The Live Lightly Podcast

Jessica (00:01)
Welcome back to the Live Lightly podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Franklin. And today I'm joined by Drew Tozer, author of Feel Good Homes and recognized expert in heat pumps and in the HVAC industry. Drew, welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today.

drew.tozer (00:12)
you

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jessica (00:18)
I'm excited to learn more. When I got your book it really hit home because lately with all the fires happening just a little bit north of my own hometown in San Diego, so about a hundred miles north, all of those fires broke out in LA at the beginning of the year. And you just start really thinking about the air quality in general, but then...

more so about the indoor air quality. And I've recently brought in some air purifiers in my own home prior to that. And I did it because I started learning about air quality and health and its connection. And luckily here in sunny San Diego, we're able to have our doors open quite a lot and there's not a ton of moisture to worry about. ⁓ And so this book really

got me thinking even more so about different systems in our home that could be more sustainable and contribute even more to the overall health and wellbeing of our home and ourselves. So, but before we dive into that conversation, I would love to start by learning a little bit about your background and what led you to write Feel Good Homes.

And what inspired your passion for educating others about the impact of HVAC systems and our health and environment?

drew.tozer (01:39)
Yeah, so I run the front end of an HVAC company called Foundry Heatpumps in Toronto, Canada. And by trade, I'm an energy advisor. So I was going into homes having conversations with homeowners about how to solve comfort, health, safety, sustainability problems in their homes. And I noticed that the conversations that I would have with homeowners always followed a pretty similar arc. And especially when we're talking about sustainability, there are

a lot of homes that we need to deal with. And I can't go into all of those homes and have those conversations with every homeowner that I would like to. So the book was basically that kind two hour conversation that I was the arc that I was working through with homeowners. It was all of that in one place, written down, more succinct, easy to read. And the most important part was that homeowners can kind of

read that and understand it on their time and at their pace. And so it really talks about how to make a comfortable, healthy and sustainable home. Yeah, and so if we want to talk about feel good homes, that's kind of my definition, the comfortable health and safe, safe, sustainable piece. But it goes

beyond that, because there's a lot of other benefits that you can have in those kind of remarkable house, which would be like low maintenance, resilience, those kind of things that really go into it. But even if we just focus on those three, that gets you most of the way there. And yeah, with early COVID days and with wildfires, that's when people start to think about indoor air quality. But the reality is that we spend about

70 % of our time in our own homes. And it's more than 90 % indoors, which includes in a car and at work and in malls and all of that stuff. So if you work from home, it will be closer to 90 % of all of your time will be indoors. And we kind of ignore that reality and ignore the quality of that time until something like a wildfire and the wildfire of smoke makes that more obvious to us.

Jessica (03:48)
until something comes up and hits you in the face and makes you think like, wow, would I be prepared if I was only 10 miles away? Would my home be in a good place? I know you touched a little bit on what a feel good home is, but could you go into more detail

drew.tozer (04:04)
Yeah, so for comfort, health and sustainability, a lot of those come down to the HVAC system. ⁓ There are homes that will be big enough and have bigger problems that you need kind of a bigger whole home solution. And those are the ones where you're going to have to improve kind of the insulation, the air tightness of the house. But most of these problems can be solved or at least improved with the right HVAC system. And that generally means a right sized heat pump.

just because furnaces, the smallest furnace on its lowest setting is still going to be too big for the average house. so heat pumps are smaller and they can be kind of properly sized to provide the right amount of heating and cooling for house. And that also means those longer run times that you're filtering and processing the air more to improve the indoor air quality. And on that kind of indoor air quality healthy side, the other advantage is that ⁓ heat pumps

Jessica (04:42)
Hmm.

drew.tozer (05:03)
obviously run on electricity. So there's no combustion inside. And so if you electrify your house, which is just switching all of the gas or propane or oil, any combustion appliances for electric options, if you electrify a house, you actually don't have that combustion. So you don't have the risk of carbon monoxide leaks, gas leaks, and explosions from those, which every year is kind of tragically a, there's always a news story about that somewhere.

Jessica (05:33)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (05:33)
And so

that's a big benefit of electrification is removing that combustion from the house. If you think about it, it's pretty archaic and outdated that our primary source of heat is still just burning stuff. It's burning something in the basement and then pushing that heat through the house. And with cold climate heat pumps specifically, we're just at a point now where the technology is just

Jessica (05:55)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (06:02)
it leads to a better homeowner experience than kind of that burning something in the basement option. Even up in Canada, where homeowners will still have that concern about, it work for me? Does it work in Canadian winters? And it does. Heat pumps are very popular in some of the coldest places. So like Sweden, Finland, Norway,

Jessica (06:08)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (06:24)
have some of the highest uptake and fastest adoption rates of heat pump technology. And so we're just at the point now with the technology where it's just good enough to fully electrify a house and improve it in so many different ways.

