Interview with Keith Hutchings of The Comfortable Home Project on the Importance of Design

Hello everyone, my name is Ian Peterman, host of Conscious Design, and today I'm really excited to have Keith Hutchings, founder of the Comfortable Home Project, because he works with passive solar homes. It's something that I actually— my grandfather worked in way before it was cool, so I'm actually one of those weird people who knew about it as a kid. But for the rest of us who probably have no idea what a passive solar house is, tell us a little bit about what it means to have a passive solar house.

So the first thing I need to say is that passive solar is not solar panels. That's the first question I usually get. Passive solar, is that like solar panels? So solar panels is a technology. You put them up on the roof, they provide electricity, use the electricity to run your air conditioner and cool your house. Or heat it, whatever. Passive solar is designing your house. So it's a design solution to design your house so that it's warm in the winter, cool in the summer, using the sun coming in to keep it warm and keeping the sun out in the summer and also bringing in the breeze wherever the prevailing breeze comes in to cool the house. So instead of running your air conditioner, you get home from work in the afternoon, it's hot. Instead of turning the air conditioner on, you open up your windows and doors and push the hot air out of your house. Passive solar is passive, so it needs human intervention. in order to make it work. So that's in the winter at night, closing curtains so that it keeps the warm in because you lose most of your heat through the windows. And then it's also opening those curtains in the morning so the sun can come in. And then in the summer, having the curtains closed so the sun doesn't come in. Shade sails outside your house to keep the the sun from coming in and heating up the house. So, in order for passive solar to work, you have to actually do some of the work because your house doesn't have any hands. So, that's kind of in a nutshell. And then, there's a whole rabbit hole that you can go down where the sun rises, where the sun sets, and all that kind of stuff.

Who knows? Maybe someone listening to this episode will figure out how to automate all that, a little button and a little solar panel and a battery, then new product for you guys.

Yeah, that sounds fantastic.

Yeah, maybe I'll do it in my spare time that I have such an abundance of.

Between podcasts.

Yeah, absolutely.

At this point, the thing is that, that is, you know, technology always eventually fails. So that's why a design solution. So the downside to having all those automatic shutters and all those kind of things is that they will eventually fail.

Oh, yeah.

When you've got moving parts, they will eventually fail. And with housing affordability in both America and where I am in Australia being really the biggest issue that we're facing, I want to think in terms of Simple and cheaper rather than— I mean, I'm a big fan of cool machines that just do stuff for me, but in terms of what ordinary, you know, the average person walking down the street needs, it's a house that has low energy costs. So, right, that's— yeah.

What do you—

Good idea. Only in Beverly Hills.

Yeah, they can afford it, right? Yeah. So you mentioned a couple things with like the design, and so that's, that's one of the things that I like about this is it's very design-focused in that you build it around— you're really aware of your environment. So you mentioned, you know, wind and direction of sun and a rabbit hole. So let's dive down that rabbit hole a little bit. What are your main— when you're putting together and saying, I'm going to build this passive solar home, if you had to pick, if you narrowed it down, is there a top 3 or 5 things that you always must have in order to make it work while there could be 20 things you could do?

Okay, caveat. I'm not a building designer. I'm not an architect. I'm not even a builder. I decided a few years ago that basically I came to the conclusion everybody had to do something about climate change and that my thing would be changing the way we build houses here. So I've actually come at this as— so in order to do that, I've been teaching myself marketing over the last 4 years. But my expertise comes from— so I work as a handyman, And I have been in the last 6 years in between 800 and 1,000 houses. So I tell people my expertise is—

Wow.

I have a self-appointed MBA in housology because I know more about how not to do housing than possibly anyone in Australia. I am the world expert in how not to do housing. So I'm just going to lay out my credentials there. I deferred them on myself. But what I've been doing is going to people's houses that are living in passive solars and looking at what they've done, and then also meeting with building designers, architects, talking to them about what they've done. So there are a couple of basic things. We're in the Southern Hemisphere. You want to have your main living areas Open towards— for us, it's the north. For you poor misbegotten souls in the Northern Hemisphere, it's the south. You want to have— I always forget this— you want to have your main living areas focused towards the south. Somebody refers to that as sunwise or towards the equator. those of us who get confused whether we're in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere. And so that, because that's where you spend most of your time, and that's also where you tend to have big windows. So you have those big pieces of glass to bring the sun in in the winter. We're a bit strange here in the Southern Hemisphere, at least here in Perth, because Heat is more of an issue than cold. So, we're trying— more of the design is about keeping the heat out of your house because we have 9 months of hot and 3 months of cold. Having said that, it was 2 degrees out yesterday morning. And, because I live in a badly designed 1960s brick venereal, our house was freezing. Freezing in the morning when I woke up, and you know, cold for end of June, isn't it? Well, remember it's winter now, so this is the seasons are reversed. It's always I see people on things like Reddit going, "Oh, it was so hot today." I'm like, "It's the middle of winter.

