The Carolina Contractor Show
The Carolina Contractor Show
Slash Your Summer Cooling Costs: Practical Tips for an Energy-Efficient Home
Have you ever wondered how you can slash your summer cooling costs while keeping your home comfortable? Our latest episode of the Carolina Contractor Show promises to reveal practical, budget-friendly strategies that will help you do just that.
But it's not all about entertainment. We're committed to equipping homeowners with actionable advice to enhance energy efficiency and reduce utility bills. Donnie and Eric Smith shed light on the importance of proper insulation and air sealing, especially in older homes, to prevent AC units from overworking. They delve into the nitty-gritty of air distribution, heat transfer, and breaking thermal bridges, ensuring your HVAC system operates more effectively and lasts longer. From using low expansion spray foam around windows and doors to installing programmable thermostats and ceiling fans, we cover a range of easy-to-implement solutions.
We round off the episode with valuable tips for outdoor home upgrades that can contribute to substantial energy savings. Learn about the benefits of installing a radiant barrier in your attic, upgrading to multi-stage HVAC units, and maintaining your system for optimal performance. We also touch on thoughtful tree management for natural shade and the impact of replacement windows and insulated garage doors. Don't miss out on this treasure trove of tips to transform your home into an energy-efficient haven. Visit thecarolinacontractor.com for more resources, past episodes, and to submit your questions and topic suggestions!
Welcome to the Carolina Contractor Show with your host, General Contractor Donnie Blanchard. Donnie, ever watch Beavis and Butthead in your earlier days.
Speaker 2:I sure did. I probably spent way too much time during the summers.
Speaker 1:but yes, sir, I never saw it when it was originally on. I listened to other people talk about it and I learned to do the voices. It came out a couple of years ago. I think they did a series of new episodes from it and I couldn't believe that. I found me, my wife, my son, laughing when it used to make me cringe to think about my kids ever watching that show.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure. Yeah, it's definitely not age appropriate for a little kid, but I can see where a teenager would find some humor in that.
Speaker 1:Well, if you get some time this summer which you never have time, it seems sit back and watch that Again. We went into Siskel and Ebert of contractors. I guess Donnie, this is the Carolina Contractor Show. My name is Eric Smith. I do inside sales with Home Builder Supply. Donnie is like big time. He's a general contractor. He owns Blanchard Building Company, he owns Sure Top Roofing and you can sometimes see him on TV. You can see him on Hulu and I guess soon A&E Network. Oh, is that in the fall? That's going to pop.
Speaker 2:Yep. So A&E Network originally produced the show and the film crew was all from A&E Network. But we finished filming last August and Hulu swooped in and bought three. They bought the rights to three different shows from A&E Network and ours was one of those. So when they bought the rights, that meant that they had the rights to debut the show instead of A&E, and I think the stipulation they had in place is that it'll still drop on A&E, which will be a lot more exposure than Hulu. But it dropped February 7th on Hulu and six months later, which would be around October, it's supposed to drop on A&E and my understanding is it'll rerun after those 10 straight weeks. It'll rerun for the next year or so, but really exciting and I don't know what's going to come from that. But all of it's a good thing, it's kind of cool.
Speaker 1:So if you want to see the Carolina contractor show in action, we have approximately 37 seconds, I think, out of something that took us what eight hours to film the radio station. And then you're in every episode and, uh, your son's in it. Who else is your dad in it?
Speaker 2:now. Yeah, my dad, my brother, my son, my daughter, uh, one daughter did not make a cameo but she could care less. I tried and anyway. But yeah, got the whole family in there multiple times. I think episode eight it's all in the family is the title and everybody gets a little piece of the action. Pop's got a speaking part and so you know that's the nicest I've ever heard him talk to anybody, so it's pretty cool there. But it was, yeah, very good experience and I'm glad I did it.
Speaker 2:I will say that for anybody that ever gets a chance to do anything like that for a TV network, it's a lot of work and you're marching to the beat of a production crew schedule. A lot of times we didn't get our call sheet for the next day until seven o'clock that night. And where it made it tough is that I had about five other custom builds going and a few roofing crews running every day. Custom builds going and a few roofing crews running every day. So having your finger on the pulse for all that, along with seven flips for the TV show simultaneous is is almost an impossible task. So I'd say about 80 plus hours a week is what I had to work to pull all that off.
