Welcome back, I'm Nate Adams, and this is the fifth part of the Electrify Everything course. This is a third module, so HVAC, this is the hard stuff. So everything else is really just changing appliances and relatively easy stuff to do. HVAC, the easiest way to look at it is like an organ transplant. So there's a bunch of little things that you really want to know, and like we've discussed in the past, particularly in the scaling piece of this, if really good experiences aren't had by both the homeowners and the contractors, we're really going to struggle to scale. Probably likely to kill it, not unlike how 1980s diesels were so bad that they damaged the reputation of diesels in the United States for years and years and years while they became super popular in Europe. That turned out to be a bad thing, but it's still a good analogy. So last time we talked about resistance heat and how it is not actually a bad thing. This is an actual picture that I took of an actual client unit running full tilts, that's 15,000 watts burning right there. So it's a useful tool, we're going to touch on that again here, but what we're really going to focus on is called static pressure. This is the most important concept that you probably never heard of and a lot of HVAC contractors aren't that familiar with this either, but it is utterly critical because if you don't keep an eye on this, your system is going to be really noisy and you're likely to have failures within one or two years after install. That's bad. You don't want to be replacing these fan motors, they're expensive. There's all kinds of other things that go wrong with high static. You'll severely limit the life of your system with high static. And then we'll touch on surge protection at the end, it's pretty quick. Okay, so here's where we are in the core syllabus. So we are down in part five and we are talking about important details. And this is a really, really important detail. And I expect that this will get a fair amount of play because it's an unusual concept that not many people are going to know about and this is a really common pitfall. So if you happen to be here because somebody sent you this, look for the link below to sign up for the rest of the course because this is just one small piece of what it is. But this is a really key thing and this is something that not many people know about and it's really important for providing good experiences. Okay, so all that said, let's dig in. External static pressure. Easiest way to look at it is what I have written here. The blood pressure of your HVAC system. And by the way, if you are here because somebody parachuted you in here, make sure you read the HVAC 101 chapter. It's the second chapter of my book, The Home Comfort Book. There will be a link below. And that compares the HVAC system in your car to the HVAC in your house. And your house comes up severely wanting and that's going to be related very strongly to the next video on what we call badass HVAC or nearly perfect HVAC. So make sure you check that out if you happen to get parachuted in here. All right, so blood pressure, very important. So the basic idea of this is inside a balloon. So if you have a balloon blown up, there is static pressure. So there's pressure inside, but it can't go anywhere because it's tied up. If you release the end of that balloon, balloon, balloon, whatever. If you release the end of that balloon, you get velocity pressure. There's a new word and you want velocity pressure. But the problem is if you have too much static pressure inside, the balloon pops. So in this case, if you're looking at it versus HVAC, it puts a whole bunch of back pressure on the fan motor and the fan motor will die very quickly, like in a year or two. And they're not cheap. They're at least $1,000 installed. But if you have too little static pressure, there's not enough pressure to flow the air. So there's a balance, not unlike blood pressure. So like I mentioned, if static pressure is too high, the system is going to die early. There's a whole bunch of different ways that static pressure can take them out. If it is too low, the system doesn't flow air to the rooms that you want to get it to. So it has to be somewhere in the middle. Here's what the numbers are. So it goes from 0.08 inches of water column to 0.5 inches of water column. So we've been talking about all sorts of weird metrics. Here's another one, and we have the Brits to thank for this one probably. And then we haven't changed the metrics. So who knows exactly what this is? It's probably Pascal's in the EU. But where you want to be is in this 0.08 to 0.5 inch range. And here we are down here. Inches WC is inches of water column. And just so you have an idea, Earth atmosphere, how much pressure we're in right now is 407 inches of water column, which is 14.7 pounds per square inch or one bar. So this isn't a great deal of pressure that we're talking about. But it is, I mean, this is like a very strong wind. It's quite a bit of pressure when you consider the difference that you're normally going to feel. And another important note is we have gotten away with as low as 0.04 inches of static pressure and still had flow. So we still had the velocity pressure happening. So 0.08 isn't a hard rule, but it's a generally accepted rule. Okay, so if we put more flow into a duct system, we get more static pressure. And it's a geometric thing. So you may be at 1,000 CFM cubic feet per minute, where you get to 0.5 inches of water column. So you're hitting where you want.  