Off-Grid Living with CABN: Sustainable Net-Zero Modular Home

Hello and welcome to this Conscious Design podcast. I'm your host, Ian Peterman, and I help turn ideas into sustainable 7-figure businesses. Join me for another episode where sustainability meets innovation and business savvy. Today, I'm excited to have Alex Kelly. She's the COO of Cabin, where they are making sustainable net-zero homes. Brave Reality. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. Well, everybody loves a good origin story. So let's wind back a little bit. Let's talk about how did this come about? How did you decide you wanted to be involved? Let's, let's jump back in time a little bit.

Yeah. So today when we're chatting, it's 2024. The cabin started 2021 and our founder, Jackson Wyatt, he had this remarkable experience in the startup world, also in sustainability. So prior to starting Cabin, he had a successful exit from a company called GreenLed, and they actually were basically turning the compostable goods industry on its ear, starting with a compostable compost bin that he and his brother designed, and they brought it to the Canadian version of Shark Tank. It's called Dragon's Den.

I've heard about this.

Yeah, and it kind of started the flywheel, if you will, in terms of their business. So they started with this initial bin and marketed that and started selling that into stores across Canada. But from there recognized an opportunity, and this is going back about 10 to 13 years ago. And that was really at a time when coffee shops and takeaway restaurants were starting to shift their thinking in terms of single-use plastics. So Jackson and his brother developed other elements that you could use in different settings. So whether that was forks and spoons made from bamboo or compostable tableware, or even they would work with factories and farmers in India and harvest the sort of waste product from a wheat harvest and use these straws and cutting them down to size and then cleaning them and sterilizing them and packaging them up to be replacements for plastic straws for drinks. So, this business, which started with sort of one SKU, then grew to, I think, about 100, 125 SKUs that were available in 50 different countries, working with manufacturing facilities all around the world. So, really kind of grew a lot of momentum in that space. And as many businesses do, as startups looked at investor trajectory and then sort of the next step. And for them, they were acquired by a larger company with similar interests. And so, Jackson kind of was looking at what to do next. And I think as many founders, kind of as much as he liked the idea of slowing down and, you know, had some grand ideas of moving to an island and being sort of chill for a while, his entrepreneurial mind got the best of him. And he was like, well, if I was going to move onto an island and, you know, I was going to have to live there and I'd need solar energy, and then how would I get the House there, and what would that look like? And then all of a sudden, cabin was truly born in this idea of wanting to live remotely, live lightly in terms of impact on the land, so very non-invasive, and also looking at something that would open up the opportunity for where he could put a house. And so that's where working with a number of engineers from his previous company Greenlit and some other incredible experts along the way, they started to develop the concept of Cabin. And we are a rapid prefab housing company made from sustainable materials and can be completely run off renewable energy. So, they started to kind of build this business baby, I guess you could say, and taking kind of all of the best practices from traditional home construction, from some different building sciences, and everything that we knew about R&D from home building and how could we improve upon it? And that's how Cabin started. And it started very much with a concept and computer modeling and then grew into a real show home, a real factory. And I joined the company almost 3 years ago now. And first in terms of consulting, you know, my background is a lot of marketing and communications and government relations and organizational strategy. But very soon after, Jackson convinced me to join full-time. So it's been a wild ride since then. You know, we've grown, we've gotten North American acclaim and inquiries from 6 of the 7 continents. We still haven't broken into Antarctica yet. Business is certainly a bit of a freight train these days.

Well, that's amazing. Well, you know, maybe if you add enough insulation, somebody will want this on the poles and you'll be good.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Oh, that's an amazing story. I love that it started off with this other product and getting into sustainability and, and then going, yeah, how do I build this on an island? Which is an interesting—

Yeah. You know, I think he, he, Jackson definitely has had a lot of inspiration, whether that's sort of literary in terms of Walden or, you know, tropical locations. I think at one point he was even looking at somewhere in Belize, but certainly big aspirations to kind of do things differently. And I think that's led to This beautiful collision of, of design and then sustainability.

Yeah. Well, let's dive into the, the product. So for, you know, as probably everyone's already gathered, right, this is for building homes in a modular way, which is, it's something that is trending upward. It's an idea, right? Most people think of modular and they immediately think mobile homes though, which this is not. This is not a tractor trailer kind of So could you dive into kind of the, the design idea of what is this? How is this better and improved?

Yeah, great question. So you're right, like people think of modular and they think of a trailer, you know, a sort of a relief trailer or a temporary housing. We trend more towards prefabricated. So, and that's where I think the difference is between some of the common ideas of modular and prefab sort of intersect in that you're building a lot of the components of the home in a factory. So it's climate controlled. You have precision. You're not dealing with unexpected rainstorms sort of soaking all of your, your materials. And so the productivity is much faster, it's efficient, and the home is much more precise. And so that's kind of where we start to kind of take a bit of fork in the road from like a traditional modular idea. So our homes, we've got 4 models that are publicly available right now from 540 square feet up to about 2,000 square feet.

Okay.

1, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom. And all of our homes, I'm biased, but they're beautiful in design. It's sort of a Scandinavian take and they're more modernistic. So the homes all feature a generous roof slope, some really open interiors. And while the design is beautiful, it's also purposeful. So we have this big roof slope to allow for a full solar array of solar panels on the roof. And we have these Broad, expansive spaces on the inside because the house itself is built from a material called cross-laminated timber. And so it's very structurally strong and resilient material, and that creates that building envelope or sort of the shell of the home. And it's so structurally significant, you don't need interior walls to hold the house together. So you've got something that's very strong, very resilient, lends itself to this beautiful sweeping 2-story vaulted ceilings and The other wonderful benefit of cross-laminated timber is that not only is it a great building material, so it was basically originally introduced to replace structural steel and concrete in high-rise buildings, so you've got something that's very strong and durable, but at the same time, it's not like traditional stick frame housing where you frame it out and then you have to cover it in drywall. This, your sort of your bones of your building, is what the interior walls are, so you have these beautiful Expansive wood walls that kind of arc up to the ceiling. So again, we're pairing a really good solid building material that we can work with quickly on site with something that looks beautiful. So these homes are designed for that. And then of course, to your Antarctica comment, they are very well insulated, so they perform better than a traditional home. And when they're angled properly with those solar panels on the roof, It can generate up to 200% of the energy required to run that house. So you actually, they're almost over-engineered in the sense that you generate more energy than you need. So these houses work hard, but they're looking beautiful while they're doing it.

Amazing. Well, yeah, so double the power. Is there, do you guys pair and slew? Like, what do you do with that extra power? Are you able to plug it in, sell it back? Yeah. Yeah.

So every jurisdiction's a little bit different, but yes, in most places you can net meter or sell back to the grid if you are connected to it. And so that is where our clients have an option. So they can be connected into your classic electrical utility and sell it back, or they can store it in some high-performance battery banks. And so it's kind of saving for a rainy day, if you will. This allows them to know with certainty that they can, they can continue to operate their house even though, you know, you might have a number of days in the winter that might be darker or rainier, and you may not have as much efficient power generation, you know that depending on the house size, up to 70 kilowatts of battery storage to run your home, charge your EV, keep things going, even when maybe everybody else around you is experiencing a power outage.

Right. There's so much that you've said to unpack now, but you mentioned a little bit about being able to put homes in places that maybe were a little bit hard to do normal construction or more remote locations. Obviously the power, you can be off-grid if you're producing 100 to 200%. That's great. Off-grid. How is this able to be easier for those more remote locations where somebody might not want to, you know, build out the giant— road to have all the big trucks come in and tear everything up.

Yeah, we have a lot of clients that are doing some remarkable buildings in very far-flung locations. And so it's an interesting one because now people, their opportunity for real estate is extended so much farther beyond what they previously kind of could have looked at because maybe they were looking for something with utility hookups. Now they bring the power themselves and they could do a well and a waste and water solution in terms of septic and a well, things like The other thing really that we're looking at is that our homes, we don't include basements in our homes. We do that so that you can build on pretty much any sort of foundation style. So if anybody here had a basement growing up, it was probably a concrete basement foundation type of setup. That can be very time-consuming. You require a lot of heavy equipment to excavate and pour in the concrete. Your windows are pretty narrow in terms of timelines, and it's actually, it's a huge greenhouse gas emitter. gas contributor. About 60% of traditional homes, their GHG emissions come from the concrete used in foundation and basements. So if our clients want to build on that, that's fine. But when we're looking at these more remote locations and how do we put in a foundation, we love to defer to helical piles. So these are like big screw piles that go anywhere from 4 to 14 feet down in the ground and create a level foundation or a level opportunity to put a steel frame on top of and then build our house up from right on top of those helical piles. So you don't have to excavate, you don't have to pour concrete, and this then makes it a lot easier to kind of break into some new territory with land. These helical pile installers, it's kind of like the size of like a lawnmower, so you can kind of get them into anywhere.

That's small.

Yeah.

That's a good-sized cement truck.

Exactly. And so that's, that's your foundation, right? So now you're unlocking land that maybe would have been previously unbuildable because the The utilities didn't exist and you couldn't get a big cement truck down. So we've kind of tackled that part of the equation. Then we look at actually building on site. So when we ship out our homes, they're actually more like a kit. It's almost like IKEA on steroids. So you've got all of your panels of the home that are vertically or horizontally stacked on a truck. And so we can actually decide based on your location, is it going to be a really big truck or a smaller truck? Which again, just helps kind of manage where we're going into. And then having a bit of a staging area and then using equipment to put it into place. And so we can do anything from, you know, a 10,000-pound capacity telehandler, which is relatively small, maybe kind of the size of maybe like a pickup truck or an SUV, up to a 60-ton crane. And depending on where the client is and what the situation is, we can kind of cater that machinery to assemble the building. To the accessibility of the environment. And then once we're on site, our buildings can go up in a matter of days. And then that gives you that envelope or that building structure to be then finished out. And again, these are all things that can be done very easily with a standard driveway, if you will. So that kind of gives you an idea of how people can look at more remote land, maybe less expensive land, looking at hard-to-reach places. We've got people who look at building in forests and building in mountaintops and on islands. And this, because we can break it down into the sum of its parts and then ship it out and assemble on site, and it's a shorter window, everything becomes a lot easier to do.

Right. Well, imagine that having such a small window, because I have, I have family that they do, they build custom homes in Washington State. And one of the biggest issues up in like Pacific Northwest and other rainy places, right, is all the mold when it takes you 4 months to build, rain's gonna happen, rain gets soaked in there, right? There's, there's so much, there's so much that can happen that then you have to go back and deal with, right? There's, there's just these extra costs just to deal with the fact that it takes months to build or build a real house from start to finish. And so if you're able to cut this down into days, right, you could, you could pick a sunny week and be like, hey, It's up. There's no— water didn't get in, we didn't get snowed in, like weather, it didn't— it was not going to really impact your final build.

