Episode 24 - Alexander Kolbe, evoDOMUS
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Transcript
Prefab Review
Hi, my name is Michael Frank and this is The Prefab Pod presented by Prefab Review where we interview leading people and companies in the prefab housing industry. Today, we're speaking with Alexander Kolbe of evoDOMUS, an architecture firm located in the middle of the country. But that builds beautiful modular homes around the country and the world. Alex, thanks for being with us.
Alexander Kolbe - evoDOMUS
Well, thanks for having me. Yeah, let me just quickly jump in and correct you on one detail. We're not an architecture firm per se, we're a design-build company. We design our own homes. I can explain that more in detail if you want, with of course a background in architecture. But yeah, we're not an architecture firm.
Prefab Review
Perfect. Okay, that is an important place to start. So I guess why don't we with your background and to start can you just tell me a little bit about how and why you started evoDOMUS
evoDOMUS
Sure. So by training I'm an architect. I had an architecture firm in Germany for 12 years or so and then fate happened and we moved to England. I continued my architecture career in England for 5 years and I'm still to this day a licensed architect and member of the Royal Institute of British Architects in England. Well what happened is in 2009 after the Lehman Crisis basically wiped out our existence in England, we decided, my wife is from Ohio, so we decided to go to Ohio and be closer to her family. We came over here in 2009 and that was a tough phase for us. It's not a good feeling to just lose your existence in a country and then move in your mid-late 40s to the United States and start all over.
Prefab Review
Yeah, were you working in banking?
evoDOMUS
I had an architecture firm in England. Sorry for confusion.
Prefab Review
Ah, yeah I was a little confused because you said you said you were an architect by training but the banking crisis made England not doable from a living standpoint?
evoDOMUS
Yes, because England at that point had a very overheated speculation bubble in residential homes and when this happened and people lost a lot of money in stocks and stuff, everything came to a screeching halt.
Prefab Review
I see. So there was no new construction happening on the residential side?
evoDOMUS
It was for us. We were on high alert. We thought this was going to last a while so we didn't want to just wait and lose our life savings and not move.
Prefab Review
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, now I understand the connection.
evoDOMUS
So we came here in 2009 and didn't really know what to do. I have been working in Germany and in England. And the whole time with two German high-end prefab home manufacturers. One is Huf Haus and the other one is Baufritz. And so I've probably designed around 200 homes for Huf Haus and a dozen or two for Baufritz in England. And so this kind of shaped us a little bit. We were really into sustainable design and into modern homes. I mean I grew up studying and living in Berlin close to Bauhaus. This whole philosophy was kind of ingrained in my DNA. So when we came here we wanted to actually continue doing what we did successfully in Germany and England. But, we didn't really know how because for me, it was next to impossible to get licensed as an architect and I felt I was too old to go back to do an internship at an architecture firm and go through. So I said, “no, I’m not doing that.” So then we reached out to our German guys and said hey Huf Haus would you be open to building your beautiful homes here in the US? I can see a market here and so that's how we started.
Prefab Review
How interesting!
evoDOMUS
Yeah, and we actually built 2 homes, one near Seattle and 1 in Pennsylvania. But it quickly turned out to be a mind-blowingly expensive endeavor to ship an entire house to the US.
Prefab Review
Oh so you were like modularizing or flat packing them and then putting it on a boat?
evoDOMUS
Yeah people call it flatpack, I call it panelized. And they ship panels sitting side by side in a container and then shipped it over and then the whole crew came over from Germany.
Prefab Review
Yeah, that's expensive.
evoDOMUS
I was here. I got the third party approvals. I worked for months and months to get this all approved and get the visa for the workers and stuff like that. So that was a daunting task and after two homes, we decided this is not gonna fly and also the prices were just so crazy. We couldn't do it. And then we had another reset and thought, okay so I guess we got to do this here stateside because this is what we wanted to do. We wanted to build modern, beautiful, green, sustainable, healthy homes.
