Check out Travis Jones of Smart Roof and Home Inspections on The Ride Along as he dives into how building science is shaking up the home inspection game. He’s coming at you straight from Dallas, talking about what makes homes stronger, longer-lasting, and more energy efficient – the nuts-and-bolts stuff if you’re looking to do more than just the basics with your Palmtech tools.
Travis gets into why picking the right roofing materials matters, how insulation can impact home efficiency, and how solar not only saves on bills but also adds a major boost to a home’s market appeal. If you’re looking for ways to help your clients make smarter home improvement decisions, this episode has the insights you need.
Lastly, if you liked this episode, be sure to sign up for The Ride Along newsletter and get the latest episodes delivered straight to your inbox!
Transcript
Brad Lowery
Nobody’s watching this right now, it’s fine. Yeah, so we’ll do an official countdown intro and then I trim it off. Why is that so live stream?
Travis Jones
Hahaha
Matt Brading
That would be very funny if like we recorded the pre thing and then put that out as a separate thing later. I’m not sure if that’s possible.
Travis Jones
Mmm.
Brad Lowery
Well, you know, we’re fixing to find out. mean, people might be watching for all I know, but you know, we’re just gonna go with it. Okay, we about ready to start this thing for real?
Travis Jones
Let’s do it.
Matt Brading
Man, I couldn’t be anymore ready.
Brad Lowery
I am so freaking excited. right. Where are my video uploads?
Matt Brading
You actually don’t seem ready.
Travis Jones
Yeah, right? Yeah, that’s fair.
Brad Lowery
You know, listen, there’s upload media. Come on now. I had done uploaded this last time. All of this gets turned off, guys.
Brad Lowery
Here we go. All right.
Learn that.
Here we go. This will be the official start right here, and I will trim it in three, two, one.
Matt Brading
Okay.
Brad Lowery
It is another day, another episode of the Ride Along here today. And Matt, how you doing? Welcome back on. Travis, how are you doing as well,
Travis Jones
Doing good, man. It’s been a busy couple of days. We a big windstorm in Dallas, Fort Worth. So yeah, it’s been crazy.
Brad Lowery
dang. So you’re in Dallas, Matt, obviously you’re down in Houston.
Matt Brading
Houston just arriving back from Las Vegas actually.
Brad Lowery
we got to talk a little bit about that because we talked in the last episode about it for sure. want to hear whether or not you and Beau got into a fight.
Matt Brading
That is correct.
Matt Brading
We did not actually. was a very, it was a very, it was a bromance to say the least. Actually, I mean, that’s not the least. I don’t want to get anybody like too excited or whatever. was just, it was just, we’re bros, man. You know, if there’s, you you meet people online. I’ve been talking to Beau on the phone. I’ve talked to him online or whatever for like three years. You sometimes wonder like if these people are going to be the same in person as they actually are like, like, you know, their, their virtual self.
Brad Lowery
I got you.
Matt Brading
I actually didn’t ever question that really with both and and it was it was exactly what you would expect. Now he’s my brother from another mother man. We’re just we’re buddies and we had a real good time stomping around Vegas and really I mean like I can’t think of anybody else I’d rather walk around that show and try to learn about stuff with. He has a really you know he’s got a we’re much different in the way we think and so.
Brad Lowery
No, definitely.
Matt Brading
When we’re walking through the show and seeing all this new and cool stuff, he’s like, wow, let’s go, go check this out. And then we ended up in a booth. would have never gone in. And then next thing you know, we’re making videos. And so we’ve got content for days, probably weeks because of it.
Brad Lowery
See, I get to all that out and it was a bromance where we went into a booth that I wasn’t thinking about and we were making and I can just make it say whatever after that. This is some special, I’ll see you guys on the ride along here. See, this is why you guys need to subscribe to the show if you haven’t already, definitely do because the conversation with Beau last time was fantastic. And we’re having a good conversation here today.
Travis Jones
Yeah, you can. The magic of editing.
Matt Brading
That’s a little scary. It’s okay though. It’s okay.
Brad Lowery
with Mr. Travis as well. So first of all, Travis, tell everybody a little bit about yourself, what you do up in Dallas, kind of what your specialty is. Because before we jump into the topic, after you introduce yourself, we got a little new segment that we’re going to be kind of doing here. first, tell everybody who you are, man.
Travis Jones
Cool. Yeah. It’s Travis Jones in Dallas, serving all kind of Dallas Fort Worth market. But, my company is called Smart Roof and Home Performance. And then on Instagram, I’m Travis builds it. And so we do roofing, home performance testing, insulation, and then kind of within that. I like to drill down on for residential roofing. do fortified roofs, which is kind of the next standard for how to do a better, more resilient roof. And then on the insulation side, I do blower door testing and blower door assisted air sealing to try to tighten up the envelope, make, give people a more comfortable and healthy home.
Brad Lowery
No, I love it. Definitely. you know, kind of in, in talking with Matt a little bit leading up to this, one of the things that we really want to dig in on today, and I think for everybody watching, this is what’s going to be interesting. We’re not just talking home inspections. We’re not just talking roofs. We’re going to be talking a little bit about building science because in your dealings with roofing, it’s not just roofing material shingles or anything of the nature that you specifically deal with, but you also deal with solar a little bit as well, don’t you?
Travis Jones
I do. Yeah. So we, I’ve dabbled in solar, you know, solar was kind of when interest rates were low, solar was a little bit more attractive to people. I think it was a better value, but as interest rates have gone up, you know, unfortunately, solar can be a, one of those industries where people over sell what it can do for you and over promise. And, it was really because of seeing some of the failures of solar, I got interested in building science and figuring out. Can we make a home better first before we put solar on it? And that’s what led me to get a blower door and start doing home performance testing and trying to just make the house better so that solar, if it’s appropriate, it’s not appropriate for every house. Especially some of the ones with you. If all the panels are in the shade, you know, you’re not, it’s not really doing anything. And unfortunately, I mean, down the street for me, I’ve got someone who’s has just a full array, just always shaded. It’s like, that’s just not how solar works, but.
