Passive homes - how do they compare to a so-called “regular” house? And what can homeowners expect with respect to their carbon footprint and future energy bills? To talk about these high performance homes and the steps it takes to shift to varying degrees of eco-conscious living, we've invited Casey Gray, the founder of an award winning sustainable building company, The Conscious Builder, and the host of the Conscious Builder podcast.

Related Content & Links: 

• Casey Grey
  • Twitter: @CaseyAGrey
  • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseygrey/
• The Conscious Builder
  • Twitter: @BuildConscious
  • Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-conscious-builder/ 
  • Website: https://www.theconsciousbuilder.com/
  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_conscious_builder 
• Resources
  • The Conscious Builder podcast: https://www.theconsciousbuilder.com/podcast 

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Transcript:

 

Dan Seguin  00:43

Welcome back, everyone to our latest episode of The ThinkEnergy podcast, the rise in green construction is projected to reach $460 billion globally by 2022. It's a clear sign that more of us are embracing cleaner living and a desire to tackle climate change, and carbon emissions from the comfort of our home. Did you know that 111 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions are released into the atmosphere every year from Canadian homes and buildings. In fact, approximately 60% of Canada's energy usage is from heating and cooling our buildings. When it comes to home design and construction, passive homes and other low impact builds are changing the building landscape thanks to informed and environmentally conscious consumers. At a high level, a passive home works with its environment, reducing the need for additional energy for heating and cooling. Some factors include how a home is positioned or oriented on the parcel of land, how it makes use of sunlight as an energy source, its air tightness and overall indoor air quality. Net-zero and passive homes don't look any different from other recently built homes - even on the inside, most of what makes the home efficient is happening behind the walls, in the foundation or on the roof. Perhaps the surest way to tell a passive home from a regular home would be to look at its utility bill. Certified passive homes are 80-90% more energy efficient than a typical home built to code. And as demand rises, and costs fall, energy efficient homes are paying for themselves faster than ever before. That being said, awareness and incentives may be the keys to greater adoption. According to the Canadian Home Builders Association, there are only 456 certified netzero buildings in the country. And according to passive house Canada, there are currently only 67, certified residential, commercial and institutional buildings. So here is today's big question. What exactly goes into a passive home? And what can homeowners expect with respect to their carbon footprint and future energy bills? To talk about these high performance homes, we've invited Casey Gray, the founder of an award winning sustainable building company, The Conscious Builder, and the host of the Conscious Builder podcast. Okay, let's get started. Casey, thanks for joining us today. Perhaps you can tell us a bit about yourself, your background and what's led you to sustainable building?

 

Casey Gray  04:05

Yeah, I guess I have to go back a little bit. My background, I guess if you want to call it back to when I skipped born raised in Ottawa, so I've been in Ottawa my whole life, in the east end of Ottawa at the beginning and then moved to the west end and south and all over the place since I've been in construction, essentially, and married and very happily been with my wife going on 16 we're trying to figure this out the other day, like married seven years later, 16 years, I think at this point. We have a seven year old, who's doing great, so very happy with that. We're navigating the school system like everybody else who has kids. Luckily, we have one to deal with. So I'm sure with multiple kids, it's a lot more difficult. So I'm not complaining by any means, that's for sure. So that's all great. But the reason why I mentioned that is actually because my family is kind of what led me into the symbol building portion. So I've been in construction since after high school went and did my apprenticeship became a carpenter and started running jobs. My guy's 21 when I ran my first job, actually, I think I was younger than that. But in either case I went on my own in my early 20s, and kind of have been growing since then. But when I went on my own, I wasn't, I was just like every other, you know, 20 year old just wanted to go out, be my own boss and make more money. That's essentially what I was looking to do. Right. That's it. That's what everybody wants to do when they're when they're young. But it wasn't until that my wife and I - actually we did a Tony Robbins event that was kind of the kickoff. So we did this Tony Robbins event called 'unleash the power within'. And it kind of changed everything for us because it changed the way that we think. And if you change the way you think of changing your life, and we came back from that experience asking ourselves a lot of questions, and why, you know, why do we do this? Why do we eat that will, you know, what's the purpose of, you know, the business, what's our life purpose, all those types of things, right. And we're kind of on cloud nine for a while. But then, not too long after that, actually, at another Tony Robbins event, we found out that we were going to have our first child, which we didn't know is his son at the time, first and only. And that really sunk in for me, because then all of a sudden, for myself, I realized that if I was going to tell this little human being who's going to be looking up to me that he or she, who didn't know at the time could be whatever whoever they want to be, I have to lead by example. So that's when things really clicked for me. And I changed the direction of the business because I started asking, you know, why -What can we do in the construction industry? I like construction, I really enjoy it. I don't want to change that career. But how can we make sure that we leave this place better? right? How can I How can I do my part to make sure that the the earth is a better place when I leave it for my child and grandchildren, hopefully, to come years down the road, everybody else for that matter, but it didn't really sink in right till, till all of a sudden you have somebody else looking up to you that you know will be looking up to you. And in doing what you do not what you say.