And so we started from nothing. Michelle, my wife, and I sat here in our little home in Cleveland Heights and thought about our future and decided it really was a bold step for us to start a prefab business in the United States out of nothing. And so we had a lot of good ideas. We had of course given our past, we had a lot of knowledge in how things should be done but we didn't have any connections. We didn't know anyone but luckily we found Bensonwood. And you guys know Bensonwood. And we worked with them. Yeah, and we built our very first home in Connecticut with Bensonwood.
But then we quickly learned that as much as I really like Bensonwood and the team, it was a great experience, but it was just too unpredictable for us because they only do the exterior wall panels and yeah, so no wiring, no plumbing. Nothing.
Prefab Review
Right? Because they only do the panelized shell of the house, right?
evoDOMUS
Yep. So that left too much open for local contractor pricing that we couldn't predict. So we felt we would slowly price ourselves out of the market and then we kind of grouped and decided we needed to do modular.
Prefab Review
Yep. Have you done modular in Europe before? Or because was it all panelized?
evoDOMUS
No. Modular is actually quite uncommon in Europe. They do room wells - they do like bathrooms and stuff like that. But the whole concept of modular construction is very unpopular in Germany. It probably also has to do with space. The roads are not as wide and it's just those oversized loads can be a challenge. So we switched our whole concept. That was still a moving target at that point, but we decided okay.
Prefab Review
Yeah makes sense.
evoDOMUS
But modular is probably the way to go. And over the years we established a really great, trustworthy relationship with a modular manufacturer here nearby; and we do now we do every single home with them.
Prefab Review
Oh really? Can you say what factory it is?
evoDOMUS
It's Structural Modulars and they they have been extremely accommodating. They went through a learning experience themselves. We reached out to quite a few modular companies and we very often heard, “yeah, interesting. but no, we don't want to deviate from our standards.” And we had much higher expectations which meant deviation on basically every step of the way. And so yeah, that kind of filtered it down and we ended up working with SMI because they were open-minded. They even sent their workers on certain trainings because we require certain technology in the homes that they weren't accustomed to. So they did their very best to make everything work and that has been a really great work relationship.
Prefab Review
That's great. So I actually didn't realize that. I mean we know them a little bit. I think they're in Pennsylvania, right?
evoDOMUS
They're near Clarion which is also a great advantage for us because it's just a 2 hour drive. So when we have a house on the line being built, we can just go there twice or three times a week and just check and supervise.
Prefab Review
Right. That makes sense.
evoDOMUS
Because every mistake, you know we're all humans we make mistakes, and every mistake we can catch in the factory is good.
Prefab Review
Yeah, right? So you don't ship something two thousand miles and then have a change order or something. Yeah, so does that mean because I think that most of the homes that you're doing are kind of East Coast, does that mean you just ship from there to the coast?
evoDOMUS
So yeah, this is really interesting. When we started, we had no idea how this business would evolve and where we would end up building. It's really interesting. We came into this high-end sector not because we wanted to, it was basically the market that requested that from us. And I can't hide my German accent, of course so people hear me talk and think, “Oh German engineering, great. I want that.” And so people just expect certain things that you can't have with every other modular manufacturer. For example, we import triple glazed windows from Germany with this as our standard. We only use German windows, the nice tri-turn windows and the big sliding doors and they have great performance values. They can do much larger glass panes than most American companies. It's also very interesting how people find us mostly through research. So we deal with a very educated clientele and then these people reach out to us from Colorado, from California, primarily from the East Coast luckily because that's easier for us to handle. But we have built a home in Vail, which is a logistical challenge. But at the same time because of the cost of construction. Yeah, it was fun. We had some fun projects building on Matrth’s Vineyard which was also something to write home about.
Prefab Review
Yeah, I was gonna say when you were talking about shipping stuff from Europe, we have yet to do, I don't think we've done a full project on Hawaii yet where we ship the stuff. But we've certainly priced it in. Yeah, usually it adds, like just shipping adds like $50 a square foot or something like that.
evoDOMUS
Yeah, yeah, I mean the shipping to Colorado was really expensive. But the interesting thing is that the local cost of building is so expensive that our pricing plus shipping would still beat the local market. So that's how this kind of developed. Of course, sometimes people call and they want a smaller home and are downsizing. They want a fifteen hundred or eighteen hundred square foot home.
evoDOMUS
In those areas we just can't do that because the cost of shipping would kind of eliminate every advantage that we might have. So yeah, so we can only do the larger, more luxurious homes in those areas.
