Kelly Fisher: Welcome to another round of Peel Passive House podcasts. Today joining us is Andrew Peel, myself, Kelly Fisher, and our guest Ken Williams. So Ken is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Legalett Canada, who we have supported with Passive House component certification and Passive House training. So today we're gonna be learning more about who Legalett are and their journey to Passive House.
So thanks for joining us, Ken. Maybe you can share with our listeners who you are and what you do with Legalett.
Ken Williams: Okay. Thanks, Kelly for having us on today. I started in the ICF industry in '92 as a builder and trainer and distributor for ICF products. I work with many companies old and new getting them started up in Ontario. Also with Giraffe ICF Bracing which was a supporting product for that industry.
During that time, I developed many new products for the industry and received over 20 ICF builder awards for projects, which were much like Legalett products and Passive House products coming to market now, were all new innovations everybody had, new product designs, new targets and construction that they were trying to get to.
And so these awards were special because they were the best in the industry internationally. And so they, I have a whole wall of these things in my office here. Some of the products I developed currently are for the industry, for Passive House, were the Legalett Geo Passive Slab. Thermalwall Passive Wall Panels, so ThermalWall PH, Thermosill PH, and Thermobuck PH.
Right now with Legalett, I currently manage their sales and marketing and create building branding for Legalett with a strong emphasis on watching for developing trends and consulting on R&D with the goal of providing for those future trends when they arrive.
Kelly Fisher: That's great. I'd love to see that whole wall of awards, Ken.
That sounds exciting. Trophies from your youth of sports or something. Awesome.
Ken Williams: Yeah, exactly.
Kelly Fisher: I think you alluded a little bit when you told us about, who you are and what you do. Legalett is involved in the ICF industry. So maybe you can speak a little bit about who is Legalett.
What do you do primarily? Do you focus on specifically Passive House projects? And what products do you make? Is that only ICF products? Or maybe you can give us a bit more context.
Ken Williams: So ICF, the acronym is Insulated Concrete Forms. Traditionally that product is thought of as a wall assembly, where you've got two panels of installation that you fill in concrete.
We are a form for floors. It's still an insulated form system, but it's for floors, not for walls. We specialize in frost-protected slab, on-grade construction within floor radiant air heating, which is unique. We're the only company in North America that, or in the world, frankly, that does that.
It's simple to build with a whole envelope solution for Passive and net zero energy construction. So we started it with just our floor with the air heating in it. But when we saw the opportunity that Passive presented we realized that we could be so much more and we developed a cladding system for any type of wall assembly whether it's wood framing or.
ICFs ICF concrete walls that improved the insulation values up to being able to let those walls become part of a Passive component in construction. So up until recently, ICF walls, although they were super insulated and performed great, could never meet Passive construction requirements or what you needed for insulation.
And they always said to do something more. And that's what was the catalyst for me to develop the ThermalWall product, which is a cladding that goes over ICFs, but it can also go over wood framing and other products.
That's awesome. Yeah. There are a lot of ICF projects that go on, and I know when we're talking about Passive House, it's one of the more simplified ways to build a Passive House because you cut your insulation, your air layer, all in one-degree layer.
But maybe we'll get into that one a little bit later on. Are there any notable projects that maybe are more recognizable that somebody might understand if they're listening through something you wanted to kinda speak to
that's really kinda cool. So there's some of the more recent projects that we have done that were notable projects that were done.
We did the Tillsonburg Seniors Apartments, that was a 1400 square-foot net zero energy certified building in Tillsonburg. This was about two years ago, I believe in Ontario. And Demian Guest House in Picton is Passive and net zero certified. And that particular project used insulated concrete forms, as well as our thermal wall panels.
They put R 100 in their ceiling and it's just an amazing building. We just received word that the Rock Residence in New Hampshire which we supplied two years ago just won first place in their net zero state awards for last year. So they have a HERS Rating. The building straight up without any solar panels had a HERS Rating of 35, and when they added their solar panels, their minus 145 for a HERS Rating on that building. And this was a homeowner-built project. There were 700, I just got the email. There were 700 contractors and architects and state people in the audience and the homeowners, the guy that beat out all the commercial builders and everybody else for the national or the state award.
And he got $5,000 to boot as a bonus. So he, and he didn't even know the award existed when he built the house. He only found out about it when they came out to test our house.
Kelly Fisher: And then for those of our listeners who may not know, Ken, what is the HERS Rating and how does that relate to energy efficiency?
Ken Williams: For that, you're gonna have to go online and check that out yourself.
Cause I, I don't have a simple answer for that, but actually Andrew, I'm sure probably knows the answer to the HERS Rating.
Andrew Peel: Yeah I'm actually not super familiar with it myself. Especially with the projects in Canada, it's not super so often used, right?
Ken Williams: Not too much. It is part of an energy star ratings for homes, but even in Canada. I think if you have a 70 that's like super energy efficient, and if you're like anything less than that, you're like off the wall and to be like 35 was something
Kelly Fisher: And if you're negative value, you're even better.
Ken Williams: Yeah. They're putting more energy back into the grid in the use. So this is a completely off-grid house, and it's not like a little shoebox either. It's a substantial home. It looks great. And then the one that's probably most recognizable is the Salus Clementine Passive project that was built in Ottawa a few years ago.
That was the first of its kind. It's low income. I guess it was a project for the mentally challenged homeless, that gave them a place to go to. So it was a funded project by the government. And the whole reason they went with Passive is that these projects, can always raise money to build the projects, but it's very difficult to get money to keep them going down the road.
Like to keep for repairs, for energy, for maintenance, for whatever they gotta do. So they had to spend, raise a little extra money to get the place built, but the ongoing cost of keeping this project going is it's ridiculously low. Their annual cost, the 42 units, each unit costs $27 per year to heat.That's all.
Kelly Fisher: Wow, that's impressive.
Ken Williams: Yeah. So as compared to, I don't know, like what, $800 or something like that. So that's just money that they don't have to raise every year to support that project. The results are more affordable design over its lifespan. One that sets a new standard for construction.
And this project also was featured on the TV show, the Disruptors. I don't think it's on anymore, but that show was like, it was. In all types of industry, whether construction or otherwise, that showed new concepts that were disrupting the way we think or the way we build or the way we live our lives.
And this was one of those projects that was classified as a disruptor in the industry.
Kelly Fisher: Salus Clementine was leading edge in it. I think it was responsible for bringing a lot more Passive House projects, to that social housing market and demographic in Canada.
Ken Williams: Yeah. I have a little side interesting story on that.
