#28 - Part 2 | Pretty Isn’t Enough: Building Physics That Actually Matter with Michael Kingsland

Jess Kismet (00:00)
So Michael, what role do ventilation systems like EFs and HIVs play in a properly sealed building? And what do builders understand? What do they need to understand about installing them correctly? Because there is a lot of talk about the difference and what they do. And I would love to get that clarified.

Michael (00:16)
Yeah, that's a really good one. think there's a fair bit of misconception out there what actually ventilation systems do for you, especially if then the word heat recovery and energy recovery are thrown into the mix. Sometimes I feel like people think they get a heating or a cooling system out of them. But really what ventilation systems do and what they're to do is to bring fresh air into the building without you having to rely on opening doors and windows. So when it's really uncomfortable outside, minus degrees or really, really hot. And also like, know,

pollution outside, bushfire, pollen if you have allergies or something and they bring in filtered fresh air 24-7 and then with the heat exchanger they maintain the conditions you already have inside. rather than you having to open the doors and windows, that's minus five outside or 40 degrees, you bring in the hot air in, the heat exchanger in that system uses the internal air to precondition the outgoing air and they're very very efficient, 85, 90, 95 percent efficient.

So let's say it's 40 degrees outside, 20 degrees inside, the outgoing air cools down the incoming air maybe to 22, 23 degrees. So it's not perfect, obviously, but much, much better than bringing the 40 degree air in directly unfiltered. So that's the advantage. And then about insulation, that's a really, really good point as well and something that frustrates me to some degree when we see kind of layouts from...

Jess Kismet (01:28)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Michael (01:38)
different suppliers where they just draw straight lines from the unit to where the outlet is. And of course you can't build like that. There's pressure drops in your systems or ducting from the unit to the outlet needs to be taken into account how long that is, how much pressure you lose there. Outlets that are very, very close to the unit need to be restricted compared to something that's very far away to get you a balanced system. So you don't want all the air coming out in the room right next to where the system is. You want the same amount of air coming out at the very end.

that's 30 meters away maybe for a big building as well and that's where things sometimes fall short with that layout that actually design the pressure drops and things like that. I do plan that correctly. Heat loss, yes thanks, another really good thing. You have got a reheat recovery system. If you then take that air from the unit where the heat exchange has been done, you've got your conditioned air and now you're pumping it into a pipe that sits in your roof space above the insulation.

Jess Kismet (02:05)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

And there's heat loss as well in the duct tape, depending on the length of the duct tape.

Michael (02:33)
And either in winter loses all the heat again or in summer gains all that hot roof ⁓ space and heat. the radens from the unit need to be insulated on the inside of your thermal envelope, essentially. Super important. Seen quite a few failures there where people just chuck the ducts and tell the insulation on the ceiling and then the system is not totally useless. You still get filtered air, but you don't get the heat exchange anymore. Or you actually make it worse.

Jess Kismet (02:37)
Mm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah, I'm finding a lot of, excuse

me, I'm finding some builders are actually putting their insulation at the roof level now to keep the ducting below the insulation.

Michael (03:07)
Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I mean, it's a lot more complex to install the insulation then. So I think that's drawback. I think it's actually better performing roof. So that's another thing. I'm not sure if we already can raise the thing with convective heat loss through insulation pads. Again, if you have the winter case, for example, so if the insulation.

Jess Kismet (03:09)
Yeah. Yeah. But it's becoming more common. Yeah.

I'm not sure if we did last time. Yeah, I know.

I know there's an issue in that hers when you put the insulation at the roof level, all of a sudden you're conditioning the whole roof. And so it does actually drop the star rating if you model it like that. Yep. Yep.

Michael (03:40)
Right, because you've got a bigger volume that you

have to keep in you're slightly increasing the surface area I guess of that layer. Yep, that's probably true. That's where I would also say don't skimp on the amount of insulation you put into your roof and the installation material itself is cheap. It's not that much more work to add another bat. It's kind of the same amount of labor almost to install that extra insulation compared to having less.

