Texas Ice Storms! How we are managing & lessons to apply.

okay guys are we actually rolling i'm i made an error and uh had some technical difficulties here but i think we are on can y'all hear me see me all those kinds of things it appears that we are live um i'm hopeful that you guys are going to be able to uh hop on i kind of messed up this live stream at the beginning i'm sorry i need to get better at uh doing the uh kind of setup for these things i'm going to pop in the comments here real quick and make sure that y'all can see me okay i think we're live sorry for the delay guys um matt reisinger in austin texas and if you've been following the news it is absolutely been nuts in texas over the last couple weeks okay here we go hyperstrike death investigator oh my gosh all the way down in aggieland i'm seeing you i'm seeing a bunch of comments straight man sorry y'all i apologize for the tech issues nine minutes after and we're finally getting going here here's the scoop texas has been crazy uh and i've got a bunch of notes from y'all in youtube comments on the chat uh all kinds of things it it's been crazy because we're just totally unprepared for this kind of weather i mean i've got a lot of you guys that are friends and fans from up north that are like what's the big deal in texas why is everyone freaking out why is the news even covering this right it gets to 10 degrees all the time in my climate [Music] oh got two microphones and there's an active echo let me see if i can um does that help on the echo guys are you are y'all still getting the echo audio issues echo going okay guys one second let me uh head over to settings real quick and see if i can figure out what's up on the echo you know wonder if it's my uh air pods let me take these out hmm i'm gonna see if that is that big guys are you all better now i'm gonna assume that that fixed that hmm okay anyways gosh i've got to get my tech issues handled okay hyperstrike is it cold enough for you to start stuffing fiberglass between your ribs yet funny enough we stuffed fiberglass into our meter box because i actually didn't have a meter box yet so my house under construction across the street uh my um uh my uh meter can was basically fully exposed and um and so we put uh rockwool bats on top of it and then bricks on top of that and so far we've been good to go so that's good news um here's the here's the kind of catch up as to what's happened in texas uh last week we lost power uh because of some ice storms and some bad weather and for us bad weather means 28 and rainy which means we've got ice down trees almost no underground power in austin almost everything's above ground so we had a bunch of lines that went down and on thursday my power went out because of the ice and storms at my current house and i don't know if you saw the video that i published a while back uh the champion sponsored uh they gave me one of their 13 kw generators and i made a great video about how to size it and what to do and man my wife was absolutely thrilled that i had that generator of the house because we actually in my neighborhood where i am were out for 52 hours because of ice and storms and yet with that generator it was amazing uh you know that natural gas generator just fired right up i have an automatic transfer switch and i was good to go whereas my entire neighborhood was totally out for that period of time in fact since i got a bunch of texts and calls from neighbors saying hey tell me about your generator and how i get one from my house uh and then we were back up and running uh through the weekend but what happened was the temperature started dipping and that um uh what's the name of the storm is it um yuri i think is the name of the storm came and just brought bitter cold i mean we were down to three or four or five degrees uh above zero fahrenheit here in texas overnight a couple of nights and the windshield was like -10 which just absolutely unheard of and this is the part that the northerners have a hard time uh kind of understanding but here in texas we're just so used to barely touching 32 degrees that most people have a uh a standard hose bib at their house you know a non-frost free if something like this let's say sticks out of the wall and they put an insulated cover on top of that hose bed and that's all you need for years uh in fact the last time it got this cold was 1989 so it's been a long long time since we've done that now you northerners on the other hand are used to seeing these guys which is a frost free husband uh this is a woodford su-chief i've also used a bunch of those over the years and as you northerners know this unit when it shuts off when i when i rotate this valve you probably can't see that on my camera i'm actually moving this valve all the way back in here and we're shutting the water off into the wall by eight or ten inches well if you don't have those in texas and your your walls here and your shutoff is right here that means that this is going to freeze this is going to freeze and most likely if it's copper it's going to burst and that's exactly what's happened especially as we've kind of thought out today the weather's been a little bit nicer we've had a bunch of uh burst pipes and uh and craziness so i'm not sure if you can see this but this is the kind of thing that's happening all over town this is my neighbor up the street uh they thawed their hose bib its copper pipe that thing was cracked was spurring out water once the ice damn plug left and they were in trouble luckily a shark bite cap saved the day which was huge and uh i keep those in three quarter and a half inch uh and so that was a pretty easy fix was a three-quarter cap on that thing and we were good to go but the