John Phillips and the retired judge.

My job was to send 18 year old kids to prison for life.

I saw the potential in this place, and it would be a place where kids could feel safe and could start working on turning their lives around.

My name is Juliet Mendoza.

My name is Jesus.

I come from a low income family.

And I didn't really have the best influences.

Well, I joined the school because I had low grades.

So many of the kids come in here, they haven't had the opportunities that they should have.

And they know that.

My name is Ed Bennett, and I came in to lea the project of the Orange County Sustainable House built for Rancho Cielo.

When I first heard about it, I said, we're in no position to start a project like this.

They were nowhere near the students that we were going up against that were college students.

And, you know, basically engineers and architects.

Do we have a chance?

No.

By far, we did not have a chance.

I don't think we can win.

Like, what's the point of this?

You know, it's not college students.

A big factor was Belhaven, Hayward's healthy homes coming in and showing us a lot of this new innovative products and theories on how to build a house that's healthier than a normal house.

Unhealthy housing is costing American health care system $700 billion a year.

That's just three feet, $700 billion a year.

He's been in the building industry supplying materials conventionally done it.

But now his mindset is, let's do this differently.

We can do it better.

So often builders say but this is the way we've always done.

Well, we've been at this i America for a couple centuries.

Technology's changed.

We can teach th kids the future of construction.

We can teach them about healthy homes.

The design was very elaborate, right?

It wasn't a typical square little box.

It had a loft on it.

It had angles.

It was a very difficult build, let alone using students.

They were like arguing a lot of how some things weren't going to work.

We never thought about energy efficiency.

You know, as far as insulation, air tightness of a house, some of the materials that we use, for example, an OSB board that gives off gases because the chemicals that are used to make it we didn't think of those things.

We're building a hous that we never had built before and never even thought about building before.

We're using different architectural designs that we've never used before.

We're using these environmentally friendly materials that we never used before.

Siding on the house is a cork siding, which I never even heard of.

Everybody, including myself, thought, hey, you know, this can't be done.

We took the students over to visit the first healthy home in Carmel.

And when we close that door and it was peacefully quiet and one temperature, everybody got it in a minute.

When you actually do the air tightness, it's pretty easy to do.

And now you add ventilation so you can fill the house full of fresh air.

And now you have a hous where you can actually downsize the heating cooling system, the associated infrastructure, the electrical panels.

And it pays for the difference at time of construction and paying you back for life with lower maintenance costs and lower energy costs, and far more comfortable experience.

You get a much better house and it's 80 degrees outside and you walk in this house.

It's 65 degrees in this house with no AC.

It's just amazing ho when you put a house together, the way that he's telling us to do it, how it really makes a difference, it's really palpable.

So he had to teach everything like little, like, very carefully, you know, because we didn't want to mess it up.

Everything that we'd done in the past, you throw it out the door and start over, right?

When a house is finished, if you look at the air tightness, you know you get that little gap around each wire and each plumbing piece.

And at the bottom of the door, and you add them all up.

It's like they didn't put a door this size in the house.

They just left it out.

Well, that's a lot of air leakage.

This house, the air leakage comes to a hole about that big right.

And that makes a huge difference.

Well, there's a lot of, like, little things that make it how the you know, I feel like with all those little things, it kind of changes the whole house in a way.

And so even just the sheetrock, it doesn't grow mold.

And I thought that was really cool.

So the your recent energy recovery ventilator that has six tubes going through it, three bring in fresh air from outside.

And the other three take out still air from inside of the home.

It pumps fresh new air in every two hours, which is really awesome.

I was learning just as much as student were learning on all this stuff.

Most older contractors, you know, have it in their head that this is how you do it.

Once you start doing it, you start realizing that it probably is a better way to do it.

The cork on the outside, you can hold the torch onto the cork and it won't get it on fire.

Even if you hold it for like an hour.

So this house here really is fire resistant.

There's no external vent in the house.

And that's where these houses really catch fire.

I saw that progress working on it.

How it started to come together.

I got on board.

I think we were the first ones to finish everything.

They made us feel good you know, like, oh, we did that.

Like, it's really.

I was never really able to be part of things like that in general.

It was like, damn, we really did it, you know?

Are we come around to the first day of Judgment.

They are nervous as can be.

Competition was very intense.

There's actual inspector on the job.

Every aspect of the house had to perform the way it should.

We have a solar field with battery that we ran this house for two straight weeks off the grid, and we were the only house that did that.

We had 5 or 600 people coming to this house day of the competition, and the air just stayed at the same temperature.

The house itself wa probably 50% of the competition.

And then the other 50% of the competition was the actual students describing the whole house, why we did this, why they did that, how things perform.

Okay.

We would like to thank you as well for allowing us to be part of this.

Thank you.

To go up on stage and talk and everything in front of all those people.

Honestly, I think I even cried because of my nerves.

She was the most timid person, I think, at the school.

She ended up being the spokesperson and really dazzled the judges.

I also planned on encouraging the girls to that.

It's possible.

There was actually ten categories of judging.

The first day they had the awards for the first two categories.

Everyone's there.

All the universities in first place.

This project was a stand out.

We were all really nervous and just hoping, you know, all of our judges would be happy living in this home.

Crossing our fingers that we win Rancho Cielo.

Congratulations.

They called off Rancho Cielo youth camp is to win the first award.

They went on to win another one.

And another on every time they won another one.

You could see their shoulders prep up.

They just stood taller.

They didn't think it could happen.

And then it did.

Rancho Cielo.

Oh.

After we kept winning, it was just like, did it really have been like we were just laughing at when the last one came up?

I think they did cried on that one.

We were the overall winner at the end.

Yeah, we took first place.

It was a pretty big thing, was really emotiona for all of us who had worked on coming from, like where I come from.

It was just like a really good achievement.

I thought our homes were normal.

Let's be honest.

Like, I thought it was healthy.

I thought my home was happy.

We went back home and it was like the homes in our neighborhoods were really unhealthy compared to this home.

Building science from around the country.

The schools of Environmental Engineering fully understand that you can actually build houses that are healthy, energy efficient and durable for no increased price.

I think what the tradespeopl need to know is that technology and the new way of building things is the way it's going to have to be anyways.

So learn it and take advantage of this now because you're going to be the cutting edge person.

California is going to build a lot of houses, and especially after the fire.

I think this is the right time to look at can we do it better?

Smarter?

Every time a house is built without using the built better for health principles.

It's a wasted opportunity to create a better house.