Episode 1930
Lumber Prices and Energy Standards: What You Need to Know Now
We’re diving into some juicy updates from the building community this week! Eric G is here to spill the tea on how we’re right in the thick of a whirlwind of change, driven by flashy new tech and potential shifts in energy standards. He’s got his finger on the pulse of what’s happening out there, and he’s calling for a hefty dose of common sense at the table. We’re talking about how all this innovation can crank up costs for homeowners, and whether it’s really worth it in the long run. So, buckle up as we navigate through the chaos, dissect the latest trends, and, fingers crossed, find some clarity in this ever-evolving landscape!
Change is in the air, folks! Eric G dives deep into the swirling winds of transformation that are sweeping through the building community. With new technologies sprouting faster than weeds in spring and potential shifts in energy standards looming like a dark cloud, it’s clear that our beloved homes are on the brink of a makeover. But hold onto your hard hats – it’s not just about shiny gadgets and fancy regulations. Our buddy Eric insists that we need a hefty dose of common sense sprinkled over all this change. After all, who wants to spend a fortune on a smart thermostat that doesn’t actually save you a dime?
We kick off with a cheeky look at the political landscape and how it could impact our wallets, particularly if waste and fraud in the government are tackled. Eric's got his eyes on lumber prices like a hawk, pointing out the intricate dance of supply and demand and how that might play out for builders and DIY enthusiasts alike. He warns us that while tech can make our homes more resilient and efficient, it can also drive up costs faster than you can say “energy-efficient furnace.” Are we really getting our money’s worth, or are we just being sold a bill of goods?
But don’t worry, there’s light at the end of the tunnel! Eric highlights the importance of making informed choices that prioritize both our pocketbooks and our planet. With a mix of humor and insight, he reminds us that while building science is evolving, we shouldn’t lose sight of practicality. So buckle up, folks, because navigating this new frontier requires a blend of innovation and good old-fashioned common sense!
Takeaways:
- We're in the midst of a significant shift in the building community, driven by new tech.
- Energy standards are on the verge of change, and we need some common sense injected into it.
- Higher costs for energy-efficient systems mean we must be savvy homeowners to save money.
- We're seeing a blend of building science and technology that can raise home costs, tricky business!
- The political landscape is chaotic, but there’s hope for common sense in building and energy codes.
- Old school incandescent bulbs may be making a comeback, despite the shiny new LED tech.
Companies mentioned in this episode:
- Monument Grills
- Igloo
- LG
- TTI
- Ryobi
To get your questions answered by Eric G give us a call in the studio at 833-239-4144 24/7 and Eric G will get back to you and answer your question and you might end up in a future episode of Around the House.
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Information given on the Around the House Show should not be considered construction or design advice for your specific project, nor is it intended to replace consulting at your home or jobsite by a building professional. The views and opinions expressed by those interviewed on the podcast are those of the guests and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the Around the House Show.
Mentioned in this episode:
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For your next BBQ check out MonumentGrills.com
Order your new Monument Grill online and get it in 3-5 days for your next BBQ! Monument Grills combines cutting-edge technology with reliable performance. Our grills are engineered for consistent heat, durability, and precision, ensuring every meal is cooked to perfection. With advanced features and dependable craftsmanship, you can trust Monument Grills to elevate your outdoor cooking experience.
Transcript
Foreign.
Speaker A:When it comes to remodeling or renovating your home, there is a lot to know and we have got you covered.
Speaker A:This is AROUND the house.
Speaker A:Welcome to the Round the House show, the next generation of home improvement.
Speaker A:I am Eric G.
Speaker A:Thanks for joining me today.
Speaker A:This episode is brought to you by our friends at Monument Grills.
Speaker A:If you're looking for that next badass barbecue, that's under 900 bucks, check them out at monument grills.com well, today I wanted to talk an update on what I'm seeing out there in the political landscape and how that is going to affect our homes in the future and what's going on now.
Speaker A:Of course, as we all know, I don't care what side of the politics side of things you are on a little bit of chaos out there.
Speaker A:But I will say it does look like that they are finding a bunch of waste and abuse possibly here in the US Government and that puts money back in our pockets as citizens.
Speaker A:So as long as we're catching those people out there that are 210 years old still collecting Social Security, we'll see if that's actually the fact or not.
Speaker A:At least we're trying to cut some of the fraud and waste out of there.
