickup truck, a little four-banger pickup truck, you fill it up for five, ten 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. I've seen I've seen some hydrogen cars out in California, and there's there's little pockets of people you know that are trying to push that over in the U.S. and they're figuring out the gas stations and stuff like that. But by and large, EV was a thing, but we don't have the infrastructure like you guys do yet over here, like as far as charging stations. There are a lot more of them. Near the end of the uh Biden era they started you know installing them and there was a lot of incentives and stuff like 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 the uptake of the infrastructure building that we were.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Electric cars and trucks are cool if you don't travel you know, if you if you just stay local. If you don't ever really leave the town that you're in, they work so well, they'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 happen. So if you're somebody that works on construction, you may be called to another construction site and then to a third construction site because you something 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.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

It takes quite a bit of mapping, still, you're right. Like I have a I have a my daughter's brother by a different marriage. Shh, she 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 trip that should have taken 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, he had to pull over at a truck station and recharge the thing and he had to wait. It 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 you're in for and everything's close to you, and that's the way you're gonna use the vehicle, I think yeah, you're fine. But like the minute you got to go on a journey, 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 though that they are there's long road truckers that are all electric now. They've really been trying that out. So like they're building it into the truck stations where they stop at so they can charge the trucks and stuff like that. So there is a whole entire like uh also autonomy is becoming a thing with truck drivers too. I was just reading about electric autonomous trucks are really starting, 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.

SPEAKER_02 34:11

I mean, at what point does it become a train, though, dude? I mean, you what point is it an autonomous electric truck and you just say, hey, why don't you just take a train and take it from across America, man?

SPEAKER_01 34:24

It's it's another pipe dream, man. We've been wanting 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 gonna do this trolley train and we're gonna do all this funding, and it's gonna go downtown, it's gonna go up into all the college towns and come back around and do all this stuff. Well, guess what it does? It just goes around downtown. It does not go anywhere else outside of town. They never completed the thing.

SPEAKER_02 34:51

I find I find it amazing how how America is just so such a big, cool country, just never nailed train travel because of the because if you had a high-speed network, 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 on a train.

SPEAKER_01 35:09

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, how free commerce works. Like you always are just gonna have all these different factions doing their own thing. So it's just a hard nut to crack when it comes to anything that works together, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 35:31

And 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 our a lot of our train stuff many, many years ago, it's a lot easier when you did it in the 1800s because they didn't give it a lot of people. I mean, to be fair, we have anyone.

SPEAKER_01 35:46

We have the infrastructure, the tracks exist. They just 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. I mean, there we have B and O railroads, like all these different other railroads, and then there's like I forgot the name of it. It used to be in there used to be a stop in Cincinnati, they 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's used at one time. It did ran through the whole entire United States. But I, you know, I think they're moving back towards that way, but like we need, like you said, like a high-powered, high-speed train. Like Miami, the state of Florida has one that goes all up and down the coast, man. That thing's like foo, it's like you're in a freaking tunnel. And uh, speaking of Nashville, they're trying to build one from Nashville to Knoxville that goes completely underground. A high-speed 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 airports. They're thinking that way. It just needs to be like the whole country instead of just this movie, you know, this place, this place. Because the other thing, like you were just alluding to, you got all these little fractions. Like, how 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 high speed, like the connectivity probably still would not exist. It's weird, man. Little little different nuances from here to here to there.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

It's a big place as well. You know, we're talking high-speed rail across the UK. It's a big place, America.

SPEAKER_01 37:13

Yeah, oh yeah. A state is a country here. That's why I say like basically our states are the size of most of your guys' countries. It is a little bit different.

SPEAKER_02 37:20

Is it like different three three and a half UKs going to Texas? Something like that. I don't know that it sounds about right.

SPEAKER_01 37:27

Yeah. Speaking 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 interesting that we have someone from the UK coming over and training guys in Texas. So tell me a little bit about that. Happened happened a while ago.