When I first met Andrew, it was actually at a Passive conference in Toronto. And we've been asked to come down and present our involvement in what we did for that project. The slab that we provided. And it was really quite unique. I believe when they dug down the soil bearing capacity was something like 1500 pounds and they're putting like a basement and plus four stories of construction on that soil.
The water table was six inches from the underside of the slab. And there were all kinds of special conditions. They had to have an elevator that went down into the water table, like the elevator pit. So we designed that whole slab for that building. And because of the way our engineering works, we were able to put that huge building on a 1500-pound bearing capacity, soil six inches from the water table.
So I was asked to present at the conference. I went down so it was a room, there's gonna be 20. 15 to 20 people and I, okay, so I get down there, put my little package together, I go down the room is got like 60 people in it. They've got the doors open, like double doors open, and there are people outside the room and they're all like, and I'm like, wow, this is more than 15 or 20 people.
And I know that everybody in this room knows more than I do about what I'm about to talk about. Anyways, I put, ran through my little PowerPoint presentation, and did a handout for everybody that answered a whole bunch of technical details and engineering questions and stuff. And then they broke for lunch and I left and there was supposed to be a speaker on after me, but say they decided to break for lunch.
As I was walking out the door and I'm walking down through this convention hall, I get about 50 feet from the room and I get my phone open and I'm about to check my messages and I turn around and there's this crowd. Following me down, Mr. Williams. I, it was like the paparazzi, they had all these questions.
They were like, just, what about this? What about that? What about that? And I went, wow. This is unbelievable. Like they, there was nobody had any questions in the room, but they all wanted to talk to me afterwards.
Kelly Fisher: All the conferences are like that. They don't wanna ask any questions in front of everybody else. They'll swarm you after it's so hard
to get outta the room.
Ken Williams: It's crazy. It was crazy. So that was a real eye-opener for us. And that kind of set our sales for where we are today.
Andrew Peel: I might jump in with the Salus Clementine project. I think that's close to my heart as well.
Cause that was the first large multi-family Passive House project in Canada, potentially in the US. I got fully certified and, just a committed whole client and team. And what I think was really special is like the impact we were alluding to it there, the impact it's had on the industry.
Folks from BC Housing came to visit that project, and that was really, I think, influential in what they were developing or, where they've been now, where they're headed with a lot of Passive House projects, Indwell prominent developers. So affordable Housing developers in Ontario.
They toured the project and got a good understanding. So I think it's really helped make help other organizations make the case for Passive House, so yeah, there was a stellar kind of pilot. Not really like a pilot project, just like a beacon project.
Ken Williams: Absolutely.
Kelly Fisher: That's really great. I like that context on the conferences, Ken, those are always a bit of an adrenaline rush when you do those presentations and then you get swarmed with people as you're leaving. It's usually a good feeling. Sometimes a bit overwhelming.
Ken Williams: He asked us to come down and I say what's it gonna cost? He, oh, no, not nothing. You're gonna be a speaker. I went, oh, okay. We'll go now. How many people are gonna be there? 20 people. And I went, 20 people. I'm gonna go all the way to Toronto for 20 people and Oh wow, okay. We'll do it. We'll do it.
But anyways, yeah, it was definitely, at the end of the day, it was definitely worth the trip.
Kelly Fisher: Yeah. So Salus Clementine, was that the first project where you heard about Passive House or had you known of it before?
Ken Williams: No, there is an interesting story. In 2013 I got a phone call from somebody in Vermont that was building a house for themselves, and they said, can we do a Passive Slab?
And I said I don't know what's that. I haven't heard of Passage Slab. It's this, thick insulation that goes under your concrete and it's got a wide edge to carry your insulation that's coming up from the ground. And I went we've already got six inches.
I need more. I need like 10 inches. I said yeah, I think we can do that. But the edge of our slabs was like an inch and three-quarters. That's how much insulation at the time that we had beyond the edge of concrete, we have more now as a standard, but at the time, inch and three quarters, I think he needed six inches.
So I went to the engineers, and I said, can we make our edge elements to look like this? And the answer was we can, but why would anybody want that much insulation? That's nuts, right? We're already getting six inches. People think we're already crazy when we have so much insulation.
And I said can we do it? Yeah, we can do it. Okay. All right. Great. So we did it and then we sent it. And the customer was part of a little Passive House community in Vermont, and they would blog every day about their progress and take some pictures and this went out all over North America. All of a sudden, every month we're getting two or three people calling us about a Passive and looking for a Passive Slab.
And we're not advertising, there's nothing on our website, but they're finding us. They're finding us because of this guy's blogging about his own project. And so when I talked about earlier, one of the things that I do is watch for emerging trends. What things are going, I looked at that and I said and without any involvement from us and being that past, it was such an unknown quantity in 2013, that's 10 years ago.
And we're getting this number of leads every month that comes in for people asking about it. We need to do something about it. So at that point, so that was our first contact and he was a Passive. And and from there we developed a line of products and branding names for Passive. So over five years went by, and during that period, all those products I mentioned with, our Geo Passage Slab and other things became kind of household names for us that we market them. But then when Salus came along and CVS Architects contacted us about the project, we were already experienced. We already had all the base work done.
We knew everything it was to know about how we can help them and get that project off the ground. And at that time, we were probably the only company in Canada that could actually meet all the needs that they needed to have done for that project.
Kelly Fisher: That's awesome. I know the Passive House community in Vermont it's very much word of mouth. Even the Passive House community as a whole is a very tight-knit community like, everybody's talking to each other and sharing ideas. And just to try and get people to not have to reinvent the wheel in every project.
Ken Williams: Yeah, exactly.
Kelly Fisher: Is really great. So it's interesting that's how you got the initiative, to develop these Passive House projects. Just from that like word of mouth on somebody's blog in North Eastern United States.
Ken Williams: I know the owners said, how many people, "how many of these you ever gonna sell? Why are we gonna do that?" We need to do it. So it was a bit of a struggle, but early on, but they quickly saw the benefit of it long-term.
Kelly Fisher: That's awesome.
So then you developed your Passive House line like your Geo Slab, for example, to meet that demand.
And because you understood that people were looking for this as a solution to building the Passive House and doing the and, especially making foundations, that's the hardest thing to do is to get outta the ground. Did you just develop the project to meet the demand or was there an interest in also sustainability that sent you down the this path to Passive House?
Ken Williams: We were already ahead of the curve compared to codes.
Building code was like two inches of insulation under your concrete pad. Our minimum was six inches of insulation we had to put in. So we're already, I don't know, 200% more than what code was outta the box. Anybody who were buying our slabs were already buying cause they were energy efficient.