What's wrong with you?" Oh yeah, you're in the northern hemisphere. Other other part of the world.

Yeah, the other part of the world back where the oh you know the sort of. Strange place. So yeah, we're kind of right at— well, it was the winter equinox last week, I think it was.

I don't know. It was actually.

So it is the coldest part of the winter and we're having one of the coldest winters in, I don't know, a long time here. So we've had some really cold mornings. Colder than it normally doesn't get. Did that make sense? No, it didn't. Yeah. And then, it's things— the other side of that is being able to get the heat out of the house. So, for us here in Perth, in the summer, the prevailing breeze comes out of the southwest. So ideally, you want to have a house that opens up towards the southwest. And then, that the house be designed in a way that it creates a Venturi effect. You have small windows towards that southwest side that open and allow the breeze to pass through so that then you have big sliding doors or big windows that open on the other side and you can actually create a vacuum in your house. I was in a house last year and it was a back block house, so where they'd taken someone's backyard, subdivided the property, long narrow driveway coming into it. And I'm standing in this guy's lounge room and I've got this gale blowing down on my neck and it's the first really hot day. Of summer. And I'm like, this fucker, he calls this a sustainable house, but he's got a fucking air conditioner. And I turn around and there's no air conditioner. It's the front door. Outside, there is no breeze, but inside between the front door, the sliding doors, and the shape of the roof, which has created a kind of— airfoil, he's got a gale blowing through his house.

Wow, that's impressive.

Yeah. And then the other thing is things like a lot more people are building 2-story houses. And if you're building a 2-story house, you want to enclose that staircase going up to the upper floor so that you can close it. Because what happens is In the winter, then that staircase becomes a chimney, sucks all of the heat out of the downstairs. Usually the upstairs is the bedrooms. The bedrooms are boiling, particularly in summer, but even in winter. And the downstairs, there's no heat at all in the winter because it's all gone upstairs. So being able to have kind of an airlock to stop that from happening so that— I mean, I've got friends who have a 3-story house. And in the winter, they have to abandon their 3rd floor because it gets up to 50 degrees up there because it's a badly designed house with a staircase chimney up through the middle and it just sucks all the heat up to there. And it's 50 degrees, that's Celsius. So that's like your hair catches on fire up there kind of temperatures.

Right. I think that's over 100 degrees. Fahrenheit, which is—

yeah, I think 50 is about 110. But yeah, you know, one of the great things about the internet is if you're wrong, people will come piling in. So someone who is good at math will correct us on that.

Probably. Yeah, wait for that. That'll probably be the first comment.

Yeah, yeah. It's like if you were born on the sun, then you would love to be up in that. And otherwise, you're running an air conditioner in most badly designed houses. You're running an air conditioner through the summer 24/7 and spending thousands of dollars a year to make your house comfortable. So, really what this is about as far as I see is it's about good design versus bad design. And most people don't know that they have the option to design, have their house designed in a way that it is warm in the winter and cool in the summer, that it's comfortable the year round. And it's also a much healthier way of living.

Right. And so in this, obviously you can from scratch, right? I could design a house from scratch, But in looking at houses and stuff, have you seen people— like, is this something that retrofit, like go in and make it a house? Is that—

It depends on the house, and then there's diminishing returns on a house. So, uh, you know, you have to— like, if the house is designed with all of the bedrooms down the side, the sunward side, so in the Northern Hemisphere the southern side and the living areas are all on the other side of the house, then you're going to have a really hard time swapping those rooms around.

Yeah.