Exactly. And, you know, we get that building envelope up and then it gives all of your interior trades, your plumber, your electrician, whoever's doing the kitchen cabinetry, what have you, a nice clean, dry, secure place to work. And that, that handoff can happen quite quickly. So it keeps timelines in check, everybody on budget, on schedule, which is really nice to be able to offer that to our clients. And then of course, they're working with a material that offers them, you know, solid wood walls. So you're not worrying about finding studs or trying to figure out kind of how to orchestrate kind of the installation of elements. And then finally, that gives us the opportunity to really work Very closely with finishers or whomever, because our units are so precise because they're made in the factory and made from this material that doesn't warp, bend, or anything like that. So when we built our show home here in Ontario just over a year and a half ago, and it went up in 2 days in the middle of January, the whole home was off interdimensionally by less than half a millimeter. So when you're doing something inside and trying to be precise with kitchen cabinetry or countertops You know that that house is going to be the size it said it was, not off by a hair or not really a right angle or something like that.

Right. You're not going to see the ceiling is actually, you know, not, not square, which is very annoying to me when I see that. But you don't have to hide it with, uh, textured paint just to—

Yeah, trim and textured paint. It seems like that's the construction industry's best friend.

Oh, so many, so many problems get hidden by those things. It's a, it's a miracle product for, for construction. Really amazing. Well, and I would imagine, right, if since you're able to provide something so precise, it's gonna be easier for electricians and plumbers, interior to cut and size and not have to waste. They're not having to cut little slices of tile to fill the tiny little 2-inch gap that's off because it's not the right size anymore.

Exactly. And that's something, you know, that we, we looked a lot into the construction industry, which is an incredible industry, but, you know, always looking at the things that seem to hamstring trades or their clients. And so, you know, sometimes it felt like there wasn't necessarily a great communication of how runs would go or where electrical could be run relative to door openings and and structural elements of the home. And so we really take a full MEP, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing plan from the get-go, and we provide that for our clients. Sure, people may want to like change where their overhead fixtures are, or, you know, make sure that the outlets are right next to the nightstand at the certain height or what have you. So there is flexibility, but we provide that. And we also give our clients and their trades the option to Fully route out all of this. So marking where everything will go so it's very clear. There's no trying to figure out how to jimmy the hot water tank into the utility area. And so we give them all that if they want it. Some plumbers and electricians, they want to use their own suppliers, and that's cool. But we do that. And then what we've also done is you can run things interior of the house, and we use things like floor joists to do that very well. But for some elements, you can have an exposed conduit, which is sort of that industrial vibe and people like, but some things what we'll do is we'll actually run them on the exterior of the house in the insulation. And so again, that gives you the opportunity to measure twice and cut once into the wood and then run it on the exterior, which gives you the option to sort of hide things and have this again, like a very beautiful uninterrupted surface and everything where you want it in terms of electrical and plumbing.

That's amazing. That sounds, that sounds so much easier. Also, is it, is it something if you buy this house, can you, as a homeowner, you can actually see where things are? So if you want to change something later, you actually know what they did? Because that's—

Yeah.

That's what people hate about houses now is like, you do work and then another electrician does work. And then by the time you buy a 25-year-old house, you're like, We have no idea where anything is and we're gonna have to dig for it if we wanna make a change.

Yeah. And that's one of the reasons why we like to offer the option of, of really rooting out where everything will go. And I say rooting, but like marking it out and labeling it because then not only do the trades have a really easy time of installing it all and there's a bit of a roadmap for them, but then that roadmap can be handed off to the client. And so if they get down the road and they decide they want to change something or they want to hang a picture and they're not worried, or they're worried about what's behind the wall or what have you, they have a full map and they can see what they could be running into or how to fix something appropriately. So it's a nice add-on to basically, yeah, have a bit of a roadmap to your own house if you need it.

I love that. That would be so helpful for so many, so many people.

Yeah. Yeah, and we have clients as well that they could put the house together if they wanted. We always recommend an install team and, you know, people who are experts, but the houses are designed to be straightforward enough that there's no incredibly complex connection details. We're talking about big screws and big pieces of wood. Like, if you've done IKEA, not to be totally reductive, this isn't going to appear foreign to you. Let's put it that way. And so again, because there is this conciseness in how our homes come together and how they're designed. For a homeowner, and oftentimes they want to be there when it goes up, they see all the parts come together. So, it's very informative in terms of an assembly strategy that they know exactly all the pieces and how they've come together. And therefore, it's not this big mystery of, you know, what's behind the drywall. You see it all coming together.

Oh, that's great. That's great. I wanted to dive a little bit into the material that you have this A cross-laminated lumber. And you, you mentioned it was on the inside. I'm assuming that there's, you don't see that from the outside, or do you double? How do you, how do you do that?