We were meeting a special niche in the design requirements for energy efficiency. Wasn't so much we were gonna be more energy efficient. It was a niche. The niche is that outbound insulation layer. How do you support that? How do you make it a simple build without a lot of complicated connecting details.
And as you alluded to earlier in this industry, trying to reinvent the wheel, so many people have tried to take standard products and force fit them into a Passive construction by adding clips and special anchors and special stainless steel screws and hardware and a whole bunch of hard to get expensive equipment or materials.
And for us, our motto is "Designed for comfort, engineered for simplicity." Okay, that's our motto. And interesting enough that was actually given to us. I can't take credit for it. That was someone from EnerCan that gave us that. They said you guys are like designed for comfort, engineer for simplicity.
And I went, yes, we are. Thank you very much.
Kelly Fisher: Good that, that stuck. Yeah. Awesome. So I guess when you were bringing in like these Passive House components, which started first with the Geo Slab, and then as you mentioned earlier, it evolved into the ThermalWall. What was the process like internally?
Were you presented with any challenges that you had to go through, like internally? Was there an approval process? Maybe you can speak to what that was like, if, was there any kind of kickback.
Ken Williams: No, there wasn't any kickback. The ThermalWall came from watching Salus Clementine.
There's slab went in like clockwork. There's still a video that we have on our website today, a timelapse video that, that slab construction. And then the concrete walls had to go up, which was regular poured concrete and they added all kinds insulation on the outside of it. Not thermal wall cause we didn't have it at that time.
And then above grade they were using TGI's with clip system and all kinds of special thermal stuff and stainless steel screws and a bunch of very expensive materials that took forever to do the perimeter insulating components for that project. I looked at that and I went, I kept going down to the job site thinking, I wonder how far they are today.
And I went, they're not very far. And I saw this wall assembly going up and I went. That's to me just looked like coming from the ICF industry where you put the wall up, you pour the concrete and you walk away. All that work just seemed like a lot. I understood the reason for wanting to go framing, and I knew that ICF could not supply the r values needed in any case.
But that's when I thought about what could we do with EPS, how do we make EPS a component that would marry up with our foundation slab edge, as well as be a simple fit that's not gonna provide any thermal bridging out of the box. And so that's when we drew something up, talked to Andrew, "what do you think?" And I know we have a steel stud embedded in our thermal wall panels. And our thought was is this steel gonna be okay? Maybe we should be using plastic. And anybody who saw it said, oh yeah, can you use fibreglass? Can you use wood? Can you use something else other than steel? Steels bad. And having come also involved with the steel industry, in part of my earlier days I knew that it could be used if it was configured correctly.
So when Andrew ran the numbers on this, it turned out that we were okay. The steel was fully embedded. It was non-continual. So it stopped, there was a break every eight feet, so it wasn't continuous steel. So there was a completely isolated piece of steel within an insulated foam section that had a very small attachment point through these long, regular screws, non-stainless steel that would go back to your framing.
So it, that would just become so simplified. And so in the company, we had no kickback. It was, okay, let's get the drawings done. So we were already in the process of getting our slab certified with PHI. And so then we added on the ThermalWall panels, our Thermalbuck and our Thermasill, which is an insulated entry-level threshold.
Kelly Fisher: Awesome. So one-stop-shop and you get your whole Passive House assembly. That's awesome. Internally to Legalett, aside from like yourself pushing for development and understanding where you can develop these products to, meet an emerging market, Were there any internal champions for Passive House to say, this is something we need to focus on? This is something we need to push. Or was everybody just on board right from the get go?
Ken Williams: Everybody, yeah, they were on board. When I've gone to them in the past and previous to any other company I've worked with, I said, this is a market that we need to address.
And here's the solution. Okay. Don't ever go to anybody with a problem and say, here's a problem. If you're gonna go with a problem, tell 'em here's the problem and here's the solution. Because now they're, they wanna listen to you cause it just takes any work off their plate.
I went, here's the problem, here's the solution. They went great. And that was pretty much the same all the way through. In order to make sure we had the best product available in the best best way to build it the best pricing, and the best design requirements, we included an architect. And an experienced energy-efficient builder who's also a rep with us and one of our engineers as the internal champion or design group that I worked with to make sure we had all the bases covered when these products came to market.
Kelly Fisher: Now I know before I joined Peel Passive House the Legalett team sat through some Passive House training. We know that's just like the CPHC, so the Certified Passive House Consultant training or the trades training. Did you see any kind of benefit to what brought your team from the knowledge base?
To help everybody understand this product line and how to interact with clients who are looking to build a Passive House?
Ken Williams: Yeah. So the history on that is after we finished Clementine we started getting more and more like our business in Passive exploded for us. We were getting regular phone calls and not just from a homeowner wanting to build his dream house, but architects and other people.
And we were now getting questions that challenge my knowledge level. Okay. Because at this time, at this point, I'm still in novice and as a novice to know the difference between fact and fiction. Okay, I didn't really know fact and fiction. Okay. There are a lot of stories about there about all Passive this, Passive that.
And when I'm starting to talk to an architect or engineer who actually knows stuff, like he knows it all already, he's just looking for some guidance. I was not able to give him the guidance properly that they would like, they should have been able to get. And I was able to get through it, but I knew that I needed to get more knowledge.
So I went and took a course, and I found it really eye-opening. I found it eye-opening in that, how it was good and it was good, but also it was very it was very limited in its discussion on EPS products. It was very focused on wood and rocks all, did not include anything with ICF.
Our floor system type of styling. Any external insulation. We already had our thermal wall product at this point. Any external insulation like ours, was all geared in other ways. And so I saw that there was definitely gonna be a need for, if we were going to go down this road after taking the course, we needed to have more involvement.
We needed to get more. We had, that's when we needed to get our certifications and the rest of it. But having come off that course I talked to one of our sales reps who himself was a designer, very, he's an engineer, he was a designer. He had a number of other little businesses going, HVAC bunch of stuff.
Really great guy. Jeremiah, LaPointe, and Jeremiah, I suggested to him he'd go and take the course that he would get a lot of benefit of it. Anyways, he did go take the course and his sales went up 60% in like over the next six months. And he was on top of that though. He was really excited about it.
He was just to the point that I think he's now on the board of directors for Passive House Canada. I went back to, our company Legalett, and said, okay, so I took the course, Jeremiah took a course, and of all the people in the company that we've got, either internally or externally in sales, we're the only two with that knowledge.