 

Dan Seguin  06:54

you know, I really liked the name of your company. How did you land on the conscious builder? And how does your name and what you stand for influence you and your work?

 

Casey Gray  07:08

Yeah, so the word 'conscious' really started to stick with my wife and I because consciousness is really a state of awareness. And you can't, you really can't change anything until you're aware of it, you can't. Without that first step awareness is the number one thing. So that's something that really stuck. And we ended up doing a podcast called the conscious living podcast, which we did 70 some odd episodes with people all over the world, not in construction, but in other things in my life ended up running with that for a little while, which led into other things, obviously. But then we kind of started building these brands off of the word conscious. And that's where I started thinking about the construction part. And that's where the conscious builder came from. Because the way we see our role is really, as an educator, it's about making conscious decisions, but you need to be aware of what those implications are before you can make those decisions. And we see ourselves as being one of the most important people when people want to build a house or do a renovation, we are the ones who need to give them the information that they need in order to make a conscious decision. Does that mean that everything we do is 100% sustainable? Or, you know, have a net zero carbon effect on the world? No, because there's a lot of other factors at play as well. And everybody's different, right? We're not here to judge, we're here to just give the information. And it's up to the homeowners that we work with to make the final decision for whatever works for them and their families and their priorities.

 

Dan Seguin  08:35

Now, Casey, when you started out in this sector, what would you say were the disrupters in your field? What were the challenges you encountered in the beginning? And have you seen a societal or industry shift since?

 

Casey Gray  08:53

Well, I'm kind of like we, I always tell people, we kind of build for the 1% of the 1%. You know, building a custom home for people to begin with is not a cheap endeavor. It doesn't matter if you build it sustainably or not. But you have to have the finances to be able to build a custom home, but then you actually have to care about the environment to want to go a step further, or care about your health, whatever it may be, or be aware of it. Right? because not a lot of people care about that stuff. But they're not aware of what the decisions are making and how those things, how those decisions are affecting themselves and others around them. So I guess, you know, at first, we weren't a disrupter until we started to make the shift. And then we kind of just went all in and we jumped right into our Passive House. And I wouldn't say we were a disrupter, we weren't the first one doing it. But we were kind of setting the bar more for ourselves and for anybody else to prove that what is possible, right. Here's what's possible. Here's what we believe, this is why we're doing it. Once again, we're not forcing anybody to do it. It's not like we're building hundreds and hundreds of homes every year. You know, maybe we'll get to a point where we can build some spec homes that are more in line with our values. And create some interest with that. But that's not where we're at at this point. So we really just continue to see ourselves as that company that can educate people, but beyond even our clients, other businesses as well and other people in the industry,

 

Dan Seguin  10:14

okay, it's safe to say that green homes have come a long way, in the last decade, and building a green home is quickly shifting from an alternative way of building to more mainstream, there are a few building standards and certifications out there to choose from, perhaps you can start us off by helping us to understand the most popular types of green builds and certifications your company does, and how they differentiate.