How does it all come together? Yeah, so cross-laminated timber, I mentioned it before, but really we've got layers of traditionally spruce, pine, and fir are the species of timber that are used. And those are layered together. It's like it says in the name, but layered together and Each layer is at an opposing 90-degree angle to the one that came before it, so you have a lot of strength because you've got these opposing layers. They're then laminated together and compressed in a way that makes a very, very strong sheet. These sheets are massive. They're about 10 feet by 25 feet when we get them from our supplier, and then they get cut down into shapes and sizes and things like that. So that is the main building component that we're working with. It gets lifted into place, and yeah, you've got these interior walls, which is a more finished wood look, and you can clear coat it, you could whitewash it, you could paint it, you could do whatever you want. The exterior, that's where there's a little bit more building products that go into it. And so we'll have a high-performance insulation, we'll have a membrane, and we'll have strapping. And strapping is thin pieces of wood that then are kind of in a latticed pattern that the cladding can then affix to. And so we offer cladding in aluminum and FSC-certified sustainable wood. or even a recycled composite, depending on what our clients want. But that gives you a roof, or excuse me, a side or wall buildup of about 10 inches. So you've got a really thick wall, and then we've got European windows and doors that then just add to the insulative benefits of the home and the high performance of them. And then this is all complemented by a CLT roof. So it's a little bit thicker insulation and then a metal roof, and then that's what all of your solar panels sit on.

Amazing. Yeah, that's a lot thicker than the walls that most houses get put together. I feel like they're, you know, like 4 or 5 inches and that's all you get and hope the insulation holds.

Yeah, it's interesting because the house, it doesn't feel overly, you know, thick when you're in it, but, you know, it is kind of just your classic buildup and that's a way that gives us the opportunity to build from, I guess, the inside out, if you will, and leaving as much interior floor area as possible for our clients to use how they wish. Right.

And, and you were saying, so there's no— when you build the shell, because of how strong this is, you do not need all of the interior wall. They're not— you don't have these load-bearing walls that magically have to just be there Everywhere to keep, to keep it up.

Yeah, like obviously, you know, we build up and then we've got our roof, so that gives you some structural integrity in terms of like side to side. If you picture a house of cards, um, you know, when you start to put your wall cards up and then you put your roof on top, gives you a little bit more. But what we do is our span of the second floor obviously adds some, some strength and reinforcement to the structural capabilities of the home. And then if we have a really large unit and it requires a little bit more fortification, then what we can do is a glulam beam. And glulam is just, you know, it's another type of this mass timber, but really it's a large beam that stretches the length or the width of the house depending on where it's required. But what that affords is the opportunity to have partition walls in the interior that aren't load-bearing. And so our clients do have a little bit of flexibility around where they want them or don't want them. Then you can have a beautiful sort of open lofted area instead of a 4-bedroom. You could have, you know, 600 square feet of just open space for a second bedroom or a second-story loft. So there's a lot of ways to play around with it.

Right. I, I'd imagine that that really opens up your design options, not being so constrained by, you have to have a load-bearing wall here and deal with it.

There's, there's no way around it.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so, you know, part of our business model is to offer these standardized units. So we've got these 4 floor plans. And, you know, that's for us kind of having an inventory and basing a standardized model on having the same windows and the same window designs. And we know that if we're doing a 3-bedroom home, that the panelization configuration is going to look like X, and the 4-bedroom will look like Y. And that allows us to order in bulk, you know, get better pricing, train our team and have our supply— or excuse me, fabrication line very dialed in. But there are opportunities if clients want, they can go on a customization journey with us, they can really play around with what they've done, or choose to change some of the partition walls on the interior. Because to your point, they're not as essential for the structural integrity of the home, more for how many bedrooms you want.

Hey, it's Ian here. So glad you're enjoying this episode of Conscious Design. If you want the full scoop on Conscious Design, What it is, how we do it, how you can do it, then check out our book. We wrote it so creative entrepreneurs like you can code social and environmental responsibility right into your brand's DNA. You can download the first chapter for free. Link is in the description. Enjoy the rest of the episode. Don't forget to like, subscribe, and share. That's a nice flexibility, more than the average average home would be able to provide. So you guys have been doing this for a few years, right? Kind of jumping back to the business side of things.

Yeah.

How many, how many have you been able to build about, if you have a number off the top of your head?

Yeah. Well, you know, and so this is the interesting thing is we started in 2021, but there was a lot of computer modeling and design work that went into that. Part of our patents that we've got pending, one is this energy-informed design, which really dictates how the house is positioned and how the roof slope interacts with the orientation relative to the sun. And that gives us this peak performance. Our homes use about 20% the energy of a traditional home. And so it's those kind of very detailed analytical reviews of— we looked in Canada in 180,000 locations across the country to build this up. So that was the beginning days of the company. And then in 2023, we built and launched our first show home in Ontario. So southern— or excuse me, Eastern Ontario. So sort of in between Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal for all of our friends south of the border. And we built that one. And then that has kicked off an incredible growth over the last 12 months. And we've sold about almost 30 units. And we've got that one. And then we had one go to in the US, and then we're about to do our 3rd build up here in Canada. So this is sort of the beginning of a very rapid succession of homes that we'll see built out through the rest of the year and into next year. And that's on top of a 67-unit development that we're launching later this year as well. So very masterful community that's been purposely designed to support these houses and the energy generation.

Yeah, I would imagine if you had a whole community of these, that's quite a bit of power that you can get together and very efficient.