Jess Kismet (03:46)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (04:05)
And that's why I think another short for this, but from a performance point of view, there's matters, there's star writing, there's energy efficiency writing, and then there's the real life. How well does your insulation actually perform when it's just sitting on the ceiling versus against the external roof wrap? That's a totally different story again. I don't know, that's another kind of words you can open and crawl into. it's, you know.

Jess Kismet (04:21)
Yeah, I know, right? It's been a whole thing. It's been a whole warm roof,

cold roof. European, Australian, it's been a whole discussion. And there's so many different variations of how it can be done. But anyway, talking about ARVs and duct runs. Inside insulation. Yeah.

Michael (04:31)
Yeah. back to EV. So the ducting really important has to be inside of that insulation. Or then if it's above, it needs to be insulated. So you need to

wrap insulation around your ducts. Otherwise the whole system becomes...

Jess Kismet (04:42)
Yep, can you just lay bats

on top of the duct runs? If they put them above your insulation, can you just dump them on?

Michael (04:45)
You can, but often it's very complicated. So

yeah, so if you look at those ones, they come usually out of the unit or out of the manifold in a fairly kind of organized manner, and then they spread out to all those different locations to the different rooms. And I think that's where it becomes tricky, especially if you've got trusses in the way and ducting running above and below trusses and all kinds of stuff. To keep that properly insulated, it's very difficult, I think. So.

Jess Kismet (05:04)
Mm.

Mm.

Michael (05:09)
Better way is to have a hung down ceiling, so have a cavity space between your internal roof lining, ceiling lining, and the actual trusses where the insulation sits and run all the ducts in there. If that's possible, that's definitely the best way.

Jess Kismet (05:14)
Yeah.

Yep.

Thank you. Thank you for that hot tip. Now, this is one of my favorites, because it confused me when I first heard about it. Could you please explain to me the 1 third, 2 thirds rule? Having insulation inside the airtight layer.

Michael (05:33)
yeah, okay, yeah, cool.

Yep, So,

one-thirds, two-thirds all comes down to the vapor control layer, essentially. So you want to stop moisture from getting into your wall and you want to stop, or if moisture does get into your wall, you want to stop it from reaching the dew point, from where, basically the point in your wall where it's cold enough for vapor to condense. So imagine again scenario, 20 degrees inside, zero degrees outside, from your internal skin,

Jess Kismet (05:50)
Mm-hmm.

Michael (06:01)
the plasterboard inside your wall and the temperature slowly reduces through your insulation until it eventually is zero degrees outside conditions. so let's imagine there's no

Jess Kismet (06:07)
outside. So from 20 from on the inside

at the airtight layer it's 20 degrees and the outside it's zero.

Michael (06:15)
Let's ignore the whole airtight

thing first. Let's just say normal standard construction, gyprock on the inside, stud frame. Yep, 20 degrees on the inside skin of the gyprock, zero degrees on the outside skin of your weather-resistant area of external building. Now if moisture gets into that space, so leaks or something, power points, but also through the plasterboard itself, it gets colder and colder, obviously, being kind of pulled towards that cold side, and eventually you get condensation.

Jess Kismet (06:20)
huh. huh.

Yeah,

because warm goes to cold,

Michael (06:41)
So that's why we then put a vapor control layer on the inside. And

so the really important word is the vapor control to stop moisture from hitting that space. Now, if you add more insulation on the inside of the vapor control layer, you can imagine that you...

Jess Kismet (06:54)
So this in this instance for those

listening, this this instance happens when you're using a vapor control layer, such as Intello, and you've got a 35 millimeter batten for your services. And some people like to put an extra layer of insulation in that batten zone to beef up their wall. So this discussion is talking about the ins and outs and the risks of doing that. Continue.