Speaker A:But Tom, with energy standards being said they're going to change.
Speaker A:Is that going to lower the price of building materials coming up?
Speaker A:I was just looking at lumber futures prices right now and that's basically what lumber's gonna cost here in a few months.
Speaker A:And being that it's February, it's growing in December, it was down in the 460s, it's up in the 6 hundreds.
Speaker A:And then if you look at all the people out there that are saying to invest, hold or sell, if it's in the mid-600s and they say sell, that means it's at the high point, which means lumber prices are going to go down.
Speaker A:If they say it's going to go up, they say buy.
Speaker A:They list this as a strong buy.
Speaker A:Get it?
Speaker A:Now you're going to make some money.
Speaker A:Which tells me that lumber prices are going to continue to raise in the short term over the next 90 days.
Speaker A:That's probably where it's going to go.
Speaker A:Now this is a very complex issue because we have supply, demand as well as what the lumberyards are selling, what is being produced by mills and what's coming in from Canada here in the U.S.
Speaker A:so there's a lot going on with that.
Speaker A:But one of the things that we haven't really talked about is how technology is helping us build but also adding increased costs to homes.
Speaker A:Great example.
Speaker A:We used to just put tar paper around as a house wrap.
Speaker A:And there wasn't any flashing.
Speaker A:It was just really basic.
Speaker A:There was some flashing, but not a lot of it.
Speaker A:Now we've really got into building science, and we're adding a lot more things into these homes to make them healthier, to make them more durable, to make them more sustainable in that that they can put up to what mother Nature throws at them.
Speaker A:Now, those things cost extra money.
Speaker A:Sometimes they save time, and many times some of those products can save expenses later.
Speaker A:For you as a homeowner, however, comma, that's where we got to be really careful is because those things like that add to the cost of homes.
Speaker A:Just like all these energy standards on the furnaces and your air conditioner.
Speaker A:Now we're adding multiple computer systems.
Speaker A:And so those prices are going up, up.
Speaker A:And it seems like we're adding 15, 20% a year sometimes onto our H vac costs.
Speaker A:Now, are we getting a more efficient one?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Are you ever gonna see that money back?
Speaker A:That's debatable because now we're starting to talk about the difference within a percentage point or two.
Speaker A:And if that adds 20% to the furnace, I don't know.
Speaker A:And I haven't seen studies to see if that's actually going to pay you back or if that is just money that they were trying to take off the grid.
Speaker A:Now, some of the things that are interesting is I'm seeing out of the Trump administration saying that they're going to eliminate the ban on incandescent light bulbs.
Speaker A:Awesome.
Speaker A:I think incandescent light bulbs have their place.
Speaker A:LEDs are good.
Speaker A:Are they problematic for some people?
Speaker A:Absolutely.
Speaker A:Are they problematic for me?
Speaker A:Shooting television all the time.
Speaker A:Those dang things flicker, the ones in appliances, especially if somebody's got that refrigerated wine cooler or glass door fridge.
Speaker A:It looks like a Las Vegas light show sometimes on camera.
Speaker A:So that can be issues that we deal with on my side of things.
Speaker A:But some people can see that.
Speaker A:And there's a lot of studies out there saying it's screwing with our brains.
Speaker A:Do I know this?
Speaker A:No.
Speaker A:I'm not a medical doctor, nor do I pretend to play one on TV or the radio.
Speaker A:But there's information out there.
Speaker A:So we really don't know all the science behind that.
Speaker A:But some of the issues we're going to have, though, in the near future is if a lot of people go back to using incandescent bulbs now, they can change the law, but then it takes companies to go, hey, we scrapped those light bulb machines a long time ago.
Speaker A:Are they gone?
Speaker A:Are they put away someplace?
Speaker A:Are those businesses still there?
Speaker A:Is somebody going to go back even though they're legal?
Speaker A:Is someone going to go back to building incandescent light bulbs?
Speaker A:They can legalize it, but many companies might go, yeah, now we're good, we're good.
Speaker A:We got rid of that stuff and we've moved on.
Speaker A:We're going to see this now in, we're starting to see a lot of studies come out and it's going to affect everything from our cars to our trucks.
Speaker A:Here in Oregon.
Speaker A:I just posted up about it today.
Speaker A:Because of leaded gas at Portland International Raceway, they're trying to put a ban through the legislature saying that they can't use leaded gas.
Speaker A:If you're near a city of 500,000 people.
