E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week is the last podcast of 2019! Happy December All. One of my passion projects is “The Pretty Good House” For the last two months we’ve been discussing it at Performance Building Supply’s Building Science Discussion Group! So I thought it was a fitting way to round out the end of 2019 with a recap of the discussion and some interesting points it brought up about renovations! I hope you enjoy - and please reach out and let me know what you’d like to hear in 2020 emily@mottramarch.com

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week we welcome back our resident building science expert Mike Maines to discuss WRB’s (Weather Resistant Barriers, Water Resistant Barriers, Water Control Layer) whatever you want to call it. It’s one of the 4 critical control layers in a building, arguably one of the most important as our buildings DO NOT need to breath - but they do need to dry out. So we need to control how and when the water gets in and out of the shell. Which WRB to use isn’t a simple answer - “It Depends” so take a listen to the podcast and check out the show notes for links to some of the things we talked about.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. It’s Black Friday Y’all! This week I just wanted to have a light and fun podcast about some randomness and Black Friday shopping. Sears and their kit houses? Why aren’t we still doing this? Webinar series for “The Pretty Good House” and I forgot to mention, but when I was talking about Black Friday shopping I wanted to share a little story about my niece. She’s smart, funny, and exuberant…but she hates to clean her room. She’s my mini me in so many ways. She often tells her mom “It’s too hard” and the truth is, maybe if we had less stuff to manage, it would be easier to manage it? Just a thought on Black Friday! If you’re out shopping, good luck to you. I’m in the office. The only thing I got up early for today, was to work off that Thanksgiving dinner.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week I had the pleasure of talking with Darius and Tom (he’s there, he’s just really silent). Together they are building a super high performance ADU in Brunswick. And although they are not new to building, this is the first opportunity for them to flex their building science muscles and really dig deep into some of the best ways to build. I like to have a variety of perspectives on the show, and I thought it would be valuable to hear about the struggles and the success of building a high performance home. Hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week I had a request to talk about how to get into this field. I don’t think it was specifically about architecture, so much as, how to offer energy efficiency when the market isn’t asking for it yet.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week I had a request to talk about how to get into this field. I don’t think it was specifically about architecture, so much as, how to offer energy efficiency when the market isn’t asking for it yet.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week we have resident building science expert, Mike Maines, back with us to discuss something that is critically important in the building industry - Air Barriers. Not only where do they belong, but why do we even need them?

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. For the month of October we are very excited to have some stellar female guests join us on the podcast. For the month of October we have been highlighting some amazing women in construction. It all started when a client of mine shared an article with a movement labeled #moveoverbob. So today we get to talk to the founder of MOB and hear why she started and what it means to be a woman in the construction industry.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. For the month of October we are very excited to have some stellar female guests join us on the podcast. The movement #moveoverbob is gaining some traction on highlighting the brilliant women who work in the construction industry. So today we had the pleasure of talking with Patrice Cappelletti of Live Solar Maine. Patrice and I have been working together for years. What I love most about working with her is her attitude. She’s fun, she’s thoughtful, she’s non-combative when an issue comes up and she’s fearless. She’s willing to try anything. People who meet Patrice instantly love her energy. Being a woman and general contractor, she felt that creating nests comes naturally for her. So here’s a little glimpse into the dynamic relationship that exists when building with Patrice.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. For the month of October we are very excited to have some stellar female guests join us on the podcast. The movement #moveoverbob is gaining some traction on highlighting the brilliant women who work in the construction industry. So today we had the pleasure of talking with Heather Thompson, Owner of Thompson Johnson Woodworks, Inc. Not only is Heather in the minority 9% of females in construction, she’s also highly focused on building science and best building practices for current and future generations. We are lucky enough to have Heather here in our home state of Maine. We took the opportunity to sit down with her to hear more about what she’s doing in the world of construction.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. For the month of October we are very excited to have some steller female guests join us on the podcast. The movement #moveoverbob is gaining some traction on highlighting the brilliant women who work in the construction industry. So today we had the pleasure of talking with Kerry Lewis, a landscape architect and colleague. She gives a lot of valuable insight on how to prep a site, how not to start from scratch, how to incorporate native plantings, and why it’s so important to have a plan and work with a landscape architect to spend less on your landscape in the long run. Better planning = better projects.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. So, unless you had your head buried in the sand, you probably heard something about the UN Climate Summit in NYC this week. Sadly, the US didn’t speak - in fact we said nothing - which pretty much stands to reason that our current administration plans to stick with pulling out of the Paris Accords - and even if they don’t - they’ve pulled back so many EPA policies that we are not on track to meet any of the goals! - Yikes. So when it’s just me on my soapbox, i’m going to try and keep these podcasts short. But they say you should talk about the things you’re passionate about and this is something I am passionate about. So tell me what your thoughts on climate change are.

Climate Action Summit 2019

How do buildings contribute to climate change?

Buildings generate nearly 40% of annual global GHG emissions.

New Research Shows Zero Carbon Buildings Are Possible Where You Might Least Expect Them

World Resources Institute

Accelerating Building Decarbonization: Eight Attainable Policy Pathways to Net Zero Carbon Buildings For All

Climate Change - SEIA

Recycling & End-of-Life Considerations for Photovoltaics

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England.

Learn about the cause:

Global Climate Strike

Strike With Us

Fridays For Future

History - School Strike for Climate

How to participate in your area:

https://strikewithus.org/#sign_up

https://www.fridaysforfuture.org/events/map

Articles on the strike and climate change:

Fast And Company

USA Today

Science Alert

Climate Change

And so much more - start your climate change research today!

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. Air sealing is one of the most critical parts of build a high performance home. This week we invited Ken Kiefer from SIGA to join us to talk about air sealing, products, and how to make it easier for the industry to build tighter buildings. We definitely subscribe to the philosophy “Build it right, Build it tight” so having Ken on the podcast was so much fun. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week, in honor of Labor Day, I wanted to talk more about the business of architecture. Today I answer a couple of questions that other architects, builders, and students have asked me in the past about starting a business with a specialty in energy efficiency.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week we invited our good friend and frequent guest, Mike Maines, back to the podcast to talk about embodied carbon. If you follow along with any of the Paris Climate Agreement or Climate Change in general, you maybe have heard we need to get a handle on our carbon emissions sooner rather than later. In today’s podcast we talk about what that means for the building sector and you as a homeowner building or renovating your home.

E3 - Energy and Efficiency with Emily is a podcast dedicated to energy efficient home building in cold climate areas of New England. This week we invited our friend and colleague Bob Swinburne to join us and talk about semi customizable plan sets like his Vermont Simple House project and our semi custom division at Mottram Architecture. We talk about why we think it’s an important and under served section of the market, what potential panelization might play in future builds, and the importance of having the architect be an advocate for the homeowner through the construction process.