biggest the biggest issue for us here in texas has been the blackouts there's all kinds of speculation on why there's been a bunch of political talk about it but ultimately what i think it boils down to is we're just not set up in texas for really cold weather including our power plants and as you know nuclear natural gas and coal plants need water for cooling and if those water lines are susceptible to freezing that means those systems are gonna have to get shut down and from what what i understand which i'm certainly not an expert on this that's a huge reason why we've lost so much power the other night when i uh was here hanging out monday night i guess it was i had power but six people who work for me were out of power and i got on the um the austin energy website just to kind of view how many power outages were happening around town and i'm gonna show you what i saw on the website if i could find it but just an absolutely insane amount of people were without power so check this out if you can see that 58 of austin energy had power which means that 40 of their customers didn't have power and i think it's on the bottom of your screen here 200 000 homes around the austin metro area were without power and this is a night when it was you know 10 degrees out if it's 10 degrees out and you have you don't have power you're really in trouble especially in a town like this that has really poor insulation really poor standards for construction we barely get to freezing most winters and if we do it's it's only one or two nights and during the daytime it gets back up to 50 degrees just incredibly unusual and that's really what's happening uh around town with uh with what's going on here is is really the blackouts have been the biggest portion of the problem now couple that with i think it's been five days in a row uh up until today where it didn't get above 32 during the day i think today's the first day it actually poked above 32 for the last five days that's really what's been been crazy uh and the other thing that i've seen all over the place uh happening because of the loss of power is we have a lot of tankless water heaters on the outside of our homes i'm sorry to admit that there's my tankless water heater right there on the outside of my house and i don't know if you saw the video i published last week on how to uh how to kind of mitigate those pipes coming outside of my envelope to there but even with all that mitigation i didn't drip my pipes the first night when it was like 10 degrees out and as a result my unit froze up and it was really really bad the next day in terms of getting a thawed but because i think i credit having pecs in there because i had pecs i was able to uh thaw that and really not have a problem which was huge for me the other thing though that's been happening all over town is this right here let's see if you can see this uh andrew who's the moderator here in his uh works with me took this video in his neighborhood that's two exterior tankless units that are absolutely raining water down from below they're mounted up kind of high which is silly and there's a ton of pipe showing which is also silly but once you lose power those tankless units if they're mounted outside like these are it just means that they're going to freeze the inside copper boiler system is going to freeze and you're totally in trouble i mean at that point you've got a 1500 brick on your wall that's just going to rain out water and all you can do is turn off the water to it i've also been uh complacent in that you know i've lived here 16 years now i've only seen one other freeze that was uh as as bad as this but it was only for a short 24 or 48 hour period of time and a couple of tankless units including my own that i had installed froze but i was able to follow them all for all those customers the very next day uh with a heat gun but in this kind of weather especially with no power that's it man things are bad and and that's really been the story around town the other thing that i think might happen to us in texas is i suspect that we're going to have a bunch of water outages that are going to happen as we thaw you know when i started watching the news a week ago and we were talking about this weather coming i heard several stories about 1989 here in austin texas i didn't live here my wife did she was in high school at that time here they had a similar two or three day freeze below zero multiple days in a row and 350 water mains busted from frozen pipes and as a result a vast amount of the city was without water you know something like a third of the city had no active water for several days so i got on instagram today and told all my friends who follow me on instagram fill your bathtub fill every water bottle you've got because i think that could be the next big uh you know tragedy that we have coming to us let alone all the people that have been without water um interesting mark's got a question mark bradley i just kind of caught my are my customers angry at me um no maybe a little bit yes um but uh for instance the very first house i built in town 15 years ago i put two exterior tankless units on that house and then put one on my house the following year it's the second owner super nice people i just talked to them a couple hours ago both their units busted because they had no power i mean people understand you know i don't think that there's necessarily a criminal intent when it's something like this that happens every 20 plus years but i can tell you that the second half of this live program i want to talk about what i would do differently or what i would recommend others do differently and a big part of that is obviously don't be dumb you know once you've experienced an