Matt Brading
Yeah, it’s not really gonna do anything.
Travis Jones
Let’s assume you get the house really fine tuned and working well. Solar’s a great cherry on top, but it’s something we have to be a little more cautious about as I’ve learned a lot more about building science.
Matt Brading
I love it because when I first met you, at least in person, Travis, this is actually what kind of fascinated me and wanted, said, man, we need to talk about this, like on a podcast or on some form, we need to have this conversation because it was intriguing to me that you were, I think, selling solar equipment and you were walking to these houses and realizing these people did not need solar equipment. They needed better energy efficiency. And that…You know, motivated you to start your business. If I have that storyline, correct. Is that, is that right?
Travis Jones
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was kind of when I started smart roof and home performance a little over, um, we’re in our third year. So October of 2022, I’ve been selling solar for about a year and a half. I’ve been selling roofs for other companies. And then I just kind of saw an opportunity to bring it all together and, really do a little more of a high touch. I’m not a volume churn and burn guy. I like to do a little more high touch with the client, figure out what do they really need? And then solar kind of fits into that discussion. Some people come to me wanting solar and we’re like, Hey, let’s do a few other things first. And then we can get to solar later on. that’s, started my own company so I could do things the way I wanted to do them.
Matt Brading
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that. So let me ask you a question about that. Like, so I think we’re probably going to bounce a little bit from solar to energy efficiency and really with a core topic being building science. you know, solar in Texas is not very popular. And I want to know, like, your take on this. So how do you feel about once we get a house in better energy efficient condition, once we address some of these issues where you’re losing efficiency?
Travis Jones
Sure.
Matt Brading
You actually think even in Texas that solar is still a good option.
Travis Jones
think it can be, but it’s all about like, are your goals with solar? if you have, let’s say your house, we’ve tightened up the envelope, we’ve improved the insulation, we’ve gotten better, more efficient HVAC. Once we do all that, we say, okay, now we need solar. Well, if you were to analyze that house before you did all the improvements and then after you did all the improvements and put the numbers on all these solar proposal tools, after you do all the improvements, you would need a lot less solar. So that’s a good starting point. You need fewer panels, which means it’s less cost. So now it’s less that you’re even risking on it. Okay. And to the extent that it can offset your electricity bill a little bit, that’s, that could be a good thing, but the real
Matt Brading
Got it.
Travis Jones
What we really need in the whole energy space is better storage options, i.e. batteries, because right now they’re really expensive and they don’t make financial sense. So I, in our market, they make sense in markets where there’s much higher electricity costs, but the battery’s not gonna pay for itself in Dallas, Fort Worth. It’s just not going to. But if you get outages and you wanna have a battery so that you can keep your freezer and all the meat you got from hunting season from staying frozen, or if you wanna keep your CPAP machine running at night, maybe that’s good reason to do it. But it’s not right now. Here’s the question I ask people. I say, why do you want solar? And if the first thing they say is to save money, I’m like, then we need to have a serious conversation. Because you’re not most likely going to save much money in Texas because our energy costs are still pretty low. And when they buy back whatever you send to them, they buy it kind of at a discount. there’s just a lot of hype.
Matt Brading
Right.
Brad Lowery
of
Matt Brading
Not a lot of it, Smithy.
Travis Jones
Yeah, there’s a lot of hype with it. And then the whole thing of like, it adds value to your house. mean, really how many, how many realtors are like, take that off so we can list your house, you know.
Matt Brading
Yeah, it’s actually questionable whether or not it adds value. A lot of people in Texas don’t really want it yet. And I think that a lot of that has to do with the fact that our energy is not very expensive as compared to some other areas. And that’s the reason why I wanted to know like in Texas, if it made sense, what you’re saying makes total sense. So like, you know, just lower the amount of energy you actually need, uh, by making your home more efficient, put your money into those areas and then, and then let’s see if we even
Travis Jones
Yeah.
Travis Jones
Mm-hmm.
Matt Brading
want to go that direction after all of that, because I think you probably see a lot more direct benefits by handling these issues. Whenever you have somebody such as yourself, go through there and really pick the house apart and start finding areas where you’re missing efficiency. Now, with that being said, because I’ve seen you with the smoke pen and everything going through and finding areas where houses are leaking. By the way, I have one of those coming, not that one.
Travis Jones
okay.
Matt Brading
But there’s another company that actually manufactures a product called flue blocker. And it’s something that goes inside your chimney flu when you’re not using it out of like big thick wool. And it’s there to keep drafts from coming in through that area. It’s really cool. let me see. What’s that?
Travis Jones
okay.
Brad Lowery
Well, how’s that people with use of insulation? I’ve seen some people like stuff vacant chimneys or vacated chimneys with insulation.
Matt Brading
Yeah, this is the same thing except it’s thinner, but it’s like a it’s a it’s more like a mineral wool or something like that. And it’s got handles on it. So and it’s sized specifically for the area. I mean, I think it’s a really good idea to block that area when you’re not using it. Right. And so I’ll I’ll I’ll let you know what those are. But anyway, they also manufacture a smoke pencil or smoke pen or something like that. And so they’re they’re sending one over and I’m going to I’m going to take a look at that and see how I might be able to incorporate that as well. Because I’ve seen you use it and it seems like such a great tool, especially
Travis Jones
Yeah.
Travis Jones
I do too. Yeah, that’d be great.
Matt Brading
conjunction with the blower door. where are the areas that you’re seeing, let’s say existing homes, what are the areas that you are seeing that are failing the most often in terms of energy efficiency, things that are like that. I want to call it like low hanging fruit. Like you walk into a house and you’re like, okay, well, first of all, we do this, this and this.