Jessica (06:39)
when you were describing the archaic, now I think my furnace is, it's up in my attic and I've never seen it, but I think that it's probably has to be gas. but when you were describing how we're still burning a fuel my mother-in-law lives in Connecticut where

They're still using fuel to power their furnaces. And it's a very expensive, super expensive. also I've never, until you were describing it and talking about it, I've never thought like, my gosh, they're actually burning like what propane, they're burning propane inside their home? Does that affect health? It's got to.

drew.tozer (07:14)
They're burning propane, yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, mean, anytime you have come.

Jessica (07:25)
on some level, like it can't be

100 % clean, right?

drew.tozer (07:28)
Well, anytime you have combustion, are, there's exhausts and there's pollutants that come from that. They do their best to have the exhaust so that it all goes outside. But that's the reason that homeowners are supposed to do annual maintenance on those systems is to ensure that they're operating properly and safely. ⁓ But the problem is that a lot of homeowners

Jessica (07:36)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

drew.tozer (07:52)
don't do that maintenance. As an HVAC contractor, the only amount of maintenance that we can assume a homeowner does is zero, because they really just ignore equipment until it breaks. And when a furnace breaks, it usually means that it's incomplete combustion or it's leaking that combustion somewhere, and that furnace will be inside the building envelope, so inside the house.

Jessica (08:02)
It's Burpin. Right.

Mm-mm.

drew.tozer (08:17)
So

if you're lucky it breaks in a way where the whole thing turns off and you're kind of forced to deal with it as one entire thing, but it's completely possible that it will break in a way where it's just kind of leaking carbon monoxide or other pollutants into the house.

Jessica (08:25)
Mm-hmm.

And that's where the whole carbon monoxide thing comes into play. Do gas furnaces have carbon monoxide? They do, right? That can be a thing for them as well. Any combustion, even electric? No, but electric, no. Okay, got it.

drew.tozer (08:41)
Yeah, any combustion. if we're, we're, pardon?

Not electric. So

if you have a gas furnace, propane furnace, oil furnace, and the same for boilers, ⁓ it's also true of fireplaces, whether it's an open fireplace or a wood burning insert or wood stove, those all carry the risk of carbon monoxide as well. It's just a byproduct of burning stuff. It's a byproduct of combustion. ⁓ The other space that it comes up is homes with attached garages.

Jessica (08:56)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (09:18)
So

that's the risk of if you turn on your car and if you leave it running in an attached garage and if you leave the garage door closed, there's always the risk that that exhaust will leak into the house rather than leak out.

Jessica (09:31)
can you talk a little bit more about

the current state of the average home and how it might be negatively impacting our health and wellbeing, like mold and moisture

drew.tozer (09:40)
For indoor air quality, a big kind of lasting thing from kind of early COVID pandemic times is that we started

Jessica (09:39)
Hmm.

drew.tozer (09:51)
caring more about monitoring indoor air quality. And it's a pretty recent development that the quality and the cost of the indoor air quality sensors, so the pollutant sensors has really come down and advanced a lot in the last few years. It used to really just be an expensive thing that was tracked and monitored at the commercial level. And now it's really accessible to any homeowner.

to do that and more more HVAC contractors are offering that as well. The problem, the difficulty with indoor air quality is that most of the pollutants are invisible and odorless. And so we do, it's very easy to ignore them. And we get very good at ignoring them until, like we said, something like the COVID pandemic.

or wildfire when you can smell the smoke, suddenly it's not invisible, it's not odorless, and you're kind of forced to acknowledge that it's there. But a lot of those pollutants are around the rest of the time that you're not thinking about them as well. And so there's two broad categories of pollutants. There's particles, particulates, small particles, and there is gas. And the way we deal with those

Jessica (10:59)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (11:11)
is different. So the way that we deal with the pollutant depends whether it's a particle or a gas. So particles like PM2.5, which is just very, very small particulates, they're small enough that when you breathe them in, they actually go into your lungs and can enter your bloodstream from your lungs and lead to kind of adverse respiratory problems. So that's that's

Jessica (11:27)
Mm-hmm.

