Hey guys, welcome to the FOC podcast. I am your host, Kyle McLaughlin got a really exciting topic to discuss today that I'm sure everybody that's either a homeowner or a tenant will be anxious to hear about, we're going to talk about how we can save money on your cost of ownership or tenant ship if that happens to be you. So the problem is huge, right? We all know that costs are rising, inflation is on the rise. People are desperately trying to find ways to reduce their costs on a monthly basis, and how to save more money. And I'm here to share some really easy ways that we can all do that starting today, that will make a great, great, huge impact for you on your cost of living on a monthly basis. So save two for this episode, I'm really excited to share with you, let's go.

So let's get right into it, how homeowners can start saving today. So the problem costs are rising. So more expensive to be a homeowner today than it ever has been in the history of the world. Really, we're at an all time high. So according to Forbes, I'm going to read some stats here for you. According to Forbes, the average cost to maintain a single family home is not only at an all time high, but according to Zillow and thumbtack, you can expect to pay about $14,000 a year, which is about $1,100 a month in the hidden costs related to owning a home. This estimate includes changes in property taxes and utilities, as well as maintenance costs as well. Another interesting stat is that from a third quarter of last year, I'm sorry, the year before now we're in 20 for the third quarter and 22 compared to the fourth third quarter and 23 average home maintenance costs increased by at least $400. So pretty significant. Obviously, the elephant in the room is inflation, which has increased the overall cost of goods and services. While ongoing labor and material shortages. shortages have also driven up the price, right? Think of purchasing as a hard part, but homeownership provides a whole new set of challenges. People end up exhausting their savings and have to rent out a portion of their property, or celandine. Downsize because they cannot afford afford insurance bills, maintenance, repairs, etc. Every little bit counts. So rather than looking for one big way to save a ton of money, let's save a lot of money in small ways and set yourself up for success. Okay, so we're gonna go over a few things today, some tips and some tricks that you can do by yourself within a budget or not to improve the energy efficiency of your home. So let's start with kind of the basics of how you can even determine whether or not your home is energy efficient. And if it needs improvement, the first thing I'd recommend is just to have a basic home inspection done. There's two ways that you can go about that you can simply Google local home inspectors in your area and find the most cost effective one and then let them know that what you're trying to accomplish that you're looking for ways to maximize your energy efficiency. Most should be trained and skilled enough to do that for you. A standard home inspection can run a couple 100 bucks depending on the size of your house or condo, very easy to do. At Northstar technologies, we offer an energy efficiency inspection report, in which we'll have one of our services and dedicated staff members go out to your property and give you a checklist and also go through an inspection of how you can improve your property. That's number one and foremost, some other things that you can start doing as a result of the homeowners inspection that you'll have done that we've seen are common. Number one is going to be having proper installation. I have my little checklist here. This is an energy savings guide that you can download off of our website. Northstar tdi.com, or Northstar homes.us. All of our content is free and downloadable. Make sure you visit that website. As I said the one of the easiest ones to determine is going to be proper installation. reading off the checklist here ensure your home is properly insulated. Good insulation keeps your home warmer in winter and cooler in summer, reducing the strain on your HVAC system HVAC system. Why is that important? Right? Most installation that's done. You know we do a lot of construction in Florida but really all across the US is going to be your standard batt insulation, so a standard mineral wool, which is good, right. But if you have blown in insulation on your roof or in your attic, that is a major source of where you're losing energy efficiency. Why? I'll give you an example in Florida you have your roof, especially during the summer that's just getting cooked all day during our hot summer days where temperatures can exceed 100 degrees and humidity is always at 100%. During the summer. Your Attic is extremely hot. It can it can reach temperatures of 130 degrees up there, right. So as the roof is getting baked, right, that heat is transferring. It's called thermal massing that process for the heat energy transfers from one material to the next and into the next until it gets into your environment, AKA your home. Right so if you have a way of bridging that or stopping that, you're going to reduce greatly the amount of energy heat that's being transferred into your home. How do we do that, well, your standard blown insulation isn't really made to do that, right, you have two problems in your attic. Number one is the lack of insulation. Number two is all your major AC components are running through your attic. So think about that for a second, your AC is outside the compressors generating all the energy, it has to to feed the wind into the vents, and those vents that run through your attic, which is the hottest point in your house or getting cooked. And then just to go through your air handler to try to get cold again, right, all of that requires an extreme amount of energy. So you want to be able to help close vents and that AC as much as possible. So instead of doing blown in insulation, if your budget allows, I would recommend doing an Icynene spraying or any sort of spray insulation, or simply just adding more blown in insulation in there. There's always code minimums for what builders require, or I'm sorry, what what the county or the municipality require builders to do. And everything is just done to code minimum right installation is no exception to that rule. So if you add simply add more blown in insulation that'll help I would highly recommend doing spray on Icynene areas strategically, where you can improve your energy efficiency, you'll see a massive reduction in your energy bill and a huge improvement in your overall energy efficiency for the house just by doing that. The next one right from our checklist that you can download on our website is going to be smart thermostats seems like pretty obvious. But most people even myself included on my previous home had the like old school Honeywell thermostat that just is basically just looks like a digital clock getting new info. thermostats have come such a long way. There's things like Adobe or NAS that are smart that connect to your iPhone or any smart tablet that you have, or even your computer. And there's a range of settings that you can set it for when you're away from home. When you're sleeping when there's peak activity, when there's peak heat weather you can use to regulate the energy output or throughput through the Nest thermostat. Alright guys, next tip from our energy savings guide is going to be something that's a little bit more customer incentive. But it's honestly going to help you the most, it's going to be replacing your windows and doors if you have the ability to do so. So obviously, that's more of a bigger ticket item for your budget. But as it comes to Windows, right, that's one of the most instant impact that you can have on saving energy, especially when you're looking at double pane windows, or Windows with high UV rating. We have some different dealers that we work with such as Marvin or Anderson beam, the more popular brands and some more cost effective brands such as Mr. Glass that we work with. So we're a full service GC and we can replace your windows at any time. Again, that can range I'll give you an average on like a 1500 square foot, three bedroom, two bathroom house can range anywhere between 12 to 18 $20,000. Depending on the brand and how many windows you have. Usually accounting for like eight or nine windows and maybe a slider to is about the price range I just gave you again, bigger ticket item, there's finance, financing options that you can have for that. So it's not a huge chunk. 