Travis Jones
Mm-hmm.
Travis Jones
Sure.
Yeah. You know, and first, just so you kind of understand the way I think about a house, a house is a system, right? It all works together and in building science, you kind of have the four pillars of that system, durability, comfort, health, and efficiency. Right? So if it’s, if we’re not going to build it to last, why are we building it? If we don’t have the most durable approach to shed water and all that, right. But then what do we do to make a house more comfortable and healthy, mainly air quality, but that’s also sound and light, you know, it’s environmental quality. Here’s the cool thing. If you make a house durable, comfortable, and healthy, it will be efficient.
Brad Lowery
Now here’s a question that I want to kind of pivot off of that specifically because I did an episode of the ride along last year. We kind of got two, two different tacks with the show here. One is the podcast as we’re doing now, but there was also kind of a video series that I shot last year and I got to do a, episode with an inspector just outside of Austin. And one of the things that, we have here in Florida is something that’s happening out in Texas as well, which is that they are throwing up new homes faster than you can blink, right? So when it comes down to durability, what standards are you seeing or what are things that people can do to improve upon durability in houses that are being chucked up as quickly as they are these days?
Travis Jones
yeah.
Travis Jones
Well, in my opinion, it always starts with the roof, right? Your roof is your umbrella and it’s supposed to, and I always tell my guys, I’m like, Hey, what’s the roof’s job to keep the water out, right? Water destroys buildings. So we just have to have, we need to do better roofs. And that’s why I do, you could look at the whole fortified standard. It’s a, it’s a better than code approach. And we do it when we’re reroofing. We’re doing one tomorrow. In fact, where it’s things like taping the seams on the deck, re-nailing the deck, making it more secure and then doing everything to keep the water out. So you start with a better roof, siding, you know, people have, I’m sure more people are getting familiar with the concept of a rain screen on siding where, know, you have your sheathing and then you, you don’t just put your siding against it, but you create a number of ways to do it, but you’re creating a gap for draining and drying so that
Matt Brading
Nice.
Travis Jones
moisture gets behind the siding, it can drain dry. it starts with that for sure. And then, you know, if you have issues with drainage, you got to deal with that. So, but we start with the roof. I think unfortunately the code, you know, for it’s interesting fortified is a better than code way to do a roof, but most of the time, the roofs that are being built and re roofed, which happens a lot, especially in my market, it’s like the biggest hail market.
Brad Lowery
This is beyond paper barrier, yeah.
Matt Brading
You too.
Travis Jones
Those, they’re not even being built to code to begin with. People don’t change the flashing, which leads to failures. People don’t have the ventilation right. That’s one of the things we fix the most. Even when someone doesn’t need a re-roof, we’ll go in and say, man, you’re under-ventilated, which may mean you need more exhaust, but it often means you need more intake, soffit vents or other types of intake vents. So we want to ventilate it right. And once we do that, that helps the performance. And then I think from a low hanging fruit standpoint, Matt, as you mentioned, like a homeowner could do this. And I’ve got some videos of me doing it at my own house. A lot of times after a renovation, right? Contractor goes in, cuts a bunch of holes and puts what kind of, we love recessed lights, right? All those recessed lights, but if they don’t air seal around those lights, it’s kind of crazy math. If you take a six inch can, and cut the drywall and you don’t seal that gap between the drywall and the can, it’s basically the same thing as putting a golf ball size hole in your sheetrock. And if you multiply that times 20 lights, right, that’s a big hole connecting your attic air you don’t want to be breathing to your inside air. so go in and getting a tube of big stretch and pulling off the trim and if it’s not sealed, just
Matt Brading
Right.
Travis Jones
big stretching around your lights or around your AC grills. That’s a weekend project that most people could do and that’s low hanging fruit.
Matt Brading
Right. Definitely. Like I like the sash coat plug there. That’s a fantastic company. But and Big Stretch is the tool for that job. But yeah, I mean, that’s an area where not only are we talking about like thermal energy, but also like dust and things are coming through those holes as well, especially when the house is pressurized and depressurized, whether it’s using fans or whether it’s opening and closing doors or whatever. Like you said, you know, a lot of times, you know, whenever
Travis Jones
Yeah.
Travis Jones
Absolutely, yeah.
Matt Brading
you’ll get those situations where a home will depressurize whenever you’re using an exhaust fan because they don’t have makeup air or something like this. I see this in homes every now and again, and you can just imagine what’s happening whenever things are moving from the attic space into the house and all the stuff that’s in your attic, not only just the air and the temperature, but all the dust and debris that is bringing with it.
Travis Jones
Here’s like quick, like simple example. So I was at a person’s house and they said, man, this tiny little hallway. like main living space hallway into a bedroom. Okay. That hallway each, there were doors, a door from the living room into the hallway and a door from the hallway into the bedroom. said, gets so hot in this hall. Why does it get so hot in here? So I’m, you know, looking at it. It’s like, well, first of all, you have a return, an AC return at the bottom of the sheetrock in the hallway. And right above me was the attic stair. And so I actually just closed the doors, turn on the air conditioner. had my little manometer and I stuck a hose under the door and it depressurized by eight Pascals that little space. And I’m like, it’s just sucking air from your, every time your air conditioning kicks on, it’s sucking air from around that attic stair into your living space. So you need to air seal your attic stairs or we’re going to start installing, we’re doing our first one next week, the FACRO Attic Stair. Did you see those at the build show? Dude, those are amazing. They lock, they have like a little key lock them and it’s an air sealed Attic Stair. Cause how are they?
Matt Brading
Yeah, I did.
Brad Lowery
How are they achieving that? Is it just simply using like weatherstripping around the hatch?