Can you give an example

really quick of what those type of particulate matter, what would that be inside a home?

drew.tozer (11:40)
Yeah, so it comes from, it's a byproduct of a lot of things. It's the common, the easiest way to think of it is it's just any type of tiny, tiny particle. So it comes from traffic, it comes from kind of the brake pads of cars, it comes from combustion. And so it's a pretty broad category because it is

because it's just the size of the particle is all we're talking about. ⁓ The biggest one in homes that it comes from is actually cooking. so, yeah, and it doesn't matter what you're cooking. also doesn't matter whether you are what you're cooking on. ⁓ All cooking, it's combustion, all cooking leads generates PM 2.5. And so the way we deal with particulates is filtration. So that's actually having a filter that catches

Jessica (12:11)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (12:37)
and removes those filters from the air. And you need a filter that is good enough to catch the smaller and smaller particles. Because you can imagine it's like catching a fish in a net, right? If you have a net with really big holes in it, it just means that those particles are going to go right through. And the smaller the particle, the more dangerous it is. So it's important to have good enough filtration to catch the tiny, tiny ones, which PM 2.5 is usually the kind of

Jessica (12:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mmm.

drew.tozer (13:06)
the threshold that we talk about as kind the more dangerous particles. If it's a gas pollutant, the solution is dilution. It is bringing in fresh air, outside air, it's ventilation. Because we can't, obviously, if you have CO2, it's not going to be captured by a filter, at least not kind of the filtration that we are talking about. ⁓ Yeah, and the reason that

Jessica (13:27)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (13:32)
So CO2 by itself isn't dangerous, but it's kind of my favorite one and my recommended one to monitor for homeowners. ⁓ And it became popular as a pollutant to monitor in early COVID days because it is a good proxy for how good or bad a ventilation system is operating. So if you went into like people exhale CO2. So the more people in a building, the more CO2 there's going to be.

Jessica (13:52)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (14:00)
If ventilation is operating properly, can bring in fresh air and kind of even that out and keep CO2 levels in check. If it's not, then CO2 is just going to build up in that space until enough people leave that it naturally ⁓ leaves or the ventilation system catches up.

Jessica (14:00)
Mm-hmm.

So what I'm hearing is is that the heat pumps filters are going to help with particulate matter, But it's not going to help with the gaseous like CO2. However, it does circulate it.

better and move move fresh air in more quickly is that what I'm understanding?

drew.tozer (14:35)
Yeah,

yeah, with with when you have an HVAC system that's smaller, it's properly sized for the house, it means it's going to run more often, which means it's circulating the air throughout the house, which one leads to more comfortable temperatures because it kind of distributes the temperatures throughout the house. So you don't have big temperature swings from downstairs to upstairs to the basement. ⁓ And the other thing is that air is going through that filter more often the longer it's running.

Jessica (14:42)
Mm-hmm. Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Thank you.

Yeah.

more often. Okay.

drew.tozer (15:05)
Yeah, and so when we're talking about ventilation and filtration, those are just important things to add on to your HVAC system. So it's something that we generally ignore because we ignore HVAC until it breaks and then we replace it with a cheap and fast solution option. Just it's kind of whatever is available at the time, especially in Canada where we ignore it until your furnace breaks on a cold winter morning.

Jessica (15:25)
Yeah.

drew.tozer (15:33)
And then you just need heat. So I don't blame homeowners for getting the cheap option because it's an emergency. just, I think it's important to think about HVAC systems proactively. And even if you don't, even if you wait until it breaks, at least know what you're going to get and have a conversation with an HVAC contractor. So when it does break, you already have a plan for what those next steps are rather than at the whim of whoever shows up.

Jessica (15:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

drew.tozer (16:02)
at the house first.

Jessica (16:04)
a great tip because you're right, most people act reactively when something's broken and they don't have time to research or have the conversation or even have the right contractor then trying to find someone who's available and that can be a challenge where I live. I don't know if it is for you know your area but I know here

drew.tozer (16:18)
Yeah.

Jessica (16:24)
getting someone the day of or even the next day that something breaks is probably near too impossible. ⁓ Luckily here, we don't have freezing cold temperatures But what you're saying too is when there's a system that's mis-sized, which you're saying most systems are oversized for the homes that they are running in, it also creates the

drew.tozer (16:46)
Mm-hmm.

Jessica (16:51)
variation of temperature from upstairs to downstairs.

And it just doesn't feel like that's sustainable for a pocketbook, nor is it sustainable for, overall energy use.

drew.tozer (17:04)
Yeah, so when you have an oversized furnace and it's the same for cooling, if you have an oversized air conditioner, what happens is that there's a minimum amount that it can put out of heating or cooling, right? So whenever the thermostat is unhappy, whenever the thermostat wants more heating, it says, hey furnace, turn on, or hey, hey, heat pump, turn on. If it's an oversized furnace, the furnace dumps a lot of heat, like a large amount of heat into the house. It makes the thermostat happy.

Jessica (17:32)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (17:33)
because that's the only sensor that's there. Thermostat is usually on the main floor. And so the main floor gets to that ideal temperature that you're targeting, that you're trying to get to. But what happens is as soon as that thermostat's happy, it turns off, right? It says, okay, that's enough heat. Furnace turns off and then the house cools down. The issue is that the, like I talk a lot about ducts.

work, right? And we have a lot of central heating and central cooling. So for the duct work that leads all the way up to the second floor or third floor, however many floors you have, that's obviously a longer run of duct work. It's further away. And so you get the thermostat calls for heat. You have the heat coming from the furnace working its way up the house. And then it's almost there. And then the thermostat says, OK, that's good. We're done. And then it all cools off. And so you'd never actually get enough heat to those other spaces.