 

Casey Gray  10:47

Yeah, so I guess at the end of the day, like we can build anything, we're certified to do all the certifications that I'll mention, there is I think I'd like to go back a little bit and I guess, give a little bit of understanding, because, you know, obviously the word green can be thrown around quite a bit, we like to use it ultimately, what we aim for is like a sustainable, a comfortable and an efficient home. A healthy home. And if you build like a healthy, comfortable home, by default, it will be efficient, it will be sustainable. And in Ontario, where we are the one that most people know about is ENERGY STAR. Now, what a lot of people don't know about energy star is that obviously the building code changes and ENERGY STAR has to change as well. So if you're living in an ENERGY STAR home that was built 10-15 years ago, it's actually worse than the building code now. So it is because it has to change. Same with R2000. R2000 changed about five, six years ago, I believe that is supposed to be 50% better than minimum building code. So there's minimum building code, which is pretty good now. Energy Star is 20% better, R2000 should be around 50%. Better. There's LEED certification, which isn't big in residential, it's more in commercial, but then there's different levels of LEED certification. So that usually ranges from 40 to 70-80% better depending on where you're going, but LEED really focuses on certain products and the carbon footprint not necessarily just on efficiency. And then you get into, there's also net-zero, which is CHBA's new standard, which I think is great. So it's technically about 30% better than minimum building code. But if you put solar panels on, you can offset all of your electricity bills, or all of your energy bills. One caveat I'll say is that technically there is a calculation that can offset your natural gas bill. However, you cannot produce natural gas. So I tell people, if you're going to put solar panels on, you might as well go fossil fuel free, because you will never put fossil fuels back into the ground. But that's maybe another conversation. And then but in theory, you end up being you know, and that's creating, or producing as much electricity as you use. And then there's the extreme, like Passive House, which has passive house International, and passive house US, which is about 80% better, you know, these are all kind of just random numbers. Not so random. But there, it depends on the design, obviously, right. But though 80% better than code, that in my opinion would be to go true. Like off grid, you kind of need to go passivhaus standard in our climate because you need to design for the worst day or week of the year. And even get into things like the Living Building Challenge, or you can't use like any plastics in your house and all sorts of craziness. But there's no shortage of things that you can go after. But a lot of those aren't mainstream, the mainstream ones are really energy star. And even R2000 has been around for years, a lot of people haven't heard of that. So I think ENERGY STAR and then net zero is picking up quite a bit of traction.

 

Dan Seguin  13:54

So I hear you have a passive home. Maybe you can tell us a bit about some of the features of your home that make it a certified passive home and its impact on your life.

 

