Let's say good morning now to the host of Home on KFI our house, whisper Dean Sharp. Welcome back from vacation.
Dean, Thank you very much.
Ah, you're welcome. So today we're talking about like cool, new futuristic things that you can get for your house, not in the future, but right now here in the present.
This is true. This is true. Every year or so I try and set aside at least a couple of shows and we talk about new stuff that's out there that really could change the game, as it were, when it comes to your home or home building or some aspect of home. And we've got a really cool list this year.
All right, so give us, give us a couple of the highlights. It sounds like you're fighting a bit of a cold as well.
Yeah, I'm I'm a little nasally this morning, so forgive me for that. But all right, so right at the top of the list. Super wood. What is super wooderwood? Well, here's the thing. It's not so much a particular wood, but it is a process now that any kind of wood can go through that makes it get this stronger than steel, eighty percent lighter than equivalent steel, and rot resistant, fire resistant, water resistant. It's really kind of an amazing idea.
Okay, So here's my one question on this, because in the wake of the wildfires in La County, they're talking about how these all these fire burn areas are toxic because the houses are built with thing with chemically you know, altered building materials, right, right, So is that does that superwood fall into that category?
Not at all, not at all. It is wood, it is in fact, In fact, the strength of superwood doesn't come from adding anything to the wood. It comes from removing something from the wood. So it goes through a little chemical treatment and the chemicals don't stick around. Okay. The chemical treatment is the equivalent to the kind of tree that we already take wood through to create pulp.
And what that does is it removes this part of the wood that are lignins and what we call hemicellulose, which are kind of the carbohydrates and the sugars inside the wood. By the way, those are the materials that bugs like termites like to eat. Okay, So imagine imagine this. Imagine you take a regular piece of wood and you let termites just get to it. You know, we've all come across it that's got all these tunnels inside it, all these voids, spaces where they have just eaten out
all of the goodness inside this wood. What they've left behind are actually the strongest parts of the wood. And now we take that after chemically removing those areas, We take that kind of spongy, open hollow wood and we apply heat and pressure to it to press it down, recompress those areas and get them to find to each other again the walls of those inner voids. And what we end up with is a wood that is unbelievably strong,
no added chemicals to it whatsoever. It's wood. It's just wood that's so cool.
And is it available now?
It is available now, just this year, just this year, and they're beginning their rollout now because they're talking about the possibilities of even creating car body frames, airplane frames, and skyscrapers out of this material.
Wow.
But this year the rollout starts with siding and decking materials and then it will move on to structural beams. So imagine this. You talk about wildfire areas. Imagine that you have an house on the open space edge of a wildfire area. Imagine the freedom you have now from a design perspective to say, you know what, I'm going to put wood siding on my house and it's gonna be entirely class A fire rated because super wood burns at the same temperature that's stone and brick burn.
Wow.
Okay, it's unbelievable.
Yeah, okay, And you're going to talk about more about this, and I would love to talk more about this, and your list of things is all things that I want to find out more about. But we don't have time here now, but we will this weekend on Home with Dean Sharp, and that is Saturday from six to eight and Sunday from nine to noon. And I will be particularly tuned into the firefly petunia.
They glow in the dark.
It's a petunia that glows in the dark. Yes, and there's no radioactivity.
No no. They've mixed it with a lubinescent mushroom gene and now they glow at night.
That is so cool. All right, Dean Sharp, thank you so much. Can't wait to listen to your show this weekend again. It's a Home on KFI. It's six to eight on Saturday morning and nine to noon on Sunday morning. Cool things in the future that you can get right now in the present.
We'll see you there, all right.