So it's a wall when you get to where your system won't flow anymore. So if you have too much pressure, again, you're going to get equipment breakdown. And curse here is most systems that I have tested and that I hear in my HVAC breath room testing land in the 0.8 to 1.5 inch. So three times what they're supposed to have. Most manufacturers stop even putting any kind of ratings on how much airflow that they will have. So more in the 0.8 to 1 inch range. So if you're at 1.5 inch, that's high blood pressure. That sucker is going to block. And I've seen failures pretty early. So and this brings up a really key thing. So we talk a lot about reducing the load in a house so that it can handle or it can be heated by a two or a three time heat pump, which is 24,000 or 36,000 BTUs. And if anybody from the EU is watching this, 36,000 BTUs is about 9.5 KW. So a lot of houses may need a four or a five ton heat pump to really do them well in a cold climate if they're leaky. But most duct systems just can't do that. So you're going to toast that HVAC system really quickly. Most duct systems can really only handle two or three tons, which is why we work hard to reduce the load of our advanced project homes into that range so that we can put a heat pump in and everything is honky-dory. Every ton of airflow is 400 cubic feet per minute. Give or take. It can be as low as 275, but that gets into a whole other thing. Like that'll make your air conditioner suck all kinds of moisture out of the air because the coil gets really cold. But that's beyond the scope of what we're talking about here. But in general, if you think 400 CFM per ton, that is kind of the standard. So two tons is 800. Three tons is 1,200 CFM. And very few systems as they stand can handle more than 1,200 and stay under half an inch of water column. So you have to be careful with that sort of thing. So there are three options to fix static pressure. So the first one is we reduce the heating load so that we can downsize the system. And I'm going to show you that more or less happening in a minute. But that is done with insulation and air sealing. That is building shell work, which we're going to be talking about insulation and air sealing after the HVAC section here. So that's the first option. You reduce how much it takes to heat the house. Second option is you make the ductwork bigger. That can be possible. And a lot of improvements can be made at the equipment or near equipment changes, as they're known as. But if you need to enlarge ductwork, particularly it goes up inside a wall or something like that, good luck. That's some pretty major surgery. But in general, what we find is if you downsize the systems, you right size the duct systems. So downsize the HVAC systems, right size the duct systems. So that oftentimes works. But you have to measure. You have to test. You have to know what you're doing. The third thing is you use resistance backup at low temperatures. So say you have a four ton load house, but you only have three tons of ductwork. You put a three ton in, and you use resistance to make up the difference in the very cold weather. It's a tool. And here we are, resistance backup, like I talked about the last time. If your ducts are too small, so you can't put the right size piece of equipment in, because the house is too leaky, you can use resistance to make up the difference. So you need to test this. And so now you'll see me, I'm going to use ESP abbreviated for external static pressure moving forward, because it doesn't fit on the slides very well. And you need to test to see what this is. It should be under half an inch when it's on high fan. And I want to note, so there's two different types of fan motors out there. So there's one called PSC. That's old school. Think of it like a giant football player that you can throw another guy on his back, and he just keeps going. You can give them high static pressure, and they flow less, but they don't care. They just kind of, you know, they go along, this is fine. I guess like that dog meme, sitting on a stool in a burning bar, this is fine. That's how PSC motors are. The new ones, ECMs, stands for electronically commutating motors. So ECM motor is technically electronically commutating motor-motor. But the ECMs are much more like a European soccer player, the supreme Adana, you touch them on the shoulder and they fall over, writhing in pain, pretending like there was a foul. So they're very efficient. They use a lot less power. So where a PSC will pull 500 to 1,000 watts all the time, no matter what you do to it, a ECM on low will pull as few as 15 watts so in low stage, in checking all of our systems, everyone has been between 15 and 40 watts on low, which is almost nothing. It's a couple bucks a month worth of electricity. What needs to happen though, and what it has happened is in July of 2019, every furnace was required to have an ECM motor put into it. So any high volume furnace. So basically anything that you as a normal consumer are gonna buy has an ECM motor now. And we're hearing of a number of failures already. So this only happened a year and a half ago as I'm recording this. And we're already getting failures after one or maybe two heating seasons because we're putting ECMs in a situation where they're not happy. So this is a real problem you're gonna hear about this more. And this is a known problem by the way, there's even a meme for it. So my friend and HVAC 2.0 contractor, Michael Housh put this meme together. So high static, peck man, nom nom nom nom. It's gonna eat them. These motors are solidly $1,000 each to replace. They may be more depending on your unit and your market. So this is something you want to avoid and there's other things that will go wrong in your system because of this as well. So hopefully I have put a little bit of the fear of God in you about static pressure because it's important. And now let's talk about testing it. I'm