SPEAKER_02 37:41

So there's a the thing we were doing here, the the certification body we're looking to bring to the US. We've been looking for a long time. We've kind of we got to the point COVID happened, it's it never quite never quite kicked off. But we got a bunch 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 happen. And for various reasons it never quite happened. But one of the guys I stayed super friendly with, Bill Colts had down in down in Galveston, Texas, he'll be happy I've shouted him out. He uh we just got talking and he ended up taking on the business that would it got created and then they kind of fell out. But he he took on the business, said, Well, hey, we're gonna train people, I'm gonna train my competitors, and I'm gonna train my suppliers, and I'm gonna 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 took a business model of I make money from you know people doing it slightly wrong to you know, let's actually stop them doing it wrong and let I'm gonna make my my money in a slightly different way. So he just started training all of the construction crews he was working with on how to spot problems before they become big problems, and and they loved it. So part of that was blower door. So we started he phoned me and was like, come over, I want to train my guys how to do blower door. They already did it, they're already accredited to do it, but I want to train all of my guys how to do it. And then we just hit it off, man. We had so much fun. We we trained a bunch of people, and from that we started training some of the construction crews on on detailing. We started merging the course, and now it's become quite a big thing. He sells sells out the course every time. There's 20 or so people that go on it, and I helped train some of the people that work there so that they could deliver the course because it wasn't viable coming over from the UK every time. And 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, every few weeks, you can do one day every few weeks, or just do it as a as a five-day five-day course. You get berm certified, building I should know that, risk management, building envelope risk management certified. And it just they do it as part of uh construction to help you understand 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 wrong, man. This is I need to tell someone. I need to tell the commissioning crew that this is this is I've seen this thing. And it just changed the game. So I ended up just going out and and hanging out with these guys. And then we we got involved with Texas AM University, they had a private partnership so that we could use their facilities to train people, and they've taken that on. They helped train some of the uh some of the college students there in construction and and looking at the new modern ways of modern ways of building. Yeah, I go to the ABBA conferences quite a lot, so I was out in Denver. I'll probably be out in this one in Minneapolis, although Minneapolis for me is a real pain in the backside to get to from the UK. So whoever organized whoever organized that from ABBA gets a slap on the wrist from me. Let's let's keep it at near international airports, please. I hear that. Yeah, it's so much easier to get to Chicago or to New York or somewhere, but to get to uh to get to Minneapolis for me is like three flights. It's it's a bit of a pain. Three flights is crazy work. I man, I love I love I love it down in Texas. I love the heat, I love the the food, I love hanging out, I love the culture. They they have a work hard, play hard culture.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

Hell yeah, I ain't no doubt about that.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

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 chairman of our group The only way you'll lose me is 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. The only way you'll lose me is when I one day retire off to Texas and I'll I'll just go out and do construction uh construction commissioning out in Texas because that's the dream. For 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 the one of the cool things we have here is the build-in performance hub. So I'm the building I'm in now, we have a 10,000 square foot warehouse. We built an 800 square foot house, like the other side of the wall next to me here.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

Oh man, we need to see that sometime.

SPEAKER_01 42:03

You know, just send me some send me some footage, we'll throw it up when we talk about this.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

I'll throw the footage up while we're talking about it and we'll we'll just roll you know, roll it in.

SPEAKER_02 42:12

We built a whole house and we've installed wood burners, we have a commercial grade MVHR, we use it for blower door. We we decided here, and that this is kind of actually the beginning of how we got into there's my ADHD kicking off. That's actually the beginning of how we got involved with with the crew down in Texas. We created a training center that was doing it differently, that was hands-on training, not classroom-based training or theory-based training. We said, if we're gonna teach you how to do something, we're gonna teach you how to do it. You know, we're you're gonna walk into a house and you're gonna knock down part of a wall, and you're gonna get whatever it is we do in the all the training 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 with all of the the people from uh from the Abbott. So that was that was great fun, uh great fun doing that. But that's I'll I'll send you some pictures, I'll send you some footage you can you can chop in for.

SPEAKER_01 43:10

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 your coping mechanisms, how do you use it to your advantage, like to put it out there?

SPEAKER_02 43:20

I guess I it was only not so long, well not so long ago. I in terms of coping mechanism 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 seconds before it was due in. And back then uh there was a lot of time I never handed in my homework, I didn't do I didn't get good grades at school, I didn't do particularly well. And you look back now and go, Yeah, that's grade A ADHD. You know, you are really taking all of the boxes, hyperactivity, you would couldn't concentrate, but then you would have the intense hyper focusing to the point it you would not Eat and not drink and uh and cause yourself all the problems. I I was as a kid, I it was it was crazy, but back then, I mean that was only how old am I now? Yeah, well, I was like thirty years ago. And it wasn't a thing, it wasn't uh recognised. And as an adult I realized 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 hyper focusing the you know, the the chronic inability to start a project, to start doing something just sitting at your desk and not being able to to manage that. Now I think to some extent the the hyper focus is what helped me get to where I've got. You know, I'm a chief executive, we have a hundred employees, we have offices all over the UK, I've travelled I've travelled to more countries than I could ever have dreamed of, and I credit my ADHD to that. I don't let it draw my life. I say because I'm able to manage those symptoms, I'm able to get out into the to the big wide world, I'm able to use it as a strength. But coping mechanisms, man, I I'm the same. Just because I'm a chief executive, uh 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 job is leadership and inspiring people, inspiring our employees or fixing problems. So when I'm struggling to start a particular project or I'm having that blank, you'll you'll know all about it. You just can't move. I go and make a cup of coffee now.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