event like this you realize that uh it's just not wise to have anything on the outside in the wintertime being susceptible to uh to freezing so absolutely that's that's what i'm gonna do differently is is a big one i'm trying to think if i've got any other interesting stories uh to tell you before i switch to what else i would do differently um did you guys ever see the video that i made um called uh an emergency plumbing tool kit uh i made a video maybe three years ago when we had some cold weather about about this topic uh and interestingly enough in the video i had a bunch of amazon links you guys probably know i do amazon affiliate links uh that's that's part of my income but i got on amazon today and i thought you know my my kit is low on half inch shark bites i wonder if they have any available i was shocked that amazon did the delivery time is a little bit low on some of these but you know regardless of affiliate links you may consider getting on amazon or supplyhouse.com some of those places and order up uh at least three or four half inch end stops or what do they call them um not end stops what's the word i'm looking for caps uh in both half inch and three quarter and then you also might get some couplings like i was showing a minute ago here's here's what i'm talking about a um a cap an end cap so that if you had a busted pipe you could cut it and cap it and at least the rest of the house would have water they're kind of expensive online they're going to be certainly cheaper in the store here's a four pack that's like 30 bucks on amazon but if you needed that part especially in an emergency be worth every penny of that i mean a plumber's gonna charge a minimum of a hundred bucks to come out and my guess is you're gonna have a waiting list a hundred people deep uh no matter which plumbing company you call so they're gonna have a hard time uh making it out to you somebody's at my front door i know that is um other stories that i would tell you there are there have been people that have been out of power for multiple days that haven't had any problems and that's interesting to think about as well for instance my mother and father-in-law live in northwest hills in the house my wife grew up and built in the 70s i actually know the builder's son who's still building today he's my age and that house is built relatively well it has a standard water heater a gas atmospherically vented unit which is up in the attic not a great place and my father-in-law even though he lost power for almost three days was really good at dripping both the hot and the cold lines on all of his faucets inside and on all of his exterior hose bibs he didn't lose any he didn't lose anything he was good to go i thought that was pretty darn interesting because he was so diligent about dripping and that incoming water temperature here in austin uh even on the coldest day of the year is something like 45 to 55 degrees that means that even if it's 10 degrees out and you've got a little bit of flow through there and it's being replaced with 50 degree water you're going to not freeze and that was huge i think a lot of the freezing issues are people that didn't do that the other thing that i did and then i recommended to people was on your exterior hose bibs even if they're not a frost free hose bib thaw them every single day so that you'll keep water going through there and you won't have that plug of water backing up in your house uh and splitting and ultimately i think the people that have copper are much more prone to splitting pipes than somebody who's running pecs on their house i saw a comment here from dean constantine is home depot open there a bunch of stores have been shut down for multiple days heb which is our main grocery store uh they were they were closed for several days in a row near me and i got online to see if anything else was open and all six stores that were within a you know 10 mile radius not that you could get out very easily but i did in my four wheel drive they were all closed uh home depot is open today i have a buddy that went there um he said every shark bite fitting was sold out so there was really nothing left for him to get to try and fix it how interesting uh one of my past clients is texting me alex alex i'm watching brother if you if you're seeing this thanks for the text man uh glad to hear that you guys have had no breakages or problems they were out of power for 48 hours dang alex that's crazy man hopefully lauren and the kids are doing okay uh gosh i haven't uh you gotta think i think you had a birthday alex that i missed this past week anyways um let's switch gears for a minute and let's talk about what i do differently i also want to get on and answer some of your questions uh you guys have been chatting it up and um so i i apologize if i've missed your missed your question there's been a uh there's been a ton of questions out there um gosh i'm not even sure how to uh sort through all these there's so many let me um while you guys are posting questions i'll see if andrew who's moderating for me uh andrew text me if you've got one or two you think would be a really good question uh otherwise i'll kind of keep my eyes on questions but let me talk about what i do differently i think that's kind of an interesting story about what's going on here um first off frost free hose bibs you know i get laughed at honestly around town for thinking about using a frost-free hose bib uh they're just so unusual to see here in austin texas um but obviously that would have prevented some massive problems uh had people had frost free uh another version of a frost rehab bib that i really liked too and then i actually did on my house and i've done a couple videos on is this one