But for our house, there are a lot of things that we could do to improve it. We've got a— our lounge room faces towards the west, so we get all that afternoon sun when the sun's really low in the sky, but the air is heated up already in the afternoon. And so, that room really gets pounded. So, that's the kind of thing that if we were going to spend some money on this house, we might replace that window with double glazing or I might put a shade sail out off of it to keep the sun off of that wall, things like that. So, there are things you can do to improvement. We're in an old house with no insulation in the walls. So, just getting some insulation in the walls. I put insulation in the ceiling, but it's a much more expensive proposition to get insulation into the walls. So, we just haven't done that. So, I'm in that.

Yeah. Is that something that people have been getting to that? I know you work to help connect people with passive solar experts and actually getting it done? Is that like, do people think about requesting that or are most people thinking—

There are, you know, there in every place there are a lot more already built houses and there's a lot of interest. In our work with the Comfortable Home Project, I've tended to more focus on new construction simply because there's a lot of people who are talking about renovating to be more comfortable already. And I sort of felt like, you know, here— so here in Perth, there are roughly 18,000 new houses built every year, most of them badly. So I thought, I'm going to put my energy into stopping more bad houses being built by forming people. And then, there's other people who can focus on the renovation side of it. But, so one of the interviews I did was a woman who did a renovation. She had a similar— she had a 1960s house. They put a big renovation on the back of it, which created a new lounge room, new kitchen onto it. And that became in the, you know, that they just spend all their time in the new renovation. The back half of the house is just bedrooms.

Yeah.

And I think there's an office in there. But that section of the house is just always so comfortable to be in that they just spend all their time in there. The interesting thing with her in that interview, and if anybody wants to go look on the website, that Sharon is The house, it's one of the homeowner interviews.

We'll make sure.

But she said afterwards, we were chatting, and this is the thing, when you're doing interviews, never turn off the audio because they say the best things before and after the camera is rolling. But Sharon said, she told us that she had a friend who was doing a renovation Sorry, was doing ground-up construction at the same time that she was doing her renovation. Renovations are more expensive than ground-up construction, so they ended up spending about the same amount of money, except for this— the friend has a house where she's spending thousands of dollars a year on her energy bills. And Sharon hasn't had an energy bill in 10 years.

So if you do this right, then you remove, or basically remove it to a point where you barely even pay for anything, heating and cooling, right?

Exactly.

That's the goal, is you, you actually don't even need an AC unit or even a heater, right? Probably only in the fall you might need a heater.

Yeah, yeah. We did an interview on Sunday and this older couple, they had built in 1972, they had built a passive solar house using most of the principles, but there were some things they got wrong in that. They decided to put a timber floor in so they didn't have the mass in the floor to hold the heat and hold the cool. And eventually it got to the point where the house was basically falling apart. And rather than fix it, they decided to knock it down. And there were 2 really interesting things. She said when they had solar panels on the roof, they had about 1.5 kilowatts of solar on the roof of the old house. And they had an air conditioner in that house and they were spending about $120 a month on energy bills spread out over the year. New house, so that included gas and gas hot water. New house, which is all electric, they don't have solar panels and they're spending $40 a month. So $40 a month for them, older couple, no kids, is what it costs them for running the fridge, the washing machine, the electric cooktop.

Yeah.

And all the rest of the cost would be heating and cooling. She said, Oh yeah, we ran the fans like 3 times last summer. So they have ceiling fans over the bed and in the lounge room. They turned them on 3 times last summer.

Wow.

And that was a house that they just moved into. So they still didn't have curtains on the windows through the whole summer. It's not double glazed. But yeah, they turned the fans on 3 times. So next summer— and the hottest it got last year was, it was like 42 degrees outside and it was 27 inside. So that was one of the days they turned the fans on. So next year with some big heavy curtains, They will probably end up running the ceiling fans once. So for me, a lot of people have been talking about these houses in terms of sustainability and being good for the planet and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, no, let's talk about these houses being good for your wallet.

Well, I mean, that's really how you're able to The way to sell sustainability on a global scale is, well, it's going to cost you less. So, how can you say no now? Yeah, yeah.

In terms of marketing, I don't actually talk about sustainability. And, I actually think that sustainability is a 4-letter word. I talk about— yeah, I'm bad at spelling. How it's good for you. One of the things I like to say is what we do now with our houses is we close them up and we turn the air conditioner on, which is the equivalent in your house. Now, if you came home of an evening and your partner or your teenager had put their gym shoes in the fridge, would you be upset and concerned? Yeah, probably, you'd think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. They're nasty. That's what we do with our houses now. We close them up and in the summer we refrigerate our gym shoes. It's nasty.