Speaker 1:And what we're talking about is the show 50, 50 flip, and again it debuted like four months ago, back in April on Hulu and it's going to be coming up this fall on a A&E network. So if you want to check that out and see Donnie in action and even see, like I said, just a few seconds of our show on the air in the radio station, you'll be able to find that.
Speaker 2:By the way, we're on season two. Everybody asked me that they don't think about going to season two. Season one they only pulled off about six episodes because of course they had a different contractor and they made it look pretty good. But season two is definitely much better.
Speaker 1:But again, we're not pushing this show exclusively. What we do want to talk about today on the Carolina Contractors Show is some things about your house and we're going to focus on summer, but we like to say that we're the sports center of DIY and homeowners, because that's what we focus on is your house and, again, donnie being a general contractor and building them and updates and supplies and materials and things like that. The website, thecarolinacontractorcom is where you want to start. You can download past episodes. We've got links to the YouTube site so you can watch these shows. You can find information on the show when we talk about specific topics and if you've got an idea for a show, please let us know. Someone you think we should interview, let us know. We love to do that. Also, I can't believe I almost forgot Donnie, the very popular Ask the Contractor button. You hit that If you have a question about your house, donnie gets them and he answers those. He'll usually respond to you directly, but then we sometimes do a questions only show which I think we're a little behind on. We'll have to do a new one of those in the near future.
Speaker 1:But today I want to talk about something we're experiencing at the recording of the show, which is very hot weather here in the middle of June, talking about triple digit indexes, and what we tend to do is stay inside and run our AC and try to stay cool, and one thing happens and that is your utility bill tends to go up. We thought let's talk about some ways you can maybe lower that utility bill, because when you get inflation and you have grocery prices and everything's up high, cutting 10 bucks here, 15 bucks here, 20 bucks there can make a big difference and there's some little things you can do that a lot of them don't take any really new investment or it's a small investment that can have an impact on that. So, donnie, let's dive right in. First step someone can do to lower their cooling expenses.
Speaker 2:Well, it really all starts with insulation. That's the biggest part of the equation and if your house is poorly insulated, chances are your AC unit never can catch up to that called for temperature on your thermostat. So that means that if it can't cycle off until the sun goes down, that that's a lot of wear and tear on your unit and you know if the same thing's happening when we have a cold snap in the winter, that reduces the lifespan of that unit tremendously. So I'd say insulation is probably the most important thing, and what goes along with insulation is air sealing. I don't think that for years people put an emphasis on the air seal part of it.
Speaker 2:But you know, when your return kicks on, it's pulling air from anywhere it can get and it's sort of like electricity takes the path of least resistance and that return pulling air. If you have leaks or gaps around your doors and windows, that's where it's going to pull that air in. And not only is it pulling in the hot air, it's pulling in air with high humidity ratio. So basically that means that when your system's trying to cool that air down it's fighting way harder than it has to fight because you're constantly introducing that outside air and say that the return is located in a room that's close to the south-facing elevation of your house. You know the south-facing elevation gets the most sun exposure, so that's going to be the hotter rooms that it has to contend with. And again it all goes back to the insulation and the air sealing. If you're insulated well and you have the proper seal around your doors and windows that comes along with a lot of the houses in new construction then you're in much better shape than what would be found in an older home.
Speaker 1:And insulation is a permanent upgrade. It's not something, it's not a temporary fix. So you can do that any time of year and you'll reap the benefits season after season.
Speaker 2:That's exactly right. And a lot of people shy away from doing insulation and they do upgrades on their house that you can see before they do the insulation. But that's probably the best selling point is that insulation it's there, it doesn't degrade, it doesn't have a lifespan when you put it in place, and especially if you're talking about spray foam we'll get into that a little later but it's definitely the gift that keeps on giving because it will bring your utility bills down faster than any other any other thing that you can do to the house. But when I rate insulation I usually say, hey, insulation is for efficiency and the air distribution is another thing that helps out and that's more of a comfort thing. But say, you have a unit located in your crawl space and it's towards one side or the other, because crawl spaces are usually on a slope and you want to put the unit in the tallest part of the crawl space. So the the lot, the lay of the lot, will dictate that in most circumstances. But you know, if you have the room that has the supply line the furthest away from the air handler, then it's not a bad idea If you have an HVAC service person out there to say, hey, can you check the air distribution? And they have something that will check the CFMs coming out of each supply register and they can install a damper on that supply. That will choke off some of the air to the rooms that are closer to that air handler and it'll push more air to the rooms that are further away. So that air distribution, especially if that room further away is one of those southern facing rooms that we just mentioned earlier, that's everything. So if you get the right insulation in place and get your air distribution dialed in, I think that's the best case all the way around.