not gonna go super deep into this but I want you to have at least an idea of what's going on. So this is also from Michael Housh of House Home Energy in Monroe, Ohio. He's awesome. He is so awesome. What a good guy. And so he put this together and it shows where you drill holes so that you can test all of these things. So total external static pressure on a furnace is from before the fan, because the fan's in here, the heat exchanger's here and then you test after the heat exchanger. So you're testing before the fan and after the heat exchanger and the difference between those is your external static pressure. This is again, part of the HVAC 2.0 process. You're tired of me saying that but we built this to be friendly to electrification. So you wanna find one of these contractors or create one, which we will get to at the end of this course. All right, so I wanna show you some actual numbers. This is me testing one of our projects. So this is test in. This is a furnace. So this is the existing furnace that was there. It was about 20 years old and it was starting to make some weird noises. It was getting towards end of life. So note there is the red probe up here that this is actually before the heat exchanger. So this is weird for my market. It's actually a down flow. So it's blowing down. So this is the filter right here. This is testing after the filter and the other hose down here, which has a blue tip on it is after the heat exchanger and then the air conditioner coil is down here. So they're always in a line like this. So the static pressure, you can see there's 0.523 and then 0.2687 and even though this is negative, you look for the difference between them. So how far apart are they?  So we are at 0.792 inches of water column. So this is well above the 0.5. This is an old PSC blower. It was probably fine, but this is not ideal. We can't run a modern ECM motor system with static that high without expecting some problems. So post install. So now this is a two ton heat pump and it's actually oversized for this house. The model didn't say it was. I wondered if it might be because it's a condo with a shared wall. It's oversized. I've watched the thing run. But now here we are again. Here's the red probe going in. So this is the big filter right here. So it's after the filter and you can see the blue probe in down here that is after the whole heat pump unit. So the heat pump has one fewer thing in it. There's no furnace in this. It's just a coil like your air conditioner and then a fan and note how much lower these numbers are. So if you add those two together, you get 0.235 inches of water column. So that's a super happy system. We're running at less than half of what the recommended high is. So this thing's crazy quiet. One of my favorite things to do on a project is once I'm done, I will go crank the thing to 100%. Go find the lady of the house who usually notices that the systems are noisy and say, so is it noisy at all? Do you notice the sound of it? And almost everyone says, oh, it's on? Yeah, it's at 100%. This is everything she's got. And they just kind of get wowed by that and you move on. That's partly delivered because of low static pressure. This is part of the magic. So this is something you need to be aware of and watch for as you are finding a contractor to do an electrification. So if they try to jam a large heat pump in there, you're gonna regret it. It's gonna create some problems. So be very careful. Now, a couple of things to note on doing this testing. This is a Blower Door Monometer. This is an older one. I bought this back in, oh, nine or 10. So it's 10 years old. But these monometers, to be accurate enough to do this, they start at 400 bucks. New version of this for the Blower Door is 1500 bucks. This is not something that you really wanna do yourself because it requires this accurate tool.  And particularly when you're drilling near the coil or the heat exchanger, bad things can happen. So you can release the refrigerant, which is not something you want inside your house. You could drill a hole in the heat exchanger and cause a carbon monoxide risk in your house. So this is a professional job, important note. So I will tell you stuff that's DIYable. Heat pump, water heater. If you're advanced, go DIY that sucker. But this, be careful. It still makes me nervous when I do it because I'm not a tech. And remember how I said you're gonna get tired of hearing about HVAC 2.0, the comfort consult brought this up a number of times in the past and we're gonna keep bringing it up because it's a solid process that helps reduce all kinds of risks and increase the odds of success of whatever project you're doing, but particularly electrifications. So guess what else is in the comfort consult? You betcha, static pressure testing. So it's not always in there. We don't require it, but it is part of it. And generally we listen to the system because oftentimes the oil can. You'll turn the air handler on and you'll hear and you'll watch the ductwork actually expand with the high pressure in them. If that's the case, it's like, well, let me go get my drill, we're gonna test this. It only takes 10 or 15 minutes to run this test, so it's not a huge deal, but the comfort consult's already pretty long. It's three or four hours as it is. So, but it's an important thing to ask about, particularly in electrification. Now, I want to go back to the large filters. See how big this filter is up here? So A, it's four inches thick and B, it's actually larger than the unit itself. Normally we size the ducts to be exactly the same size of the filter and it's actually pretty close. It's about the same size as the actual filter hole that's inside here. But the duct modifications that happened here and pretty small duct modifications mixed with the lower airflow from a small heat pump that is right size to the house. And we did some air sealing on this house as well. The relatively minor, I think we got a 20 or 25% drop and most of my drops are upwards of 50%. But by running this nice big filter, which has very low pressure going across it and running a nice large duct and downsizing the unit, we didn't change anything else in this house. One small addition, there's a little duct that's behind here going to the bedrooms behind this space. But this led to about a two thirds drop in static pressure with the same duct system. So this can be done. You can right size the system to the duct system. So that's an important thing to know.  