And here's what it did for our sales. Okay. For Jeremiah sales and I look after sales in markets where we don't have reps. So my sales and Jeremiah's sales, this is where we're at now. Okay. For those. So can you imagine what we could do if all of our reps had that training? And now with all our products being about to be certified and we have all that knowledge, we're gonna be getting more inquiries for this.
These guys really need to understand what they're gonna be talking about, just like Jeremiah or I do now. And so the company agreed with me. And so our marketing money that year went all to training all of our staff. So every sales rep in North America all of our engineers any of our design team, including about four or five of our Champion architects or outside companies that work with us on a regular basis. We brought all of them through that Passive House training. I think there were maybe 30 people in total or something closer to that, that we put it through. And our business has, we've just never looked back. It's been phenomenal for everybody. Our sales guys are more comfortable talking with people about Passive.
Now they understand the difference between Passive Certified and Passive-like. Before passive is just a word that was thrown around before.
Kelly Fisher: Oh, it still is a little bit
Ken Williams: I know it's, it still is, but. But it is by everybody else. But our guys now understand the difference. Before they never knew the difference. Knowing the difference is half the battle.
Andrew Peel: That's great. And I think it's showing that the ripple effect that as people, more and more people get trained up and now all these sales folks, Legalett, that are talking to homeowners and maybe even some that haven't come specifically for Passive House but now hey, they get introduced to it, right?
Like we're seeing that with companies that get trained, they're able to influence many more people than us Passive House consultants.
Kelly Fisher: Yeah. That's great. So maybe those metrics that you shared with respect to like how much your, your sales have increased with respect to learning more about Passive House and bringing it more into, the products that you're selling and sharing with your clients.
How much of your business now is Passive House versus, your regular projects?
Ken Williams: So there's Passive, as I said, there's Passive House and there's "Passive-like." So about 40% of all the leads that we get, whether it's through our website or phone calls or the reps get directly, 40% of it can be, is directly calling us about either Passive or net zero.
They're seeing that as a requirement. 90% of all of our sales include one, at least one of our certified Passive products.
Kelly Fisher: That's impressive.
Ken Williams: Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly Fisher: So that's a fair bit of products going out the door that are Passive Certified. That's, yeah, that's great. Names. So I guess then we could say that certification has positively impacted your business.
That and your awareness and the industry of the products you provide and the projects that you've worked on. Like I know definitely the Endymion Guest House, for example, in Prince Edward County, which is quite a nice building. And they used almost exclusively all your products.
Ken Williams: They did, yes. Yeah.
Kelly Fisher: Even your in-floor heating products.
Ken Williams: They did. Yeah.
Kelly Fisher: One-stop shop. Yeah, that's great.
Ken Williams: One-stop shop. Yeah.
Kelly Fisher: So are most of your clients then, cause I know you, you've mentioned that you've got, a development in the US where we're kicked off in Vermont, and then you've got some projects in the Ontario area.
But is that primarily where your projects are located or are they more kind of continental?
Ken Williams: We have projects in the mountains of Colorado. We did a trucking, a refrigerated trucking centre in downtown Long Island, about two miles from the World Trade Center.
We did projects, three buildings that went up on, delivered on Ice Roads in Northern Ontario. We put two fourplexes five hours north of Fort McMurray. We've got this, the project in Vermont the first-place energy champion projects in Oregon, Washington, Vancouver, and Alberta. Everywhere. Yeah. Quebec Maritimes. We're everywhere. We've got sales reps in, I think half a dozen different states and plus every province in Canada.
Kelly Fisher: Oh, that's awesome. So I guess your growth trajectory is, you're just gonna keep aiming for the stars and see how far you can get?
Ken Williams: Yeah. Pretty much. I don't think we're ever gonna be a commodity product. Passive House is unique. You're never gonna go to, into a home hardware and buy, go in and ask for the Passive House, insulation or the Passive House framing package.
That'll never happen. But there's certainly a market for it. And that's the advantage of being in a small market is you're, you can be a big fish in a small pond very easily as opposed to being small fish in a really big pond. And for us, we're kinda like a big fish in a very small pond.
And it worked well for our business size.
Kelly Fisher: Oh yeah, I say so. Maybe you can speak a little bit about the certification process. So you mentioned you've got the Geo Slab certified. I think you've got three different versions of that, and then you've got the thermal wall. What was the certification process like?
Did you learn anything from that maybe you wanna share it with somebody else who's looking to get into it.
Ken Williams: Yeah I made a couple of little notes on that there, but the certification process, it was rewarding. It was pretty straightforward, we didn't really have any timeline for where we have to have it out the door by.
We were fairly flexible. Peel would come back and see, we need to stop. We would create more drawings, send it out, and then, we wanna get this product done. So now we had to add another product. It'll be another product we're getting done. And we still hadn't sent it for certification yet.
So we were able to get it all in under that one umbrella. But at the end of the day most of our customers, just knowing that we were getting it certified, there was value in that, that it was coming. And then once we had it I don't think really anything changed for us business-wise.
I don't think our business went up, but I know we get specified into projects better now easier that we see plans coming to us with us already specified in and partly due to the certification process.
Kelly Fisher: Yeah it's a lot easier as designers to find products that are certified cause we know the performance has been validated.
So it really does help us understand, especially with that tender process. It's really quick to say, oh yes, that's an acceptable substitution because the data is there already. So that's a really great point to bring up. And did Peel add any value to the process for you?
Did we make it any easier or how did we add value?
Ken Williams: We had no experience otherwise, but it certainly wasn't a difficult process. You guys were always available, easy to get hold of, spoke to us in layman's terms when you needed to, and spoke to us in technical terms when it was required.
So it yeah, it worked out well. It worked out well. For us. It was a very rewarding experience. It helped us better understand our strengths. And how our solutions were unique and simple at the same time compared to the existing lessons of achieving thermal breaks. So once we had our certifications, even though our, now our sales reps afterwards wound up getting all the training, they were able to see sure it's certified, but what's the big deal?
Now they could really understand what the big deal was and how they can explain it better to their customers. Yeah, no, it all came together very well.
Kelly Fisher: Yeah. That's good to hear. Do you have any advice for anybody, or any other manufacturers looking to get into the Passive House world and maybe get their products certified?
Ken Williams: Yeah, I see products, I look at them and I think they have no business being in the pa... Like there should be easier, better easier ways, right? And so if there's a manufacturer and they think they may have a product that could be used in Passive or they have a product that's being used in Passive, just because it's being used in Passive doesn't necessarily mean it's the best product to be used in Passive, maybe they could tweak what they've got. They need to be talking to the designers or the contractors that are the applicators that are putting these things together. See what they could do to help make it easier, faster, better, cheaper. Maybe they need to develop an additional product that can work with an existing product they've got that can, become a super product that could work with it.