Right. Yeah, it is. And we— there's less and less, like, new construction. I have, I have family that's working works in construction, and they're like, you seal them up so much now that you have to— they put in holes now because without them you run the risk of like suffocation because you, you're literally sealing the house to a point that you want, you want your AC to work efficiently, but then it goes to the point where, well, there's no oxygen coming into the house.

Yeah.

There's a certain ratio you need if you want your pilot light to turn on for a gas stove. You can't just have no airflow at all. You can't live in a space station.

Yeah. And yes. And then what you're also doing is, because if you've got something like gas heating or even gas cooking, that releases a tremendous amount of moisture when the gas is burning and that moisture collects in your sealed house. creates mold and mildew. What you really want to be doing is cooling your house down by getting— changing the air.

Yeah, I, I lived and grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the US, and, and yeah, mold, mold is a problem because these houses are really well sealed and there's a lot of moisture generally there in the air, and that all works to mold everything up. You mentioned something interesting with the floor of that couple's house where they chose wood, and that was a bad idea because they didn't have a heating base. So if we can talk about materials a little bit, I know materials obviously play an important part, especially with this floor example. So are there certain materials that you look for? Are I've seen houses where they put dirt on the roof and things like that. Is that something that passive solar looks at outside of just even general construction materials, or how does that work with what you've seen?

What you're looking for with passive solar— let me just circle around for a second. There are 2 different things in this kind of design space. There's a process called the passive solar. And, what passive solar is doing is using mass. So, it's your building materials. Sometimes people use things like water tanks or something, something that can absorb the heat in the winter of the sun coming in and then radiate that out through the night. So, that might be a poured concrete floor. It also wants to be mass in the walls. Often people, even if they're using timber construction, they'll put a feature wall someplace that will be able to absorb that heat and/or hold the cooling. Because in every part— well, in most parts of the world, the temperature cools down at night. And so, in the summer, what you want is you've radiated the heat from the day out, you've absorbed the cool, and that— holds that. There is another process that some people do, which is called Passive House. It was invented by a— get in trouble here— a German architect. And, that is basically they create a sealed envelope that is an airtight house. But then, the even better if in there, there's a mechanical device called an HRV.

An HRV.

I think I've got that right, that it pulls moisture out of the wet areas. So, the kitchen and bathroom, it pulls the air out, it brings fresh air in, and there's a radiator inside that box that— so, if the house is in winter, it has been warmed. Then, it takes the cool air that's coming in, exchanges it with the hot air that's in the house. So, to warm that house, that incoming air up, and then pushes it into the house. So, it's using this mechanical device to be constantly changing the air. And, what that does is, because the other problem with your sealed houses that you're talking about— is that they can have really high levels of CO2 in them. You go into some houses and you just find yourself falling asleep.

Yeah.

I went to a friend's house. They had a gas heater sitting there running next to me and I just couldn't keep my eyes open. I was like, oh yeah, the gas heater, nice, sitting here burning up all the oxygen in the room. I need that oxygen, thank you very much. So that's what this unit does. Heat recovery. I can't remember. I'm really bad with initially kind of things.

I'll make a note. Yeah.

Look up Passive House. I think it's HRV, but I always get it wrong. So we just will ignore that. And the really cool thing with this device for people. And again, this is the marketing issue. So many people are bad at marketing. They talk about these great houses. The thing they never talk about is on that incoming air, you can put a HEPA filter and you can filter all of the air that's coming in to remove dust, pollen, whatever as it's—

Because it's a closed system. Yeah.

So, you've got a closed system. And, I just think, I don't know if anybody's done any science on this, but when somebody told me about that, I was like, there are so many people that are hay fever, dust allergies, all those kind of things. And, to be able to spend 8 hours in a house where the air is being filtered as it comes in sounds like just absolute bliss to me. Perth in particular, I like to say, was a city designed by God to fuck with people who have dust allergies. We have the deserts off to the east and the wind comes across the desert and then it comes across what they call the Wheatbelt. So it's a big kind of just rural area of broadacre farming. So it comes across and then it picks up. It's already loaded with dust, but there's a lot of room in that air to cram a whole bunch of pollen into it.

Oh, nice.