Michael (07:14)
Yeah,

correct. Great. Thanks, Heaps. So yeah, where people want to kind of tickle out the maximum performance out of the whole insulation wall system and put some really, really high performance insulation on the inside. So again, the one-thirds, two-thirds rule has nothing to do with actual thickness of the insulation. It has to do with the performance of the insulation. So we know that phenolic foams or XPS has a much higher performance per thickness compared to like glass wool bats, for example.

And if you have too much performance, so more than one third essentially of insulation on the inside of your vapor control layer, the backside of this insulation gets suddenly cold. So that's where your vapor control layer sits.

Jess Kismet (07:51)
So one

third of the total intuitive R value of that wall, maximum internal to the vapor control layer.

Michael (07:56)
correct R value, that's right.

⁓ So that's also kind of a loose rule of thumb, like a ballpark kind of thing to make sure you're safe. You want to make sure that the vapor control layer is inside of the dew point. And if you're adding more insulation to the inside, it's called dew point shift. You're shifting the dew point further towards the inside. And you might actually shift it past the vapor control layer and then you're in trouble. Because then you're starting to have condensation on the inside of your vapor control. So a great example is double start frame.

Jess Kismet (08:05)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

because it gets cold, gets,

so you're saying it gets cold if there's too much installation internal to the Epic control layer, it gets cold too quickly on the inside.

Michael (08:39)
It pushes the vapor control layer too far towards the outside from an other point of view. That's why it's really hard to explain if you can't draw kind of a little graph. The picture would be great. Yeah, it's not easy trying to find better words to explain this. Yeah.

Jess Kismet (08:45)
Mm. Mm-hmm. I know, it took me a minute. It took me a hot minute and I still don't get it.

There was a diagram, maybe you could draw us

a diagram and I can put it on the screen. And that way anyone who's listening, yeah, draw me a diagram. If you're watching this on YouTube or on the Spotify screen, there'll be an image on your screen right now that you can look at that explains the two thirds, one third rule visually.

Michael (08:59)
Mental eye I can do that hundred percent. I'll draw one. Yeah

Cool.

Brilliant.

And I think a great example for that is where people want to maximize the insulation. It's not that 35-milli cavity on the inside. Usually it's really hard to break that rule, but it's the double stud frames where people want to have an easy vapor control layer between the two stud frames because there's no internal blade walls, there's no ceiling hangers and any of that kind of stuff, the stud frame, stud wall hangers and things where the...

Jess Kismet (09:27)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Michael (09:40)
Yeah, anyway, so it's making a cleaner kind of line through your frames, that you don't have to break that vapor control layer, which you don't want to break ideally. But then you kind of run into the risk of shifting the dew point past that one on the inside, because it's like then you're one to one ratio, essentially not one third, two third. So.

Jess Kismet (09:44)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah, it's very technical,

very sciencey. Look at the image guys.

Michael (10:00)
Imagine, sorry, that's an easy one. Imagine

you've got a double-stud frame, both 90 mils are touching maybe, and you've got a vapor control layer in the middle. Inside 20 degrees, outside 0 degrees. In the middle, halfway in between the two, it sits at 10 degrees. And at 50 % relative humidity, I think the dew point is roughly 12 degrees. So that means 10 degrees that the vapor control layer would already sit in a too-cold zone, and you get condensation.

Jess Kismet (10:14)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. It's right.

Got it. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Michael (10:26)
If you have only a single start frame with it right on the

Jess Kismet (10:27)
Yeah.

Michael (10:29)
inside, it's still sitting at the 22 degree mark and the 10 degrees in the middle of your 19 mil start frame. That makes sense. So the bigger you make it, the more you flatten out that gradient goes through your wall. And then that web control layer has to be further on the inside to be in the warm part.

Jess Kismet (10:34)
Yeah, yes, yes, that makes sense.

And that G-point wouldn't happen without the vapor control layer.

Michael (10:50)
It would still happen, but the point of the neighbor control layer is to stop from moisture reaching the viewpoint. So if you have it behind the viewpoint, you might as well not put the neighbor control layer there. So it needs to be on the warm side of the neighbor Doing this double-stack frame thing, you're essentially putting it to the cold side of the view point and then it's useless.