And I can't point to something specific, but I know that was the course that we went down. I watched what was being done at Clementine and I went, there's gotta be a better way. That just was like, arduous what they had to go through and saying it did take forever. And so we did come up with something and it's, people look at them and go, and you know what's interesting?
When they see our products for the first time, if they've done any Passive construction, they're assuming it's going to be complicated. Everything is complicated. And I did the first job. Ed Marion had a job of three years ago with Thermal Walls, which was one of our first jobs. And he said can you come down and show these guys how it goes together?
" Ed, it's just gonna sit on the side of the house. You're gonna screw it in."
" Yeah, I know. But I think I, said they should use this product and you should you come down and show 'em."
Okay. So I get down, I say, okay, grab that panel. They put it up. Okay, take the snap channel out.
They take the snap channel out. I say, put a screw through. They put a screw through. Okay. That's it. And they all looked at me when that's it. That's all we gotta do? That's all you gotta do. Oh yeah, we got that. That's okay. But they were so used to everything being complicated and coming from the ICF industry. This is another anecdotal story coming from the ICF industry, from its fledgling years in the beginning. Every project that you went to, every job that ever got done, there was always at least one subtrade or the homeowner that wasn't, or the general contractor or the building inspector or somebody that wasn't happy.
Okay. And usually wasn't just one, it was usually a group. It was always something. No one liked the concrete guy, somebody didn't like it, something. So the very first Legalett job I did before I was working with Legalett I had a company, a packaged home company that we started up called I Built Homes. And we used one of their slabs on one of our projects.
And it was the first project I had ever been involved with where everybody was happy. The general contractor was happy, the homeowner was happy, the floor finish, the excavators, the electricians, the plumbers, everybody was happy and everybody made money. That's the other thing. You don't always make money in ICF, but everybody made money and I looked at it and then I called up Legalett and said, okay let's talk.
We want to, I wanna get involved. And so it was the first time I ever had a project that as a first project and everybody, this was their first experience that, and everybody was happy and everybody made money.
Kelly Fisher: There's always that level of apprehension that people have when they hear Passive House.
And it's always so annoying because it's really not that much harder, if at all. It's just a bit more insulation and you're paying a bit more attention to things and it's just, it boggles my mind when you change a typical process for some of these people, how just kind of dazed do they get.
So it's really great to hear that you have that impact on trade sites and these construction sites with your trades that everybody is happy because having worked on job sites before that's not often the case. So let's dive in then to some of the products that you've carried. So we wanna better understand cause we talked a lot about Passive House and what that entails and how you've come to Passive House as a supplier.
But how does your product, whether that's the Thermalwall or your Geo Slab, how does that compare to building code? When we're talking about, levels of performance and
that type of stuff?
Ken Williams: We substantially exceed the building code, like we're well beyond building code in all aspects of our materials.
And for our slabs, the slab is an engineered product, so it falls under part four of the code. And it's a unique engineering, it's not typically done. Here in North America, it's a European style of engineering. But yeah, we stamp all our own projects here in Canada, and we have 'em re-stamped through the US in every state that we go to.
But, so for code, it's just more than code. Everything's more than code.
Kelly Fisher: That's cool. And you mentioned that even your slab was more than code before you even adopted the Geo Slab.
Ken Williams: Yes. Our minimum insulation is still six inches. But we regularly, they say the job in Vermont that won the energy efficiency award, it was eight inches of insulation.
We have a project going up in Peterborough, starting shortly at United Rentals building at 7,500 square foot slab that's gonna have two feet of insulation under it.
Kelly Fisher: Wow. Are they doing the in-floor system with that, or is it
just insulation?
Ken Williams: No, just insulation. That's a unique project in that it's compensation. They're not putting insulation in for insulation purposes. We have a means of lightening the load of a building on the soil: it's called compensation. So let's say you've got a building that requires, 2,500 pounds of bearing capacity soil, but you only have got a thousand-pound bearing capacity soils.
So what we would do is we will excavate a certain additional depth of soil, maybe a foot, maybe two feet of soil, and we've replaced that soil with insulation. And so what we've done, there's no net gain of weight on the land. And so with that net gain, we're back to zero again. We can put a heavier building.
And that was the, with Salus Clementine, that was one of the things they excavated so much fill in the site, and we had so much insulation under the slab that it was a compensated foundation for that as well.
Kelly Fisher: That's interesting. So it's like doing a raft slab out of concrete, but you're using foam instead?
Ken Williams: Yeah. It is a raft slab. Ours is a modified two-way wraps slab, but it's, it is a wraps slab with insulation as a sub base. And then there's a gravel base below that provides a drainage plane underneath the building.
Kelly Fisher: So are there any particular types of projects that should seriously consider any of the Legalett products?
Ken Williams: Yeah, we fit into a lot of, one of... one of the things we don't do a lot of is a basement slab. So if someone's got a house and they would normally just be putting a basement in, we're not necessarily gonna be the right fit for just a basement. But if it's a walkup basement, if it's any kind of slab on grade if it's a like a split level where you've got an upper level that you're not gonna have a basement under, but then you've got, the back of the house has got a walkup level, and it does have a basement, but it's a walkup basement in a split system like that, we can do that.
If it's an addition you don't need to dig. You just basically scrape the soil off the surrounding part of the building, you butt right up to your existing building and you just put our slab in place and there's no settlement. We have no settlement under slabs. Any building that is looking for energy efficiency, that's obviously gonna be the go-to solution.
Kelly Fisher: Oh, yeah. Hands down. Yeah. Just even the Passive certification alone is good enough for that energy efficiency.
Ken Williams: Also I mentioned earlier about low bearing capacity soils, but if you've got high water tables bedrock soils that, like landfill sites. One of the interesting things about soil is if you have a landfill site and might be there for 20 years and Nelson wants to go put a house on top of it in regular construction, they're gonna dig down, they're gonna put footings and frost wells.
Once they dig through the crust is stable, it's solid, but dig through the crust, you got nothing. Okay. So if we don't have to dig through that two-foot crust, if all we're doing is building on top of the crust, then build the soils are fine. So we can build on top of unstable soils if the surface soil is intact.
Kelly Fisher: It's a huge advantage to your system.
Ken Williams: So people with the know, developers that have access to cheap land because it's deemed to be really expensive to redevelop they don't have that expense.
Kelly Fisher: That's awesome. That's an added benefit that a lot of people may not know
about.
