On his podcast Better Buildings for Humans, Joe Menchefski explores ways to make our built spaces healthier and more liveable with top building science experts from around the world. As part of the team at Advanced Glazings, a Nova Scotia fabricator specializing in aerogel products, Menchefski has deep knowledge of innovative energy-efficient technologies. Who better to ask about the state of sustainable building today and what to expect in the years ahead? Tune in to hear two professional talkers go at it in this episode of Fenestration Conversations.
Skip Maclean has retired from ODL, his last stop on a 53-year journey through the Canadian window and door manufacturing industry. Along the way he rose to the top, chairing innumerable committees, serving as president of Fenestration Canada and being honoured with its 2019 C.P. Loewen award. He did it with humour, humility and intelligence, and counts many of today’s industry leaders as his proteges. Maclean joins the Conversation to share his memories and accumulated wisdom.
Our business is making things, not talking about them. So it’s no surprise that many of us struggle with the demands of promoting our businesses to potential clients and customers. Alison Simpson, president and CEO of the CMA, has been helping major corporations do just that throughout her career and she joins Pat Flannery for a lively conversation chock full of good advice. She also has details of an exciting program enabling small businesses to obtain government funds to hire digital marketing experts and to upskill their existing IT staff.
Chris Magwood of the Rocky Mountain Institute joins the podcast to discuss the One Number approach to sustainable building regulation…and he has some objections. While a performance-based approach aimed at regulating the whole-life carbon impact of a construction project should be our ultimate goal, Magwood feels the upfront impact of embodied carbon needs to be evaluated separately, but adjacent to, the long-term impact of operational carbon. Listen now to find out why, and for Magwood’s assessment of where we are in being able to do the carbon impact modelling we will need to meet the future sustainable building regulations under discussion today.
How would it be if all the databases and charts and spreadsheets and regulations and tiers defining whether our products comply with sustainable building laws just…went away? Replaced by one number: – the only number that matters – the amount of carbon dioxide emitted over a building’s lifetime as a result of its manufacture, construction, use and disposal. Partner at Layton Consulting, Jonathon “JoMo” Layton joins the podcast to chew over this radical idea and lend his expertise to the question of whether it could work and how it would affect us all.
High-profile wildfires doing substantial property damage to urban areas in B.C. and Alberta have spurred NRCan to look at creating Canadian building standards for wildfire resistance. The consultation process has just begun, but it seems likely that some day soon we may see new codes requiring resistant windows, doors and other components in wildfire-prone areas. What might these rules look like? How do we determine if a product is sufficiently resistant to external fires? And what is the science behind making frames and glass that resists fire and prevents heat transfer to the home interior? Robin Urquhart has worked on rebuilding communities destroyed by wildfires and joins the Conversation to share his deep knowledge of this topic.
FenCan codes and regulatory affairs direction, Adrian Edge, is back on to talk about the latest trade war developments and how they might impact the glazing and fenestration industries. Our sector avoided new tariffs on April 2, but the stunning measures announced by Trump against the rest of the world are crashing markets and have already, in the words of our prime minister, ended the free trade and partnership relationship we have enjoyed with the United States for decades. Edge talks about the possible ramifications of that, and about how you can still export to the U.S. tariff-free.Mark Carney clip courtesy Associated Press YouTube.
David Cooper has been researching and developing vacuum insulating glass for over a decade and chairs multiple international standards committees that will define how it can be used, how its quality can be assessed and how to test its performance. With demand for VIG growing and producers multiplying, specifiers and contractors need guidance on what to look for in these products – guidance that may be coming soon in the form of balloted ASTM standards for durability and load tolerance. Cooper joins The Conversation to explain where these efforts are at and to update us on the state of VIG technology and availability.
FenCan’s director of government and regulatory affairs, Adrian Edge, joins to talk tariffs. What is the status? Are they gone or are they coming back in a month? Either way, what can we and our governments do to protect ourselves and our businesses going forward? Things get political and practical in this edition.