And yeah, luckily we get a lot of inquiries from the East Coast. So we we're currently working on projects in North Carolina near Asheville. We have a project, actually 2 projects, in Long island, in the Hamptons. We've done projects in Connecticut, in and around Philadelphia, and we have a couple projects also nearby. We've done a house here in Cleveland and we have one on the drawing board here also in the Cleveland area.
It has to do with the pricing of property in general. So you know our homes cost, they're not cheap. They cost something between $350 - $600 a square foot depending on those specifications. The size. The complexity of the design. The structural issues, the kitchen the cabinetry, everything plays a role. And since our homes are completely custom we have a pretty far range and we work with our clients to get that to a level they feel comfortable with but we also are very upfront with our pricing information. We have it on the website. We tell everybody this is what you have to expect and luckily there's a few people who.
Prefab Review
Yeah, a lot of this is so local. Like I'm sure $600 per square foot and like Cleveland Heights is really expensive, but honestly for your quality of home if you could do that in the bay area right now or outside LA that would be like.
evoDOMUS
That would be, yeah that would be very attractive now. You hit the nail on the head there. So a $600/sqft foot home in Cleveland would probably not fly because of just the value of property and why? You can buy a beautiful 6,000 square foot home, one hundred years old with two acres of land for under a million dollars. So that's when people start thinking about what can I justify as an investment? But there are also people who say, “I don't care. This is my home. I'm going to spend this. I want to enjoy this and I don't think about resale value. And then of course I’ve got to say $600 in Cleveland would be a long shot because the labor rates are cheaper here. Transportation is short. So here, we're looking more at $400 - $450 a square foot.
Prefab Review
That makes sense. So I mean, your houses are quite striking. And they definitely, at least from what I've seen on the website, certainly have a scale to them which is impressive but otherwise it seems like there's actually quite a lot of variety in the aesthetics. It's not like, I'd say like there are some companies that, like Turkel Design is another really great architecture firm and their houses have a very sort of common sensibility, whereas yours actually have quite a lot of diversity. Can you talk a little bit about your design sensibility? How you go about it and how that's determined on a house-by-house basis.
evoDOMUS
Because of our architectural background of course, we love designing. That's my purpose in life. I love designing homes and for us this is what we do and we are very convinced that what we do is the right thing to do but we primarily just love designing. And every home we do is a completely custom design. We literally start from a hand sketch. Of course we have established certain rules for ourselves, certain guidelines that you have to adhere to in order to make it modular. But we really start with a hand sketch and then develop it from there to a 3D model in our computer system and then we can walk our clients through. So we can do a Zoom call or meet in person depending on the distance and we can walk the client through the house, show them everything inside and outside and show them the lot we built even the land around it in 3D. This is a really great process where we get to a point where the client can really see his unbuilt home in front of him and really get excited. And then we massage the design. We toss the ball back and forth. Really like working with an architecture firm. But like I said we are not but we are
Prefab Review
I feel like that's a technical thing, in terms of like, you can't stamp it as an architect versus like you're actually doing stuff that's tactically different. It sounds like.
evoDOMUS
It's tough because I am an architect somewhere. That's not correct here and people hear me talk and they know, “oh yeah, the guy knows what he's talking about.”
Prefab Review
So yeah, just your stamp doesn't work in this country or whatever.
evoDOMUS
That is really important to us. We design based on the client's wish list. They give us a room program or sometimes some clients feel overwhelmed by the thought of building their own home and we take them by the hand and say, “listen we’ll guide you through this. We’ll ask you questions, don't worry about it. We work with you. Develop something where we can show you the 3D model.” And what's also important, I tink what most architecture firms cannot do, is we always keep track of the cost because for us, it is crucial because we don't work for fees. We sell a whole house and we can only make money when we reach a point where the client A, loves the design and B, is comfortable with the budget.