Speaker A:They just might as well say at Portland International Raceway this is the only city of that size.
Speaker A:They're just trying to shut the raceway down by passing that for a few dozen cars that race there.
Speaker A:But our elected officials are not smart enough to go, oh, wait a minute, AV gas, which plenty of Cessnas and Pipers and single engine dump twin engine planes out there fly on.
Speaker A:Let's not bring that up, that that uses the same gasoline, that's okay to fly overhead, but that does in cars.
Speaker A:And I was just reading a study, for instance in Europe, came out of England that says that brake dust from our cars, including electric ones, are more hazardous to our health than the worst diesel emissions.
Speaker A:So maybe we're going to start to see some common sense come back into things here a little bit.
Speaker A:Let's, let's not go after the pet projects.
Speaker A:Let's actually work on some of these issues that we see out there.
Speaker A:So I think that we might see some common sense coming into building and I do some of the new tech and building.
Speaker A:We're making healthier homes and I think that's smart.
Speaker A:If we go back to the energy inefficient homes we built in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and then it starts to go off the rails for a while.
Speaker A:On the healthy side, those are still some of the healthiest homes out there to live in because the house is breathed.
Speaker A:So you have two things to do with that.
Speaker A:You either have to go back to that, to less energy efficient homes, which a lot of people don't like spending money on high electricity costs, especially with what we're seeing out there with energy costs.
Speaker A:Now let's talk about electricity costs here for a Minute in our homes, many times the ones that we see that are giving the highest rate of increases as far as energy costs are because these companies are investing in solar, wind, some of that technology that I don't know if it's paying off or not, but they're investing in that stuff, in getting away from some of the other natural gas, coal, some of those things.
Speaker A:And I get it, I want our environment to be really clean, too.
Speaker A:But some of these natural gas plants are pretty clean.
Speaker A:And if you look at that, compared to some of the waste of what happens to these solar panel and wind farms when they're done with them, I'm not sure if they're that much cleaner on paper.
Speaker A:And I think we need to bring some common sense back in.
Speaker A:It's like all of us out there with curbside recycling that we're putting our plastic in.
Speaker A:We're putting our.
Speaker A:All of our things in that we're doing our work.
Speaker A:We're putting it in there.
Speaker A:Putting their plastic with the little diamond shape in there.
Speaker A:You're putting the right ones in.
Speaker A:Your cardboard's going in there.
Speaker A:It's a mixed recycle.
Speaker A:I was watching a film up in.
Speaker A:In Canada.
Speaker A:They thought they'd test to see what they did.
Speaker A:And I want to see this happen in the US If I had the time, I would do this study.
Speaker A:These companies went and bought.
Speaker A:They did an expose on it.
Speaker A:They bought 5 or 10 tons of bailed plastic waste and they drove in the middle of it.
Speaker A:GPS monitors.
Speaker A:And where did it go?
Speaker A:The first half of the video I watched that stuff.
Speaker A:A lot of it went right into the landfill is a plastic bundle.
Speaker A:It was recycled.
Speaker A:And it was cheaper for that company to go send it in the landfill than to recycle it, even though we have spent all the time, money in expense to separate that out.
Speaker A:Oh, it feels good.
Speaker A:We're recycling.
Speaker A:That stuff's just going back in the landfill.
Speaker A:And that to me is just insane.
Speaker A:Why are we wasting our energy on doing all of that?
Speaker A:Maybe we should be working on taking that waste and burning it into energy cleanly.
Speaker A:Maybe we should be doing something with it instead of just bearing it.
Speaker A:So I think we need to be adding in a lot more common sense into how we operate ourselves.
Speaker A:And this isn't a people problem.
Speaker A:It's a government business problem that we've got to.
Speaker A:We've got to fix.
Speaker A:It's perfectly okay in the city of Portland to dump a million gallons of sewage when they get an overflow right into the Willamette river here.
Speaker A:But they're trying to ban dozen cars, two dozen, maybe three dozen cars from racing at the local raceway because it's bad for someone's health.
Speaker A:Even though there's 30 or 40 planes flying overhead every single day over that raceway using AV gas.
Speaker A:I think we might be bringing common sense back into everything in our lives.
Speaker A:And I hope that happens, because this pick them and choose them stuff is insane, and it's costing us is homeowners a lot of money.
Speaker A:So all of us, if we.