here this is the aqua hose bib these guys are based out of seattle uh and they make a kind of a sleek unit that looks a little nicer but they have kind of a secret ingredient i do want to mention this is their frost free hose bib unit right here this is the four inch model which would work perfect in texas you could even use it on a 2x4 wall so your hose bib is going to come in here but it's actually going to shut off back here in the wall and then make these in six inch deep eight inch deep all the way up to 12 inch deep models which are very very deep but one thing that's kind of cool about aqua that is different from most of the hose bibs out there besides of course this uh lack of the uh connector you actually need to insert something like this uh in here and i've heard a couple of you say that you don't like the idea of having a specialized piece compared to a standard one i i get that but one thing that's really interesting about these is these are stainless steel uh and this is copper and i did a video i don't know a year or two ago that these guys sponsored where i put both of these units through a freezer and then filled the freezer with dry ice it was like minus 100 out and the copper because it's such a good transmitter of heat had a giant condensation ball form on here and this one didn't because it was stainless steel and stainless steel is a terrible conductor right you wouldn't use stainless steel wiring in your house because the stainless does not conduct that heat very well the same is true about cold so when this shuts off back here you're not having that cold radiate back through the stainless steel device so a little plug for aqua my friends over there but another thing that i'm going to do regardless of of using frost free hose bibs back in the 90s when i started construction in washington dc we didn't use any frost free hose bibs in washington dc we used the standard hose bib and we had an inside shutoff valve usually in the basement now one issue we have here is we don't have basements right which means that i don't have a space to put a shut off valve without putting some kind of an access door in the drywall but if i had a standard hose bib and i have an inside shutoff that means that i can shut the water off to this hose bib and then usually those shutoffs have a little bleeder valve so you can bleed in a little bit of air which means that i can drain that water out i think that'd be handy to have even if you had a frost free hose bid because you could try you could turn those things off and drain these if you knew that you were going to have this five degree weather out or if you ever needed to change this like my friend up the street that had a busted pipe super easy to change if you have a shutoff on there so that's something i think i'm gonna start adding hard to do though in every house right especially when i don't have a basement i'm not trying to find a closet um a place that i can do a shut off valve that sort of thing um a couple of you asked me about my new house thank you andrew for filtering comments for me my new house made it through this craziness just fine i have two little uh thousand watt space heaters going in there and that's it and my new house has done amazingly well a big part of that is my new house has an insulated slab and in the south the slab really in the north even too is a massive place where you're losing heat out of your houses major major btu loss i took my flear camera into my current home which is a standard slab on great house and then i took my fleeter gun into my house under construction and took some images and i'm going to show you those in one second if i can pull them up and so for instance here's my new house right here with an insulated slab and you can see that floor is basically the same temperature as the walls i've got a little bit of a black line where the base of my wall hits the slab because i'm getting a little bit of thermal transfer there but i basically have eliminated a massive amount of btu loss at my new house under construction and then in my current house i put this on instagram the other day if you can see this what we're showing here is this bottom slab which is a dark color at the end really really cold huge amount of heat loss through there and then my two by four insulated wall of my current house above that is doing a decent job you can actually see the studs but you can see that heat loss in my slab right there and by having an insulated slab at the new house massive difference i mean that's literally cutting my my need for heating down by like 30 percent uh what else couple new couple things at my house that i've been thinking about so my new house under construction all electric i have no natural gas appliances whatsoever i did that for a couple reasons number one i'm gonna have a solar input i'm gonna uh do a 6kw solar array and i'm actually talking to uh a very interesting diy company uh about that they're wanting to sponsor the video but uh i've been wanting to do a somewhere between a five and eight kw solar rain i think that i'm gonna be net zero at around six kw at the new house but what do i do in these kinds of outages i mean a solar array does nothing for you i talked to one of my clients uh who has a giant like 12k array on his roof uh his power's out in that part of austin and his solar rays covered with snow that's not doing any good right now so you really do need either a propane or a natural gas-fired generator now natural gas which is how my current generator is is powered uh is pretty darn reliable you know it's it's a uh a transportation that runs underground it's not really susceptible to storms but there's a lot of talk over the last couple days about