Travis Jones
It’s the way they build it. Yeah. It’s a, you know, they’re not cheap. It’s, think we’re getting one that’s a, it’s a, about a $700 door. and you know, there’s different prices. They, this one we’re getting has a cool like metal stairs, but, you can maybe get them as low. wooden stairs, maybe as low as like 350, but basically because there’s weather stripping and the way they built it, when it shuts and you turn the key and it latches, it’s airtight.
Matt Brading
Travis Jones
And they also make a cover you can put on it to have another layer that has an airtight deal. know,
Brad Lowery
You talk about those encapsulated foil contraptions that go around the top of the attic access.
Travis Jones
Yeah, the funny thing about those, I’ve got some funny videos about those. Everyone thinks, I’m insulating. It’s like, yeah, but you’re not air sealing. So I was in an attic and it was a great friend, Evan, who’s a mold inspector. He’s part of our BS and beer group here in Dallas. And he’s done his own, like a lot of DIY stuff at his house.
Matt Brading
I don’t know.
Travis Jones
And he thought he’d done a good job of sealing that attic stair and he had the little silver. And so we go up in the attic. have the blower door running and I’ve got my little retro tech air tracer running along the seam and it’s just sucking air into the house. It’s like even Evan, who’s a very conscientious knows what he’s doing. It’s just, it’s just not the sometimes just not the right product. You just need a better product to serve that purpose.
Brad Lowery
I’ve got a question on this simply because again, you know, when I got into the home inspection field almost 10 years ago, a lot of what you heard people talking about was that you wanted the house to be able to breathe, right? You wanted the house to be well ventilated, be able to breathe. And yet a lot of the modern language is about air sealing. Like, do you actually want the house to breathe or do you want it to be airtight? Which is it?
Travis Jones
So, Allison Bales has been writing this blog for years called Energy Vanguard. He’s out of Atlanta. He’s a brilliant guy, brilliant building science guy. And he wrote a book called, A House Needs to Breathe or Does It? And he talks about it. said, look, if you’re inside something that’s breathing, you better get out. No, he said, a house does need to breathe only to the extent that we make it breathe.
Matt Brading
Ha ha.
Matt Brading
Controlled ventilation.
Travis Jones
So it’s controlled. it’s like, and another phrase you’ll hear the building science guy say is build tight, ventilate right. So it’s cause where do you want the air coming from? Do you want to breathe naturally from like who wants to spend time in their attic? If you have an unconditioned attic that you don’t want to breathe that air.
Matt Brading
Right? There you go.
Travis Jones
So we want to air seal all of that. if you get tight enough to where you need the highest end fresh air, like an ERV, you do that. But maybe you just need a ventilating dehumidifier just to get some fresh air in there. And if it’s an older home, you may never get it so tight in a retro that you need fresh air coming in. It can’t hurt. But yeah, I think you have to, it’s an attic, an unconditioned attic needs to breathe. We want good ventilation, but a house only needs to breathe to the extent that we are controlling it. It’s about control.
Matt Brading
Now, I think like to add something to that and to like kind of expand upon what your question was, Brad, like, you know, when you’re talking about these old houses, I think you should kind of compare them more to an attic. Okay. Like the fact of the matter is like we are building houses to try to achieve better energy efficiency. This has been going on for a long time now. And while we’re, we were making advancements like into like passive houses and houses that have like crazy energy efficiency. There’s this space where like, you know, we, we have the old houses that like basically weren’t efficient. And then we have the houses like in between the high performance that are like somewhat efficient. you know, anytime you get past that old house where like it was completely, I mean, you’d have a 2000 square foot house with like a four and a half ton AC on it. Cause they had barely any, if any insulation, they had single pane windows. There was like, no R value anywhere going on in these things. You don’t want to encapsulate that, right? Like you don’t want to eliminate air movement. Like you have to, and that was the reason why you think like, okay, well how we didn’t air seal things like back in the day, like why were houses not just completely filled with mold? Well, they compare them to an attic. mean, air was literally moving through them the whole time, you know, but now, but there was also costing a lot more in energy because you know, you had to have much bigger units and you had to run them a lot more to cool them or heat them. You you’re constantly losing heat in these houses. And so, you know, as we get into more modern construction, we’re getting more energy efficient and then it becomes more important to manage ventilation and to have everything be air sealed and control what is going through the house. Because I mean, that’s where the danger happens is whenever we get into this zone where we’re getting energy efficient and we lose control of ventilation, that’s when all of a sudden the stuff from outside starts making an inside where when and where it’s not supposed to. And we end up in situations where we have mold, where we are not just uncomfortable, but we have a health concern. I’m sorry, Travis, you’re the building science guy. How did I do on that?
Travis Jones
Yeah, no, that’s yeah. That’s I think what, what has happened is. So it’s like, think about an airplane. Some of the early airplanes. There was like, you know, you had a little windshield, but it was open to the air, right? You weren’t worried about getting fresh air in the airplane. just breathe. And then as airplanes got more sophisticated and wanted to climb higher, now you have to do more things. You got to, it’s got to be more airtight. But once it’s airtight, now we got to make sure we’re filtering it. And then if you want to go to space in a rocket ship, the higher performance the airplane, the more you need things like the right kind of ventilation and airflow and filtration. It’s the same thing with a car. It’s one thing to ride in a convertible, but when you get in your car, we think of how much we’ve improved the way climate zones and air and all that. But those all have filters and all that. What’s happened is with our homes, as we’ve gotten them tighter, we don’t always bring in the right, technology, the right mechanicals. Right. So Corbett Lunsford is one of my mentors in the, in the home performance space. He’s got an incredible YouTube channel, home diagnosis. They, he’s got three seasons of a TV show where they talk, they go in and figure out how to solve these problems with, with a home. And he says his, his kind of model is very simple. Air seal, insulate, mechanicals. So I do the air seal, insulate part, and then I have a great HVAC contractor to come in and say, all right, now that we’ve air sealed and insulated, what do we need to do on the mechanical side? Dehumidification, fresh air, filtration. And then sometimes, how many times, you know, or…
Brad Lowery
Got it, got it.