Jessica (18:30)
and

drew.tozer (18:30)
which is why, at least in Canada, always talk about kind of the room on the top floor at the back of the house is always cold, it's because it's always the furthest away from the furnace, and so the furnace doesn't run for long enough to provide enough warm air to that space. ⁓ And so the benefit from heat pumps is that they are smaller, so they can actually provide the right amount of heat to the house, which just means that it's

Jessica (18:41)
and

drew.tozer (18:59)
almost always running. The goal is to have the heat pump always running, right? Because it means it's matching exactly the needs of the house. And so that far away room is actually constantly getting the heat that it needs. And yeah, it does make it makes a big difference for the temperature. The temperature differences that you can have between floors like my house.

Jessica (19:08)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (19:24)
When we bought it, we had the oversized furnace. There was a top floor. It was an attic that was converted into a bedroom. And it was basically unusable for like half the year. Like it was, if it was any summer month or any winter month, it was either too hot or too cold and you didn't want to be up there. And so it was kind of a few months a year when it was in shoulder seasons, you could actually use that space. And so with these changes for my house, which is how I got into this was kind of first.

Jessica (19:34)
Mm-hmm.

Forget it. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (19:51)
figuring out how to fix my house without ruining anything. That was the biggest change for me was that was like a quarter of my house was suddenly I could use it again because it was comfortable, reasonable throughout the entire year rather than those kind of four shoulder months.

Jessica (19:55)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's, again, I'm just thinking about how my mother-in-law's house is on the East Coast. And she has a third floor and it was just unbearable to be there in the winter or summer. And you'd have to have a ⁓ space heater, which is so inefficient and very costly to run them. And in the summer, just forget about it, right? So a lot of people deal with these things and basements.

drew.tozer (20:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jessica (20:38)
I used to live in Colorado and everybody had a basement and in the winter it's miserable so why even bother but it's a part of the house that you should be able to use year round.

drew.tozer (20:45)
Yeah. It's a part of the house. Yeah.

And we and

like homeowners are happy to pay tens of thousands of dollars for ⁓ an extension on the house in addition on the house to get more square footage, but then they have the basement in the top floor that they're just ignoring. And a lot of that just comes from homeowners not knowing what to do, how to fix that. I think that we've accepted it is what it is. And old houses are drafty and that top floor is going to be

Jessica (21:00)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (21:18)
unreasonably hot all the time and there's just nothing we can do about it. When in reality I think there's just there's a path to better homes and using the space that we have within our house. Like a feel-good home to me is kind of the the best version of your house. Whatever your house is, it's the best version of that. So you can use all the space, it's all comfortable, it's all healthy, you're really optimizing what you already own.

Jessica (21:23)
Mm-hmm.

And when you look at it that way, it pays for itself because like you said, if you were to put an addition on your house to add an extra bonus space, but you're not using something upstairs or downstairs in the basement because it's uncomfortable, you're balancing it out and being able to use those spaces again, instead of accepting that that's just the way it is and we can't really use that space for much

drew.tozer (21:57)
Mm-hmm.

Jessica (22:12)
It's very interesting how, you just kind of accept it and learn to figure out how to adapt to all those, nuances. And one of those things is like, some climates are very, very moist and damp, and you get those moldy musty,

drew.tozer (22:33)
Mm-hmm,

mm-hmm.

Jessica (22:33)
you know,

and it's just super uncomfortable. Can you talk about how this type of a system would create a more comfortable environment in very humid places where mold might be an issue and anything else that comes with too much humidity?

drew.tozer (22:49)
Yeah, let's talk about the word, the bad word. ⁓ is like mold is a serious thing. It's a serious health risk. It's also something that if you it's much easier to deal with before it's a problem rather than waiting until you have mold in the house and certainly waiting until it's an obvious enough obvious enough problem that you can't ignore it anymore. And then dealing with kind of the remediation project after that, which which are

Jessica (22:51)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (23:19)
big, invasive, expensive projects, opening walls or moving all the mold. So mold comes when building materials get wet. ⁓ And we often think about it from floods or from water damage, the water leaking into the house somewhere. And you can see it as somewhere with basements, you can see it anytime there's a flood, they have to go in and they just cut off the bottom foot and a half, two feet of drywall.

Jessica (23:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (23:49)
because it just has to go. Drywall is mold food, basically. So it's less of an issue in older homes, just with the types of building materials like glass and plaster. ⁓ It's a lot less susceptible to mold, but mold loves drywall. So anytime drywall gets wet. So we think about the water damage, but the other cause of it is high humidity or humidity issues.