Prefab Review
Yeah, so let's talk about that. I know what this is like with a lot of companies but I want to just go through like, let's say I come in and I want to work with you all on building a home. Can you walk me through the steps. Is the first step that I sign a design agreement with you?
evoDOMUS
Yeah, almost. The step 0 is that we have a free consultation. So we talk to the client at length. Sometimes we do several Zoom calls before the client signs up and then we have an initial design deposit that we charge something between $15,000 and $25,000 and that includes a site visit. So we go out wherever they are to visit them. Yeah yes, exactly so we.
Prefab Review
I see. So you fly out or whatever and you visit the site you walk it?
evoDOMUS
It entails a lot of traveling but it's part of our business. So we travel out.
Prefab Review
Does feasibility come before this? Or is this a part of this initial thing?
evoDOMUS
What I do when I have my first conversations, I test the client and I tell them what the expected costs are because I need to know if this is feasible for the client or not because if not then we're wasting our time. So we tried to kind of take that out a little bit and when we feel like this is a match then we go out and visit them and look at the site. Oh I know what you mean? Sorry I misunderstood a bit.
Prefab Review
Okay, but so site feasibility comes, because one of the issues we've had, for example recently, is homes in Marin County have a hard time getting a crane in to do the module.
evoDOMUS
We inform the clients what the requirements are in terms of accessibility. Oftentimes I tell them, “okay, show me where the site is.” I go on Google earth or Google Maps and just do the street view and check it out and see if I can add something and oftentimes please.
Prefab Review
Yeah, great. Right? Go to Google earth and make sure the roads are fine.
evoDOMUS
Yeah, and oftentimes we send our logistics crew out and say, “hey guys, go to that site and let us know if can you can you get a 200 ton crane there or not.” And so that works pretty well and then really where it starts to is when we do the site visit and physically meet the client there.
And we get a feeling for the locality, for the atmosphere, The views orientation, topography, neighbors, where's the view? Where's the wind? Where's the sun? All these things play a major role in designing a home. Yeah, and then we gather as much information as the client can supply and then we start with the design, that famous hand sketch and I have to admit sometimes I get so excited about a design that I go from hand sketch straight to 3D in the computer without even telling the client and then show them.
How I open is, “please, this is just a sketch. I just felt it was so great I wanted to do it in 3D.” But yeah, once we have that we have an agreement on the design. We still don't have all the specifications at that point but we have a very streamlined process. We use a project management tool for the estimating and then Michelle, my wife, goes in and she actually spends a couple weeks doing a line item by line breakdown of the entire house. Not only our portion of the work.
Prefab Review
Great.
evoDOMUS
There's also a significant portion that needs to be done by the client's local contractor for the site preparation, utilities, foundations, and then the finishing touches after the house is assembled. So we provide that in a long list of sometimes a hundred pages or more. All these line items and we work with allowances, so we put in a reasonable number for one of our beautiful German kitchens or American or Italian, whatever you want. There's no limitation if the client says no, I want a designer kitchen or no brand names here.
Prefab Review
That makes sense. And so they essentially, sorry this is getting a little in the weeds, but from an agreement standpoint, they sign what looks like a production agreement with you and then they sign a different agreement with the general contractor for this work?
evoDOMUS
Well yeah. Yes, so the client has to sign 2 contracts. We help them to gauge the local contractors and check their references and oftentimes they have someone already. And you know the client who is interested in a modular home usually knows already a little bit about the whole process. So they're not surprised when they hear you need a local contractor.
Prefab Review
Yeah, it makes sense. They probably read our site. From a sort of stylistic inspiration, you ask people for mood boards. Do you ask them what they like? How do you decide that?
evoDOMUS
Yeah, usually we make suggestions. We encourage them, if you client if you have a certain picture collection or you know your loves and hates or whatever it is. Some people go to online portals and have images there. And they share these with us or they just point at stuff on our Instagram or our website and say, “I like this, can we develop something in that direction that works. And oftentimes it's also kind of funny then, people have a certain budget and let's call it tight. I mean it sounds arrogant if you talk about a tight budget at $400 a square foot, but sometimes people show me designs that cost like $5,000,000 - $7,000,000 and this is what I like. Well yeah, not quite in your budget. So we kind of work with them and try to get it to a level that works for them because like I said, this is for us the only way to make money. If we get to a point where the client is happy and confident.