Ken Williams: Most of 'em don't,
Kelly Fisher: Yeah. So then if we move along in, your Passive House journey.
And we move past the development of products and into, where you're at now, are there any things that you wish you knew ahead of time with respect to Passive House that maybe you go back and do differently or developed sooner? Anything like that?
Ken Williams: I think we, we grew along with the Passive, the demand for Passive House. I think we were a little bit ahead of the curve. All the way through. As we were developing products. And again, that's what I've always done. I look at trends. If I get three questions, the same question three times in a month from three different people, and I've never had the question before, to me that's a developing trend.
And so now I've gotta go back at it and I'll go to our website people and say, search this and tell me how many people out there are making those inquiries. Around the world. How many people are asking about that? What's the most common search engine when someone's talking about X?
And then they'll come back and they go, whoa, wow. Look at all this. And so then we'll go and build a marketing piece or develop something around that new search engine that has been popping up. But so that's what I watched for. But, so we've always been ahead of the curve when it came to, on this Passive the Passive product lines.
In the beginning, the PH industry led us. We were chasing it, trying to catch up with knowledge products that make good sense, staff training and market acceptance. I see us now more as leaders in the industry. Construction professionals and homeowners now seek us out for all over North America to help 'em find the right mix of products for their projects.
And we couldn't have been doing that now if we didn't get ourselves set up for that with the certifications and the staff training that we did, three or four years ago.
Kelly Fisher: Is there anything on your Passive House journey as you've been developing these projects and established yourself as a leader in the industry that, has surprised you or, driven you and excited you to further your role in the industry?
Ken Williams: Yes, I guess so. Last May we came in on a Monday morning. And it was the first week of May, and we had over 40 messages on our answering service. And there were 30 leads that came in that day. So that was like 70 new contacts plus. Normally we would see four or five.
And by Wednesday of that week, our website almost crashed, and by Friday we had over 500 people in North America looking for quotes on projects in that. And compared to what normally have been maybe on a really good week, 20 or 25, we had 500 and that was in thanks to, unbeknownst to us. And thanks to a shout-out to Mark Reisinger and the Build Show. Who ran a segment on their show about our product on a home that was built in Colorado two years ago. And it had over 400,000 views in the first month that it went out.
Kelly Fisher: Oh, wow.
Ken Williams: And we still get, every week, we still get 20% of our leads come from that show.
And it's just been compounded. It's compounded. Our business went up 2000% over the first three months after that video came in.
Kelly Fisher: Wow. Yeah. So that's good publicity.
Ken Williams: That surprised me. Yeah. . And as a side note of that, we actually stopped advertising last year.
We don't need to advertise anymore. We can't, there's no need to advertise because we can't support
Kelly Fisher: You can't keep up. Yeah.
Ken Williams: Anymore.
Kelly Fisher: Awesome. It's a good place to be.
Ken Williams: Yeah. And so far this year I checked yesterday and it's the beginning of January. We're up 60% over last year. So it just keeps going.
It's just, we just got to hold on. That's all. Yeah. Just hold on.
Kelly Fisher: Is there anything about Passive House that resonates with you on a personal level? I know often people find a personal attachment to bringing Passive House into their career. Whether it's for, being environmentally conscious or making the world a better place for those who come after us.
Is there anything like that as you dove into the industry that led you to really be committed to Passive House?
Ken Williams: I like the concept. We service all aspects of the industry, whether it's net zero, whether it's just a homeowner wanting to build on some really bad soil, and we're the solution. He doesn't really care less about energy efficiency. So Passive is one of our markets that we deal with.
And it's one of our bigger ones now than it was. And it was the in, it was the impetus for all the new products that we came out with that we saw that as a leading trend. And even for people that aren't wanting to build Passive, just the idea that they've got a product in their house that was Passive certified, there's a value to them for that. And so for other manufacturers and just thinking if they're just to get whatever, if it's a screw, if it's a, if it's a roofing shingle, whatever, if there's some Passive component value to it with the certification on it for the minimal cost that it actually costs to put all that together for a homeowner to say, "hey, I've got that in my house, and that's Passive certified," to them, there's a value.
I know the house isn't certified, but having products that are, there's a value to it. So it's like having your energy rated, your Passive rated product. I think there's value in it.
Andrew Peel: Have you looked at the retrofit application for the Thermalwall?
Ken Williams: We have, yeah. Yeah, we have. There's actually we had a, somebody just called me today, one of our sales guys, "can we put this on a brick wall?" I said, yes, we can. Half the guys don't know what's on our estimators. Like we have covered everything. They just, all they gotta do is brick, and it comes up with the tapcon number of tapcon they need. Everything's included. So
Kelly Fisher: Your estimator tool is really fun. Jeremiah shared that with us a while ago. It's pretty cool.
Ken Williams: It's amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. Josh is the gatekeeper for that. He's the only one that can do anything with it. It's massive, it's a document that's been in development for 20 years.
It's the same massive spreadsheet behind it that, that they're working within all the formulas. And so...
Kelly Fisher: It's always fun. How much of the world operates off spreadsheets? Don't realize until you dive into a few things. Yeah.
Ken Williams: That's for sure. Yeah.
Kelly Fisher: So maybe we'll switch gears a little bit. And you can share something with us that might frustrate you about the construction industry. Like in all of your years of experience, I'm sure you've got some things that are really pet peeves for you, but is there anything maybe, that you wanted to share with us about that or even in the Passive House
industry?
Ken Williams: Yeah. So one of the things that surprised me was that the Passive House industry can appear to be very anti-EPS and concrete. Okay. And I understand how those opinions have developed as the wood industry has done a great job in demonstrating their green building material with lower embodied carbon. And coming from the ICF industry where I was seen on firsthand, hundreds of exceptionally built resilient homes that can operate on next to nothing for energy consumption, and stand up to hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, it just surprises me that these values and benefits beyond the insulation and air tightness don't seem to have any place in Passive House design, but not part of that consideration.
There's a recent discussion paper about wood versus concrete for high-rise construction with Adam, who is the Vice President of Environment and Sustainability, and Richard McGrath, who is the director of Codes and Standards for Buildings. And it speaks to many of the arguments that I regularly hear about, like why wood is better building material or its approach for the environment and the reduction of carbon emissions.
And so the discussion that they had, was over the new document that came out by the ISD, which is International Institute for Sustainable Development. The document is called Emission Omissions. And so they argue that due to the omissions of some known life-cycle items that were not included in the original reports that the carbon impact of the wood construction may be higher than that of concrete in some cases if a proper life-cycle analysis is applied.