Jessica (23:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (24:18)
⁓ And that is from condensation. So that is just when you can think of air as all air holds some amount of water. All air can hold water. The bigger, ⁓ the warmer the air, the more water it can hold. So warm air is like a big glass of water, and small or cold air is like a smaller glass. And so dew point is the size of glass that is the perfect size for the amount of water that's in the air.

Jessica (24:39)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (24:46)
Condensation happens when you have a big glass that's full of water and you try to put it into a touch. It touches a cold surface, so you try to pour that big glass into a small glass and it overflows. So condensation is just water overflowing from the air ⁓ and the common. We think about it a lot ⁓ in winter because we have a lot of very cold surfaces, so it's a very small glass. It's easy to have it overflow, but with

It's just as big of a problem in warm humid places where it might be a big glass, but there's a lot more water. And so it's still very susceptible to having that overflow under building materials. So the solution ⁓ is always having the right humidity levels inside. And again, that kind of falls under that indoor air quality monitoring. One of the things to monitor is humidity levels. ⁓

Jessica (25:22)
Mm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (25:43)
It's kind of different in different areas. I talk about winter humidity, we're aiming for 30 to 40 % relative humidity. And in the summer, we're aiming for 40 to 50 % relative humidity. It's higher in the summer than in the winter. ⁓ And so the goal is just to keep humidity levels in door low enough where that's not a problem. The other reason that right size HVAC comes up in this

is because when you have a smaller air conditioner, it actually means that it runs longer, which means that the indoor coil gets cold enough that it actually dehumidifies. It actually causes that condensation in the HVAC system and removes moisture from the air. Just like we were talking about the big furnace dumping heat into the house, if you have a big air conditioner that dumps cooling into the house, then what happens is the air conditioner

Jessica (26:31)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (26:37)
runs for five minutes, turns off, runs for five minutes, turns off, and the coil actually, it can get to the point where the coil never gets cold enough to cause any dehumidification. ⁓ And so the thermostat's happy because it only cares about the air temperature, but it's not dealing with the humidity levels at all.

Jessica (26:40)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm and that can cause a very uncomfortable situation in the home when humidity is too high

drew.tozer (27:05)
Yeah, high humidity is uncomfortable. It's a big health risk when we talk about heat waves that are getting more more serious. We talk about Arizona and the dry heat and how that's much more comfortable. You can live there and deal with much higher temperatures because there isn't

Jessica (27:08)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (27:30)
the humidity there. problem with humidity, the reason that we feel uncomfortable in it is because the way our bodies cool themselves, the way we lower our body temperature is by sweating and having that sweat evaporate off of our skin and cool our skin. When we are in a space that is very hot and very humid, that sweat has, it's harder and harder to evaporate, right? So our bodies have to work harder and harder to cool themselves.

Jessica (27:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

drew.tozer (27:59)
And so heat waves can get to a point where they are hot enough and humid enough where our bodies just can't regulate, like they can't cool themselves at all. And that's extremely dangerous for people. So indoors, we're not usually talking about that. That's something that's more extreme heat waves.

Jessica (28:13)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

drew.tozer (28:18)
everything like when it happens here we always talk about it's like it's soupy outside it feels very every everything's very thick it feels it's terrible to just be outside it doesn't matter if you're in the sun or not because it's just so humid there's just so much water in the air

Jessica (28:22)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So all these problems can be solved just by having the right kind of unit in your home. I love that. And in your book, you outline a path to creating the feel good home using the haven method, H-A-V-E-N. Can you walk us through what that involves?

drew.tozer (28:53)
Yeah, so I love a framework. love an acronym. So HAVEN, the H stands for heating load. A is for air leakage. V is for value mindset. E is for environmental control. And N is for necessary infrastructure. So if we just work through those, the heating load is just how much heating your house needs on a cold winter day. For people in other climates, it's going to be the same. It's the same concept.

Jessica (28:55)
you

drew.tozer (29:19)
for cooling load. it's how much cooling does your house need on a hot summer's day, one of the hottest summer's day of the year. And so that's just talking about, like when we're talking about getting an HVAC system that is properly sized, that's the right size for your house. To do that, you need to know what the right size for the house is, which is just to say it matches the heating load or the cooling load.

Jessica (29:26)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (29:45)
A is air leakage. So in Canada, we talk a lot about heating costs. are a heating dominated climate. so air leakage is the biggest source of heat loss in a house. And it's going to be true of hot climates as well. Air leakage is going to be the biggest source of heat entering the house. And so for some houses, if the heating or cooling load is small enough, then you can just kind of solve those problems with HVAC.

If you have a giant house or a very leaky house, ⁓ it might require air sealing or other bigger projects to solve those problems. that's that. V is value mindset. So that is thinking about, like we were talking about the costs of running, the cost of these upgrades, the cost of running the equipment. Value mindset to me is thinking about the benefits that you get from these types of projects.