Yeah, yeah. What we've found is that when you— excuse me— the individual units, they generate incredible amounts of power and they do really well on their own. But when you have clusters of about 5 to 8 units, they really can— there's a lot of efficiencies of scale in terms of your waste and water solutions and then also the energy generation. amongst. And so you kind of move into almost this mini decentralized grid for electricity. And this is something that's very repeatable in our developments. And we've got a lot of developer clients who actually see this as a nice way to rapidly build and get their returns on their land development costs, but also look at alternative opportunities for infrastructure. In North America, a lot of our municipalities are having Major issues with aging infrastructure. And so their pipes and things like that aren't able to withstand sort of 50, 60, 70 years of use. And so to even add on to that and add more electrical cabling and things like that, that's a major mission for a lot of municipalities. So developers have this windfall to be able to say, we can bring more housing and we don't have to extend the grid in the same way we would have to with a traditional development. So there's a lot of opportunities, a lot of boxes that we tick for municipalities, but also for our clients who are developers.

Right. I love that idea. It definitely— yes, our municipalities are struggling with infrastructure for sure at the rate we keep growing. So that's great to be able to make it easier. And like you said, it's not, you know, Maybe combining the water, the waste, electricity, all being able to be a little bit, you know, even if not fully off the grid, a little bit less pull and drain on those systems. Yeah.

And I think it's interesting. Fortunately, we keep seeing more and more natural disasters or climate change impacts for communities in Florida or Texas, or we've seen a lot of hurricane season this year. It's the earliest hurricane season in a very long long time. And people are now thinking about like, how will my house withstand some of these pressures or climate changes? And so with Cabin, you know, we're not unique in that we offer solar-powered homes. That's been happening for a long time. And when Hurricane Ian hit the west coast of Florida a number of years ago, it was devastating. But there was a community and it was sort of almost this like island amongst all of the damage. And they were completely solar powered and they were operational in the days, in the day of and the days after the hurricane because they sustained minimal damage, but they weren't reliant on the state or the region's electrical grid. And so it's that resiliency and self-sufficiency that I think a lot of people are interested in more. And I think that presents as a business a really interesting opportunity for us because people are thinking a little bit more critically about their house and how it can survive some of these major impacts. And the storm of the century is now every couple of years. So how do you, how do you manage that effectively and, and know that you have confidence in your home?

Thinking of that, you know, everybody can pretty easily think about how you repair a house, standard stick construction house. With you guys being modular, does that actually make it easier for you to repair? Big deal. Let's say, you know, hurricane comes through, there's always damage. You never get away— well, you rarely get away with zero damage. Does this make it faster? Is this something that, you know, you can order like, hey, this, this section is damaged, too bad to repair really, can we just swap it out, get a new— order a new panel module from you guys and pop it in?

Is Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I've never, I've never been asked that question in that sort of way. Typically, when people ask us about, you know, how resilient the homes are, are, the first thing is kind of lifespan. So our homes are rated for about 85 years. So that's in line with a lot of traditional stick frame construction, if not longer. I say that, and I think my house was built 200 years ago, and it's still standing. So we've something to learn from from people in the 1800s.

Yeah, their houses were sturdy.

Yeah, yeah. But so there's the lifespan element. And then they, you know, when we're looking at like a high wind event, like a tornado or a hurricane, again, there's a lot of, we're not the first people to build with cross-laminated timber, we're not the last, but there's a lot of research that's been done in terms of how those homes perform. And the research, again, third body research or third party research, identifies that these homes that are made from cross-laminated timber for that building envelope perform consistently higher than a traditional stick frame home. So it's not like you're going to have, you know, the house crumble in the same way that you would a traditional home because it is that strong. When we're looking at damage from storm events or things like that, you might see something— broken windows, those are easy to replace, cladding coming off, and maybe you'll have to do some insulation repairs and maybe your membrane, but the core of the home is expected to withstand that, these major wind events. And then the other question that we get quite a lot is about solar panels. And I think, you know, probably 20 years ago there was a big push for solar panels. Now we see sort of a resurgence of it because the technology, quite frankly, is a lot better than it used to be. So these don't run They don't run in such a way that if one goes down, the whole panel or the whole array goes down. Like, they can independently function. They're a lot more resilient. But you may have a tree branch or hail or something like that land. And we pick the, the companies that we work with that have the best warranty that you can actually validate for the longest amount of time. We also choose things with the longest battery life— or sorry, the longest—

Warranty.

life, I guess you could say. So our solar panels are rated for 25 years. So those things in an event you may have to replace because they get damaged or replace because they get blown off. And that's a matter of, you know, maybe your homeowner's insurance or going after the warranty of your solar panel. But again, all highly fixable and don't impact the overall structure of the home.

Right. So it doesn't— the envelope So, basically, what you're saying is the envelope should hold generally.

Exactly.

It holds really, really well. You just might lose some of the stuff on the outside that might—

Exactly, exactly. And like, yeah, we've got big roofs that extend to provide significant amount of shading over the windows, and that's part of our passive heating and cooling strategy. And so, again, in really high weather events, like, you know, Cat 5, kind of all bets are But we do expect them to perform really well. You do have your classic hurricane mitigation strategies of hurricane shutters, roof hold-downs, things like that. And for any of our clients living in somewhere where there's adverse weather expected, this is why, A, we always default to local trades, architect, and engineer records to validate that the house is appropriate and meets all code compliance for that very specific region. Our homes are designed to satisfy North American codes or international building residential building code, but again, there's always those nuances at a local level. One of our clients is doing a hospitality resort in Sonoma County in California, so like wine country. One of their major considerations isn't so much hurricanes but seismic activity, and so they have engineers and architects. that are really drilling down into both the seismic impact and how we can ensure that all of those loads and shear forces are accounted for, but then also that we meet the higher levels of compliance in California. So Title 24, which is all about environmental impacts, again, how do we satisfy, if not surpass, some of those requirements?