The consumer friendly version of this is nearly perfect HVAC because it is. So this tackles all sorts of stuff. You've got this nice filter in there. And so this is all in one line rather than being a U shaped system like this one is, but this is a traditional basement system in our market. So this tackles the six functions of HVAC, which is load matching. You want to have variable speed and throttle for it. You want to have filtration, which is the nice media filter. You want to have dehumidification, which can be done with a reheat dehumidification with that resistance backup that I was talking about last time. A fresh air line. So there's a fresh air duct that goes outside with a damper on it that closes when it gets too hot or cold. Mixing, you want to stir the house all the time and run that air through that filter, particularly as we are in the pandemic. One of the best things you can do is filter the air in your house frequently. That's true all the time. If you want to get sick less, filter your air a lot and have a really good filter. So it actually knocks the garbage out. And then the last one is humidification, which isn't appropriate for all markets or all houses, but it can be nice to not have super dry skin. So we're going to be talking about this in the next video. That's the short version right there. All right, last little piece we're going to talk about for important details is surge protection. So many power systems have a lot of voltage fluctuation. So you may hear a traditional power called 110. You may hear it called 120. They're both technically correct. So they're allowed to be somewhere between 110 and 125. But if you get lots of fluctuations, the inverter equipment, which is what you want to buy, is very sensitive to that. You will fry compressors. Ask me how I know this. So we have lost a few because I didn't know about this. Now I know about this. So this is the one that is the industry consensus. It has five different circuits in it. So it'll handle five different major surges without killing your equipment. It's not inexpensive. This is a $500 part plus install. And you can get some cheap whole home ones for 100 bucks or 150 bucks for the part. They may be fine. I don't know.  So here we are, ICM 493 Surge Protector. This goes outside right along with your shutoff that is on the outdoor unit. And here's what power fluctuation looks like, by the way. I pulled this out of the Sense Energy Monitor Facebook Group. And see how he's got 120 on one side and almost 120 and 109 on the other. That's a big difference. And it was 84 times in the last month. So this is one of the beta things that Sense has running right now. They call it labs. This house is really problematic. If this fellow had an inverter heat pump, he probably would have toasted some equipment. So you get a lightning strike where there's all kinds of things that can lead to a surge. Spend the money, put this in.  They can also kill the boards on the inside unit. All right, so that's that important HVAC details. So we talked about resistance heat last time. Again, how it is a tool. We touched on it again here. Static pressure is the blood pressure in your house or in your duct system rather, should be between 0.08 and 0.5 inches of water column. And then surge protection. So these are all important pieces and this is in the weeds, but you're early adopters. So if you don't know about this and you don't ask about this, the odds of you having failures related to these things are really hot. And that is what we are trying to avoid. And again, you're gonna wanna try and look for an HVAC 2.0 contractor or find someone who's willing to go with you through the process and become a 2.0 contractor. We're going to help make that very easy. All right, and that's the end of this module. So that's it. This piece of the electrify everything course. Again, if you happen to parachute in here because somebody sent you the link, please sign up for this because you're missing a ton of other stuff.  So if you have gotten value from this course and the other pieces, send me some money. So you can send me five bucks. You can send me a thousand, whatever works, whatever value you find in this, that would be nice because we are doing all of this on a shoe strength. So we are building HVAC 2.0 on our own dime, which means we are not making any money off of it yet. It has some cash flow, but it's not making money yet because we are working to build it and build it really, really well so that when we do step on the gas, it doesn't break. We don't want to scale a turd. So if you enjoy our work and this course, send us a couple bucks. And then also sign up for the rest of the electrify everything course, which is free. So thanks again for watching this. I'm Nate Adams, sometimes known as Nate the House Whisperer and I'll see you next time when we get to talk about badass HVAC. It's actually going to be a webinar. So enjoy your day. See you next time. Bye-bye.