Then it comes across. Yeah, as much as it can. And then it comes across and it hits the cool ocean air and it drops all that shit on the poor benighted hay fever sufferers of Perth. It's like, just sorry, I'm gonna curse again. I just can't help myself. It's just like, I see you there. Fuck you, I'm gonna drop all this stuff on you. That is how Perth was designed. And we've got some nice forests in there because some of the Australian pollens are even worse for the sufferers of hay fever and things. So we picked that up too because there's a big forest just between, in the middle over there.

You got grass pollen, you got the tree pollen.

Tree pollen, everything to just make their lives an absolute misery.

Add some mold spores to that, and I think you'd cover all the things that you'd be allergic to.

I don't think anybody's thought of that yet. I might get on that. Yeah. And so I'm just like, why are you guys not talking about living in a house with— so the thing with the Passive House is they don't use mass. They enclose the house and then heat the house by using the heat that's created by cooking appliances running.

Right.

So it's a super insulated house. So I just wanted to bring that in as a way of when you're talking about materials. So there's that one design solution, which is Passive House, And, that is a perfectly sealed house. One of the things they do is what's called a door fan test. So, they take out the front door and they put a fan, a door that has a fan mounted into it.

Okay.

And then, they measure the volume of air that comes through as they suck all that air out of the house. And, to be a Passive House house, it should only do one air exchange an hour. So, as it's pulling the air out, it's creating a vacuum. Now, my house would probably do 20, 25 air exchanges an hour.

I don't know how many my house would do.

Yeah, no, it's best not to just ask. But, with this house, 1 air exchange an hour. So, it's really well sealed and then bringing in that fresh air constantly. But, in order to have that kind of system here, you need to have an air conditioner really designed for colder rather than hotter climates. But, if I suffered from hay fever and I was going to build, I'd build a Passive House and then just filter that air coming in.

Yeah.

So—

Open doors doesn't really filter anything.

Well, when you've got all of that coming in. So then, with a passive solar house, you're using the mass of the house the walls, the floor to even out that temperature through the day. So, just to run my— the temperature outside might be doing this and the temperature inside is doing this. So, it's rising up a little bit during the day, dropping down a little bit at night, but not big changes. And, that's— But the materials aren't that important as long as they've got mass in them.

Right. So it's not really as much about the material type or whether you use concrete or not. It's, does it have enough mass to actually— can it absorb the temperature and then slow release, basically? Can it even out the temperature? And that's the defining part about a material choice.

And then, there are a lot of trade-offs that you have to decide. Are you using brick? Are you using something like rammed earth? Are you putting tiles on the floor? There are choices that you make. Are you using double glazing? There are places for double glazing. Here in Perth, I was up in houses in British Columbia where they had triple glazing. And, the walls were framed out in 2x8s and filled with insulation. But, they were talking about temperatures of 50 below zero, and that's in Fahrenheit in the winter. Like, yeah, no, I'm not staying here. I'm out of here.

Yeah, they get cold there.

Yeah, there's an understatement. Yeah. I was talking about 1 or 2 degrees here with big sad face.

Right.

But their houses are built for it. Our houses are not built for it. But I look at pictures all the time of houses in America. You may hear the American accent. I grew up in a house in New Jersey with no insulation in the walls, no thought towards orientation, anything like that.

Sounds like suburban America.

Yeah, exactly. So it's the same problem in America is just designing houses badly. Right.

So, and obviously you're working to help people figure out that there are options, right? And what they can build. Is there, I guess somebody were to like, start wanting to look for a house or, or builder, like, what, what are things that you would look for? I wanted to go build a passive solar house. Is there anything that you should look for in a builder or questions you should ask to make sure you're actually getting a passive solar house and not just a house with more windows in it?

Well, the first thing to do is to educate yourself about the principles of passive solar design. I mean, I know a bunch of people who were owner-builders. They built their own house that they designed themselves. And I had one friend who they looked at a— they had educated themselves about passive solar. They knew, well, they knew more than me about it. And strictly from just learning stuff off the internet and And that kind of thing. And then, they went out to the project home builders and they found a house. They had a kind of weird-shaped block, so it was hard to find a house that would fit on the block. They found one design from a project home builder, the kind of guys that just stamp out the same houses. They might have a dozen designs and they just build those.

I agree.

And so, you can get the Imperial or the Cape Cod. And, Completely irrespective of orientation of block, whatever, they just plunk this thing. And they found that if they just flipped it over, if they simply did a mirror image of the standard design, they had an 80% passive solar house. And I was working with an architect at that point, and we were talking about designing a project for them around modular construction and things. So, I went and talked to them. He looked at their drawing. He made some really minor changes. He just widened some hallways or narrowed some hallways.