Jessica (30:37)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (30:44)
And so if you if you always think about HVAC as an emergency replacement, it's a binary system of either it's on or it's off. It's heating or it's not heating. It's cooling or it's not cooling. And any HVAC is good enough as long as it works. Then you're always going to go with the cheapest contractor and the cheapest equipment. And if you only ever focus on price, you're never going to solve any of these other problems. You're always just going to get the cheapest equipment. So the value mindset is about thinking

Jessica (31:11)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (31:14)
about the outcomes and the goals that you're trying to achieve and then working towards that with the project that you're planning. E is environmental control. And so you can, if you picture a house, there's going to be a barrier around it that is the building envelope. That's what separates the inside from the outside. So the goal is really just to be able to control the indoor environment. So that means

Jessica (31:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (31:43)
keeping it comfortable, keeping those temperatures on each floor, the temperature that you want it to be, it's keeping it healthy. So it's controlling indoor pollutants and controlling the indoor air quality. Yeah, and it's really, and then, I mean, we can talk about sustainability too. That doesn't fall into this, but the goal is really to be able to just control the indoor environmental quality. And then N is necessary infrastructure. So any project that we do,

Jessica (31:48)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (32:13)
we it is the things that we are installing especially for HVAC they are fitting within infrastructure that already exists. So whether that's the electrical system, whether that whether you have ductwork or not, whether you have a radiator, a boiler and radiator system or not, it's it's thinking about the pros and cons the things that your house already has and doesn't have because those types of upgrades are expensive. It's expensive to

open walls and add duct work to a house that doesn't currently have it. So if you have the budget for that, then great. Central systems can be wonderful. But if you don't, then it's figuring out the project that will fit within budget that can still achieve the results that we're going for.

Jessica (33:01)
Sounds like there's a lot involved and people should start planning ahead now. Basically like find the right contractor that's going to be reliable and know what they need to know to get your house into a position where when it's time to replace, it's ready.

drew.tozer (33:21)
Yeah, that's right. it is complicated. And that's why I wrote the book was because it's such a hard thing to figure out yourself. And so and it's especially it's almost impossible to figure it yourself while also dealing with the emergency of not having heating or cooling when you need it. Like that's too much pressure. There's no time or space to breathe to be able to work through these different problems.

Jessica (33:25)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm, totally. Yeah. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (33:48)
Especially

as you said, if you have contractors that ⁓ aren't flexible or there's not enough of them to go around. So if you get one to come out to your house, you kind of need them to do the work that day because they're not going to be able to come back for another week after that. So yeah, that's why I that's why the book exists is to kind of help homeowners think about these problems beforehand before it's actually a problem and work through even if it's not creating a whole plan at least start

Jessica (34:03)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (34:17)
thinking about what the next step will be for you when your HVAC system inevitably breaks, like it's going to break sometime. And so just have some sort of a plan for when that happens.

Jessica (34:25)
Mm-hmm.

I think that it's a great tool. When I read it, I came up with a lot of different things that I would ask my own HVAC guy. we bought a house a few years ago I just wanted to have someone come and do a maintenance check before we turn on our air conditioner for the summer,

you know, is our unit in good shape? I didn't really know anything else to ask. And the book gives you a good foundation of knowledge to be able to ask the right questions, So in that way, I would recommend it to anyone.

who is in a position where they're not in an emergency state, but they wanna think about planning ahead. And I have another question that came up, it can be more costly to add a second, because you were talking about opening up walls and adding vents, is that what somebody might consider doing?

drew.tozer (35:20)
Mm-hmm.

Jessica (35:24)
if they're not in need of it right now, but they're thinking about doing an air pump, is that a necessary step or does the air pump eliminate like that big project?

drew.tozer (35:35)
So there are ductless and ducted air source heat pumps. The ductless ones are, there's pros and cons to each. Usually ductless heat pumps I only recommend to homeowners that don't have duct work already. They are generally a bit worse at dehumidification and the biggest problem with them is that they do almost no filtration. They do nothing for indoor air quality.

Jessica (35:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

drew.tozer (36:02)
Whereas

a central ducted system, you can put a good filter on that and you can add a fresh air duct and have that ventilation and filtration and good indoor air quality come from that. Whether you do that, like that's kind of the end part of Haven is thinking about that infrastructure that exists. it is something where like for my house, it needed some extra duct work.

Jessica (36:13)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (36:31)
And so that was something that I didn't do all at once. It's fine to do these things piecemeal, like just have that plan. And every time you, if you do a kitchen renovation and you're going to open the walls, that's the time to add duct work. If you know that you're going to need duct work in that space to get upstairs with it. So you don't need to do it all at once, but when you, when you do that renovation and you're opening up the walls, that's kind of your only opportunity to do that project because you can imagine.