Yeah, it's amazing just how many— you talk about the nuances when you get into construction, And just how much down to, down to the city level, there's sometimes such big changes and differences between building, you know, build something in Toronto versus California versus Florida, the weather, the laws, all these things. So much to think about. So it's, it's an impressive task to say we're going to build a modular home that's going to actually meet all those requirements in all those areas. So it's a lot to do.

Yeah. And, you know, and I think that's where, again, like, there's kind of always this, like, you know, when people call us and they're talking about their chief building official and how they'll get a permit for a modular house, and that's where it's saying, well, actually, we trend more towards the— it's more like a traditional build, if you will, and traditional building materials and how it all comes together. It just so happens instead of buying the lumber at Home Depot and starting to frame out a wall, we bring these wall sections to you and they're just built from wood in a different way. So again, very different than some of, some of the houses that are built for more of a shorter lifespan or, you know, designed to be trucked out in like all one piece or are a little bit more— they're not as hard-wearing, I guess you could say, than some of the things that we're building. Like, you could drive a truck over the houses that we build and they wouldn't budge. And, uh, it really is more like a traditional home, just built in a bit of a different way.

Right. Well, jumping over to where you guys are going. So I know you're in North America. You have US, Canada. Where else? Is this something that, say you had an island out in the Caribbean you wanted to build in? Is this something that you guys can do?

Anybody call me, let me know. Yeah, like I said, like when we launched, you know, we were very fortunate. We have an amazing team that runs all of our PR and, you know, we earned a lot of great coverage that I think people were hungry for something different. And certainly the interest in housing during the pandemic and everything that's come after it really sort of helped catalyze what we were doing. And so we've had a lot of interest from major publications. And so that's really helped us to gain this worldwide following. We've got thousands of people on our newsletter list. We've got waitlists of over 800 people and developers and hospitality groups. That quite frankly we're just working through. So for us, you know, the plan was always let's start in North America more because shipping in a continent, it really comes down to logistics and where our factory is. And then also there's transferability in terms of the electrical components really between the US and Canada. Like my hair dryer will work great in your house and at my house kind of thing. But when we move into our European clients, I've chatted with folks in South Africa, I've chatted with people in India and Japan, and then throughout South America. It's just a matter of time for us. And I think that that definitely is a longer range expansion and growth for us. We've got a lot of our suppliers come from Europe. They have the highest standard in some of these building technologies, whether it's membranes and tapes and insulation or windows. And some of the stuff that they're doing in mass timber is incredible. And so Europe makes a lot of sense. And it's really just a matter of, as reductive as it sounds, swapping out some of the elements that would be more North American in nature, like electrical, for a different market. But I think beyond that, you know, it's really for us looking at not only our B2C, Part of the business, or individual clients who are buying for their primary residence or secondary residence, or maybe they want to do some sort of Airbnb, VRBO income. I think that's really one key part for us. The other is looking at developers. So again, like I mentioned before, this is a turnkey option for them. It's really easy. It's very fast, and they can stay on budget and on their timelines. So that's one other piece, and then hospitality. So a lot of eco resorts, we've had a lot of interest from the islands, Costa Rica, lots of far-flung places where you want to go and be sort of removed from society and cut off and be in a very serene place. It's very difficult to oftentimes build there. And so cabin presents an opportunity for some of these hospitality groups to look at creating a really luxurious experience in a jungle or on the side of a mountain on an island somewhere. So for us, the path to expansion is more through our clients and looking at these tremendous opportunities to expand into markets or expand into locations rather. Our homes fit the bill. And again, you can ship them around the world and back again. So that's all taken care of. Jackson, his background's in shipping logistics and manufacturing. So He would ship billions of bamboo forks around the world. This is just a bit of a bigger piece, less to fit in the container, but we can ship it. And then we were designed to be able to build very easily with minimal equipment and minimal people. So in terms of a labor force, we can bring our people in and train people, folks on the ground to be able to build. So there's also this beautiful synchronicity in terms of every new market is an opportunity to establish an emerging labor force and then create the opportunity to grow within that community farther flung than before.

Amazing. Well, it seems like a pretty easy path. It sounds— it makes perfect sense. It's a nice clean path. Let me just say clean path toward—

Yeah, I think—

Easy. It's always deceptively easy when you lay it out. Here's the 5 steps we need to do. And then we'll be everywhere.

Yeah. You know, for us, like, we look at housing, it's a global issue, and I think it's on every major news source and every politician's agenda. Like, housing is something, it's a human right, and we believe very strongly that there should be a way to disperse what we're doing to a lot of different places. And so, when we started the company, we also started a nonprofit foundation And part of our work at the CABN Foundation is to take everything that we're learning and everything that I've shared with you, advanced building sciences and technology and regenerative or renewable energy and community design, and how do we augment or replace renewable— or excuse me, how do we augment or replace community infrastructure systems? Like, what are we looking at here? We take all of that from the CABN corporate arm and we translate that into the foundation, and we work exclusively with communities of practice. and municipalities to say, here's kind of all the tools and tricks of the trade that we've learned. We provide that. If you build a cabin, amazing. But if you decide to do a decentralized microgrid in your community to offset an aging grid, go for it. Like, amazing. We love that. We will cheer you on. We will share whatever resources. And so for us, you know, maybe the cabin model that, you know, moves into different markets around the world looks different, or maybe it's for the work of our foundation. At the end of the day, we need billions of homes for people. So if we can be a small part of that, that's incredibly meaningful for us.