This video is brought to you by VitaJax, VitaJax keeping YouTubers awake since 2005. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, my fellow Americans. It's your most trusted voice on radio and television speaking, Larry Lonesome Roads. Here to tell you the truth behind what those fat cats in Washington don't want you to know. You stick with me and I'll be your best friend. Now, a quick word from our sponsor, Eliah Kazan, and his product, the 1957 Dark Satire, A Face in the Crowd. Starring the one and only Andy Griffith in a story chillingly prescient for our media saturated times, that acts as a cautionary tale about the power of the media, the corruption of fame, and how you can never, ever trust what you see on your screen. Opening in a ramshackle jail in rural Arkansas, the story follows go-getting radio journalist Marsha Jeffries, played by Patricia Neal, who attempts to interview several inmates for a program called A Face in the Crowd. After being introduced to down on his luck drifter, Larry Roads, Marsha quickly becomes captivated by the folksy, straight-talking guitar player, and senses a lucrative business opportunity after giving him his own program on local radio. However, as Roads' popularity increases with his audience to the point where he achieves an illustrious new show entirely devoted to him by a major New York broadcaster, it's not long before the ego of this folksy country bumpkin mutates into something far more sinister, a deranged egomaniacal political operator who is then hired by a senator to help him win his bid for the presidency. A Face in the Crowd's depiction of a media personality from humble origins becoming a cult-like leader of millions may have appeared novel and fresh to audiences in 1957, but now, six decades after release, its story sadly contains many disturbing real-life parallels to political and media personas we know today, predicting the rise and fall, if only metaphorically, of figures such as Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, and Bill O'Reilly who once dominated in their field. The casting choice of Andy Griffith soon to become a household name with his eponymously titled show is both ingeniously ironic and, at the same time, darkly subversive, giving a performance in his film debut that is both likable and deceitful, tricking our confidence into thinking that redemption is just around the corner for his character before he descends further and further into madness. Although the film's message might be obvious, we do ourselves a disservice to ignore it. For whether it's false advertising, product marketing, or good old-fashioned demagoguery, there is a depressing realization that some things never change and indeed transcend time, making a Face in the Crowd's relevance to our discourse today only more poignant, and reminding us to always treat with skepticism any media personality who demands that you follow them. Now with that done, don't forget to hit that like and subscribe button. Uh oh.


G'day, guys. Welcome to my channel Bootlossophy. If we haven't met before, my name is Tech and I'm coming to you from Widgetlands, Nungabuja in Western Australia. Today, I'm going to open for you this box from Parkhurst Boots. It's a group MTO model. Let's take a look at what it is. So for those of you who have seen my other Parkhurst unboxings, you'll get to recognize this box. Parkhurst uses the same box for shipping as well as the actual boot box. It's an all-in-one, and I think that's great because obviously it's saving carbon, saving recycling and so on. Very, very plain cardboard box. Let's take a look at what's inside. So included in it is a spare pair of laces. In this case, flat Wexcotton laces. This one in black. A card from Andrew Savisco, the owner of Parkhurst. Thank you for your support, enjoy and wear well. Two boot bags. How interesting. They're a different color. They're usually the sort of linen white or black. This time they're in a sort of khaki and no Parkhurst logo. Okay, that's interesting. That's I guess the new sort of editions in the box from Parkhurst 2.0, which I'll talk about in a minute. Inside this tissue paper. Oh, here we go. And as you can see, this is the Parkhurst Niagara Mock-Toe model. This one in a blue calf skin. It's a group MTO, and I'll tell you about that in a minute. Let's get both boots out. I'll just put this box away. So there you are. Let's go into it in some detail. This is a really beautiful pair of boots. So let's look at these boots in some detail and close-up. I couldn't resist. I put them on very quickly. So there's some slight creasing, but don't worry about that, because I did put them on. So let's see what we can see. Clearly this is a Mock-Toe design. It's a Mock Mock-Toe, very similar to the old Indies. It's called a Mock-Toe because of this stitching across the vamp that sort of replicates of American First Nations moccasin shoes done by First Nations Indigenous people. But it's a Mock one. What that is, it's a cosmetic stitching across a one-piece vamp. The pattern is fairly simple. It has one piece of leather that goes across the waist and the vamp. It has two quarters on each side, and there's a one-piece backstay. So fairly simple. So this stitching creates a little bit of interest for the boot. The calf leather in this lovely