Speaker 2:While we're talking about that, I'll get into heat transfer and I won't go too deep on this.
Speaker 2:But you've got convective and conductive heat transfer and basically one is caused by air pushing on your house and then the other is caused by just the surface of your house, the surface area outside warming up and that heat passing through the walls. But again, that goes back to insulation, because you know the heat passing from outside of your house to the inside. The effect is called thermal bridging is the proper term. The insulation breaks up that thermal bridge so it won't let that heat pass through easily. That is If you want to do a quick check on your insulation. You know the minimum for your walls is an R13, but a R15 will fit in a regular two by four cavity. Kind of hard to check the insulation in the walls unless you just know, unless you have an area that you maybe have an exposed insulated wall in the garage, or you know on the attic side where you can see what's in there. But under the house it should be an R19 and the current code for the attic is an R38.
Speaker 1:And not long ago we did a whole show on spray foam. As you said, we can get the spray foam in just a minute, but little stuff that you can do. Windows it's the number one source of loss of heat, or cool, depending on the time of the year. What are the cheap fixes on that that someone can do?
Speaker 2:So with a window, if you're handy you know you could go room by room and this might take you a few weekends. But they have low expansion spray foam and the keyword there is low expansion. If you put regular great stuff or what have you from the big box store, it is high expansion. It's going to really blow up and it will almost crush your windows. You'll never be able to open those again. So the low expansion spray foam is a much less aggressive version and and that does a lot, and you would basically have to pop the casing off of your windows and the window skirt and the window apron. Those are kind of hard to take off if your windows are trimmed out like that. So the sides and the top are probably the most important because when they set those windows they're making a hard connection to that rough opening on the framing on the bottom. But the sides always have the gap and the top always has a gap. No-transcript. Same thing applies to your exterior doors and when I say that, it really causes your HVAC system to work a lot less hard, a heat pump and people get confused when you're talking about an air conditioner that's named a heat pump. I know it sounds crazy but a heat pump works either way. You know your house loses heat in the winter and it gains heat in the summer and that heat pump is pulling the warm out of the air. So it's pumping the heat out of the air to give you cool air inside and I believe that rule of thumb is it normally cools the air down that's going into the return by about 15 or 20 degrees. So that means that if you turn your AC off and go on vacation and you come back in your house is 80 degrees, don't expect it to get down to 70 very fast because it has to cycle all that hot air through and cool it down by 20 degrees at a time and it's just really hard for your system to catch up in a quick manner.
Speaker 2:Pretty cool thing that I did a while back and I made a spreadsheet and I showed that if you make some of these improvements to your house, you know just um how you can save just $100 a month on your utility bills. And the cool thing that I found is when you put the square footage in there, you can save on, say, a 1,200-square-foot house. It's pretty easy to get your utilities down by about $100 a month. But if you go into a 4,000-square-foot house built in 1960, they have unreal utility bills. It's not out of the question to lower their bills by three or $400 a month.
Speaker 2:And when you put that number in there and you project that out over the life of a 30 year mortgage, I used to tell people if you don't build efficiently, you can either pay for the house once or you can pay for it twice because the savings you know it was a hundred thousand dollars over a 30 year mortgage, on just a hundred dollars saved a month. And uh, the price per kilowatt hour is only going to go up. Duke Energy has never came down on their bill as long as I've been paying it. So it just all makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1:We've always talked about programmable thermostats. I thought I was the last one on the train, but I found a fact, government statistic that only half of homes in the US have a programmable thermostat, which means they probably have either the old mercury switches or they just have one. That's a might be digital but you can't do any programming with it. And I priced them out and the average cost for a digital programmable um thermostat is about 125 bucks. If I installed mine myself and if trust me if I can do it, it ain't that hard. But if you'd rather have a pro do it, you'll find them. Put it in, put them in two of them. If you have a twin system, a couple hundred bucks. So talk about a three $350 investment and you literally average 20 to $25 savings in a month. So your return on the investment of a thermostat is a year and change. To put that in.