Keith Daubmann is an owner of MY Architectural Glass and MY Shower Door, a glass fabricator and custom glazing contractor serving southwestern Florida. What makes Daubmann unique is his thunderous presence on social media, running accounts with around 30,000 followers and hosting a weekly YouTube show, Hard Hat Highlights. He claims he has never had a guest on his show that didn’t become a client shortly after. Daubmann joined The Conversation to talk about how to use social media in the glass business and how it can do a lot of the work of building trust with prospects before you even meet them.
Langley, B.C.,-based Cascadia has published its first environmental product declarations for its fibreglass fenestration systems and its happy it did. Marketing manager Chris Guelpa joined the Conversation to talk about the process; the help they got; the markets and opportunities the EPDs are opening up; and how fibreglass stacks up in the embodied carbon discussion.
Movember is back with an added focus. The popular fundraising drive for men’s health has added support for mental health to its efforts along with prostate and testicular cancer. Mitch Hermansen joined Annex Business Media publisher/editor, Patrick Flannery, to talk about why these issues are important and what we in the construction community can do to help the guys who work for us.
Those of us who ship product across provincial borders have probably noticed that it can be easier to ship to the United States than inside our own country. Recently, the federal Committee on Internal Trade has announced a pilot program that would see any province’s trucking regulations acknowledged in all the others’. Duncan Robertson, senior policy analyst for Nova Scotia, joins the podcast to talk about this small step toward actual free trade within Canada.
Natural Resources Canada is working on a new label that will be required to be displayed on manufactured window products that are shipped across provincial borders or imported into Canada. The label would display the same energy efficiency information as NFRC, CSA and Energy Star labels, and could act to replace them if the manufacturer desired. Adam Buist is helping to develop the new label and joins Fenestration Conversations to explain the work, explore the benefits and challenges, and update us on the status of the project.Adam invites questions and outreach at adam.buist@NRCan-RNCan.gc.ca.Fenestration Review’s article about the program here: https://www.fenestrationreview.com/one-label-to-rule-them-all/
New standards for energy efficiency and low carbon impact in construction are demanding new skills in the trades – skills your young workers might be more familiar with than you are. Chad Flinn, associate vice-president of academics at Red Deer Polytechnic, and Judi Varga-Toth, manager of the ImpAct-Climate program at Colleges and Institutes Canada, are working to educate today’s construction industry in how to design and install the elements of net zero buildings. Learning needs to be ongoing in this time of rapid change, and Flinn and Varga-Toth share insights and free online resources in this episode of Fenestration Conversations.
The steadily rising concern with environmental protection has brought concerns about the amount of plastic we put into landfills and oceans. Durable plastic products, such as vinyl window frames, are in danger of being swept up in government efforts to mitigage these risks. Tony Vella of Vision Extrusions Group and chair of the Vinyl Insitute of Canada has been working hard to educate decision-makers about the difference between durable PVC and single-use plastics. He joins the Conversation to let us know about the proposed federal Plastics Registry, the state of play with the issue generally and his efforts to bring some sanity to the public discussion.
By Anton Van Dyk’s count, there are now up to 15 separate areas where fenestration products have to demonstrate compliance to one regulatory regime or another. Embodied carbon will soon become another, yet both end users and manufacturers have been slow to understand things like Environmental Product Declarations and how they will affect product development. Van Dyk and Layton think the approach to lowering the carbon cost of our buildings has created confusion. They join the podcast to outline their vision for how we should go forward.
When information technology is the topic, media outlets across the country turn to Carmi Levy to explain what is going on and give them the deep background on the issues. So we invited him to the Conversation to share some very practical advice on how to think about your IT department and personnel and how to source and vet providers that will make your life and business better, not worse. Choosing the right people, in-house versus outsourcing, common pitfalls to avoid, how to choose the right product, what to expect from a vendor – Levy has seen it all and we discuss it all.
Terry Adamson, technical director for Fenestration Canada, joins The Conversation to preview the proposed changes to the National Building Code related to window and doors. Wider door openings for accessibility…tighter air tightness…solar heat gain requirements…upper storey window fall protection…glazing guard loads…it’s all here in an information-dense download.
Cornerstone, owner of Ply Gem and Northstar, has made some significant investments to double capacity in several key manufacturing areas including insulating glass and extrusions. Marketing manager Richard Hill joins the Conversation to tell us what they did, why they did it and where they hope it takes the company in the future.