Casey Gray  14:08

Yeah, so we do not own it anymore. We sold it a couple years ago. So we've built it, lived in it for four years, sold it. And it did have a pretty big impact obviously on our business too. As far as I'm aware, we're the only builder who has actually built sort of multiple certified passive homes within the area, because we've helped a couple architects do certified homes for themselves as well. Now speaking about the house that we built for ourselves - really what it comes down to when it comes to building a passive home. The big focus on passive is the energy consumption, the heating, cooling demand and the air tightness. So a big part of a comfortable healthy home is how airtight you can make it. Ideally you want to make it as airtight as you possibly can, and then control the ventilation through mechanical ventilation. A lot of people think that they need their home to breathe. Yes, you do need your home to breathe, but you want your home to breathe like your lungs breathe, right you want to breathe in and out through your lungs, you don't want to breathe through your skin. So you don't want to dig holes through your, through your walls. You want to seal those all up. And then you want to precondition the air that's coming into your house and filter it just like what your nose would do. So that's kind of the best analogy that I give. And also if you don't believe in air tightness, you know, on a day like today, which is nice and cold, you're in Ottawa, put on a jacket, go outside and unzip it and stand towards the wind, and you tell me if air tightness works or not. That's another analogy I like to use. We need air tightness, right, and you could have a really thin jacket that would be warm, if it's airtight, and a really thick jacket that's not airtight and be cold, right. So those are all things that are important. That's what passive house really focuses on there is high insulation levels, but it's a big focus on air tightness as well. So really the difference from a passive house, your regular house, or you know, code, let's call it code home, is there's more thought put into the envelope, which really comes down to the insulation, the air tightness, the windows and doors. And then by default, you also have to put some thought into your heating and cooling system because it drastically reduces everything, as well as your ventilation system, because it becomes extremely important. So everything else could be the same. From the outside, you never know if a house was passive, where you would not pick it up because you notice the walls are really thick, which you might not even notice from the outside, it depends on where they put the windows in the assembly. But other than that, you wouldn't notice it. But the real experience is when you live in it, when you live in a passive home, you realize how comfortable it is, you realize how quiet it is, you realize how fresh the air is in it all the time, we went to Florida for an extended period of time when we lived there. And when we came back, like the house is vacant, it's been vacant for a while. And it just felt like fresh wood and walked into the house, like leave a house vacant for for a couple months and come back to it and tell me how fresh It smells this house smell fresh, you have to experience it, you can't really like put it on a brochure and sell it to people, you just have to experience it. And those are the things that you get from a passive home. If you live in a passive home that's in the city, beside a busy street, you will experience how nice it is to live in a passive home because you won't hear anything outside. Those are the things that become really important and you realize it's kind of one of those things, you don't miss it until you've experienced it and then don't have it anymore.

 

Dan Seguin  17:33

I think the general understanding Casey is that by choosing to go with a green building standard, there are higher upfront costs. What are the typical upfront costs? And what is considered a reasonable payback period for those investments?

 

Casey Gray  17:50

That's difficult to answer, I wouldn't be able to give you any exact numbers. Part of the reason I can't is because we've never built the same house twice. So the only real way to figure out what a payback period is, is if you take one home, and you build it to a minimum building code, and then you take the same exact design and you modify it to hit this next building code, right and nobody's done that, to my knowledge, right? So a lot of people say it costs you 20% more to passive house or 10% or whatever it may be. But 10% more than what? What is that baseline? And I think what people don't realize because I've had this come up a lot in passive house is that you can build like I can build you a 2500 square foot home with vinyl siding carpet, like you know shingle roof meant you know not you know PVC windows, an IKEA kitchen like all these lower end features, or I can build you the same size home with with a copper roof and a stone exterior and reclaimed wood hardwood floors. You know $150,000 Custom kitchen, same square footage, completely different makeup, let's say on the outside, different baseline to start with. So to take the more expensive model and go to passive it's going to be a very small percent to take the other the cheaper option and go to passive it's going to be a much higher percent. Because where you end up spending money when it comes to building, whether it's passive or just a more energy efficient home, it's going to be around the envelope, you'll spend more on your insulation and air sealing. And you'll spend more on potentially your HVAC system if you go fossil fuel free, right but in theory, you can actually save money on your h HVAC system, because you will need a smaller system. But when we build homes, a lot of them are thought of and 10 years of business. We've only built two homes with natural gas all the rest of them fossil fuel free and just because the technology is more expensive, it just costs a little bit more. So the energy consumption or the cost to run those things would be the same. So I don't think it really comes down to you know what's the payback? Yes, you will save energy costs. If you're comparing apples to apples. I don't know how long it's going to take. But I think that I'm hoping, I'd say I believe that there will be value in the future, right? There's not a lot of value with any of these sorts of certifications on the marketplace right now, especially with the way the market is going now. But soon enough, just like gas mileage, I think it would be important for people to realize the importance of the ERS rating on their home and how that affects them and their comfort, and so forth.