I love that. It's such a good— it's an important thing to point out, right? Housing is so important. Not everywhere. You know, a lot of us, especially North America, we sit here and go, oh yeah, we have a place to live and it's nice and it's efficient. But there's also so many areas, you know, talk about South Africa, Africa, Entire continent of Africa. There's so much growth and the efficiency. I think it's the 20% that you said of energy required. It's a huge thing because now we're seeing things about, oh, our energy grid is not— doesn't even have the power to run AI as it's skyrocketing up, right? Those are now some of the conversations we're having. So. I don't know how to fix that energy requirement, but you guys are at least addressing, you know, one major— if everybody has a house, that's billions of houses out there. And how do you—

yeah, and the interesting— oh, yeah, and sorry to cut you off, but the industry— you were saying about AI and data centers, that's a whole other, like, nut to crack in terms of energy and usage. But, you know, when we're also looking at homes that have a really big roof And we see this a lot with commercial buildings too, where, you know, that's a lot of solar real estate that we wouldn't otherwise use. And so we've actually chatted with a number of different politicians from, you know, both sides of political leanings. But again, housing is a bipartisan issue. But when we're talking to them, even folks that maybe wouldn't necessarily align with like more greener renewable energies are really excited about this because Because they recognize for expansion and growth and development, we need more sustainable infrastructure for electricity. And these homes, whether you're putting solar on the roof to use for yourself or it's part of a community-fed plan wherein all of that energy is used for the collective of the community, that is an incredible asset to, again, create something where potentially there wasn't anything in terms of that electricity. So, we're not a one-size-fits-all, but we really strongly believe in our whole team that technology and design and these advances, they shouldn't sit up at kind of one end of the scale in terms of housing. Like, that is something that should be shared as widely as possible, because if there's something that's gleaned from the higher-end luxurious homes that are doing all these wonderful things, why wouldn't we share it to make everybody's Everybody's like lift everybody else up. So that's really kind of what drives us to, to share as much as possible.

Yeah, it's such a— I was telling you I live in Phoenix and it was such an interesting thing moving here because I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. There's still so few solar panels on roofs. You can see entire neighborhoods where there's like, oh, you know, 100 homes and there's like 3 that have solar panels and we're talking about Arizona. We get like 5 cloudy days a year. It's crazy just from like what you're talking about from an infrastructure standpoint. And this is where I agree. I've spent some time in D.C. talking to people about circularity. And as soon as you remove the part where like, oh, it's sustainable and go, this is energy stability, everybody goes, yes, we need that. We don't want the grid to go down. Like, well, exactly. Well, you have all— we have millions of homes, no solar, but solar all, you know, could, could have it all the time. So I love that you guys are, are pushing that and going, hey, we have this giant roof, put solar, just do it. Like, it's, it's worth it.

And I think, you know, to your point, like, just like our water, and I'll bring up this example, but Yeah. But in Calgary, which is in Alberta, recently they had one of their water, like one of their main water mains, like not even like have a crack. Like it was like so massively broken that all of Calgary was like, had no water basically. They were on very, very tight water rations because a main central line for the whole city, and this is a major city, was down. Like, and this is a water line that's the size of like a Toyota Corolla and it had this gaping hole in it. And so, you know, I think that this is something where traditionally we don't think about our water, like, coming in through our taps. No, it's always here. Yeah, it's always here. It's under the ground. Like, somehow by some sorcery it comes out and like, here it is, I've got it in my glass. It's great. Similarly, we turn on a light, we don't really think about kind of what happens to get from point A to point B. But, you know, similarly with what happened in Calgary, Texas had that freak snowstorm a few years ago and like the whole state was down. And then it presented this very interesting conversation about how like Texas's electricity grid is owned versus the US and the rest of the US. And I think more and more the environment is testing our systems that we haven't thought about for Our whole lives, you know, they've been in place and they've been working just fine for 50 years, 60 years, etc. And similarly, I don't think people think about their homes because we've been building homes the same way with no real change for like the last 50 years. The industry hasn't changed. But people are starting to see the cracks, whether they're quite literal, like in Calgary with this water main, or, you know, this fragmented electrical system, our utility system. throughout the US. And that's not just the US, it's Canada as well. Like, there's a lot of improvement to be had. And so I think my hope is, as consumers and policymakers and business, like, as we're starting to see where the fractures lay, I think there's also tremendous opportunity to say, well, now that we're aware of the problem, what else can we look at? And it may be saying like, okay, well, we've got Ian and his roof in Arizona. Let's put some solar panels on there. Or Texas, what can we do there? And the technology again is getting much better. Solar panels used to be prohibitively expensive. They would get damaged and then the replacement cost was brutal. The batteries were really expensive and they're really big. But now look at all of the natural resource exploration that we're putting into creating batteries for our Teslas. Like, we can also look at that for batteries for our homes, and those will shrink over time as the technology gets better and the storage capacity Decreases. Well, more storage, but the size decreases.

Yeah, yeah. I think there's so much, and there's even— we could dive, dive into this really deep, but there's, um, there's now— there's a company out of California that has a battery specifically for buildings, and it is no lithium, no rare earth metals in it at all.