I don't know.

That was 4 or 5 years ago.

I can't remember.

But, he just moved a few lines on the paper and it would've boosted that performance and the comfortableness of the house by—

50%.

Like 10, 20%. So this is not cancer research. It's not. It's—

It's not.

You can educate yourself. And I see so many houses, you know, the houses that I'm going into are often built perfectly backwards. So the living areas here are on the southern side of the house. My next-door neighbor's house, all down the northern side, they had a carport. So, no sun comes into that house whatsoever. So, they have perfectly shielded themselves against any solar warming in the winter.

Right.

The next thing to do is to find someone to design your house because the house has to be designed if you're doing new construction or even a renovation, The house has to be designed specifically for that location, and you're going to be a lot better off with that anyway. If you go to a project home builder who says, oh yeah, we do green. So you want to look back and find, does this person have a track record of building well-designed houses that are energy efficient? I didn't use the sustainable word in there because it's a 4-letter word and you said no cursing on this show. So I'm not using that word. But do they have a proven track record of building energy-efficient houses? Do they know what they're doing? Because right now, as this becomes a little more popular and there's interest about it, people are saying, oh, we build an energy-efficient house. Actually, no, you don't. You build the same house you build all the time. You just put a stamp on there that you drew with a crayon that said energy efficient. Here, they have a star rating system here in Australia. The building code requires a new house be 6 stars. And I've seen ads where something says energy efficient, 6-star home. No, actually, you've built the minimum you've required. acquired and you've just called it a 6-star home. We call it greenwashing. It's like, yeah, we'll just call it anything because there's no legal definition of what is an energy-efficient house. You have to know what you're doing. I feel like that's kind of everywhere.

There's lots of—

Exactly.

Yeah.

My experience is here, but I know it's worldwide.

Yes. It's here too.

And then the next— so then you've got your— you found a building designer and a builder who has experience, who has built other houses, who knows about this kind of stuff. That's why we have a service directory on our website because I realize people are choosing their builder because he's some guy they met at the tennis Rather than, you know, it's like, oh, you're a builder, do you want to build me a house? Because they like the guy. And, you know, it's fine unless you want something really specific. Yeah, like you want to not have an energy bill for the rest of your life, which I think is kind of specific. Yeah, you want a house. I was looking at this design the other day a guy put up on a Facebook page. And I was just like, I actually commented on the post. I said, I would live in this house if I hated my children and I hated my wife because it was so many small rooms. You would never see your children. So it was really bad design. I got in a lot of trouble for that. Yeah. Somebody's, oh, this is a terrible thing to say. No, it's bad design. And, you know, good design Good human design should facilitate connection between people. And most design, what we see in housing, is it actually separates people.

I've had this conversation with a few architects now. There's this idea of human-centered design in the product world, industrial design. Not everybody follows it, but we at least have the word and there's a class for it. Whereas—

Yeah.

I've talked to enough architects now that the general consensus is like, oh, we don't actually think about the people that are inside the building. We just, you know, is it wide enough for your shoulders to pass through? Great, that's a doorway. And, uh, you know, we have a standard bed size that we drop in and we have a standard toilet we drop in. And as far as like thinking about the people that are gonna spend most of their time in a house. We don't really think about that as much. That's rare. That's rare to think about it. There's no human-centered architecture.

So, the 2 examples that I love, the negative and the positive, we have a suburb in the north of Perth called Wanneroo. It's a whole bunch of new housing developments and they were designed to facilitate social isolation because they all have automatic garages. It might even be like a planning code requirement that you have a garage that you can pull your car in. And so what people do is they come home, they mash the button on the remote, and they drive into their carport and they never see their neighbors. They may not actually have any human neighbors. They would never know. They could all be robots.

Oh, wow.

No one would know. And social isolation is one of the biggest diseases of our society right now. The other side of that was I used to live in New York City and the housing that was designed, I think accidentally, nobody was talking about human-centered design in the 1880s, but because it's granite rock, they didn't want dig down into it to build these houses. So the furnaces in the basement is a— they built like a half basement with that, you know, the heating in it. So they could only just dig down a little bit through that rock. And so all the houses have this staircase out the front. The Dutch is the stoep. I love that word.

Mm-hmm.