Travis Jones
You go to a house and they had, they knew they needed by code some fresh air. So they’re just pulling a duct from a soffit and they have a motorized damper going into the return. And it’s, and it’s basically been disabled, right? Why, why did they disable it? Well, but what’s happening? There’s a reason that they came out and said, let’s disable this fresh air. It’s cause they have too much humidity, right?
Matt Brading
Yeah, bye.
because they don’t know what they’re doing.
They, humidity, right? They think that that is the culprit, but oftentimes that is not the culprit. That is controlled ventilation. And where the culprit is, is the areas where they slipped up and we have uncontrolled ventilation.
Travis Jones
Well, it can be though. Here’s the thing. If you dump fresh air in Texas into your return plenum, what are the chances that air is gonna be a lot warmer than the air that’s in your house? Pretty good. That warm air coming into that plenum is now gonna hit that evaporator coil on your AC and it’s gonna increase the humidity.
Matt Brading
Yeah.
Travis Jones
in the system. So I think they disable it because it’s every time the fresh air comes on in the summer, it just makes it more humid in the house. Well, there’s a reason it’s cause that hot air coming in is warming up the coil and adding moisture to the air. So that’s just not a good way to do fresh air. It’s a shortcut. It’s acceptable, but that’s where doing it through a Santa Fe ventilating dehumidifier so that you’re not or an ERV. So you’re not dumping hotter air into the return.
Matt Brading
ERV.
Travis Jones
You know, so that’s part of the problem is it’s as we get tighter and the code requires some things and not others. Guys don’t understand how to, they don’t know what to do. had a, talking to a guy. I’m not, I won’t name the builder, but they do really nice homes. And he was telling me, yeah, we put a fresh air. We build tight enough that we have to put fresh air in all of our houses. It’s like, well, do you put dehumidifiers? He’s like, no, why not? Well, the code doesn’t require it. It’s extra. You know, they’re like a high end production builder. And he said, they keep getting callbacks for if they’re lucky, people say it’s too humid. But if it’s really bad, they say, I have mold. And it’s like that we should be putting dehumidifiers in, but we don’t, especially at that level of air tightness. Because now the air conditioner is more efficient. It doesn’t run as much. It doesn’t pull out as much humidity. So you need dedicated dehumidification. It gets very complex. we need great HVAC contractors. We need more of them to help solve these issues.
Matt Brading
That’s for sure.
Brad Lowery
Well, this is where I, I start to wonder if we’re introducing some of our own problems to fix down the line, right? you know, for example, it’s, and I’m not, I’m not advocating against more efficient homes, but down here in Florida, you’ve got, houses that have weathered everything from hurricanes to termites to everything in between. And they’ve been here for over a hundred years, right? I mean, every, every part of the country where you’ve got ancient homes and it’s like, so what, what has allowed those houses to hold up?
Travis Jones
Mm-hmm.
Brad Lowery
without modern efficiency codes over the years and still be relatively durable, still be relatively sound to have aged gracefully in such a way, whereas with the sophistication that we have now with some of these new systems, we have to now think extra hard about, for example, like you’re talking about air sources, how much humidity? It’s like, okay, we solved one problem, but by doing that, we just created another one.
Travis Jones
Mm-hmm.
Brad Lowery
And this to me is now so regionally specific that, you know, one specific building code is not going to solve for it. You’re going to have to do this by region, right? You guys have a lot of humidity in Dallas. Imagine building things that tight in Florida where humidity is just, we have air you can wear, right? So how do you solve for that? You know, something that I kind of was thinking on as you were talking about sealing things.
Travis Jones
absolutely.
Travis Jones
You
Brad Lowery
is like how does air tightness better affect or negatively affect things like stack effect in the wintertime because in Dallas you guys still deal with winter to a small degree. Can you speak to that at all?
Travis Jones
Well, sure. mean, if you have the more air sealed your attic is in the winter, right? That hot air is wanting to push up. Well, you’re keeping it. You’re trying to cut off the path for the air to get out of the conditioned space. Right. And so, there’s a, I call him building science Yoda. name is, Ken Allison. He’s coming to speak at our BS & beer next next or this month, but he likes to say, if you stop the flow of air, you don’t need much insulation. A lot of the heat transfer is air transfer. And so I think getting it air sealed is going to help that. And I think maybe to zoom out and say, why do we build to begin with? What is the purpose of the built environment? We’re trying to separate ourselves from the outdoor conditions, right? And if you’ve ever been, if you’ve ever had the privilege of on a warm night, being a camping, on a camping trip and you’re in a tent with another guy. It’s not a pleasant night’s sleep, right? It is not a pleasant night’s sleep, right? And you gotta roll those, right? It’s like we’ve cut off the outside, now what’s, the thing is as humans, we create a lot of stuff. We have humidity, we have smells, we have skin that sloughs off methane. Yes, we cook, like the act of cooking in your, you’re throwing off all kinds of VOCs and pollutants. So we’ve enclosed ourselves so we can stay,
Brad Lowery
They got real fast air traffic.
Matt Brading
Yeah.
Brad Lowery
Nothing, yeah.