 

Dan Seguin  20:34

From everything I've read, the Ottawa housing market is booming, despite the pandemic, what have you noticed most during this time?

 

Casey Gray  20:46

We've noticed that there's a lot of we have a lot of leads, like we have no shortage of people reaching out to us for work, but people can't find lots people are looking to build but they can't find a lot, right, there's no lot to build or there's they can't you know, they find a house, they lose the house to somebody else who wanted to pay more for it. So that's what we're seeing. Right. That's the toughest part. Obviously, we're seeing that there's an increase in price, right? Typically, when demand goes up, prices go up. So that's affecting material substrate, and so forth. So it makes it harder to estimate projects. Everything that we do is open book and cost plus we have our fees. So if things go up, we just need to communicate that to our clients. For the most part, they're aware of the situation that we're in, right, there's a lot of delays, people are just busy. And what we're trying to find guys we don't have it's of anybody's listening to this and want to join our team, definitely submit an application at the conscious builder. But we're looking for carpenters and helpers, because we can't keep up with the work that is coming our way, but also with the work that we already have. Because some of the delays now things are starting to pile up.

 

Dan Seguin  21:48

Now, Casey, I'm going to read your company's mission statement from your website, because I really like it. It says that your mission is: to make sure that everybody in the world has a healthy, comfortable and efficient home to live in. What do you think is needed to achieve that? Is it financial incentives? Is it government policy to support homeowners and the industry?

 

Casey Gray  22:15

Well, I think it's, I believe we all need to take responsibility for our own homes, right, we need to at least the ones, the ones of us who have that ability to do that, right, we need to lead by example. It's not to say like our mission statement doesn't mean that we're going to build homes for everybody, it means that we're going to do our best to provide the information for people to do that for themselves, or to hire somebody to do it or to ask the right questions to the builder, whoever they're working with, right? We're like, we're not gonna be able to build for everybody, there's only so many houses, so many projects that we can do in a year. But if we can help somebody else in another city or province, ask the right questions and find the right builder for somebody who's doing that, or we can help that builder become better and educate them. And that that's what it's going to take I think, you know, it's interesting when with regards to incentives, or you know, those obviously help, but I think that they are they help for the wrong reasons. Right. So the question is, how do we get people to want to care about this, right to to actually want to improve the health of their home, the comfort of their home, without being financially incentivized they want to do it because they know it's better for themselves and know it's better for their, for their kids? Or they know it's better for the environment, because you're using a lot less electricity. That's the tricky part. And I don't know if I have the answer to that, I'm just doing my part to say, we need to do this. Like it's obvious. You can look at things happening in the world, we have to act, I will say that there's no lag that's too little, like every little step helps, right? Even if you just can't improve the performance of your home, like we're, we're living in a home right now, there's natural gas in the home that we're living in right now. We didn't build it, it's it wasn't by our choice, but we do other things that we can that are within our power to offset our carbon footprint, for example, those are all those are all things that we can do, right, you stop using plastic bags and use, you know, cloth bags, or whatever it may be, is a really simple one right? To start using the compost more often, right? If you're turning down the thermostat a little bit or just doing things in the right order to write don't people like to jump into low hanging fruit? There is a proper or order of tackling your renovations in your home if you are going that route as well. So these are all things that you know, fall in, you know, a lot of information there. But I think ultimately we just need to take responsibility and lead by example. And that goes for governments too right? They have a lot of homes that they can upgrade that are funded that they actually make a much better financial case for someone like the government or any sort of Community Housing that holds multiple properties that pays the bills that need something that's going to last a long time. They can really make a financial case for building something like Passive House there, it makes a lot of sense. It's harder to do the one off projects.

 

Dan Seguin  25:25

Moment of truth. Casey, are there any myths you would like to dispel around buildings, or renovating green?