So there's this like maybe meter and a half to 2-meter-high staircase leading up to the entrance of the house. Of course, none of these houses had air conditioning in them. So what people would do is they would sit out on the steps in the summer because it was too hot to be in your apartment. Kids would play in the street and the parents would all sit out on the steps and it created community. And so that's bad design derived Carports versus the stoop, which facilitates connection and community. You know all your neighbors because you've hung out on the street. You may not like all your neighbors, but—

That'd be probably hard to do, find like all of your neighbors. There's always got to be—

No, yeah, that never happens. Yeah. That's, I mean, one of the things I learned years ago is that anytime any group of people that you have, Some of the people will be assholes, and probably sometimes that's you. But yeah.

If it's nobody else, it's you.

Yeah, yeah. If everyone else, or if it's all of them, then it's probably you. But one architect I talked to recently referred to some of our suburbs as cemeteries for the living. Someone else used a term which I really liked, which is filing cabinets for the living. We're building these housing estates, which is just a place to stick people.

Right.

Bad design.

People storage.

Yeah, yeah. People storage. And that's all they are. And that's just bad design. So circling back again to that steps. Then, the next step is if you're doing new construction is you have some understanding of orientation, you have chosen a building designer, then you start looking for blocks of land because you want a house that towards that, in your case, southern side, the sunward side, you have it open and that it can't be built out. So I went to work on a house. The house was a fake French provincial. It was only a 2-story house, but it was really high ceiling. So it was really a 3-story house with quite a steep roof because they were copying those houses that they build in France where they have snow. So they put a 30-degree pitch roof on it.

There's one of those houses in my neighborhood.

Yeah, yeah. And you're in?

LA. LA.

Don't snow much there, but you can shed the ash from the forest fires, so that's good.

Maybe that's what they were thinking.

Yeah, yeah. The next-door house was clearly designed as a passive solar house with big high openings and windows and things. And they got no sun at all because of this atrocity built next to them. So you want to be choosing your block in a way that—

You want to be building your house. Yeah.

One of the guys I interviewed, he looked at 6 different blocks and he rang up his building designer. The building designer brought it up on Google Earth, said, that'd be a no. The next-door neighbor is going to knock down that house, they're going to build a 3-story McMansion, you will get no sun. The other thing you need to know is where the prevailing breeze comes from because if you have, again, a 2-story house or a big high fence on that side, that breeze is going to come in, go right up over your roof, and you're going to get no breeze. So you want to be thinking about those kinds of things. A good building designer is going to be able to work around a lot of this stuff. If you inherit the block from your grandmother and it's got an old falling-down house on it and you want to build a new house, you're going to go to your building designer, you're going to say, this is the block of land I've got, what can we do with it? And if they're experienced in this, they're going to work around it. Maybe they're not going to build a perfect house. The house I was in on the weekend, the one with the $40 a month energy bills, a whole bunch of compromises, a really less than ideal block, but it was the block they had.

Right.

They're an older retired couple. They can't afford to go buy a new property, but Well, even a 70% is still great. I walked in the door and it was really cold on Saturday outside, really cold for Perth standards, but, you know, I'm a wimp. And you just stepped in and in that stepping in through the front door, it was almost too warm in the room. And then I closed the door and it was like, oh God, it's nice in here. But that initial stepping through the door, and they had the sliding doors open, just like the windows cracked, because there were 4 of us— there were 6 of us sitting in this lounge room. So it was like, let's— it started to get a little stuffy in the room. So this was almost too warm on a cold day outside.

Without a heater on.

Without a heater on and the windows open. Because that was, again, that's that mass that's holding the heat of the day because it was a sunny day. So the sun is coming in, but the air temperature was cold. So you make compromises, but it's still going to be a much better house than the house that's built perfectly backwards.

Right.

Like my neighbor's house, they're getting a whole bunch of solar gains warmed up Or my neighbor's house, carport all the way down the northern side, no solar gains, and they just freeze in there in the winter. He just said, yeah, that was the house they could afford to buy.

Right. Well, sometimes we have that, and hopefully you can make minor upgrades and changes.

Yeah. But the important thing, I think, For me in all of this, in talking about it and learning about it, is that it is not some kind of thing where in order— you have to do it perfectly or it'll all explode.

Right.