gorgeous blue feels soft. I think it'll take a great polish if you want it polished. If I use it as a dress shoe, I may very well polish it up. It feels soft and supple yet firm at the same time. One thing I want to point out is very unlike Parkhurst in the past. This is a fully lined boot. It's lined up the shaft. It's lined in the tongue. And yeah, it's lined in the vamp. So it's fully lined with a soft glove leather. Really nice. Parkhurst logo at the bottom. And at the bottom is a half sock liner for a bit of comfort. It's slightly padded. And then inside, I can see and feel a leather insole. If you take a look at the uppers, I've already mentioned this really soft calf skin, supple yet tough at the same time. The stitching looks gorgeous. I mean, there's not a stitch out of place as far as I can see. It's a triple stitch at the quarters, two very close together stitches in this one. Single stitch to put the reinforcement up there across the collar. The collar is rolled into the lining. As you can see, it's not raw. Single stitch along the backstay. And obviously this cosmetic stitch there. The tongue is lined right up to the fifth eyelet. So it's sort of at that level. The hardware is antique brass. One, two, three, four, five eyelets and three speed hooks. That's really a really good combination. The lace is interesting. They're a little bit skinny, I think. But it may be good because it then doesn't crowd out this sort of facing here, which I find in my order in these irritates the hell out of me because they have a hell of a lot of eyelets and speed hooks and they use thick laces, but you can always change the laces. Coming down, my understanding is this is a leather cork and leather sole construction. So the inside, as I said, is a leather, a piece of veg tan leather insole. It sits on a cork footbed, which is used to fill the cavity that's created by this 360 degree Goodyear welt. There is a piece of steel embedded in the cork, which is the shank, and that again is a change for Parkhurst because Parkhurst used to use fiberglass shanks, which I love because that took me through the airport very easily. It's Goodyear welt construction, 360 degrees. What that means is there is a thin piece of leather called the welt that goes all the way around the boot. The uppers are turned in and sewn to the inside edge of the welt, and the outside edge of the welt here is sewn through to the outsole. So in that way, this stitch here, which could potentially wick water upwards, just wicks it up to this level and doesn't go inside the boot. The welt is sewn on the inside and doesn't, no stitches appear on the outside that take any water directly inside. If you take a look at the welt, it's a wheeled welt. It's wheeled to create this nice little pattern, but it's a split reverse welt, which means the welt is split on the inside edge, and the top half is turned up and flanged against the wall of the boot. So it gives you then extra barrier against moisture, a little bit of extra water resistance. The sole itself, let's take a look at what it is. You can see there's the welt, there's the midsole, and there's the outsole. So there's a hell of a lot of leather in there. Leather outsole, obviously, slippery going to be until it sort of scratches up, starts to look ugly, and then it'll grip. I like leather soles. It sounds like glutton for punishment, but I really like leather soles. I think they're elegant. They give a lovely shape. There are no studs popping out and all sorts of things. They're breathable, they're flexible. The only downside is when they're new, they're very slippery. When they're old, they're pretty ugly, but I do like them. The heel stack, again, let's see, welt, one, two, I think three very thick pieces of leather making up the heel stack. Then there's the rubber insert to give you grip, and a leather top lift. Brass nails, good touch. And obviously this leather, I don't know what you call it, mitre, gives you grip as you put your heel down. So all in all, veg 10 leather outsole, veg 10 midsole, veg 10 welt, veg 10 insole, soft calfskin leather, pretty good hardware. These are really good materials. I am really liking this boot. Okay, let's talk a little bit about Parkhurst before we put these boots on. I'll put a link in the description below to the Parkhurst website, which I'll also put on screen as I talk. Parkhurst was started by the owner Andrew Savisco, and it's still pretty much a one-man band. Andrew had a vision where he would be making, he wanted to make really good value boots that weren't at the very high prices, but still gave extremely good quality content. And he had the vision of sourcing all of his materials from US sources, whether they actually be materials made in the US, or if they were made in the UK, for example, Day Night Souls, he would get them sourced from a local supplier so that he kept supply chains within the US. So it's quite an inspirational vision. Unfortunately, COVID hit Parkhurst very hard. Parkhurst make boots in small batches. So in terms of what they had available, they used to get quite interesting innovative leathers and make a limited run so that they then change over leathers. But COVID struck them substantially because supply chains started drying up and Andrew just couldn't get the boots manufactured