It's—

you don't want to put it in your car. It's too heavy, but the ground doesn't care. It'll hold, it'll hold the weight just fine, but it's able to provide all the benefits and be easier. You know, if you crash into it, it's not going to start a fire, which is good to have next to your house or your garage, right? Your, your teenager drives through it, it's going to be fine. You know, those, those, but these are all things like, as, as you said, there's so many things that we are starting to see the cracks in, literally or figuratively. And it's— I think it is a huge opportunity, and you guys are already capturing it in one way, but continuing to capture those ideas. Okay, well, if the system is breaking down, don't just do it the same way you did it before and patch it. How do we actually do an improvement and take the advantage to upgrade? the system and make it more efficient. Make, you know, if we can make everything else 80% more efficient, just like, let's do that. Like, that's why wouldn't we do that? Everyone wins when we do that.

Yeah. And I think, you know, like the US does it really well in terms of incentivization. And a lot of our American clients love it because they have tremendous incentivization for solar panels, for example. Many, many years ago, I started my career in public health and health promotion. And when you're looking at sort of a sweeping public health campaign, it's always about incentivizing people. And what does that offer, whether it's an improvement in their lifestyle or improvement in their bottom line or what have you? And I think the same falls true for people in their homes. And, you know, it's really expensive to say, well, I'm going to put in high-performance insulation or I'm gonna put solar panels, or I'm gonna trade out my like old school furnace for like a super efficient heat pump. And this is all like if you're retrofitting your house. But if there's an opportunity or there's a subsidization or some sort of incentivization that makes what could right now be a bit more of a costly alternative makes more sense, or if we can really show people that switching to solar over the lifespan of the panels, like here in Canada, People can save up to $63,000 over the lifespan of the panels. Like that makes the upfront cost, I think, a little bit more easy to stomach. And then the other thing too is also looking at how all of these alternative sources are sort of adopted into classic financial institutions. And so when we look at our prefabricated homes, it's not the same as buying a house that's already prebuilt at a development. But a lot of mortgage systems are still coming online and they're figuring it out. But like these sustainable homes that look like a home and feel like a home, but maybe there's something different about the construction. So we do prefab or there's differences in terms of in electricity. How do they create a model? And I think it's just a matter of catching up, whether it's a financial institution, whether it's insurance, they're all getting there. They're coming to the table. And that I think will only help to make it more accessible for different people and different, different markets across the country.

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's the important part, right? Keep moving forward. And as everybody else joins you, you'll figure, they'll, you know, you figure out the mortgage and the insurance, all those components finally come together. And then, you know, hopefully the idea is like 10 years from now, it'll be very easy. I won't be a confusing conversation with an insurance agent about how is your home built? Why is your, why is your home special?

And, you know, not to freak out anybody, people, there's insurance for homes, but it's interesting because I've had a lot of conversations with insurance brokers about solar panels. And there's a really interesting piece about solar panels. And I think, again, historically there is maybe associated with more potential for fire or something like that. But again, we've come a long way. And then also building code is meant to be protective in a lot of ways. And I'm sure some people have their own trials and tribulations with building code or have never thought of it in their life. But building code is designed to keep us safe. So for example, if you have a massive solar array on the back— on the roof rather, You're gonna have your solar or like your battery storage outside of the house. Like most jurisdictions require you to have a separate battery storage so that you can't light your house on fire. It's just like when everybody started charging their EVs and they lit on fire in the garage. You're not meant to have them in the garage. So, you know, it's all this learning and, and there's education. And again, that's, that's also part of our purpose here is to educate so that people understand and they make the connections and And our clients all have insurance as they should. And, you know, they figure out different opportunities through credit unions or construction loans or things like that for their banking. But again, it's putting all those pieces together. And in 10 years, 5 years, hopefully next year, maybe this conversation will be totally dated in terms of, you know, we've come so long or so far that these things are no longer an issue.

Yeah, let's do it. Let's make, let's make this antiquated conversation in the old times before it was all common. That's our, that's our goal. That's our goal there.

Lofty.

Well, amazing. And this has been, this has been a great conversation. We've covered so much. I feel like we keep going. Houses, they're so, they're such a complicated thing and all the nuances in different areas, technology that goes into a We could keep talking forever, but for now at least, let's kind of wrap. And I just wanted to, a couple things. One, make sure for people who wanted to get in touch, what's the best way to reach out? I know you already have a good waiting list, but let's add more people to that. How, how do people do that? And then anything else you wanna throw into the mix that we, we haven't covered?

Yeah. Well, for anybody who's interested, visiting www.cabin. And that's cabin, C-A-B-I-N.co. We always joke there's no I in cabin. We've got a very collaborative team. And yeah, you know, I think for us, we've got our standard models on our website, but we've also got a couple other cool things in the hopper. We've got a sort of a townhouse or a multi-res style unit, and we're going to be kind of launching some other sort of purpose-built buildings. We've got some commercial projects. in the hopper as well. So use the website as a bit of a starting point and, and go from there. But no, I've really appreciated the time and would welcome any questions from any folks out there. So the website's a great way to get in touch with us.

Perfect. Well, thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate it. For everyone listening, there will be links in the description. Feel free to click that. And yeah, great episode. Thanks for being on. And that wraps up another episode of the Conscious Design Podcast. If today's episode inspired you to bring your product idea to life and turn it into a sustainable 7-figure business, visit petermanfirm.com or click the link below. Your ideas have the power to change the world, and we're here to help make that happen. Thank you for joining us, and I'll see you on the next episode.