Speaker A:If I could request one thing of everybody out there, let's put our common sense hats on a little bit and see if we can make some changes right now.
Speaker A:Let's put the politics aside.
Speaker A:Let's put the.
Speaker A:The left and the right trying to hate each other aside.
Speaker A:I don't want to get into politics in this show, but they make money off hating each other.
Speaker A:I'm talking about the politicians.
Speaker A:So let's see if we can come together and go, hey, this makes sense to keep our environment clean.
Speaker A:Let's make sense to make our homes efficient and save us electricity in a common sense way.
Speaker A:But I think we got to remove these weird pet projects where we're spending all this money on something that makes a little bit of a difference.
Speaker A:But the big ones we're just gonna ignore.
Speaker A:And many times that's because there are lobbies out there paying a lot of money to politicians to make them look the other way.
Speaker A:And I think maybe some of those days, that pendulum might be swinging the other way and those days come into an end.
Speaker A:So I don't want to talk politics, but I just want to say that we're in an interesting time right now, But I'm hopeful that we can bring some common sense back into building codes, back into energy codes, back into all of that, because I want to save money.
Speaker A:I want my kids to have a great environment to live in.
Speaker A:But we got to put our thinking caps on and throw some common sense into this whole thing.
Speaker A:Now, we got a great show coming up this weekend that you won't want to miss.
Speaker A:We've got Andy Grak coming back in, and I'm going to say that right now because it's really exciting.
Speaker A:He is coming back in.
Speaker A:We're going to be talking.
Speaker A:He is a.
Speaker A:He is insurance public adjuster.
Speaker A:I'm going to give you a little quick tease here about that because we get into some stuff of how to navigate that stuff and how not to ruin an insurance claim and get denied first.
Speaker A:Especially when you're talking with water and mold and things like that in your home.
Speaker A:And the rest of that we'll talk about a little bit later.
Speaker A:As far as recalls out there, let's see.
Speaker A:Igloo is recalling more than 1 million 90 quart rolling coolers due to fingertip amputation and crushing hazards.
Speaker A:Take a look at that@cpsc.gov let's see.
Speaker A:Looking to see set smart recalls low gas climbing ropes due to fall hazard.
Speaker A:Those are failing.
Speaker A:Be careful with that.
Speaker A:About 22.
Speaker A:Let's take a look.
Speaker A:A lot of kids toys.
Speaker A:There's an air pistol trading company recalls roll up window blinds due to strangulation entanglement hazards because of cords.
Speaker A:Not too many of those.
Speaker A:And that looks like to be the big one.
Speaker A:There is a very popular baby gate and I say that kind of laughingly.
Speaker A: There's about: Speaker A:Looks like they got them on Amazon that is now on recall and those can cause harm.
Speaker A: There's about: Speaker A:I think I might even have one of those.
Speaker A:So I got to take a look.
Speaker A:I had one of those for my dogs to keep them out when they're puppies and that might be one of those.
Speaker A:So I got to take a look at that myself.
Speaker A:And don't forget they have that big LG recall range on their electric ranges due to fire hazard.
Speaker A:Unfortunately they're going to give you a sticker instead of trying to do something with that.
Speaker A:And then the other big one is the TTI Outdoor power equipment recalls the right Ryobi battery powered mowers due to fire hazard.
Speaker A:So there's about 217,500 of those.
Speaker A:And make sure you take a look at it.
Speaker A:There are model numbers on here to take a look, but they should stop using the recalled mower and contact tti, which is Ryobi, for instructions how to disable the recall mower and receive a free replacement.
Speaker A:Hey, look guys, if you got a Ryobi mower, there's a chance they'll send you a new one.
Speaker A:So that's interesting.
Speaker A:Injuries reported on that.
Speaker A:So it's something.
Speaker A:That's their 21 inch walk behind mower and 21,200 17,500 of those.
Speaker A:So that's a big one right there.
Speaker A:All right everybody, this one's going a little long today.
Speaker A:I got on my rant a little bit, but I just wanted to say hey, and if you want to send a comment on what I said, I'm always open to discussion.
Speaker A:Head over to aroundthehouse online.com I'm Eric G.
Speaker A:Thanks for tuning in to around the House.
Speaker A:We'll tackle this again this weekend.
Speaker A:We'll see you then.
Speaker A:Song let's be lovers we're all over the radio Take my hand out Nowhere to go all over the radio with.