through the US factory through lockdowns and supply chain issues, lack of materials and supplies and so on. And it hasn't been until recently that Parkhurst turned the corner and I suppose you could call it Parkhurst 2.0 where Andrew reached out to his contacts and found a factory in Spain as well as another factory in New York to take over some of the backlog. And so you'll be starting to see as this video goes up more and more styles and collections start to regenerate. At the moment he's got the Elmwood, which is a Chelsea boot in various leathers and the Niagara, such as this one that you're seeing that I'm reviewing, in also various leathers and gradually he will start to bring in the old Alan and Richmond styles. So that in a nutshell is really where we are with Parkhurst and I'm dying to get these on foot so let's go try them on. Okay I'm very excited to put these on so let's start. So these are, oh that slipped in rather nicely, the glove lining is a new experience in Parkhurst for me. So these are size 8 in Parkhurst's 602M or M602 Last. As you know if you've been watching my channel I'm a US Brannock 8.5D that's my true to size, 8.5D in the US measurement. But in most boots I wear an 8D because as in most boots I tend to size a half down from my true to size to get into these heritage style American boots. So this is no different. I'm wearing an 8 and in terms of sizing as I put them on they feel really good. There's a good, I would say yeah, good thumbs width between the tip and where my big toe is, maybe a little less. The width on both feet, this is the wider foot of mine, the width on both feet is just about right, really nice. There's extra room in this modified 602M Last. There's more volume and I can feel that. I mean my, I can quite easily wiggle my toes. There's plenty of room in there. Interestingly the 602M Last or the old 602M Last is a combination last which means it's a narrow in the heel and the waist and then it widens up at the ball of the foot to the toe. Interestingly these feel a little less snug than some of my other Parkhurst boots. Not uncomfortable but they're just not as fitting in the waist and the heel. Immediately I can feel that the brand new leather soles are a little bit slippery and carpet so I need to be careful when I stand up in case it looks like I'm on a skating rink. Extremely comfortable underfoot as I stand up. I can feel the firmness of the leather cork, leather underneath my feet. Now how can I describe this? It feels like I'm on firm foundations. That leather is flexible but it makes me feel like my feet are planted into them, into the layers of leather and I suppose that'll only just get better. The sole and one of the benefits of a leather sole is quite flexible so I'm not getting a lot of heel slip. I don't think I tied my left boot particularly tight when I tied the laces because I did it in a hurry so I'm slipping slightly in the heel over there but otherwise they feel really comfortable. So in terms of sizing half down from Brannock you may have to contact Andrew if you have particularly wide feet you may have to size up. In terms of comfort these feel really really good. It's been a long time since I've had a pair of boots like these. Now okay I think the arch support is fine but it's probably not up to Alden's standard but you know Alden's have a history in making orthopedic shoes and my Alden 403s really do grip my arches in that cantilever sort of part here. They really mold into my arches. Look these are fine. They don't compare with my White Sand P for example but those have half a cow under them in all leather. So they're good. Fit and comfort I'd say a good eight and a half to nine out of ten maybe closer to the nine and I suspect that over time I'll increase that comfort factor. No tightness no pain spots superb. Definitely two thumbs up. Now finally these are group MTO boots so when I ordered them with the group that was organized by the Parkhurst Enthusiast group in Facebook these came up to us at US $438 so it's well over $300 that Parkhurst used to be built around but the actual materials and the construction in this boot as you saw is definitely a step up above. There are a couple of other ready to wear ready to buy Niagara's on the Parkhurst website in two different leathers with different soles and they sell at the moment for US $418. I do believe Andrew is going to bring this into the ready to wear section. I'm not quite sure what price it is but with the leather sole and the and the extra leather inside I think it might be coming out at the $438 mark. Look I think it represents excellent value. I mean you saw what went into it. You saw the care and attention and I really think at $438 you are getting a really well made boot that will fit into your different casual and potentially even office wear type suits and I think it represents excellent value. I'm going to put a link below in the description to the website where you can take a look at the existing other boots that they have at the moment and perhaps by the time you go in the other models will have come out. So don't forget though before you go there click on the like button and the subscribe button to help me grow my channel and otherwise keep look out for my other videos coming out. Take care guys and I'll see you soon.