Latest / Bozeman Builders Science / Ep. 0: BBS - Pilot Episode
Transcript
- Ian White: Your house is complicated. You've got plumbing, electrical, heating and cooling, ventilation, insulation, and then somebody starts talking about building envelopes, air pressure, vapor pressure, indoor air quality, a blower door test, and pretty quickly understanding your own house starts to feel like something you need an engineering degree for. But here's the thing. Your house isn't just a collection of complicated stuff. It's a system. And once you start looking at it that way, I think the whole thing gets a lot easier to understand. Welcome to the Bozeman Building Science Podcast. I'm your host Ian and today we're gonna make your house a little less confusing. That's really the whole idea behind this podcast, because building science, it sounds intimidating. It sounds like something you should probably have a degree in before you're allowed to actually have an opinion about it. And there absolutely are people with degrees, certifications, decades of experience, and a much deeper understanding of individual parts of building science than I have. And we're gonna talk to a lot of those people. But I don't think you need to be one of those people to understand your own home better. At the most basic level, it's just trying to keep you comfortable. It keeps the weather out and gives you a safe place to live. But it takes a whole bunch of smaller systems working together to make that happen. And that's where this gets interesting. Because we tend to separate those systems. We have a heating problem, or we have a crawl space problem. But your house doesn't really work like that. Those things are still interacting with one another, whether we understand the interaction or not. And once I started looking at homes that way, a lot of things that seemed incredibly complicated started becoming more approachable, which is probably a good time to explain who I am and how I ended up here. I'm Ian. My background is a little unconventional. I've always been a builder, designer, tinker, whatever you want to call it. I'm largely self taught and I'm extremely systems oriented. I like understanding how things work, but more than that, I like understanding why they work. I hate being told what to think without understanding the why behind it. Because if you're anything like me, being given the answer isn't enough. I need to understand what the answer is built on. Show me the foundation. Show me the system underneath it. Help me understand why A affects B. Because once I understand that, I don't have to memorize the answer anymore. It just makes sense. And more importantly, I understand the steps in between. If all I know is that A eventually gets me to D, that's great. Up until something changes. If I actually understand why A goes to B, B goes to C, and then C gets me to D, now I can actually think through the problem. I can ask better questions, and I can adapt when a situation is different. It helps me understand why the right answer for one house might not be the right answer for another. And that's the kind of understanding I'm after. Professionally, I work in radon mitigation and mold remediation with Bozeman Radon and Mold, and that work has exposed me to a lot of situations where the problem in front of us doesn't fit neatly into one category. You might start with a radon problem and actually end up talking about pressure or ventilation. You might start with mold and end up talking about moisture movement or how the home is being heated. I started realizing that understanding the individual problem was useful. But understanding the systems underneath it made everything else so much easier to understand. And that's really what pushed me further into building science. Not because I wanted to memorize a bunch of terminology. That's boring. I wanted the things I was seeing every day to make sense in terms I could understand. And that's probably the role I'm best suited for here. Call it technical translator. Sometimes I'm gonna know the subject really well. Other times I'm going to know enough to ask the questions I want answered. And sometimes we just need to bring in somebody who understands a particular subject far better than I probably ever will. And then there's going to be times where I find something interesting, dig into it, and come back here to tell you what I found. Because you don't have to know everything about a subject to start understanding it. You just need somewhere to start. So let's come back to your house being a system. Inside that one big system are hundreds of smaller ones. And I think one of the easiest ways to make all of that less intimidating is to forget about the terminology for a minute and just ask a really simple question. What's the goal? What is this thing actually trying to accomplish? Once we understand that, we can start asking why it works the way it does, what affects it and how it interacts with the rest of the house. Take a bathroom fan. The goal is pretty easy to understand. When you take a shower, you put a bunch of moisture into the air, and the fan moves that air outside. Simple enough. But if we're moving air out of the house, where does replacement air come from? Now that bathroom fan isn't just a bathroom fan, it's part of a bigger system. How about a crawl space? It's easy to think of this separate area underneath the home that we just use to store our Christmas tree. But it's still part of the building. The conditions down there can affect the conditions upstairs. So if we're trying to understand a moisture problem or an air quality issue, or even why part of the house feels different from another, suddenly that crawl space actually matters. Radon is another great example, and obviously it's one I'm around quite a bit. It's tempting to make radon really simple. There's radon in the ground, it can enter houses, done. Except the house itself plays a huge role in what's actually happening. How it was built, how the air moves through it, what's happening underneath it. Suddenly we're not just talking about radon anymore. We're