Travis Jones
out of the elements, right? mean, the whole, South really grew after the air conditioner was invented when Carrier invented the air conditioner. Cause people are like, well now we can, now we can live in this stuff. But the more you live in it, it’s like, what else is happening in the space and how do we deal with it? And you’re right, the tighter we, there’s always a consequence. It’s a, there’s, and maybe it’s a way of thinking of it’s just trade-offs. You know, the tight, like think about it with roofing. We see a lot of houses that originally had a wood shake roof on it. And they were a big gable and they just have two little gable vents on the end and they had wood shakes. Well, eventually we couldn’t do wood shakes anymore. So we took those off. We decked the house and now we have an asphalt shingle. So that whole assembly used to breathe really well with just these two little gable vents. It does not breathe well anymore, right? Because just the shingles themselves. It wasn’t airtight all around. So that whole assembly could breathe. But then we changed the surface, the primary surface and didn’t change the ventilation. like, let’s put whirly birds. Let’s put Ridge vent. Let’s put, you know, I there’s a house I’ve been working on that there is no soffit. There’s just not any to pull air. And it has gable vents, Ridge vent and whirly birds. They have basically three different kinds of exhaust. It’s not working. Yeah. But the house wasn’t designed to work like that. So we have to say, okay. It’s we’ve changed something. What are the unintended consequences? How do we need to, and now what do we need to do to update the design, change the roof assembly, et cetera. Right. So I think we have to do that with everything. And, we, does, it’s going to be a, it takes time to evolve into how we need to handle all of that. You know, everything from the wall and roof assemblies to the inside to all of it.
Brad Lowery
We’re just continually losing.
Matt Brading
I feel like you’re, you’re, you’re asking like, you know, basically like, why don’t we build like we used to like things were fine. Why do we had to go mess with it? I think some of it comes down to like changes in code, um, that, know, kind of like what you were saying, you know, some things that we are not allowed to do anymore for other, for various reasons. I mean, we used to do all kinds of crazy stuff. They used to put asbestos in homes, lead paint, galvanized water piping, you know, we come up with.
Travis Jones
Learning. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Matt Brading
better ways of doing things because we learn more. And then I think, you know, the, becomes this gray area because you want to, uh, you know, well, okay. If, if, if we can, if we know this now, if we have this knowledge now, let’s use this knowledge to create something a little bit better. And then, so, so we do that. But I mean, yeah, every time you try to get some, make something a little bit better, there could be something else to, oh, well, we did this, but we didn’t do that. And this is really what’s happening in production building right now because they’re kind of like, got a toe in building science because people want energy efficiency and that’s the other driver, right? It’s people. People want energy efficiency, right? The people want that. And so builders have to build this or the people are going to buy the houses or at least they have to sell them on it, right? So production builders are selling them on the energy efficiency, but they’re not delivering. They’re not meeting the expectations and there’s not really a whole lot of people that
Travis Jones
Mm-hmm.
Matt Brading
know what those expectations are, how to achieve them, not in construction these days. And man, it is seemingly a dying breed, construction, people in construction. We need people in the trades for sure.
Travis Jones
Yeah, we do.
Brad Lowery
Now, Matt, you hit on something interesting there, which is the consumer demand as well. I remember seeing these were new construction homes. Gosh, like I said, almost about 10 years ago when I first started inspecting and Washington, DC was going through a new construction boom where I was at the time. you know, the guy that I kind of learned under, he pointed out a few things as I was going through on a few phase two inspections and he pointed out some of the some of the caulk work that was being done around.
Travis Jones
Mm.
Brad Lowery
exterior joints in the wall framing. And he’s like, yeah, so if you look at this corner over here, if you look over these windows here, a lot of these builders, we didn’t use to caulk these areas, but they’re doing that now to sell it as being more energy efficient. You really think that that little bead of caulk was really doing anything? No, but the buyers coming on site and they’re going, well, this separates them from this guy down the road, this builder down the road over here in this division. And for them, it was just that one little thing that they could do that made them more valuable than the other builder, right? But from there, you started to see fully encapsulated basements. You started to see closed cell foam, spray insulation, things like that. so, you know, I guess maybe consumer awareness does help to drive some of this to a degree. Travis, how have you really seen that affect your roof business?
Travis Jones
Man, the roofing business, it’s the wild west out here in Texas. So there’s no, there’s no license. There’s no mandatory license in Texas. The only roofing license is voluntary and it’s through RCAT. And what I got, I was able to get it last year and became one of literally 350 roofers in Texas with a license. We have like 15,000 roofing companies and now some people like, the license doesn’t mean anything, but, okay. It’s marketing, you know, whatever. Hey, I went through the, I want the accountability. want to keep getting better, but the incentives, if you ever heard the phrase, show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome. Like, what are we incentivizing? So unfortunately the way most people, especially in DFW get new roofs is insurance pays for it. So they’re always like, I get a new roof. My insurance is going to pay for it. Well, as deductibles have gone up, that becomes a problem because guys used to just eat the deductible. And then how do they do that? How do they do a roof for less? Well, they cut corners. So people are used to this idea that, well I can, I shouldn’t have to pay for a roof. I’ve been paying my insurance premiums, which are high. They feel justified and I get it. Right. But because the roof, like I said, is this umbrella for your house, and it’s important to re… to do it correctly, to protect your home, protect your investment, protect your family. really, to me, it comes back to the consumer. They have to get educated about what kind of roof do I want? I’ll give you an example. So we’ve been out doing repairs the last couple days after this big windstorm. And in fact, I just went to one last call before I came back to do this podcast and I get there and he’s got three little hip and ridge cap shingles in his hand. It’s the only thing that happened to his house. It’s the reason he had to call me. And I look at it. was like, well, this is three tab. It’s not a ridge shingle. It’s three tab because
Matt Brading
Low wind rating.
Travis Jones
To save a couple hundred bucks, so many roofers around here will buy, instead of buying ridge shingles, they’ll buy three-tab, they’ll cut it, and they’ll create their own ridge. Okay, a three-tab shingle, at best, on a roof is at a 60 mile per hour wind rating. A ridge shingle, you can get 110 mile per hour wind rating. And ridges and hips are the most vulnerable to wind. Like, why would you take this cheap product and put it here? And so he paid me more to fix it. I was like, look, I’m just going to reattach these and nail them. them. Here’s another shout out for Sacha. Use them through the roof to seal it and, and you’ll be good. Okay. And so I had to charge him. I went out there, did the work. What I charged him is more than it would have cost to buy the right product to begin with.