I'm a Doom scroller, I sit there, scroll on my phone, scroll on my phone instead of doing it. I'll have the thing up on the computer screen right in front of me and be sitting there scrolling on my phone.

SPEAKER_02 45:35

Yeah. Oh, it's so bad. So one of the cool things I get to do as as part of my job is actually just go walk around the office, just go and talk to people. That's awesome. 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? I need and my team know they know how to play me. They, you know, I 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. I need this back. We're being chased on it, and whatever work it works, my brain goes, There's an there's an urgency, I get the dopamine hit to to go and do it. So my team, my team play on that sometimes where they they know how to get the best out of me. And and I know that's awesome though, man.

SPEAKER_01 46:16

I'm glad that they do. Like, I my team's learning that they're I'm I haven't worked with them probably as long as you have some of your people, like my my right hand person, Karina, she probably knows that about me by now, but like that is a very value. If people know how you work, man, that that makes things a lot helps easier to manage for sure.

SPEAKER_02 46:35

It's good and it's needed. It's it's helpful to have good people, uh good people around you. I I talk about it openly as well with with the staff. I talk about it's okay, you know. I 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 you'll know you'll know the burnout that happens when you when you're overstimulated, when you overcommitted, you feel like you've done two days' work in one day because you've just had a hyper focused session. I say to my staff, just go home. Stand up at 4 pm, 3 pm, go home because you're no use to me at that point. You're more useful going and doing something in your house. Come in tomorrow early. Come in tomorrow when you are ready and you you've got over that, you've had a sleep. So I can get the best out of you as a boss. 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 go home.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

That is man, you just did it's so funny. Like ADHV people know exactly what you just said there, because like there comes a point in time where it don't matter what you'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.

SPEAKER_02 47:39

Like 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 that side of the building. And 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, it's my brain resetting and saying, right, you've done a big task, you've 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 without ADHD, people that don't understand or know just will struggle. People that have it know exactly what you're doing. You're you're resetting, you're calming down, you're finding the inspiration to do the next task.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

Can you just hit a wall at some point? I mean, when you have it, like you can get hyper-focused, 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 really 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 what 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 do, but that is will be the struggle from there on out. Like it's gonna be you know me peeling myself away from something else to go back to something that my brain already shut off.

SPEAKER_02 48:47

Yeah, and I think both you know if you're an employer, if you're a boss of somebody that has ADHD, learn my my best 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 you're a great boss. Don't be afraid of it, embrace it. If somebody at 3 p.m. is sitting doom scrolling and they're not doing anything, send them home. It's the best thing you can do because you're gonna get a better employee tomorrow morning.

SPEAKER_01 49:14

Yeah, if they learned how to harness it, which is what you're basically saying, if they learn how to harness it instead of like try to resist it, like there is a way to maximize and optimize that person and get a lot of performance out of them that you probably won't get out of somebody else if you know how to dial them in the right way.

SPEAKER_02 49:31

If your phone runs out of charge, you've got to put it on charge, and it takes a while.

SPEAKER_01 49:35

Yeah, 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 everybody 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 read, what would that piece of advice be?

SPEAKER_02 49:52

Oh, that's a great question. I would say uh just never never care too much what people around you that don't mean anything to you think. So to expand on that just ever so slightly, only care what your immediate family thinks, man. And by your immediate family, I mean your wife, your kids, and that's it. And maybe maybe your sister-in-law, maybe maybe you maybe your mum, but maybe not. Your immediate family is everything, and you their opinion matters, not the outside world. And you draw the circle where the outside world is. But 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 you're retired, man. Your family is the only thing that matters.

SPEAKER_01 50:43

That is awesome, man. I love it. Thank you so much. Thanks for being a guest today. Cool, man. I'd love to have lunch with you or something like that.

SPEAKER_02 50:50

Cool, sounds good, man.

SPEAKER_00 50:52

All right, thank you. I'll talk to you, man. Thank you.