natural gas getting shot off and i thought well gosh if the natural gas gets shut off and that's how i heat my current house i'm in trouble i mean i got nothing i've got a natural gas cooktop i've got a natural gas furnace there's really nothing that i can do so at the new house i was thinking maybe i should go propane actually because you know propane doesn't go bad on like gasoline and my original plan actually a few months ago was to uh to do a propane um smaller generator you know my new house is super efficient so one of my mitsubishi hvac systems could be powered along with my kitchen fridge and freezer and my garage freezer as well as a lighting circuit with just a portable you know champion 6500 watt uh standalone generator and the cool thing about champion is the portables that i have from them are dual fuel so they'll run either propane or gasoline but again propane never goes bad your propane barbecue tank could sit in your garage for 30 years and if we run on propane that means i could store a pretty decent amount of propane and be good to go the hard part though is and then of course i need to get it filled occasionally and there is some end date on my propane if we had some really long lasting storm so i'm kind of debating that a little bit what do you guys think about that if i've got natural gas in the street am i silly not to just go ahead and pay the 30 a month tap fee to the natural gas company but have that fuel source readily available or should i go to propane knowing that no one can ever shut me off the only thing i could do is run out and potentially have plenty of storage on hand so i wouldn't run out the other thing that i'm debating is do i do a plug-in model meaning a you know portable wheelbarrow style generator that you press a button and the battery fires it up but you'd have to pull it out and plug it in when you have an outage versus what i have at my house which is a bigger unit and has an automatic transfer switch so when my power went out last week for 52 hours i was out of power for about i don't know a minute and a half two minutes once the power goes out the generator fires up once the generator gets up to its running speed the automatic transfer switch just boom switches it over to uh generator power and then it ran for 52 hours no problem i mean that was awesome my wife gave me a huge kiss and was so thankful i'm back huh it doesn't look like i'm back but maybe i'm back can y'all can y'all see me okay supposedly we're back uh my computer's not showing me but i'm gonna pretend like uh nothing's happened uh and i will apologize that uh my internet went down my my daughter came in and said her zoom class for school kicked her out too so sorry guys um let's see what was i talking about oh let me go back to questions andrew had a couple questions renee goodwin what's your experience with frozen and thawed pex piping any long-term negatives uh that's a great question you know generally speaking pex is able to expand and contract and i actually did a bunch of videos two or three years ago where i i froze a bunch of pecs in a freezer at my office and i didn't see any detrimental issues with that so i think that's a big reason to use pex and open or packs pex a which turns out i think there's another flavor or another brand of pex as well for a while there i thought hooping was the only one but for pecs a i think there's some other options i think that one's probably the most freeze resistant uh meaning it'll expand and contract right back to where it was no problem so you know for anybody that's got pecs in their house i think you're gonna be automatically much much better than someone without that uh let's see andrew any other questions from the crew debra generator sizing recommendations um the guy's a champion who uh sponsored that video with me came out with a brand new sizing tool that i really like where you're able to kind of check off on the tool hey here's the things that i want to run concurrently tv internet router coffee maker gas-fired furnace or heat pump and you kind of go through and check their list on their website and it'll go okay here's what will work and the cool thing about it is it'll also show you if you're going to buy just a standalone you know portable unit which again i was planning on using across the street i think that you could make that work on a bigger sized unit especially if you're just using your emergency circuits so i don't know my my thought though is as much as i hate to be thoroughly texting and say bigger is better i tend to think that running more systems and not being constrained a whole lot is the better way to go so my house i put in the biggest one they make that's a home standby generator i think it was 13kw something like that and it was all it's been awesome the only the only kind of uh the only kind of uh what's the word i'm looking for the only uh thing i can't run is my oven my oven's a 50 amp circuit uh with an oven microwave combo that's the only thing that's not running on mine so i mean if you can do something like that you're good to go if you have a bigger house champion's biggest is 13 you're going to have to go to generac or kohler or one of those other brands i think both generac and kohler make fantastic units uh and they go up to 20 plus kw so even a very large house uh can be run by one of those and anybody is going to make one that's going to run on either natural gas or propane so you don't have to worry about that uh b johnson minnesota hello from minnesota our long cold snap here over a week in the minus 20 range oh my gosh froze a four inch schedule 40 pvc roof drop roof top drain any tips oh man that stinks um that's really hard to freeze a schedule 40 pipe too