Jessica (36:34)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (36:58)
once you've finished that kitchen renovation, then if you're thinking about duct work two years later, you're not going to want to open up the kitchen wall of your newly renovated kitchen. So it's like that opportunity is gone. So it's just having that plan so that any upgrades that you make kind of work towards this bigger picture for the house.

Jessica (37:09)
Mm-hmm.

I like the plan ahead method because if you're gonna spend the money you might as well do it on something that's going to be more efficient and better for your health and overall an actual upgrade instead of just a replacement because that's the goal right is as a homeowner you would like to

update for functionality and you make it better. And so we should think about things that are important. it's not something that's visually going to be an upgrade.

But it is really important, for the overall health and well-being of the environment that you are in, like you said, 80 to 90 % of your life, depending on if you work at home or not. So, yeah.

drew.tozer (37:59)
Yeah, yeah. And

these are certainly the things that we don't think about, homeowners on average don't think about, because they're not the sexy upgrade option. It's not marble countertops that you're getting for your house. It's all invisible behind the scenes upgrades. But it makes a huge difference on kind of the quality of life that you spend inside that space, especially given the huge number of hours that you will spend

Jessica (38:17)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (38:29)
in your house. so like the budget side, yes, it can be more expensive to pick these better options. But I would also think about it kind of going back to the value mindset pieces. What is that better comfort worth to you? What is clean air worth to you? Like homeowners will buy water softeners and water filters for their water because they can taste the pollutants. But then we're not willing to invest in the clean air because it's easier to ignore.

⁓ when it's not clean. that's just another thing to think about is just kind of this investment in your home in terms of a comfortable, healthy space.

Jessica (38:59)
Mm-hmm.

and like you said too, you can even be adding square footage for a lot of people. Usable square footage year round as well. So it is actually an investment in your home and comfort is huge too, right? You know, I mean, you want to be able to be upstairs and feel comfortable and be in the basement and feel comfortable year round. So thank you for writing that book. Are there any other challenges or concerns that homeowners should be aware of? I think

it's important to be aware of what it is your goal is, but also to be aware of the challenges

drew.tozer (39:46)
Yeah, so I think you nailed it with the kind of describing the book earlier, which is that it's the goal was to give homeowners enough information without it's not a technical guide. It's not a science book. I'm trying to give you enough information to solve your problems in your house. If you if you want to dive deeper, there are great

Jessica (40:05)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (40:11)
building science HVAC books that go, it's a deep rabbit hole that you can go down. But this is like, this is a short, meant to be more accessible, engaging book to help homeowners. And for contractors, so again, I'm in Canada, so we think more about furnaces, we think more about the winter months. And so my recommendation for finding a good heat pump installer,

is usually two things. One is focusing on that heat load calculation. So most contractors don't care or they use a rule of thumb or they do they kind of skip the heat load piece to figure out what your house actually needs. If it has an oversized furnace, they just go in and they just want to install a new oversized furnace. So the number one tip is find a contractor that will do a performance based heat load calculation, figure out the needs of the house.

Jessica (40:51)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (41:05)
And the

second one is finding a contractor that won't redirect to gas appliances just because that's what they are used to installing. that's a serious problem and a big barrier for homeowners is they, they listen to a podcast like this and get advice about how to improve their house or how to be more sustainable. And then they go call their local contractor and the contractor says, no, that's all wrong. I want to do this other thing. And the homeowner's stuck.

in the middle there between two experts that are saying opposite things and nine times out of ten they're going to go with the advice of the contractor, the advice of the person that's actually going to be doing that work in their house. And so that's the other recommendation for homeowners is find a contractor that doesn't put you in the middle of two experts. They are kind of

on board on the same page for what we are trying to do and the problems we're trying to solve in homes.

Jessica (42:06)
Mm, that's really great advice. And again, the book gives you such a solid foundation in being able to know where to begin and know how to ask questions. And because that's really the foundation of anything that you're trying to do that you've never done before is knowing the right questions to ask. And without your book, it's like, don't who would even know.

drew.tozer (42:29)
Yeah, I don't even know what I don't know.

Yeah.

Jessica (42:31)
Right, exactly.

You don't know what you don't know. So can you tell us where to find your book, Drew?

drew.tozer (42:37)
Yeah, so if you go to my website foundryheatpumps.ca, if you're in Ontario where I am, you can sign up and I will send you a free hard copy of the book. If you're anywhere else in the world, you can sign up and you'll get a PDF copy of the book. And if you get a PDF and you still want a hard copy, it's on Amazon. You can also get any local bookstore to order it. My goal with this...

Jessica (42:41)
Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (43:04)
is homeowner education. It's talking about in the same way that you are talking about how it doesn't need to be, it is what it is. We can have better living spaces. So I'm an HVAC company. If you're near Toronto, certainly I can help you. But the bigger picture here is that we're trying to solve problems for homeowners in their homes. And so I'm very happy to just give this information.