 

Casey Gray  25:35

Yeah, the myth I think I already alluded to was that your house needs to breathe. Right? A lot of people think that they need their house to breathe, and you don't want it to be too airtight. Like I said, you do want your walls to be as airtight as possible, but you want them to be permeable, meaning like you want vapor to be able to travel through them if need be, but not air. And that is I'll go back to the analogy I already said is that just like your body, you need to breathe as a human, you breathe through your lungs, you don't breathe through your skin, you sweat through your skin, right? So moisture needs to get out of your body, it will come through your skin. But if oxygen or air needs to come out here, it's going to go through your lungs and out your nose, your mouth, it's the same sort of thing. So think of your nose mouth as the ventilation system, your mechanical ventilation system for your home that preconditions right, so that's how you want to ventilate your home. A lot of people get these homes, they have this box hanging in the basement, it's called it's an HRV. I hope that people are starting to put ERV's in because those are actually what we need in our climate. People will argue with me on that. But people in the high performance building community understand this. But a lot of homeowners get it, they don't understand it because they weren't explained how, what it does or how it works. And they just unplug and they never run it, we need to run those like you want that fresh air system to be running 24 seven, and you want to seal up all the other holes. So make your house as airtight as possible, mechanically ventilate it. And that will help your indoor air quality.

 

Dan Seguin  27:07

Now, my friend, it's time to dust off your crystal ball. What are some of the emerging technologies and innovations that excite you about your industry?

 

Casey Gray  27:17

So in our industry, I think we're lagging a little bit like there's obviously a lot of technology when it comes to solar panels. And there's even some solar panels that are coming out that can generate electricity at night with the like condensation that forms on the back of them. I think that there's a lot of promise for 3D printing. That's where I believe that there's going to be a huge impact. I think building homes in a more controlled environment like in a factory makes a lot of sense. However, you are limited by the radius around that factory to do it. That's where I think 3d printing can come into play. If you could have technologies doing some amazing things. But if there's a machine that could show up on site and literally print a house, and then move over to the next step and print like they're doing it like in China, like there's a it's not printing everything, right, but they're printing the structure, right? They printed like 10 houses in a day. There's these tiny little cabins, it comes out like soft ice cream, it's like a cement mixture of some sort. There's also a company, I think it's the University of Southern California startup company. They're doing a lot of really cool testing, they've been doing it for 15 years at this point where they would have this machine show up and printed and really would be is designed for areas where there might be mass to start like an earthquake or hurricane or something comes through and just destroys all the buildings in the area. These machines could show up and print out the shacks really quickly where people would at least be protected from the elements. I think that's where the technology is going. It's going to be hopefully automating things now when it comes to renovations, it's going to be harder, like I think we're still going to need manpower for a long time. But there's even robots coming out there that can navigate rough terrain, right. There's a robot always navigating rough terrain and laying bricks. Right. So I think there's just so much I think construction is one of those industries that hasn't been disrupted yet, when it comes to technology. We are still slapping two by fours and two by sixes together in the same way we did it 150 years ago, at least where we live here in Ottawa, and there's a lot of room for improvement. So I don't know what's going to come first. But I think 3D printing is going to have a huge impact on our industry.

 

Dan Seguin  29:32

Well, Casey, for folks that want to make their existing homes more energy efficient and help contribute to a low carbon future. Where should they start? And what should they know if they want to pursue some of the standards or certifications you mentioned earlier in the podcast.

 