Matt Brading
There you go.
Matt Brading
That’s ridiculous. It’s, is.
Travis Jones
Isn’t that crazy? But they’re doing it all the time.
Matt Brading
And I guess that’s the deal. you you carrying that license and that means something, right? It means, Hey, I, I, there’s, there’s something here to say, I am trying to give you value. I’m trying to bring the best, you know, possible product to you as, the client, you know, and this is, and I’m licensed to do so I went out of my way when I didn’t have to, to achieve this, to try to give you that level of comfort.
Travis Jones
Yeah.
Travis Jones
Yeah. You know, and then what I do, Brad, too, is part of why I, in my, on my Instagram, especially, I’m just trying to, and I made, I didn’t just do the repair. I made a couple of videos I’ll post later because I’m trying to educate homeowners. And I’m, and, I can’t remember who said this. It may have been Matt Rice here. was talking about it. He’s like, look, educate your competition for free.
Brad Lowery
That’s good, man.
Travis Jones
And so I have literally tomorrow we’re doing a fortified roof. And I think at least one guy’s coming down from Oklahoma to see it. But I have, I’ve invited three of my competitors to come and learn how to do fortified roofs while I do one. Because at the end of the day,
Brad Lowery
Fantastic.
Travis Jones
I like, I’ll tell them, I’m like, look, we need more good guys. know, the race to the bottom, that knows no end. And I’m not interested in competing and I’m not competing with the guys that are racing to the bottom. The guys that are doing it well. I would love to lose a job to one of those guys. Cause there’s so much work.
Brad Lowery
Dude, that’s, that’s a whole nother episode altogether because we deal with this from the homeless fraction front, right, Matt? I mean, it’s dealing with guys that are trying to undercut the competition. I had a hopefully she’s not listening to the episode because I’m doing a home inspection for tomorrow. But you know, there’s a an agent north of me, who I used to do a lot of work with up in DC. And she said, Hey, I’ve got this client for you, but you better not charge me those DC prices. I’m like, I’m going to charge you what I charge you.
Travis Jones
Hahaha
Brad Lowery
Because I just had somebody that was just up north of Tampa call me and goes, hey, what did you charge for this job that you last did? Yeah, we raised our rates. We would have charged $200 over that. You should probably do the same. And it’s and he’s one of the leading guys in the area. But I had lost work in that neck of the woods before because an agent goes, yeah, I’m sorry, a standard inspection, a four point and a win. I can find somebody that could do that for 375 all in. I was like, then you can use them because I’m not making that drive for that money. You know, but it’s there’s always, yeah, there’s always going to be those scalpers. So you’re bringing value, you’re adding value, and you’re doing it in ways that are going to be much more noticeable and realizable to a consumer than, you know, just making a jump to something that is a massive upfront cost in the form of something like solar. These are practical things that they could do to really improve upon their home. That’s that’s huge. So, dude, we could talk about this all day. But there’s a couple things that I want to talk about before we wrap up the show. One.
Travis Jones
Good luck. Yeah.
Travis Jones
Mm-hmm.
Travis Jones
Sure.
Brad Lowery
because I’ve only got a little bit left here. I wanted to reintroduce a segment that I used to do on the show back in the day called the drink of the day. And this would be at some point in the future where we have a really cool little cutaway thing. let’s go left to right on my screen. Matt, what are you sipping on tonight?
Travis Jones
Yeah
Travis Jones
There you go.
Matt Brading
tonight I have got a cup of Eagle rare. I, I poured the, yeah, I went, I went, semi special occasion for this one. I was feeling good about this podcast. So I went, with a 10 year Eagle rare. Cheers.
Travis Jones
Brad Lowery
Oh brother!
Brad Lowery
I love it. Cheers to you , Matt. Travis, How about you buddy.
Travis Jones
Cheers. All right. So this is funny. It’s a little embarrassing, but I was inspired by Matt’s green light. You know, we talked about St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, right? And so I have my little green light.
Matt Brading
It almost looks like I’m my like from the three person view. looks like my screen is bleeding into Travis’s screen. That’s pretty awesome. Totally.
Travis Jones
Isn’t that great? So, so I have, I have a son in law and I have a son in law to be my middle daughter is getting married in May. My son in law to be his, he lives in Colorado. His name is Dallas and he bought me a bottle of that Eagle rare and I would have poured it, but I finished it.
Brad Lowery
That’s it.
Brad Lowery
Congratulations.
Brad Lowery
Congratulations, it’s important to do.
Travis Jones
Thank you. So my other son, my son-in-law currently, God love him, Zach, he’s a good old boy. And he brought this over and cause there was some green in it. You’d see that not quite the color. It’s a little light. Guys, this is the Jim Bean apple. This is, you know what? Hey, it’s a-
Matt Brading
You
Matt Brading
hey!
Brad Lowery
Let’s go. Let’s go.
Travis Jones
Apple liqueur infused with Kentucky straight bourbon. So, you know, it’s a little on the sweet side, but hey, cheers.
Matt Brading
No.
Brad Lowery
You know, I had relatives
Matt Brading
It’s a Thursday drink, a Thursday kind of drink.
Travis Jones
Yeah, that’s right.
Brad Lowery
That’s it cheap stuff on there is you know somebody told me before you know what the difference between a nine dollar bottle of wine and a 90 dollar bottle of wine is About 90 91 something like that. Yeah, they’re $89. I can’t do math Yeah, yeah, it’s that’s all it is. Hey, whatever gets the job done, you know, but Yeah, it’s you know, whatever way it gets tough.