But the way to look at that is if I improve the windows that I have in my house, right, if my house normally was built before 2005, you're probably not going to have energy efficient windows, but even some of the newer construction to you, you'd want to get that checked out to make sure you have at least have the most up to date window that you can possibly have, right? If you're changing the windows, most of the time, it's a capital improvement, you're improving the value of your property, you're improving the equity in your property. So you have to think am I gonna Am I thinking about selling in the near future, or within the next five years? Or is this my forever home versus home that I'll always have for a long time whether it's an investment or personal property to where you can either offset that cost on a long term basis by the reduction in your energy bills, right and sometimes, actually, most of the time, insurance companies will provide discounts for you having high energy efficiency windows or impact rated windows. So that's important to note too not only on the energy savings side but on the insurance side as well. One of the last tips I'm going to give you from our energy guide is going to be ceiling right and that ceiling like the seal above me but ceiling any sort of lease that you may have in your home whether it's a door opening a window opening any rough opening from the outside to the inside of your home should be sealed, completely weatherproof drying. So what we say here is identify and seal any air leaks in doors and windows. This prevents the loss of heated or cooled air making your HVAC HVAC system more energy efficient, right? So you may wonder how you actually can determine whether or not something's leaking sometimes a very observable right you may see a hole or some sort of damage in the ceiling in the ceiling of your window of your doors. There's weather stripping on the bottom doors that sometimes get worn out over time as you open and close the doors. Same thing with above and below the doors. Another important thing to note too that I see a lot of people do not just in southwest Florida or Florida in general but across the country is people have the tendency to leave their garage door open but still have the the actual garage door right but the inside doors why.

Well make sure that if you're gonna have your garage door open, obviously close your door, your inside door. But try not to have the garage door open the main garage door open, because you're allowing all that air to come in and brace against the door that you have on the interior side. So I think that's just like kind of a common sense one most people will be like, well, I already know that. But I think it's worth mentioning, because I just happen to see so many people that keep their main garage door open. So make sure that stays closed as much as possible, especially during the summer. Another way to identify any leaks, especially air leaks, or water leaks is obviously to have a licensed inspector go out and check out your property. They have special tools and measuring systems that they use, in order to determine whether or not there was a perforation, and how easy or if it could simply be caught. Or if there needs to be some replacement that has to happen, right. So easy one there that you can that you can do again today when you go home, if you're listening to this at work on your commute from or to work. Once you get to your house, just look at all your windows and look around the ceiling and the caulking and if at all looks at any, if it looks like it's been damaged in the past, or if there might be a hole or something, get that clocked or get that checked out. Okay guys, so as we close out the episode, obviously, these are great tips. If you already have a home, if you're considering building a home, the best absolute best thing you can do is to build an energy efficient home, which reduces the amount of traditional materials that you're using such as wood concrete or steel, which are known to be huge thermal, not thermal insulators, but thermal thermal masters. So these traditional materials are known to be thermal masters, which is going to reduce the energy efficiency of your home. Right What you want is thermal insulators or thermal not that don't have any thermal bridging. That way, you're having the most energy efficient home possible. And one of the best ways to do that Northstar Building Systems offers a complete composite building system shell. So you would replace your concrete wall blocking your walls and you would replace the wood in your trusses and in your bucking. In order to reduce all those traditional materials and have a higher energy efficient home. 

We offer that as as a standard building system in our company. Whether you're already working with a builder or interviewing builders, that doesn't matter, we can act as a full builder. Or we can sell our shells to your builder to introduce that into the home that you're building. So obviously if you're building great option if you're not, please be sure if you already have a home to download this energy savings checklist from either the link below this video or also our website, Northstar TZ i.com and Northstar homes.us. I hope that today was insightful and helpful for you guys, we look forward to future episodes in which we'll be providing not only more tips, but over general guidelines on the construction industry as part of the FLC podcast. If you're wondering the FOC podcast FOC stands for the future of construction. And that's what we strive to do here every single day working with homeowners with the general public, but also working with builders and developers and hold them accountable hold everybody accountable to improve the way that we're building our homes that we put our families in our commercial buildings that we work out of our essential workers and government buildings that are that we desperately need to have them be the most energy efficient, sustainable, and cost effective that they possibly can be, in the words of the great Kanye West better, faster, stronger. And that's what we strive to do here every single day. So please subscribe to our podcast helps spread the awareness, pound on the like button, pound on the subscribe button and do whatever you can to spread our message. We greatly appreciate it and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the FOP podcast. Thank you.