especially a four inch roof drain but with ice damming i can see it i mean i think the biggest tip would be consider a heater for those you can drop a heater into that pipe in the winter time and i think they make specific heaters for those i bet if you googled it you could find it but i have this image in my mind of like a uh a heater that would like be for your fish tank that's kind of a tube heat tube style heater with a cord connector that you could literally drop in there uh melt that ice that's that's at the top of the pipe and you'd be good to go so that's probably the best bet i don't know that if it's a four inch pipe even wrapping heat tape around there is going to give you enough heat for that so you're going to have to go to more extreme temperature or more extreme measures they also make gutter heaters and things like that that you can turn on periodically that'd be the way to fix something like that call away i can't even imagine minus 20 uh in minnesota that's nuts man i would i would be surprised that you have a lot of flat roofs uh or rooftop drains in minnesota with the with the ice damming issue i wonder if any of our clients in austin have any rooftop drain issues with uh with this weather i built several flat roofed houses that have internal roof drains and they're pretty darn bulletproof but i don't know how ice proof they are because we're just again totally um unaware and on uh on ready for that uh for some reason my comments have stopped over here even though it looks like my live stream is going uh so andrew if you can hear me throw me some more comments otherwise we'll wrap this up i don't want to keep you guys too long we've been on for 45 minutes uh coaster have you installed a tesla solar roof on a house yet i have not i'm excited to do that someday i think they have a really cool product um you want to take a minute and talk about tesla powerwall and battery backup for solar for a minute that'd be kind of an interesting topic uh i'm maybe taking this to another part that you weren't interested in coaster but uh that client that i told you that has that big solar array like 12kw or 10kw something like that he called me after being out of power for 48 hours and said hey i'd really like to do a tesla power wall in my garage and i said well you know number one we've got to deal with not being able to make power on a snowy day because your solar cells are covered on your flat roof number two most of the time those tesla solar walls or power walls rather are only sized for you to be able to run overnight and then the solar comes back on the next day and starts charging again so if you wanted to be able to run for multiple days during bad weather especially when production was down you'd have to probably size a pretty darn good system in terms of number of batteries running in series so i don't know that they're the best solution i think honestly for general outages your best solution is is to think about a generator because now you can you can run for however many days you need to no issues with weather no issues with no sun that sort of thing and then most of the time you're grid connected and you're going to be able to do that the other issue that uh that i found when i was kind of looking into it in fact i'd been talking to generac uh about doing their battery mounted system at my house uh under construction one of the issues that i kind of ran into as i was researching it was those battery mounted systems tesla generac all of them they have a limited life span right just like all batteries do just like your hybrid cars batteries do right now there's no great recycling program for those so you know here you've got a a battery that's really not worth anything and is really hard to get rid of at the end of its life cycle and just like your laptop battery after you hit a certain number of charges the amount of charge that will fit in there is going to get reduced so by time you're you know six seven eight years old now you've got to reduce battery capacity and i don't want to quote the percentage because i don't know it exactly but i think it's something like you know maybe sixty or eighty percent of its capacity after year six seven eight something like that so now you've got a 10 year old battery in your garage it's only able to power at you know let's say 50 60 70 of its original capacity what do you do with that uh plus you know that could be a pretty decent amount of space taken up out of your garage you got to put them inside your house so it was for those reasons plus expense that i kind of decided to shy away from that on my house uh and i would say a you know a standard natural gas or propane general generator super reliable we've been making gas engines for years that can be a really good way to go okay one more question sins warrior 16 is it going to affect the building code in the region in the future do you think it will affect new houses that are going to be built down south did i answer this one already um yeah i think i answered this one already but briefly i don't think it will affect building codes personally but i do think that people will be more and more thinking about how do i make my house not have the same leaks that i had during the great freeze of 2021. i mean people are going to be talking about this my kids included for the next 10 15 20 years and how they lived through all the power outages and all the ice and that crazy temperature so uh i think that this is going to be talked about a lot the other thing that i wouldn't be surprised about and i'm not really interested in getting into a political conversation about global warming but our weather patterns seem like they're definitely different than when i was