You can educate yourself. It's something that people can learn about. I'm assuming that most of your audience, because you are a young guy, is going to be people around that age. And so if you're thinking about buying a house in the next year, 2 years, 3 years kind of thing, then you start educating yourself about it now so that when you then start looking at it, you go, you can then, you can just walk into the house and you go, oh my God, we're going to spend a fortune on energy here because this house is built perfectly backwards. And that's the remarkable thing to me. If you can build a perfectly a house perfectly backwards, you can just as easily build it the right way. Yeah, just do it.

Just think. It just comes from not thinking about it. Yeah, yeah. Right? I mean, we know how to design houses; just we don't build them the right way.

Yeah, yeah.

Because somebody said we were looking in a mirror one time, and I. I think we just ended up with backwards houses now.

Yeah, exactly. It's like, oops.

Yeah.

In fact, I spoke to an architect. He'd just finished his degree. He'd just gotten his license. He was hired by one of the project builders, and he was just drawing up the designs that were agreed to by the salesperson. And he turned to his boss and said, if we just flip this drawing over, this would be an almost perfect passive of solar house because of where the block is. And the, you know, his manager said, uh, they've already signed off on the contract, forget about it. And, and then he was fired a week later. So, you know, it's like, oh man.

And yeah, it's not like it's gonna cost— it's not like the material, right? It's not like it's a huge material increase if you're just—

No, no, it wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever. Somebody just had to think. And somebody then would've had to go back to the client and say, look, you know how we agreed to this? If you do this, you will have minimal energy bills for the rest of your life if you leave this house. So somebody, the salesman would have to go back and say, can we—

Save you money.

Would you like to change this? So yeah, and they just wanted to crank out houses. So it then becomes, so my whole interest in this is consumer-led demand. And it's your listeners who are going to— because I'm assuming they're listening to a design podcast, they are not going to want to be in crappy designed houses where—

Yeah.

If you're a designer, but most people, 90% of the people I talk to, I say, would you like to live in a house that had no energy bills over the life of the home? And they're like, Really? Can I have that? And that, I say, is that's down to us. We've done a poor job of marketing. If I say to you, do you want to have a house that's green?

You go, probably not. No.

But do you want to have a house where your children won't develop respiratory illnesses because it's much less prone to mold and mildew?

Probably. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Yeah. So yeah, I know, that was part of why I was excited to have you on because passive solar needs a little more marketing in order for people to know.

It really is.

It's like, it's kind of how I approach all my, all my projects and how I think is you're not aware of it. You're not conscious of it. You can't do anything about it. You can't make the change. So if nobody knows that you can have a house that— yeah, almost nothing in heating and cooling, and nobody knows, it doesn't really matter. It's like, it's the whole question, if a tree falls down and nobody hears it.

Yes, people don't— they don't know what they don't know.

Nobody's doing it. So yeah, yeah, that's really important. And On that, if somebody wants to get a hold of you, learn more about passive solar, where would they find you?

So, um, I'm assuming this will be in the show notes, but we are at thecomfortablehomeproject.com.au. Uh, that's a really important part in there. And we're also on Facebook. I'm Keith Hutchings. I'm on LinkedIn. I spend entirely too much time on LinkedIn, and I will accept connection requests from anyone who doesn't spam me later with Bitcoin requests. So if you watch this and you want to connect, yeah, I'd love to talk to people, particularly in the design space, because I suffer from terrible, terrible visual literacy. I'm trying to get the disability pension for my visual literacy impairment. So if your viewers are designers and I can learn more about visual literacy, I talked to my design friends and they're like, oh, this logo is terrible.

And I'm like, looks all right to me.

Yeah, but the kerning. So yeah, send me connection requests.

You know the terminology, so this is good. You're making—

Yeah, I just know it. I can't see it. You know, I don't understand it at all. So yeah, I'm keen to learn from your fellow designers about visual literacy because so far my application for a disability pension for my visual literacy impairment has not come through yet, and it's a terrible, terrible issue.

It sounds like a malady.

A malady, that's a great word.

I love that word. I think it applies perfectly here. Well, amazing. This has been, this has been really great. I appreciate you taking the time to talk about passive solar homes. And absolutely, if anybody listening, watching, whatever, wants to learn more, reach out. Definitely in the show notes, we'll have links for everything. And thank you for watching and listening. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you from everybody. And for the designers out there, thank you for what you do to make the world work better because, wow, there's a lot of bad design out there. So not just in my space, but everywhere. So yeah, thank you for what you do. Or as they like to say in America, thank you for your service.