Jess Kismet (10:56)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So if you've got a

double-starred, that paper control still needs to be on the internal side. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Do you have a favorite Passive House project?

Michael (11:14)
on the inside, correct? Yeah. Tricky thing, but yeah.

Yeah, well, yeah, 100%. The favorite one is the one that we recently did with our own prefab system here in Canberra. Double story building. Took us few months, of course, to build all the panels in our workshop, but then amazing thing, literally from total bare dirt on site, including putting the footings in all the foundations. And we had double story building up and connected in seven days. And air tightness comes out of the box with the system. So we managed to get to

Jess Kismet (11:31)
Mm-hmm.

Wow.

0.16? You did not.

Michael (11:55)
Yep, so a bit, just a tiny bit

better than passive-house requirements. And that's just literally sticking the panels together, taping the joints and we're there essentially. So the idea of developing this prefab system.

Jess Kismet (11:59)
0.16

my goodness, they sit panels?

Are they sit panels?

Michael (12:10)
It's a sit panel system essentially. So it's what you can see behind me. So this is our office and that's the prototype we've got a pass of our certified as well. It's kind of a CLT look alike. So it's a 27 millimeter CLT skin, which I can show you in like window reveals. So that's that internal board and that's actually glued to a start frame. That's 200 mil thick. We fill it with insulation. Yeah, just. ⁓

Jess Kismet (12:15)
Yeah.

⁓ yeah?

huh.

Michael (12:35)
Basically, the biggest development part of that thing was how to connect the panels easily and maintain the ad-hattness. And that's what we can solve for the system to make it foolproof. Ideally, we want to sell this to builders who want to build really well, have lots of projects of the go, can't kind of focus on everything. And we kind of take care of those difficult kind of parts. Sadly, the prefab at the moment isn't hold because we realized we're running out of space. Where we work, we weren't able to kind of do it in a way that

Jess Kismet (12:40)
Mm-hmm.

Holy smokes.

Mm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Wow.

Michael (13:02)
was economically kind of viable for us really. Very complicated kind of storage, like tiny, tiny manufacturing space. Had to shift the panels into a different warehouse next door, like dollies through the car park until we have enough to fill a shipping container and then bring them back again to load the container in the car park. Horrible working conditions. So we're looking for somewhere bigger at the moment, again, to set up the whole pretty fat thing again. But the system is amazing. I want to build myself a house out of that one.

Jess Kismet (13:15)
Mm.

Mm-hmm. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, it

looks cool, works well.

Michael (13:30)
than five

now for clients, not one for myself yet, sadly. I have to wait a bit longer anyways.

Jess Kismet (13:34)
it's always the way.

Where are you able to give us some photos or show us the house? Yeah. All right. Cool. Again, photos will be on the screen or take the show notes for some more information on that on that project from Maros. Awesome. All right. So. How do you see the high performance landscape moving in Australia or high performance, better building? Do you think?

Michael (13:43)
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's some nice timelapse videos.

Jess Kismet (14:03)
What's your opinion? Do you think that there is potential here that is being, could, you know, industry as a whole is going to be dragged along or do you think it's going to be still, it's going to remain too niche for too long?

Michael (14:13)
Yeah.

No, think we have to. mean, one of the biggest problems we have in the industry is actually the drive for more energy efficient buildings. And if you want to build more energy efficiently, you have to do it the right way, or you're creating so many other problems that mold in conversation in your structure, rotting structures, things like that, that weren't there before when you had no high performance buildings, essentially. So high performance meaning, let's say energy efficient. So if you want to

focus on energy efficiency, have to do it the right way and you can't get around the rest of that stuff. It's like, I'm trying to always come up with new good examples. I think I've used cars before and now I'm kind of trying to see where do people want to spend their money when they build a new house. And there's of course all those nice shiny things that you can see, but there's a few must haves that people essentially don't, would ever think about skimping on like foundations of a building. And if you want to go too high,

performance or high energy efficiency, know, six, seven star kind of matters, rating stuff like that, but not do the rest right. It's like only putting half foundation on your building. That's kind of where we are at the moment. And people don't realize that they're creating this kind of tale of other problems if they just by being more energy efficient, essentially putting people putting plastic raincoats on and starts wetting. That's what happens in buildings. don't ventilate properly.