growing up so i suspect that this won't be an every 50-year event maybe this will be in every what five or ten year event and how much would that change what you would do as a builder or as someone building a house if you thought that something like this that just happened could happen to you again in the next five or ten years um bisamato have you ever installed geothermal in any of your builds thoughts why wasn't it an option for your new home build you know i have never installed geothermal down here in austin texas i've talked about it multiple times with multiple clients and there's a couple reasons this is probably a whole video that could be made on this but for texas i'm not a huge fan of geothermal a couple reasons number one we're incredibly rocky here so at my house across the street under construction i've got about three inches of topsoil and then a solid rock so if i was going to get geothermal and i'd i'd have to be drilling rock to put that in and rock is not a great transmitter of heat like water especially or like regular soil especially if you hit up a an aquifer or a well source so geothermal i don't believe is quite as good here in texas because of those reasons another couple reasons i don't love geothermal for texas is we just don't do it very often we don't have the subcontractor base the few systems get installed here are by a contractor that does maybe one or two systems a year whereas if you live in wisconsin as a geothermal contractor that's digging drilling new wells and installing new systems you know five days a week so you're just naturally going to be a lot more reliable and efficient when you've got a contract who does it day in and day out you know would you want to go to a surgeon who only performs a surgery once a month or to the eye doctor that's doing five laser surgeries a day you know naturally the guy who's doing it five times a day is going to be much better at it than the surgeon who only does that particular surgery on a rare occasion the other thing that really tips me over on geothermal is honestly the efficiency and the abilities that the mitsubishi vrf systems have and daikin and lg's in the same boat they are so darn deficient they can make heat down to -5 degrees outside at full capacity when they're hyper heat systems and the outdoor compressors are so darn quiet that you just don't have the same issues that you had with heat pumps from years ago so i think that geothermal in texas is not a great investment i would definitely opt for a higher end vrf system from one of the big three manufacturers mitsubishi is the the camp that i've been on for the last 15 years and that's what i installed at my house across the street i think that they make terrific equipment on the other hand though when i say this often be cautious you don't want to be the the same with your mitsubishi equipment as i said with geothermal you don't want to be the one person who's put a mitsubishi system in when the dealer the installer has never done it before or only does one every six months here in austin where i am with a great contractor that does it all the time day in and day out with great service and the techs know exactly what they're doing so it makes perfect sense for me to use a vrf mitsubishi system in particular but as i mentioned earlier daikin lg those guys made some great systems carriers green speed system i've heard really good things about in fact i'm doing an install of one of those coming up so stay tuned for a video on that i think they make terrific equipment and you know a bunch of others make really nice variable speed equipment and if you couple that with the dehumidifier if you've been watching my videos you know that you can get a really good system without having to go to the expense of geothermal and i also wonder how long that tax credit is going to be available in fact i actually don't know if it's currently still out there or not all right guys i've been talking for 55 minutes it's time for me to soothe my throat with a little hot tea i check my texts and my emails i have a feeling i'm going to be out on a couple service calls tomorrow for uh past clients or friends or neighbors but sure appreciate your support guys um thank you for all the comments i'm so sorry for the technical issue that i had my live chat's been broken too because of my internet break but it looks like i'm still broadcasting so just want to thank you guys for all that you do to support me and the build show as you know the are grown a ton uh we're approaching 800k on on subs which is crazy uh and uh many of you have been longtime supporters as you know i started youtube in 2008 when i had a little fledgling homebuilding company that was just uh you know two or three years old i started my company in 05 and youtube's done a huge amount of blessing for me and my family my wife also started a youtube channel during covid which is nutty and i don't know i'm hearing that the water might be shut off tonight holy cow crazy okay anyways i mentioned that earlier i knew that could happen if you're watching this and you're in texas last thought fill up your bathtubs fill up your water bottles heck i would put glasses of water on the on the counter if water gets turned off it's gonna get really bad really quick uh thanks again for all your support guys um follow me on twitter instagram otherwise we'll see you next time on the build show it's dorky i know but it's my thing all right y'all have a great night catch y'all later

Channel: Matt Risinger

Views: 91,867

Rating: 4.8953867 out of 5

Keywords: Matt Risinger, Build Show Network, The Build Show, Build

Id: yGd9jI72Fqw

Length: 46min 29sec (2789 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021