There were six scenarios in the report and only one of the scenarios showed that wood had a lower embodied carbon emission. Okay. And so it's a very interesting document. We just recently put this on our website along with a 75-year life cycle study. Comparing various building materials.
And so if I wish anything had been done earlier, I wish this report had come out 10 years ago. We may not be talking as much now about wood versus concrete, but more about how wood and concrete together are great building materials.
Kelly Fisher: I do agree, there's a lot of I dunno how to best describe it in a word.
A word that's more diplomatic, but there is a lot of tension in the industry about the materials you use and especially when you focus on Passive House and you're looking towards sustainability and resiliency and improved performance. I always tell people as a designer that Passive House is agnostic to how you get there.
You can use whatever materials you want as long as they're suitable to be used. And you can build out your insulation, you can build out your structure in any way that works for you. And that there is really no kind of connection back to the type of materials you wanna choose unless you're being conscious of that lifecycle analysis.
But the lifecycle analysis, like you say, can vary depending on who's doing it, the inputs that they're using, and even how much of the industry they're assessing when they're doing their cradle-to-grave. And there can be some things missed in that might not be known to people who don't know what they don't know.
They're just reading reports. They're just reading maybe some journals and that sort of thing for where this information's coming from. But it's hard to make an assessment if you're not a subject matter expert on those types of topics. I always try to lead people down the path of using what products work best for you and for your budget and focus on the other aspects of things.
So I guess that kinda leads us into this underbelly of the industry when we're looking at comparing different materials. So do you think that there's anything that we need to talk about in the industry that we need to get right or maybe something that we should talk about more openly so that people are more aware of these types of things?
Ken Williams: I guess it's the, we touched on already, but it was the, just throwing the word Passive House around, oh, it's Passive House. Passive House. And that's my guys, the sales guys were always calling me about, oh, somebody wants Passive, what do we do? He said this, he said that I don't get those calls anymore because they took the training.
Okay. But the customers. Because there was a lack of knowledgeable people in the industry. The homeowner became the knowledgeable guy, and half of what he knew was fiction. Okay? So now our sales guys at the time previously would be talking to, a half-knowledgeable homeowner who thought he was the expert.
And it just was always a problem. I think we're in a much better place today than we were like five years ago, not just as a company, but I think the industry in general, I think there are more, far more knowledgeable people. There are so many more people that have taken courses. The companies that used to outsource Passive House design the architectural firms now have their own in-house people to do that.
Now they're not outsourcing the independence that started out as this was their career to do Passive House design for, as an outsource service, are finding it difficult to survive, I think today cause there's not that much of that business now available. So they're moving on to, into other, expanding their career options or moving into other careers I think.
Kelly Fisher: So then as we bridge between, what we're doing now and how we're gonna move towards the future when we look at, governmental kind of carbon reduction plans and just trying to meet some of these, you know standards or kind of missions to reduce our footprint.
There is generally a growing concern in the construction industry and in particular in the Passive House industry as you've alluded to, for using materials like concrete and foam. And do you have any insights or future developments that you could share on the impact of these products and how you're looking to reduce embodied carbon?
Ken Williams: I think that the two documents I mentioned will speak for themselves. Okay. The embodied carbon it's quite a divergent from the standard party line right now that you hear about concrete and EPS. I know that the EPS industry, in general, has reduced their in production of manufacturing has reduced their embodied carbon.
Kelly Fisher: Tremendous amount
Ken Williams: And concrete, there's another, we don't even have this on our website yet, but in independently of the analysis report that's there there's apparently a new ad mix for concrete now that's reducing, its embodied carbon just as it stands by 50%. So that's huge, apparently I was just talking to one of our people yesterday and they were at a conference in Montreal and where this was, information came out and it was presented at the time and it was, everybody was blown away by it.
And apparently, it's not something always there's gonna be one plant in Takty-Yuck-Tuck that's gonna be making this, it's gonna be like, it's readily available everywhere,
Kelly Fisher: Oh, absolutely. And sometimes when you learn more about these products, you realize it's been around, it's been available, and it's just a matter of you specifying it as a designer.
There are admixtures they can add to the concrete that reduces its embodied carbon it's carbon footprint and all you have to do is specify it. They already exist. It's just that they don't build with it now for whatever reason. Which is mind-boggling when you get into some of this nitty-gritty of these details.
Ken Williams: That's right. And one of the things with our slabs, although our slabs are eight inches of concrete, no, I just think a four or five-inch concrete slab or eight inches. We don't have footings. We don't have frost walls. Okay. We don't have insulation on frost walls, and we don't need that.
We just have our under-slab installation, and when we put our air heating in it, the pipes are four inches in diameter. Okay. So everywhere there's a pipe, okay, it's a void that eliminates that amount of concrete as opposed to half-inch pecks, which is like minimal. And we actually reduce the amount of concrete in a foundation slab over what would be used in a footing frost wall and regular slab by the time we've added our pipe into it.
So we're out of the box.
Kelly Fisher: That's, yeah. That's phenomenal.
Ken Williams: But you know what, we'll never get evaluated for that. There's not gonna be if I did it, that doesn't get evaluated. But we just know that if you use our slab, we're using less concrete in that building design.
Kelly Fisher: Hypothetically it should be included in an LCA evaluation for the building, interesting to see how many people are overlooking that when you try to do a comparison.
Andrew Peel: That comparison game is always a challenge. It's like how much does a conventional cost, a building cost versus a Passive hose? How much material would you like? It's a bit of a rabbit hole you can go down to unless you have a well-defined methodology to follow. Yeah, it can be misleading for sure.
Ken Williams: The interesting thing with our thermal wall product, one of the advantages that really big advantages that we saw with it that has not been used that much or implemented is that right now most construction has been with two by six framing.
That's the standard. And so they can put an R 20 bat in the wall and then they add one inch of code board to the outside and you've got your wall assembling, right? Then you're, now you're like R 25 or whatever. Maybe it's R 28. I said, so no six inches of fat. So you're like 20 R, 24 and I think it's R 26 or R 27 your R value. We can go back to a two-inch, like a two-by-four stud instead of two by six stud. Put no insulation in the wall, no vapour barrier, and add our eight-inch thermal wall panel to the outside so we're all outbound. Fully, no thermal bridging. Give the customer R 32 in a wall assembly. That was like, like half the work of doing all the other stuff for less money.
Kelly Fisher: And less thermal bridging too, because he's got a more continuous layer of insulation. It's a win for everybody.