Speaker 2:Oh, no doubt, yeah, and it's nice if you get the ones that will talk to your wifi system, you can control those from your phone. So several advantages. If you do go on that vacation and turn your system down, you can have your house cool or warm when you get back. And you know what that means is you don't want to turn your system off during the day when you're at work because it has to work that much harder to cool the whole house back off. So that kind of. That kind of cancels out the efficiency. But if you just let it go a few degrees during the day and then program it to come back to the desired temperature, say around you know, an hour before you come back home, then that's that's totally doable. And and what that does is your HVAC system. It cycles off and on fewer times a day. And when you consider that you say what three to six cycles a day and multiply that over a 15 year lifespan of an HVAC system, you may get an extra couple of years just from having a programmable thermostat.
Speaker 1:Now, I've mentioned this also before on previous shows. I don't do this for anybody but my own house. But I'm the ceiling fan install master. I've put seven ceiling fans in my house. Three were replacements, the others were brand new installs. I love them. Do you have any in your house? Oh yeah, everywhere. You know the two directions how to determine what time of year to use what direction of the.
Speaker 2:You know the two directions, how to determine what time of year to use, what direction of the. Isn't it counterclockwise to push the air down in the summer? Yeah, okay, I don't know if I had that backwards. I always have to look it back up because I forget. No, you got it right so counterclockwise.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, it's got a little switch. People don't even know this. I was surprised that your ceiling fan has a switch to change the rotation and what you're trying to do is either keep cool air down or pull warm air up and distribute it through the house. So having a ceiling fan on in the winter and you have it set in the right direction in the summer, it's an instant impact on a room. It will cool a room down by a few degrees and again it means your system doesn't have to run nearly as hard you ever put one in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I have, and I didn't like it. It's not it. Yeah, yeah, I have, and I didn't like it. It's too many pieces and parts. It's like a piece of furniture from Ikea. When you open it up, you're thinking how am I going to do this? It's Legos for grownups. You know Food for thought. Say you live on a slab and you have your air handler and everything in the attic, so you're blowing the air out of the ceiling. Or say your air handler is in the crawl space on crawl space foundation and your air is coming from the registers in the floor. I wonder how that impacts the fan direction.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I'll have to look that up. I don't know if it would have an effect. I guess once the cold air is in the room, the goal is to keep it down. So maybe it doesn't matter and cold air would fall anyway. We're getting into physics and stuff that I'm I'm not smart enough to talk about, all right. Well then, then bail me out here, donnie. Uh, what's something else we can do?
Speaker 2:Um, well, that you know that's on the cheap, and so that that programmable thermostat and fan, both of those are two things that you have the minimal investment with, with a pretty significant impact. Um, I'd say the only other thing that I would focus on is having, you know, some pretty good blinds and curtains. If you're not a curtain person, you know they have things blackout blinds and blackout curtains and I think if you were going to consider those, maybe entertain something like that on the south facing elevation. I hate to keep harping on that, but that's where most of your heat loss and heat gain takes place. And well, heat gain, especially in the summertime.
Speaker 2:But you know, blinds are a saving grace. I can sit in front of my window in the mornings in my living room drinking my coffee and you can tell, you can put your hand up to the window there with the blinds open and you can feel the heat when the sun is directly on that and you can close the blinds and it basically does away with that. So there has to be something to it. You know, storm doors are another thing and I have a storm door on my back deck and, you know, in the mornings I don't even open the back door because when you do you get wafted with really hot air and so there's a lot going on between that insulated fiberglass door and that storm door right there. But definitely storm door can help. I just think those you know programmable thermostat fan direction and blinds or curtains to block the direct sunlight are three easy, cheap things this time of year.
Speaker 1:Someone cooks a meal, especially if it's the oven. You heat up the whole oven. That's kind of an obvious appliance that generates heat. But a lot of appliances kind of generate heat and cause you to run your AC longer or increase your utility bill. What are some of the appliances we don't think about that? Do that?
Speaker 2:Well, in all fairness, the appliances have improved so much in efficiency. You know you used to hear about Energy Star this and Energy Star that, where now I'd say everything is Energy Star compliant, just about because the energy code dictates that, and they all pull so little electricity compared to what they used to that that's not as much of a problem as you would have had as 15, 20 years ago. But refrigerators still generate heat. You know, washers generate a little bit of heat. Your dryer generates heat. I will say this warning sign If your laundry room gets excessively hot, uh, dryers are supposed to.
Speaker 2:They're made so that the air is supposed to make its way to the outside, so there's an exhaust line and all that is put together with, you know, hvac equipment.