Travis Jones
Zero.
Matt Brading
Yeah.
Travis Jones
Yeah.
Travis Jones
That’s right. That’s right.
Brad Lowery
So for me over here, I am wrapping up a little Sazerac, which I made with an ice cube tonight. You’re not usually supposed to do that. You’re supposed to use a chilled glass, but I cheated and I wanted it cold fast because we were recording this show. So I whipped up the traditional New Orleans cocktail, the Sazerac, which is a great plug because Inspection Fuel 2025 will be in New Orleans this September, I believe. So stay tuned for dates on that because the show will definitely be live there too.
Travis Jones
Nice.
Brad Lowery
But Matt, let’s wrap it up here. Dude, what were some key highlights from the Builders Conference,
Matt Brading
man, key highlights. You know, I, when I go into this thing, I mean, I really never know what I’m going to see whenever I go through the expo. And so, I did find a few really cool products. There is a product made by, you know, the, the cassette tapes, Maxell. Okay. They have, a, I can’t remember what the acronym stands for, but I made a video on it, but they make up here. have one right here. They make a product. MAP is another company that they have same company makes this product right here, which is a piece of flashing. is basically just rubber, it is self. It’s got an adhesive on it, self adhesive. And so, you know, they make these with different size holes. They make them brown. They make them square as well. And a couple of different things that you can use for flash wall penetrations. Obviously, you know, we’ve got companies like quick flash and green skin that make products like this, but they are made with a lot of material. Well, the one thing about like quick flashes, they make a big plastic piece which is great and easy to tape but that same plastic base is used for every one of them So they have that same wasted material that’s used for every one of these You know if you got a small hole like this They just use this small amount of material and it’s just the self adhesive so you don’t even have to have any tape So I think that’s a super cool product I also ran into a company called Hydro block which I think is out of Utah I think they’re out of Utah –
Travis Jones
So.
Matt Brading
And they make a product that can be used for drywall. I’ve got a sample of it somewhere here, but it can be used. It’s completely 100 % waterproof. Now I’ve not used this, so this isn’t a plug for them, but it’s completely 100 % waterproof. It can be used in place of drywall. It can be used for sheathing. It’s structurally rated and can be used for sheathing. It can be used under stucco. So you know how they were doing like, therefore a little while they had like a hardy backer or a hardy board they would use and put a stucco material over it. I haven’t seen this in a while now, but, uh, because there’s so many problems in like our area. So humid, it’s, we have so many problems with, with moisture and stucco, right? Uh, not just humidity, but just rain period. Uh, we have so many problems with that. And so they were trying to find solutions to that. So they had this time type of fiber cement board product that had like a cement, uh, coating on the outside that looked like stucco, but it wasn’t, this can be done very much in that way only the board itself is completely 100 % waterproof, super duper light, but yet super durable. I feel like it’s got like a, like a, it was like an hour or two hour fire rating or something like that. Like it is a long time before it actually burns. It’s almost like everything the guy told me, and again, I have no experience with it, but everything the guy told me was like, wow, like this is a pretty spectacular product. So Hydro Block, that was another one that I thought was pretty cool. Those are probably the two takeaways that I can really remember. I mean, I got a bunch of material, a bunch of things that I filmed. Also, Dyken, I visited the Dyken booth and didn’t even realize that they have a large facility out here and real close to me and invited me over to take a look at some of their equipment and do some videos over there. So I’m looking forward to that as well.
Travis Jones
Cool.
Brad Lowery
That’s awesome, man. Good stuff. So well, Travis, we got to have you back on the show, man. Seriously, this has been an awesome conversation. Truly. And honestly, I think like next year, that we need to just have you podcast live from the builders conference. That’d be pretty awesome, too. Truly. Yep. But no, Travis Matt warned me he’s like, Hey, look, this might be the easiest episode that we’ve done, just because look-
Travis Jones
It’s been fun, man. Yeah, absolutely.
Matt Brading
That would be good. We should totally do that.
Brad Lowery
Travis can rip on so many different things. Seriously, I mean, we’re at 50 minutes. This is gonna be one of the longer episodes. I hope you guys are stuck around for the whole thing, seriously. But Travis, where can they go follow you? Seriously, where can they follow you on social media?
Travis Jones
Nice.
Travis Jones
Yeah. So I do most of my stuff on Instagram. Travis builds it and, um, would love to interact with people, comment, you know, ask questions. I, you know, I love it. You know, my, uh, I’m, I’ll be 52 in June. And one of the things I’ve liked to say is, um, a couple of phrases that had become a part of my life more so in the last, I don’t know, 10 years than before is. I changed my mind about that or I was wrong about that. And I think that’s part of, part of my journey in being able to share stuff is it’s not all cause I just know everything. It’s cause I want to learn. want to grow. And if, if I get new information, I want to, I want to change my mind.
Brad Lowery
I love it.
Travis Jones
And we get too stuck, I think, in our way. So I loved the whole Instagram world. That’s kind how Matt and I connected. And I’ve connected with so many others that way. And the great thing is there’s a lot of people out there trying to do some good. So I appreciate that. Matt, super appreciate all your stuff, man. It’s inspiring to a lot of people. And we love it
Matt Brading
Likewise, my friend, likewise.
Brad Lowery
That’s awesome. Well, you guys go follow Travis, follow Matt, follow the show to definitely make sure you subscribe because there’s going to be a whole lot more of this coming down the road. Honestly, Travis, I feel like for our first long term, like if we’re to go full three hour Joe Rogan show style, like we’re just got to bring you back because this was easy. The easiest, you know, we’ve done truly. So thank you guys so much for watching. We’ll see you right here next time on The Ride Along.
Travis Jones
Yeah baby, let’s do it. Let’s do it.
Travis Jones
awesome.
Brad Lowery
All right. I’m hitting end here.