Casey Gray  29:53

But you should start by checking out the Conscious Builder. We got a lot of stuff on our YouTube channel. There's probably if you have any questions You can probably find it there. And if you can't send them our way, and we'll answer them for you. But ultimately, you need to, I always tell people, you got to build your team, you have to do what's called an integrated design process. So if you have an existing home that you want to improve the comfort, the performance and efficiency, whatever it is your purpose, there is a certain way that you need to do that you can't just tackle the low hanging fruit number one, you're going to need an energy advisor, you need your baseline, right, so the energy advisor needs to come in, they need to take a basically set a line of here's what how your house performs now. And then in that report, they will say if you upgrade your windows, if you upgrade your insulation, if you upgrade the insulation in your basement or attic, irritate nice, this is how much more it's going to improve the performance. There's all these things that it gives you. But you can't just go for example, and look at Oh, I'm going to save 20% if I upgrade my furnace, I might as well start with that what will happen is that if you do your furnace, first in your air conditioning, and then you upgrade your windows, and then you make your house more airtight. And then you add more insulation to your walls, you enter your attic, you now end up having a furnace that's oversized, and it's short cycles. So you want to first first focus on your envelopes, do everything you possibly can with your envelope first, that will reduce the heating and cooling demand. And then before you actually put your new heating and cooling system in, get the energy advisor back to test again, so that you can get a properly sized system. Most people's homes have systems that are too large. And that's one of the reasons they end up with cold rooms and hot rooms because they're balanced. But the issue is, is not running long enough to get the air to the far parts of the house, for example, or the air tightness wasn't done properly. So just you need a good team that can work well together, that's gonna be your energy advisor. It'll be your designer, and it'll be your contractor. They need to understand the importance of all these things. And then you need to make the hard decisions of what you're going to do first, because most people, I've yet to have a client who says, here's the work we want to do, and here's the money we have, and then they have leftover money. It's usually the work we want to do. And here's the money we have. And I say okay, well what's most important to you because we can't fit it all in hate. So let's fit as much as we possibly can in what the goal is.  

Dan Seguin  32:20

Are you ready to close this off with some rapid fire questions?

 

Casey Gray  32:25

Okay, that means I gotta keep my answer short, right?

 

Dan Seguin  32:29

What is your favorite word?

 

Casey Gray  32:32

My favorite word? I have to go with 'Conscious'. I've never been asked that question before, but the unconscious is a good one.

 

Dan Seguin  32:39

What is the one thing you can't live without?

 

Casey Gray  32:45

My family.

 

Dan Seguin  32:46

Okay, this one's interesting. What habit or hobby have you picked up Casey during shelter in place?

 

Casey Gray  32:54

I have gotten into cryptocurrency. So educating myself on that, and that technology and how that's changing the financial world, actually. So. Yeah, so I've been educating myself on that.

 

Dan Seguin  33:08

If you could have one, just one superpower, what would it be?

 

Casey Gray  33:13

That's a good one. I think I just want to fly just because that'd be fun.

 

Dan Seguin  33:16

Okay, Casey, if you could turn back time and talk to your 18 year old self? What would you tell him?

 

Casey Gray  33:23

I don't think I'd tell him anything. This is something I have thought about before. And the reason I say that is because if I were to tell him something, I wouldn't be where I am today. And I wouldn't have made the mistakes that I had to make growing up. So I think I would, I don't think I would say anything, I would just leave them and let them figure out stuff as he's supposed to.

 

Dan Seguin  33:40

And lastly, my friend, what do you currently find most interesting about your sector?

 

Casey Gray  33:47

What's most interesting is still what was interesting before is that there is room for growth. There is a lot of opportunity to improve homes, both new homes and renovations and there's never one at least in what we do there. No, there's never one the same. So every project is different, everyone has a new problem to solve new challenges that we need to accept and overcome. So I think that that's what keeps me going is I like that variety. And I like being able to take on those new challenges ultimately.

 

Dan Seguin  34:21

Casey, we've reached the end of another episode of the thick energy podcast. Thank you. Thank you very much for joining us today. I hope you had a lot of fun. Cheers.

 

Casey Gray  34:32

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun. Those are some good rapid fire questions.

 

Dan Seguin  34:38

Thank you for joining us today. I truly hope you enjoyed this episode of The ThinkEnergy podcast. For past episodes, make sure you visit our website hydroottawa.com/podcast. Lastly, if you found value in this podcast, be sure to subscribe. Anyway, this podcast is a wrap. Cheers, everyone.