Speaker 2:So if your dryer is heating up your laundry room, you probably have a bigger problem, but it can increase the degree by a degree or so, and I have a thermostat located pretty close to my laundry room, so I really have to watch that. But I would say that if there was a solution to that and you do have older appliances, then maybe try to wash clothes and not in the peak hours when your other systems aren't working as hard. It just makes sense that you should do that early in the morning or later at night. I put something down as a quick tip, and I think we've talked about this in the past. We used to advise folks to, in terms of appliances, the one appliance that you could save money on is your water heater. So if you go out of town, we advise people to flip your breaker, and we've since been told by a couple of plumbers that that may not be a great idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's um, there's a little bit of an opinion back and forth, but for the most part they don't think there's a cost benefit by turning the breaker off, because you're still going to have to heat it back up. Uh, number two if you have a little bit of an older water heater system, they don't like to necessarily be turned off, cool off and then restart. Everyone that I've talked to so far said they don't know of any true benefit of turning it completely off. But some of the newer ones have vacation mode which drops the temperature down. It might save you a few pennies, but there's there's no consensus that it's a good thing. It could potentially cause more harm than good by turning off your water heater completely when you go on vacation.
Speaker 2:Wait, wait, wait. Okay Question for you. All, right, you're saying that on the newer models they have an efficiency mode or vacation mode, where you push the button and it just allows the water to be warm and not hot. Is that what you're saying? That's what I'm saying, okay, so everybody listens to the show. Eric's pet peeve is when somebody says hot water heater, because you don't heat hot water, it's already hot, right, so I think what you just described to me would be labeled as a warm water heater.
Speaker 1:It's a hot water heater that doesn't get as hot when you don't want it to. I didn't catch that, but well done. You will spend the rest of your life trying to counter that time that I said that about you, because now everybody else says that to you, about calling it a hot water heater, and you just can't let that go without trying to get even with me.
Speaker 2:It's everybody's's, everybody's favorite. I people say that to me all the time, People who listen to the show every week. They always say hey, man, you will never believe I heard such and such say hot water heater and I corrected them right in front of everybody. So whatever, whatever stick.
Speaker 1:four-year-old joke and it's still going hey, uh, let's move outdoors. Um, obviously you don't want to heat up the kitchen in the middle of the summer when it's 105 degrees, and turn on the oven and do all those things. Of course, that would be a great time to grill out, but what are some other quick things you can do outside your house?
Speaker 2:OK, I'll start with the. Neither one of these are cheap and but if you're going to make an upgrade to your house, it's going to save you money in the long run. Both of these work really well. And I'll start with the least expensive of the two Radiant Barrier. We've talked about it on the show several times, but Radiant Barrier is almost like a. It looks like tinfoil with a fiber woven into it. So it's like a very thick tinfoil that you can't tear.
Speaker 2:And I started a weatherization company back I don't know 15 plus years ago and we retrofitted a lot of old houses with this radiant barrier. And where it goes in a retrofit situation is on the bottom side of the rafters. So you basically go row by row it comes in a three foot roll. You go row by row in an attic and you put it on the bottom of the rafters and you encapsulate that entire attic on the bottom side of all the rafters and we would follow up with that with blown in insulation and that.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, that was before spray foam had come down in price. Now if you do the spray foam between the rafter cavities, I don't know that radiant barrier would be necessary. But radiant barriers is peanuts in price compared to the spray foam. So if you're wanting to do something yourself, it's totally DIY and I will say that it works so well that we would do one side of the attic and the one side of the attic would would cool off. You could feel a temperature difference before you even did the other side. So this stuff works great.
Speaker 1:Let me add to that when you said the cost for it. You can do about a thousand square feet for under 200 bucks.
Speaker 2:Big, big payback on that and and your attic is going to love you for that. So the other item that I was going to mention is just a new HVAC system. Average lifespan on those about 15 years on a good system. But if your HVAC has seen its best days and you're just going to do a new system, I always tell people now's the time to do it because the energy code requirements keep making the price go up and up and I think that's some kind of conspiracy between the manufacturers and the people who write the code book. But I want to say the minimum SEER rating is a 16 now and for years it was a 13 and eventually it moved up 14, 15. Now it's a 16.