Jess Kismet (15:18)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

No.

Michael (15:34)
They don't stop moisture from getting to those colds where the sweat then builds in your structure. They don't stop the moisture from getting to the first place.

Jess Kismet (15:39)
Mm-hmm.

So you see all of

this as inevitable part of the evolving of the Australian construction industry.

Michael (15:47)
Yeah,

I think because we're there from an energy efficiency point of view and people want that, the rest will have to follow. Or we're running into a huge problem if you don't address that. We already are. We already kind of are there really at the moment with all the high-rise multi-raisy things that are built not to that standard and inevitably have condensation and mold issues.

Jess Kismet (15:52)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm. Mm.

This is a slide note.

Side note, I saw a LinkedIn post today about Monash University, no, Monash Hospital? Hospital, I think it was. And they just discovered mold in the cancer ward. Not good. Probably coming from the HVAC systems. I'm not sure where it was coming from. For sick people, yeah. So they've moved everybody out of the hospital, out of that ward, and they're sort of going about a remediation process, I believe. I have to find the article, but... ⁓

Michael (16:20)
Yeah, right, nice. ⁓ Good healing environment for patients. Yeah, that's right.

Actually,

Jess Kismet (16:38)
What sort of... Yeah, yeah, I will.

Michael (16:38)
I'd love that one if you can forward it to me. I'd love to see that as well. That'd be good.

Jess Kismet (16:41)
But what confuses me about that is, I mean, these are vulnerable people in that, inside that space. But if chronic inflammatory response syndrome or mild illness is not a thing, why, why would they go to the effort of... Make it make sense. Why is it not a recognised illness? I just, I'm just, it's a rhetorical question because no one's really got an answer.

Michael (17:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Jess Kismet (17:05)
I just don't understand why it's so obviously a problem for so many people yet it's not a recognised illness. The syndrome is not recognised, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Michael (17:14)
Yeah.

I think it's just because

it's a funny thing of being a construction issue, then kind of maybe also because people are used to it. They kind of always had slightly moldy houses and that's kind of, it's just how it is. There's a lot of, think things are what they are and you can't do anything about them. I think commercial construction really faces a huge challenge because we're not going to go away from steel and concrete and steel and concrete are so highly conductive in terms of

Jess Kismet (17:36)
Mm.

Michael (17:46)
thermal bridging from the inside to the outside, where you end up with mold automatically if you don't. And especially if you want to be more energy efficient. Energy efficiency makes the mold problem worse. People think like this is great thing because we're saving money, because you know energy bills are lower, but it actually increases that. Your discussion with Joe a few months ago, that was a great comment he had in terms of you changing the physics inside your wall. I love that bit and it's really true.

Jess Kismet (18:08)
Hehehe.

Yeah. Yeah.

Michael (18:14)
you know you're starting to put no vapor permeable wraps on the outside. And the word already has it in there, they're vapor permeable. But if you have condensation in your walls, it's not vapor that you have in your wall, you've got wetness, you've got liquid water. And that water doesn't go through your wrap because the vapor permeable is actually watertight. So how do you get this water to go through your wrap and actually to make your wall dry out again? How do you make water turn into vapor? You have to heat it up, put energy in. Where does the energy come from? Used to come from the inside. Now you've got all this insulation.

Jess Kismet (18:24)
water. Yeah. Yeah.

heat it up.