talking about the building, and that's the point. I'm not trying to teach you bathroom ventilation, crawl space science, or radon mitigation. We'll have plenty of time for that. I just want to start changing the way we look at these problems. Once you stop seeing them as a completely separate thing, you have a much better starting point for understanding what's actually happening. And more importantly, you can start asking better questions. I think that part matters because my goal here isn't to turn homeowners into contractors. I don't want you listening to three episodes of this podcast and suddenly redesigning your HVAC system. What I do want is for you to have enough understanding to actually participate in that conversation. If someone recommends a thousand dollar change to your home, you should be able to ask why. What are we trying to accomplish? And what makes you think this is the problem? How are we even going to know whether or not that actually works? You don't need to know the answer before you ask the question, and that's the point. We're trying to understand the reasoning behind the recommendation. And homeowners deserve that conversation. Sometimes there isn't one perfect answer. There may be multiple ways to solve a problem. And there's always going to be trade offs. And sometimes the most accurate answer really is it depends. And that's okay. I'd rather have someone say it depends and explain it than give me an overly confident answer that ignores half of what's going on. That's something I want to preserve on this podcast. We're not going to get everything perfectly right out of the gate. There's going to be subjects where the answers change as we learn. There's going to be things I don't understand well enough yet to explain. And when that's the case, I don't want to pretend otherwise. I want to find the answer. Because that's really where this technical translator idea becomes useful. There is an unbelievable amount of information available to us. And it's great. But access to information and actually understanding it are two very different things. You look something up because you have a question. The answer you use is call it three terms you've never heard before. So you look those up. And now you've got six tabs open. One article says one thing. Some guy on Reddit says something different. A manufacturer tells you they have the product that's gonna solve your problem, and somebody on YouTube tells you everybody else has it wrong. 45 minutes later, you have more questions than answers. And somehow you're less confident that you actually understand those potential answers. I've been there, and I will be there again. The goal here is not to remove all the complexity and the confusion. Sometimes that matters. The goal is to figure out which parts of it you actually need in order for it to make sense. Start simple, understand the goal, then ask why. And go another layer deeper if and when you want to. If we eventually get to a layer where I don't know the answer, I'm gonna learn right alongside you guys. We'll find somebody who does. I don't want this show to work because I'm pretending to be the smartest person in the room. I want it to work because we're willing to keep asking questions until the answer actually makes sense. And the cool part about that? This is gonna take us all over the place. My background means we're gonna spend time talking about radon and molt, obviously. But those subjects are connected to so much more. We're gonna end up talking about how air moves through a building, how moisture moves through it, and how we build in the first place. And I want to talk to the people who understand those pieces far better than I probably ever will. Sometimes it will just be me. I want to have conversations with builders, contractors, consultants, or other people from the industry though. And sometimes the entire episode might come from a single question a homeowner asked me that made me realize that's actually a really good question. Why does that happen? Those are probably going to be some of my favorite episodes. Because I don't think learning has to feel like sitting through a lecture. I hate that. You can have a conversation. You can follow an interesting question. You can hear somebody explain something in a way and it'll finally click. I love those moments. And 20 minutes later, you find yourself understanding something that felt completely inaccessible before. And that's what I want this show to be. So if there's one thing I want you to take away from this first episode. It's that your house isn't magic. It is complicated and there's a lot happening inside of it. All those systems are constantly interacting with one another, but they behave the way they do for a reason. And they were designed the way they were for a reason. We can understand those reasons. We don't need to understand everything at once. We just need somewhere to start. So what's the goal? Why does it work the way it does? And how does it interact with the rest of the house? If we can build that foundation, everything we add on top of it gets a little easier to understand. And hopefully, the next time somebody's standing in your basement explaining a problem you've never dealt with before, hopefully that conversation feels a little different. Instead of just hearing a bunch of technical terminology and hoping the person standing in front of you knows what they're saying, you can participate. You can ask why and understand the reasoning. Ultimately, you can make a better decision about your own home. Because at the end of the day, it is your house. You deserve to understand it. So that's where we're starting. Your home is a system. From here, we're going to start pulling pieces out of that system and figuring out how they work. Sometimes I'll know the answer, but more often than not, we'll bring in somebody who knows far more about it than I probably ever will. and we'll figure it out together. Either way, I'll tell you what I found when I dug into it. Thanks for listening to the Bozeman Builder Science Podcast, and I'll see you on the next one.