Speaker 2:And I would advise people to definitely entertain a multi-stage unit. And what the multi-stage unit is. Basically, if you have a four ton system, it doesn't need to run four tons in the spring and the fall. So you might need four tons right now. In the hottest part of the summer or the coldest part of the winter you might need that tonnage, but for the most part where we live, you do not. So that's a similar concept to a car that has an eight-cylinder engine. It gets on the interstate, downsizes to six because that's all it needs. So definitely multi-stage doesn't require a zoning board. If you want to zone it, you might have a couple thousand dollars extra in that and then maybe a thousand or so dollars in the multi-stage part, depending on how big the unit is.
Speaker 2:But I have that in my house. So I have a master bedroom zone and my son has a zone and my daughters are on their own zone and we all well, as they get older, we live on different schedules. So, uh, it definitely contributes to lower utility bills because you're not using near what you would need if you didn't have that. So you know the lake house that I mentioned. I want to say that it's insulated so well and he has a multi-stage unit, four ton unit. I don't think that we've ran more than two tons ever and the cycle time on and off is less than an hour all day long. So it barely runs because it holds heat and cold so well.
Speaker 1:And if you have a new system or your system's running fine, be sure to keep it clear debris and grass and bushes and make sure it has airflow. Of course we mentioned earlier have somebody take care of it. We've always talked about having someone keep it maintained. But you can go around it and pull away debris, because blocked airflow on an AC system that outside unit is never a good thing. Some people say you can plant trees. That's not going to do much good for quite a while. I would rephrase it Instead of worrying about planting trees, be aware before you cut one, because it might be giving you more shade than you realize. Be aware before you cut one, because it might be giving you more shade than you realize.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've got my wheel spinning, eric. Uh-oh, we were outside. I thought of two things outside the house and, as you were saying that, a couple other things. I want to mention. Replacement windows big ticket item, but the old windows I don't think even qualified as an R1. One alternative you may get instead of a replacement window is what's called a sash replacement kit. We've done tons of those and everybody's been happy with them. Never had anybody tell me they didn't make a big difference and those are much cheaper than a full-blown replacement window.
Speaker 2:If you don't have an insulated garage door, my garage faces west so that low summer sun on the west-facing elevation of my house will definitely heat my garage up. So insulated garage door is pretty darn cheap to retrofit or you could just get an entirely new garage door. They're not that expensive. I gave this speech to somebody at a roof inspection this week but the skylights were all overhauled in 2010. So if your skylights predate 2010, you may consider getting a new skylight. And they have the low E coating which is kind of like an invisible tent. And they have the low E coating which is kind of like an invisible tent. And they also have the argon gas between the panes to meet the new code.
Speaker 2:So I've had people tell me that had skylights in their kitchen. They've told me that we can't even use our kitchen in the summer because it heats it up so much. But all the new skylights solve that problem. And if you needed to retrofit your insulation I know we mentioned spray foam in the attic and retrofit your insulation, I know we mentioned spray foam in the attic and of course, spray foam under a house is easy enough. And a common question I get is how can I add insulation to my walls? And most insulation companies do what they call drill and fill. So, especially if you have siding, that's a possibility. But they can even do it with bricks. So I would recommend contacting your local insulation company to get a quote for that. It's not as much as you might think.
Speaker 1:I had a friend who bought an old farmhouse and he did drill and fill himself. He was cutting holes in the side and he was back filling it with insulation and then he kept. It was wood siding. He'd take the piece that he cut out, put it back in and then he caulked it in. Or wood caulked it in, sanded it smooth and then he repainted everything.
Speaker 2:There's ways to do everything, and I guess that just comes down to what makes sense for your house there. But yeah, drilling feels kind of scary, but it can be done.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, we hope these tips help. Again, you're not going to get a big deduction. There's no way to drop your monthly utility bill by $100 or $200 instantly. But some of those retrofits considering spray foam insulation the sash kits, by the way, that Donnie mentioned can also kind of update the look of your window. If you're tired of your grid design or something, that's a great time to do that too. But we'll put some details up at the website, the carolinacontractorcom, and we hope these help out and you can stay cool in the heat. And coming up in the near future we're going to be interviewing Dennis from builder brigade, so keep in tune for that.
Speaker 1:And, of course, look on TV, see if you can find Donnie. It's like where's Waldo. You can find Donnie on a television show 50, 50 flip and we appreciate you taking time to tune into today's show. We and we appreciate you taking time to tune in to today's show. We hope to catch you next week on the Carolina contractor show. Have a good day everybody. Thanks for listening to the Carolina contractor show. Visit the Carolina contractorcom.