Ken Williams: This is what the builder in Vermont used to use our eight-inch thermal wall with two-by-four framing. So he's got this beautiful little off-grid 1500 square foot house out in the country and inside it's all wood.
He's got the, it's all exposed wood. It's like that cabin thing. It's got the cabin look going on inside. It's so cool.
Kelly Fisher: So this just leads us into maybe some insight that, what is something you wish your clients knew more about? Because as a team at Legalett, you have a lot of experience, and knowledge. And you've learned a lot about Passive House along the way. But is there anything you wish your clients could bring more or knew more about when they were bringing these discussions to you?
Ken Williams: Interestingly, when customers call us they're mostly half sold already. They have been scouring our website.
They have known a million different things. They've seen the Mark Reisinger video and his extreme enthusiasm for what he's looking at in these pictures that are being shown to him and other videos that we've got out there. So again it's the same thing I talked about earlier there though, the one thing that is always that hang up is the embodied carbon and the wood industry is really, capitalized on that as a marketing tool.
And again the wood versus concrete document it's not like battering wood. It's not that. But it's a really good discussion paper and worth reading. That's the information that I wish more people knew about when they got hold of us. Cause in the back of their mind, someone's heard, they've heard that somewhere along the line and they're wondering about it.
So I'm thinking now we've got it on our website and we are gonna be doing some marketing around that. I think that we'll see less of that now.
Kelly Fisher: Yeah. Maybe you can share those with us as well. Just so that we can include them in this. I think that'd be really informative to our listeners to make sure that we all know what you're talking about. Cause I think that these reports that you've got, I think might help shed some light on some of the differences or the discrepancies between the industries.
Ken Williams: Absolutely.
Kelly Fisher: So then as we look to the future and what Legalett is planning and around the Passive House world and even just your regular kind of sales, where do you see the industry going, especially with respect to the products that you sell?
Ken Williams: I don't expect to see us mainstream anywhere. Again, we're a niche product. Passive Houses is a niche product. ICF for all the work that gets done with ICF, it's actually become almost a commodity product now. It's sold in every lumber store in North America, but it's still a very niche business. And I think there's gonna be some components of Passive that will show up in lumber yards in some capacity. But generally, the whole Passive office industry I just think it's gonna be, it's gonna keep growing for sure.
In a perfect world, if the building codes ever got to where a Passive House was the way forward, then Passive House organizations would no longer be needed. Okay. The goal of integrating Passive House principles in the standard construction code through educating homeowners, governments, and industry professionals will be done.
But that's still a way off. We've got lots of work to do before we get there.
Kelly Fisher: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Do you have any upcoming, exciting projects that you're working on?
Ken Williams: We do.
Kelly Fisher: Or any new products you're looking to bring into the market?
Ken Williams: New products, not that I can speak of about this time but projects, yes.
We've got the United Rentals new store going up in Peterborough on two feet of compensated soil and compensation on bad soils. We have Solar Decathlon Project in Illinois as part of the federal government, US Federal Government's energy department. There are 10 universities competing.
One of them is from BC and is competing in that project. We have the architect and designer for the Endymion House working with the bank, one of the banks for a number of banks to go up in Canada. That's coming down the road. I can't say which, how, where, or how high, but yes that's coming up.
And just in general, got a couple of crazy big projects in the US going up one in Wyoming and one down in Georgia, which is, those are both areas we've never built in before and we've got two huge projects going up down there.
Kelly Fisher: And I think we've got a project too that your product is being used on the King William Passive House in Hamilton, which will be a modular construction.
Ken Williams: Oh, I didn't know we were in that. Okay. That's great. Good news.
Kelly Fisher: We got
Ken Williams: the
Kelly Fisher: ThermalWall specified for that product too.
Ken Williams: Nice. That's great. We have three buildings going up, so it's, we don't normally build in the winter, but there are 3 3500 square foot slabs going up. Unheated slabs going up in Hagersville. They just poured one last week. They started the other one today. They're gonna pour it on next Wednesday, I think. And then there's one more they're doing three back to back. And they're completely tenting these things, so they're building inside a tent so that the grounds can't be frozen.
They're heating 'em. And so it's like building in the summertime. Everybody's in there with their shirts off and they're putting their slabs down. So they got three of those going out. That's cool. Yeah. Anyways, we have lots of stuff, lot lots of stuff
coming up.
Kelly Fisher: Yeah. That's very exciting.
So I guess I wanted to wrap up, maybe bring everything together here and maybe you as an individual and maybe a bit pulling from your experience with Legalett. But we're trying to maybe better understand, what kind of legacy you wanna leave as an individual and a designer for, working towards Passive House and designing these Passive House products. But as Legalett as well as, is there a particular legacy you're looking to leave in the construction market?
Ken Williams: I hadn't planned to leave right away, so I don't know, I haven't thought that far down the road. What I enjoy about my job is building new things, like just new things.
Every job I've ever had in this entire industry is always to create new things for that industry. And I know there's gonna be some more stuff that we're gonna be able to create for the Passive House industry, that's not been done yet. There will be more products and I think that for Legalett, I just, I'd like to be able to see them at a, in a position where regularly, not just one of our products was included in 90% of our sales, but two or three of our products were included in 90% of our sales. The adoption of a whole envelope solution was included, was part of many of our approaches, not just Thermalwall or not just the slab and our Thermasills and whatnot.
So that's what I'd like to spend my time on, is trying to direct it so that more of the products are being used all the time.
Kelly Fisher: That's a good approach to try and overcome there. Yeah. Okay. So I think that wraps up everything that we wanted to chat with you about today.
Thanks, Ken for taking the time to sit with us today and sharing your experience with Passive House with our listeners. It's been really great to pick your mind with all your years of experience in the industry and better understand your journey towards Passive House as an individual and with Legalett.
We really appreciate you taking the time to sit with us and kinda come through some of these topics.
Ken Williams: Thanks, Kelly for letting me share my experience with you guys. I don't often get asked that, so it was nice to reminisce about some of the things I've gone through over the last few years.
Yeah.
I'm happy to provide the avenue for you to do that. That's good. So anybody who's listening to you can reach us online at peelpassivehouse.ca for more information on the services we provide. This podcast was produced by Andy Ly, Andrew Peel, and Kelly Fisher, myself. And a special thank you to our guest Ken Williams for his time to sit down with us.
So Ken if our listeners are looking to learn more about Legalett, how can they reach you and your team?
You can go to www.Legalett.ca. Make sure you're dot ca. Dot com and you'll wind up in Sweden.
Kelly Fisher: Good to know. Awesome. Thank you.