Jessica (43:05)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (43:32)
away for free to everyone that will listen.

Jessica (43:36)
because things can't change unless people are aware, right? that's where change begins having these conversations and raising awareness amongst your communities, So now all of the listeners out there have something new to go and talk about with their friends and family. And

I'm always looking to upgrade the health and wellness of my own life and of those around me. So that's of my go-to topic whenever I'm talking with friends or family members just whatever I've learned that I didn't know before. it's important to have those conversations because otherwise nothing changes and nothing advances. So thank you so much for.

drew.tozer (44:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Jessica (44:17)
revolutionizing the HVAC because I feel like it's it's one of those industries that kind of just has stayed the same for a really long time. There's not a ton of new technology out there unless people are really doing huge remodeling projects on their home and they can put to system, but even then it's like my

drew.tozer (44:29)
yeah.

oversized systems. Yeah. Yeah. And to your point about kind of doing those investments in your home, this is the nice part about doing it with HVAC is yes, you spend so much time in your home. This can be a one time big investment that you then just don't have to worry about, think about anymore. It's just

Jessica (44:43)
used to get two systems and now they're both wrong. So yeah.

drew.tozer (45:08)
improving the comfort, improving the air quality in the background. So we were talking about how a countertop is great because you see it every day. It can be kind of nice that when you solve these problems in your home, you just get used to how comfortable and healthy the home is suddenly. And part of that is that you can kind of take advantage. You start taking that for granted. But the other part is like, well, now you're just living more of your life in a comfortable, healthy, sustainable place.

Jessica (45:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly. And something else came to mind when you were saying that, and I'm trying to go back and pinpoint what it was. I was going to ask, once you make this investment, how long does the system last? Does it have a lifespan that would outlast a new furnace or air conditioning system?

drew.tozer (45:57)
They're about the same. Like every time we talk about furnaces, air conditioners, heat pumps, it's kind of 15 to 20 years. The biggest part of that, like I like to think about it like buying new windows and part of it is the equipment that you choose, the quality of windows that you choose. And the other part is the quality of worksmanship, the quality of contractor they use to install them. So you can get the fanciest triple pane windows, but it's

Jessica (45:59)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

drew.tozer (46:25)
you got a terrible cheap installer, there's just going to be a big gap around the window and they're going to perform poorly. if you install, you kind of regardless of which HVAC system you get, if you kind of cheap out, if you go with the cheapest price for contractor, it's more likely to fail early. the hard part is that you see the cost, like you see the price difference for the contractors, good and bad ones.

Jessica (46:43)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm

drew.tozer (46:53)
⁓

And it's easy to just kick that down the road saying, well, if it fails in five years, that's kind of five years from now problem. And I'd rather just save that money upfront. So my advice is always just to get a high quality contractor in your area to do whatever the work is, because that investment that you're making ⁓ in your house, that equipment, those systems will just last longer.

Jessica (47:20)
Good advice. Sound advice. I agree. the house that we bought three years ago. Everything had been updated, but by like somebody who didn't quite know what they were doing. Either it was DIY or and or just

drew.tozer (47:36)
DIY work.

Jessica (47:44)
somebody who could come in and do it on the weekend, who knows how to do it, but that's not their thing. You know what I mean? It's just been a ton of money to fix the systems and update them. just all the things that if you initially spent the money on a better system, a better contractor, yeah, you wouldn't have to be doing this.

drew.tozer (48:05)
Do it once and do it right.

Jessica (48:11)
stuff that we're having to spend money on right now to make it all better, it's not even, it's like better, but not, yeah.

drew.tozer (48:18)
It's just getting it back to the level

where it was supposed to be anyway. It's why people hate anytime there's, for homes with basements, anytime there's foundation work to be done. Because it's just a huge cost and you're like, it doesn't make the house better, it just stopped the house from falling over, which was what I wanted the house to do anyway.

Jessica (48:23)
Exactly.

Mmm.

Huh.

Right, that's all.

Yeah, exactly. So this is just foundational, let's get it done right. And ⁓ find your book on Amazon or again, can you just remind us one more time and I'll link it in the show notes your website.

drew.tozer (48:42)
That's just foundation work.

Yeah, foundary heat

pumps dot ca. Yeah, and it and any local bookstore should be able to order it as well. It's with the major book distributors. So if you don't want to support Amazon, you want to support local, then that's that's a good option. A good way to do it.

Jessica (49:06)
100 % if you can find it at a local bookstore, please do. That is definitely the preferred route of being a consumer is to buy local and support families and small businesses. thank you so much, Drew. I appreciate your time and your wisdom and sharing your expertise with us today.

drew.tozer (49:25)
Yeah, thanks. for having me. This was great.