Indoor Air Quality with Kaiterra CEO Liam
Talking Healthy Buildings and Indoor Air Quality with Liam Bates, CEO of Kaiterra
Welcome to episode 40 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss wellbeing and sustainability in real estate and hospitality. I’m your host, Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico healthy buildings / wellbeing interiors.
This week I’m in Beijing with Liam Bates, CEO of Kaiterra, a company creating indoor air quality monitors combined with a software component that evaluates that data to drive improvements in indoor environmental quality and ultimately reduce energy expenditure.
We discuss outdoor air quality’s impact on the air we breathe indoors, what uncomfortably high CO2 levels in enclosed meeting rooms mean for our mental performance, the importance of continuous 24/7 365 data monitoring of indoor air, how efforts to create more sustainable buildings in the past may have inadvertently created less healthy buildings, the levers available to us to improve poor quality indoor air and how buildings, landlords and employers need to up their game like never before to encourage workers back into the office.
GUEST / LIAM BATES / CEO OF KAITERRA
HOST / MATT MORLEY / WELLBEING CHAMPION
Conversation Highlights
Most of the buildings in which we spend our time weren't created with the health and wellbeing of the occupants in mind.
As we moved towards putting an emphasis on a building’s energy efficiency, it often came at a cost to the ventilation, and as a result the quality of air inside a building.
Thanks to IOT products and the cloud we now have the potential to monitor indoor air throughout an entire building 24/7 and 365.
Making the buildings in which you live and work slightly more energy efficient is going to bring far larger returns in terms of impact on the planet than driving an electric car, or becoming vegan.
It's not like you can see air - without a sensor, you really have no idea what's going on. But once you can see it, suddenly there are changes available that have a rapid impact on both occupant wellbeing and the building’s sustainability.
FULL TRANSCRIPT COURTESY OF OTTER.AI (EXCUSE TYPOS)
Liam Bates
So, in a nutshell, what we do at Kaiterra is create solutions to help people, companies and buildings understand, measure and ultimately improve their indoor environment, while also reducing their carbon footprint. So low carbon healthy buildings.
As human beings, we spend around 90% of our time indoors. And the reality is that most of the buildings in which we spend our time weren't created with the health and wellbeing of the occupants in mind.
Sometimes it's an afterthought. But in the vast majority of cases, it's not even a thought at all. It's never really been a consideration. And given the massive impact that the environment has on how we feel and how productive and how happy we are. we think it's really important that there's
So more concretely, what we're doing is we're making hardware, physical products to measure environmental quality, specifically air quality. And then we have a layer of software on top that helps sift through that data, helps people understand it, visualize it, analyze it, and ultimately helping people to make more data driven decisions to improve their indoor environment.
Matt Morley
So if we start big picture, it's always worthwhile on these discussions to establish upfront what the negatives are, what the risks are. If we look at what the health risks risks are of poor quality indoor air, I think there's a general acceptance of outdoor air pollution. But when we look at indoor air in cities, what's going on there?
Liam Bates
You brought up a really interesting point there which is outdoor air quality, we often think that there's air pollution only outside, maybe in Beijing or in New Delhi but of course it's an issue almost everywhere in the world, the vast majority of the planet does have issues with outdoor air quality as well.
Indoor air quality is driven by what's going on outdoors. Some of the obvious examples are- if there's a wildfire burning, as we've seen happen more and more on the West Coast, or the US bushfires across Australia.
You see the same thing in Singapore. So if the outdoor air is polluted, the air indoors is usually not very much better. So that's one factor. The other is essentially poor air quality that is created from within the building. And there are a few different parameters here.
Some that most people might be familiar with would be CO2 levels. We've all we've all been in that meeting room where there's too many people, not enough ventilation and you start to feel claustrophobic, hot, even, sleepy, you think somebody needs to open a window… that’s due to an increased level of carbon dioxide in the room.
But there's also other important parameters to indoor air quality - Volatile Organic Compounds, VOCs, these are chemicals that are given off by furniture in the room, paint on the walls, sometimes even the people in the rooms as well.
Particulate Matter (PM) is the third main parameter that is of concern for indoor air quality - that can come from the outdoors, smog, it can also come from indoors. And let's say the poor ventilation between the kitchen and the office, or even someone vacuuming the carpets in the morning, and kicking up dust into the air. Anyone with asthma will know exactly what I'm talking about.
There's a lot of research that shows both short term health impacts and productivity impacts as well as long term health impacts of indoor air quality.
Matt Morley
A lot of the guidance and advocacy for a greater integration of indoor air quality monitors in new buildings, and in refurbishments, particularly in big cities like London, here in Barcelona, is being led by the healthy building, the sustainable green building movement. How does that connect with your work? Specifically the certification systems for healthy buildings for example.