Prefab Review
That makes sense. So I guess one of the things I don't actually see featured on your website anymore but I know it was a thing for a while, you talked about how you're actually a vendor for some sort of suppliers that you like a lot. I think it was windows and maybe a few other products.
evoDOMUS
So yeah, we have a sister company that does imports of windows, several brands of european windows and cabinetry. And it's kind of evolving you know because here's a funny little story: We do mostly modular but we also design homes for people who for whatever reason can't do modular. We're currently building a home in the Philippines of all places. These people have been following us for years and they've been looking for land and once they had their piece of land, right on the ocean on an island in the Philippines, they reached out and I said, “yeah, I'm sorry but I can't ship a house to the Philippines. We can design something for you and we can work with local engineering firms and get it through the permitting process and yet do a full design package for you. But we cannot ship a house. And that happened and then these people said well we also want materials. We want all your great materials and that's when our sister company came in really handy because we could supply them with cabinetry, floor materials, even plumbing fixtures and all kinds of stuff. So it's a useful vehicle if you want to supply people with materials that you can't easily get here locally.
Prefab Review
So you're actually doing the design and procurement for not just the outside of the house but the inside of the house as well? Like all the finishes etc.?
evoDOMUS
Yeah, yeah, So we typically do the windows, the cabinetry, interior blinds, and ethanol or bioethanol fireplaces. So these are products that we supply. But Like I said, the client is not bound to take them from us. They can do whatever they want
Prefab Review
Got it. That's cool. That makes a ton of sense. And then there are, just before we get into our fire round, I mean you have a lot of beautiful houses and projects on your website that are probably why you have a bunch of fans all over the world. Are there 1 or 2 projects that were particularly notable that you maybe want to talk about sort of the story behind them?
evoDOMUS
Yeah, one of my personal all-time favorites is the one in Martha's vineyard. This is, I don't know how much time we have left, but this is a story that moved me personally a lot. It was a wonderful client to start with and the wonderful location. It's an ocean front lot in Edgar town and you know it came with a lot of challenges. One challenge was actually how do you get there from Cleveland, you know.
You can fly through international airports like Boston or something and then take a little island hopper from Boston to Martha's Vineyard, and it's dreadful to be honest. And then you have delays in Boston and you can't get home the same day. And which is the reason why that project made me decide to get a pilot license to fly myself. Because we just couldn't handle the jobs anymore. And you know, it's a 13 hour drive just to the harbor from here. If you don't want to fly commercial. Then you have to stay overnight and you have to get the ferry over. Do your business over there for a couple hours and then get the ferry back. And then you have a horrible 13 hour drive back home which you can't do in the same day. So it changed everything for us. I can have a meeting in Martha’s vineyard and be home for dinner. And not that you get the wrong idea, I don't own a plane, I just rent a plane but it made my life. And never, honestly I never ever considered in my entire life to become a pilot. But yes it’s the best thing I've ever done.
Prefab Review
It's a very cool reason to get a pilot's license - for the business. Yeah, I'm gonna have to tell my wife that I need to get a pilot's license.
evoDOMUS
So this project came with this logistical challenge that we solved. And then the next problem was how do you get modules to the Island and how do you find a contractor and how there's no crane on the island. You know our modules are large and there's no crane.
Prefab Review
Oh, they don't have a crane?. So you probably have to ship one right? Interesting. So you have to ship that over.
evoDOMUS
Let alone a 200 ton crane. So yeah, we had to barge everything you can't get on a ferry. With those, you have to have a barge and you have to prepare a landing area for the barge to get the stuff off the barge and our local contractors. They were a Godsend. They were just amazing. They helped us so much and they made it all possible without them. I think we would have passed okay, but they were eager and determined. They were helpful and it was a really great experience.
evoDOMUS
And so we got this stuff all over to the island and built this home and it was really beautiful as an experience per se the whole setting, working with the client, working with the contractor. It was a perfect project and you know getting the permits was also interesting.