Michael (18:42)
So you're making the building more energy efficient. If the heat doesn't come through anymore, the water stays there. It builds up, it accumulates. Southern walls or shaded walls, yes, you can still get rid of it if it gets warmed up from the outside as well, sure, but it doesn't happen on southern walls in winter for many months. Stuff keeps accumulating and getting worse.

Jess Kismet (18:48)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

So if you get a leak in,

if you get a water leak, if you've got a really good, good quality vapour permeable membrane on the outside that's well taped and not ripped, it's not gonna, you probably won't get a water, like a rain leak, but you might get a plumbing leak.

Michael (19:07)
Yeah.

click. That's right.

That's another thing, but even without a plumbing leak, that's already a problem in the first place. We know just the vapor permeability on the outside is not good enough in climate zone 6 to 8, 5 to 8 maybe. It doesn't cut it essentially. Yeah, it doesn't cut the mustard. You need that vapor control layer on the inside as well. And that's what people at the moment still mostly ignore because, and I think partly due to the reason that the whole thing is marketed as an air tightness system, not as a vapor control system.

Jess Kismet (19:24)
Mm. Mm. Mm-hmm.

Doesn't cut the mustard.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, I think we talked about this last time.

We touched on this last time. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael (19:44)
Yeah. Yeah. So really kind of

the industry needs to shift there from thinking of airtightness on the inside to making it vapor tight from the inside. And yes, ideally, best vapor tight system is also airtight, but really the focus needs to be on the tightness. And if it's not totally airtight, restrict the vapor as much as possible to get to your mold structure.

Jess Kismet (19:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yep. If you could give a builder, every builder in Australia, a free copy of one detail or one drawing, what would it be?

Michael (20:16)
Probably understanding where your thermal envelope actually runs and what pokes through it. So there's a kind of a famous little thing where you look at a building plan and you take a red pen and draw a line and understanding your structure and understanding where all those transitions are between inside and outside. What's actually inside and outside? There's garage spaces that are then often part. It's a complicated 3D structure. That's one of the things that looks so great on paper and architects draw sections to their buildings and you see this kind of

2d cut but that's not reality there's always a corner that when the three faces come together and then how to deal with that one or there's some kind of

Jess Kismet (20:52)
I think that's a common

thing for builders. get all these details, but then you can't capture everything in 2D. So there's something beyond that 2D detail that they can't see on the paper. So you're saying a proper red pen, a proper thermal envelope schematic is what you would say.

Michael (20:58)
Yep, yep, that is a tough one.

Correct, yeah, that's really hard. I think we'll probably eventually move to a...

schematic and

then trying to visualize all those things that are not captured in your 2D section and how to deal with that. Again, that's where I say again, if you focus on the airtightness from the outside, that's already kind of covering most of it. And then you don't need to be quite as thorough anymore on the inside really. mean, ideally you are really, but it kind of takes a bit of the pressure off to be perfect. And it's a bit more forgiving, but then yeah, make it really from the outside.

Jess Kismet (21:19)
So that's not one detail, that's a stack of details.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Alright, we've got to the final question that I ask everybody. If you had one thing that you want the listener to know that you've learned in your career, what would that be?

Michael (21:44)
Yeah.

Thanks.

Don't build a house, it's too stressful. No, Yeah, marriages break up, all that kind of stuff. It's a tough one. No, think, trying to... No, the biggest lesson that I think want to give to people is to think about the bits that are really important about your building that you can't change down the track. So stuff.

Jess Kismet (21:56)
⁓ no, don't live in a house. Just don't have a house. ⁓ It's too risky.

no.

Michael (22:24)
that's inside your wall, inside your structure, inside your roof. You can't open up your roof down the track easily. even, I think there's bit of a kind of, maybe some parts of the industry are kind of spruiking kind of the idea that it's very easy to upgrade your windows. It's actually a very destructive kind of process if you want to change your windows over to a decent system if you start cheap and want to upgrade later. People change kitsins like they change their socks pretty much.

Jess Kismet (22:37)
Hmm.