Prefab Review
That's awesome. And is that one of the products on your website?
evoDOMUS
Yeah, and this is one of our greenest homes and it has a beautiful green roof. All our homes by the way have super insulated walls and high performance windows. So in the end, we can heat and cool the whole house with heat pumps and mini splits. This house has a blower door test of .78 which is also pretty amazing. A great thermal envelope. It's very tight. It has a really beautiful indoor climate. You can just smell it when you walk into the house. It's really great and then for some unlucky reason, the owners had to sell the house and the new owner sold it in no time and the new owner and that was really touching for me. The owners wrote me a personal thank you letter. I didn't know and out of the blue I received this email from that guy and he tells me, yeah I bought that house and I got to tell you, I absolutely love it. It's beautiful. And this is why we do this, you know.
Prefab Review
That's great.
evoDOMUS
Yeah, we need money to pay the bills, but we work with a lot of dedication and personal engagement on an emotional level basically. And to get that kind of feedback is really very rewarding.
Prefab Review
That makes sense. That's a great story. Just to transition, anytime we have experts like you on the podcast, we try to take advantage by doing a little fire round where we ask frequently asked questions we get from the many people who come to our website every day. So I'll ask you a couple questions. Try to, you know, answer each in a minute or less but not too strict. Okay so I guess when we're talking about site evaluation, we talked about that before, what are the specific things you're looking at to evaluate if a site is sort of feasible or not feasible for modular?
evoDOMUS
Well then, number one is accessibility. Is there enough room on the streets? Can we get there with a sixty foot long module that's sixteen foot wide and a big crane, semi-trucks and everything? Is there a weak bridge somewhere? Even the roads might be okay, but then we actually had a real problem with the project back in the day in California. Everything seemed fine but the bridge wasn't able to carry the crane. Luckily then, the answer is to cut the house in different size modules so that you don't need such a big crane anymore. And that's one benefit that we have: we can just redesign it the way we need it but we'd like to catch this upfront. And then another thing I tend to ask my clients where sometimes we're facing some resistance from Homeowners Associations who are just out of principle against prefab because they have the wrong idea of prefab. They hear prefab and think trailer I got to tell you I mean a house that you can lift up on 2 stainless steel beams that weighs 40,000lbs and doesn't flex. That's a darn stable house. But yeah, that can happen. That's what it comes down to. Everything else we can address - so snow loads, seismic requirements, sprinklers yes, or no, rock. Do we have to blast rock? Can we do our beloved prefab foundation walls or do we need to cast iron in place or a block. For foundations, we like the prefab foundations because they're accurate. They're down to the millimeter. You know if you have a basement that's an inch too long. You can't address that. Your module is your module.
Prefab Review
Oh so when you’re saying prefab foundations, those are flat packed right? Those aren't modularized?
evoDOMUS
Those are flat packed. Yes, they come fully insulated. They have r-21 insulation built in; they can be assembled in a day.
Prefab Review
Oh, so that's cool. So you’re actually doing those and you do those in the factory as well.
evoDOMUS
Yeah, we buy them. Usually we leave it in the scope of the local contractor because those guys want to make some money too and also they have to do it? Yeah but we specify it and we do the shop drawings or we check the shop drawings. We do all the structural stuff for them and then our crew comes in to assemble the house. That's also crucial. Sometimes contractors get a little antsy when they hear modular because they think they have to put it together. That's not the case. We have our set crew that does the assembly for us.
Prefab Review
But that makes sense. I guess so we sort of talked about sustainability a little bit. I feel like there are so many, again you can look at our site. We have hundreds of reviews, and so many people come to us and say, you know we're a green builder and it's just like, “okay you built like a conventional house but you put like a big PV or whatever solar system on it and you can achieve your net energy. So my impression is that you're a lot more thorough. What is sort of sustainability when it comes to a house?