Michael (22:50)
Focus on getting that building shell very good so you know it's safe and comfortable and energy efficient maybe, but really kind of usually if it's safe and comfortable, it's also energy efficient. focus on those two bits first. Yeah, healthy building.

Jess Kismet (22:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. So you're saying get a cheaper kitchen

and get the structure right and change the kitchen later when you've got, you, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael (23:08)
Yeah, change the kitchen and your taps and your fancy tiles and all the kind of stuff

that you want to show off to your friends. Get it totally fair enough. That's the bits that you see, but it's not the most important. It's like your foundations. You don't say, look, pretty big building. Actually, maybe think about making your building a bit smaller if you can't afford it, rather than going for the cheap and making it really big. So budget constraints are a thing. Everyone has them. Nobody has...

Jess Kismet (23:20)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yep, yep, people don't want to hear that, but yeah, yeah.

Michael (23:35)
endless pockets. So, yeah, you would never skimp on foundations. That's what I always say. But then people... Well, that's the other thing. And exactly that's where kind of the code still falls short because you can still ignore all those other important things that will come down the track eventually. But then you end up with a house that's actually not in 10 years no more code compliant. So that's kind of what you're risking. And then you think maybe maybe there's a reason why the code demands this stuff of me now that I didn't have to do 10 years ago.

Jess Kismet (23:40)
Because engineers don't let you.

You can.

Yeah. Yep.

Yep. Speaking

of windows and changing your windows, I don't know if you saw it, but I posted something yesterday that I screen recorded. There's a Facebook group called Reporting Dodgy Builders or something, Dodgy Builders Australia or something like that. And somebody had posted their brand new windows, their house that was handed over in Melbourne a week ago and their windows were sopping wet. Their window frames and the glass were sopping wet. And the guy was like,

Michael (24:12)
yeah, Cool.

Yeah. ⁓

Jess Kismet (24:28)
I don't think this is normal. What is this? And are people saying, ⁓ your flashing is upside down or you've got a water leak or something out of like, though, that's not an upside down flashing. That's not a water leak. That's that's single framed, single glazed aluminium frame windows condensating because you've got a you've got an ensuite bathroom that's pumping vapor into your bedroom and you've got two adults breathing in there. And it's just, you know, they obviously didn't understand what was.

Michael (24:42)
non-thermally broken.

Jess Kismet (24:55)
what the implications were of that. if you want to see it, it'll be in the show notes, a link to that post. But it was just the worst I've ever seen. It was crazy.

Michael (25:00)
Yeah, that'll be great.

Yeah, well, actually that's one more thing as well, where people, you know, traditionally you've got the single glazing and then those really heavy curtains and perlments on the inside to kind of try to make it somewhat livable. They actually make it worse because, again, the moisture goes through your curtains very easily, but they somewhat insulate the glazing a bit from the inside, from the warmer room, which means the glass and the faces of the window actually get colder than they would normally get. So if you want to reduce your condensation on your window, those curtains. But then you're colder in your building. So that's that.

Jess Kismet (25:10)
Yes.

Thank

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, and then they get that then then the curtains

get wet and they get moldy. That's really common. And then you open the curtains in the morning and you send hundreds of thousands of mold spores screaming into your bedroom and you breathe them in and you don't know because they're invisible. So, yeah, single glazed, single glazed.

Michael (25:33)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So probably in a good

ventilation, lots of them bridges in the window, cold surfaces. Yeah. Stuff, stuff. Yeah.

Jess Kismet (25:51)
Yeah, it's just a bad combination. And then people think they're doing the right thing. it's just

one of those things. Just one of the many things. All right, Michael, that is gonna be us wrapped. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you coming back again. And we'll see you next week in Sydney. Okay, all right, bye. See ya.

Michael (26:02)
Yeah. Well.

No, thank you. That's great. I really enjoyed that. Will do. Thanks. Looking forward. I've got more cool stories then. Thanks.

See you. Bye.