evoDOMUS
Do we have another hour? So it comes down to the thermal performance is one main parameter. That's really important. So we super insulate our walls. We have better insulation in the walls. We still do 2 by 6 framing but instead of fire buffers we use Rock Wool insulation mineral rule we use thicker drywall on the inside and we use zip sheeting on the outside and then we wrap the whole house in an additional layer of insulation which has a double purpose. One is to increase the r value of the wall and two to break thermal bridging through the studs. And that is a very important part of it. So we end up with a minimum of around r-30 to r-33 and depending on what we put on the outside we can get that number even higher. We do a lot of stucco as part of our European designs. And systems with the rain as a rain screen system so we can add more insulation to it and get the R value even higher. Another important part is the use of healthy materials. Of course we use low VOC or no VOC paint. We keep an eye on formaldehyde content of things. You know it's something that people talk about all the time without really knowing that formaldehyde even exists in nature. So it's something you can't entirely avoid, but we try to keep it as low as we possibly can. We make sure that the house is airtight. We try to do outdoor blow tests. Our goal is ideally under 1, you can't always reach that goal also because we are so custom every house is different. Every location is different and with my clients with their ocean views and sometimes the view is the wrong orientation. You know, to the West or East or North. Worst case, we never try to build passive houses. We try to reach net zero. That's our personal goal. So by adding solar panels you can get a house to a really good rating ideally 0. We also do a lot of simple smart things like protecting the glass from the sun. You know there's a summer-winter change. So in the summer we have canopies or balconies. We have protruding volumes on the second floor that casts a shadow on the glass underneath. Because as soon as the UV portion of the light hits the glass, it turns into heat and transmits to the inside and your house tends to overheat. However, in winter you want that when the sun comes lower. Then the roof overhang won't protect you anymore, but it invites the sun into the house and that is a very important part of just using your brain a little bit to create something that works without an excessive use of AC.
Prefab Review
Yeah, were you saying, maybe I didn't catch this right, were you saying that you typically use mini splits as opposed to central air?
evoDOMUS
Yes, we don't do gas furnaces. We have an aversion to fossil fuels. We don't do that at all unless okay, there's 1 project that we had to do it because they require it by code. A driveway, a snowfall system. But usually we only use heat pumps. Preferably air source heat pumps. We're doing one project right now with ground source heat pumps but in our opinion that's just additional money. There's no real benefit in using ground source heat pumps, the modern air source pumps with hyper heat. They do a great job.
evoDOMUS
I mean we live in Ohio. We have heat pumps at our office and they're not running right now. So it's March and the office is so well insulated and you don't need it. One side effect of building an airtight house is you need ventilation. You need fresh air and oxygen in the house. And we use passive flow certified ventilation systems and guess where they come from. From Germany of course. I'm sorry, it's just so funny. You know all other things that you really need, a lot of them come from Europe and Germany in particular. So we use them because they're very simple. They're decentralized; they work in pairs. So they have a heat exchanger in the wall and so unit one pushes out the the waste air through that heat exchanger which naturally heats up by the warm air and then after 70 seconds a control unit switches direction now unit 2 pushes out the air and unit 1 which is now hot sucks in the the outside air and heats it up and they're like 85% or more energy efficient. So the end result is that you have very very little demand for heat. That's why the heat pumps work so well. What we also do depends on the level that the client requires. We can also do ducted systems. We do, I would say 50% of our homes have ducted heat pumps where you don't see the mini splits on the wall. We can combine that with ducted erv systems with your dehumidification and all the good stuff. So it's really up to what the client wants. Personally, if I were to build a house now, I would probably use a wall hanging mini splits. I don't mind them. If you know, it's $10,000 - $15,000 extra just to have them ducted but it can be done and we do it all the time. Yeah.
Prefab Review
Right? So it's just an aesthetics thing right? Yeah makes sense. Terrific. Well that fire round wasn't quite as fast but it was worth it. So final question, and I ask this to everyone. What are you most excited about for your company or for the industry in the near future?
evoDOMUS
Well, I'm excited about the fact that more and more people are beginning to understand the necessity of building green and energy-efficient homes. Because I don't want to get into politics but we just witness how around the globe, governments fail to address climate change and global warming. So it's up to us, the people, we have to do what we can do and I embrace every client who comes to us because of what we do, this really means a lot to me.
Prefab Review
Awesome! Well thanks so much alexander. It was terrific to learn about you and your company. For more information about Alexander and evoDOMUS visit evodomus.com and as always you can visit us at prefabreview.com
evoDOMUS
Well thank you, and I appreciate the time and have a great day.
Prefab Review
Thanks!