Liam Bates
There's definitely a massive trend in in that around healthy buildings in general, and around the importance of monitoring, and specifically continuous monitoring within those. So I think maybe a few a few steps back into history.
There's been a focus on sustainability for longer than there has been healthy buildings. And we've known that energy efficiency is important.
Unfortunately, often the indoor environment came at the cost, I'd say a degradation of the indoor environmental quality.
So an interesting example that I sort of always like to use, which is a little bit extreme, is that if you wanted to make the perfect sustainable building, what you would do is you probably build a concrete block with no windows, no doors, thick concrete, and no ventilation system, and you’d leave the lights turned off all the time. And then your building wouldn't be using any energy.
And it would be incredibly sustainable. But it'd be terrible for anybody that was inside that building. And that's obviously an extreme example. But historically, as we moved towards putting an emphasis on a building’s energy efficiency, it often came at a cost to the ventilation, and the quality of air inside the building.
What’s driven a lot of the new certifications would be the WELL building standard, as well as RESET.
WELL has a strong focus on healthy buildings in general, with a focus on air but also water, nutrition and light while RESET is more closely focused on on air quality specifically. And what's interesting with both of these, is that they've really been leading the charge when it comes to continuous monitoring.
That is making a shift from historically how we took measurements in buildings, which is having someone come around maybe once a year, with a large laboratory grade instrument, putting it in a room, taking a reading, sometimes even writing it down on a notebook, and then coming back one year later to see if things were better or worse. And so it's really just a one point in time measurement.
Whereas what we're seeing now, which is really enabled by the shift in IOT products, connected products, more integrations with building management systems, but also with the cloud, is that now we the potential to monitor indoor air throughout an entire building 24/7 and 365.
These building certifications are now allowing, more points or more paths to certification through the utilization of this data. And I think that's a great thing. Because it's really providing a true picture of what's going on inside the building, as opposed to what was it like this one day when someone happened to come in, which is kind of like rolling the dice.
If, if it happened to be polluted outside, it would look like your building was performing badly. If somebody happened to just clean the carpets that morning, and there were chemicals in the building, it might look like your air quality is terrible, or vice versa. And that's really not how we should be making decisions for where we spend 90% of our time as human beings, especially in the 21st century, with all the access to data that we have, uh, you know, I really believe that we should be making data driven decisions.
Matt Morley
It's a fundamental shift in how we think about monitoring our air, I think it's important that we give that historical perspective. If you do that at the beginning of a flush out, or post construction, you typically leave it there for any any number of weeks, depending on how it was built, right?
And you might take a recording at the beginning of that flush out another one at the end of the flush out and then and then that was it. But really, then you've no idea you are flying blind for every consecutive day after that until the next air quality monitor reading, right.
I think this is it's really empowering system to be able to say that the building management, and therefore, you know, if the transparency and the communication around it can be as simple as a digital screen at the entrance and reception lobby, right, just saying, look, here's what's happening today, here's where we're at in terms of where the outdoor air quality vs your indoor air quality.
What are the levers available to improve indoor air quality?
Liam Bates
It’s a complicated answer, we have a lot of work to do, because air quality, when you think about it holistically is not as simple as, let's say temperature.
If you're in a room, and you feel cold, you know that there's one simple solution, which is to increase the temperature. And when you increase it to a certain amount you will feel comfortable, at least from the thermal comfort perspective. And you can also you know exactly what the building needs to make it happen.
And you can also work out what the energy consumption is, it's a relatively simple equation to translate how somebody is feeling into what should be done, what the impact is of making those decisions.
Overall air quality is a lot more complicated. At the most basic level, how much outdoor air are we bringing into the building. If you have high levels of carbon dioxide, that means that you need to bring in more outdoor air - adjusting the ventilation rate is a way that you can impact that.
Natural ventilation vs outdoor air pollution
Of course, you can also do that by opening the windows. These things come at a cost potentially however, because what happens if I open the windows and there is for example, ozone, present outside is, you know, relatively common in many parts of the world, or what if there's particulate matter because next to a highway.
So, this is where it gets a little bit more complicated and where a lot of our our development and engineering work goes as a company is, is understanding the relationship between these different parameters and how they interact so that ultimately, an intelligent decision can be made.
filtration rates of indoor air
Then you have of course, the filtration rate in an HVAC filter. So what is the grade of the filter in the air handling unit. Again, that comes at a cost, the higher the grade of the filter, the more particles that will filter out, the cleaner your air will be but there will also be less air coming to the building.
Green and healthy building priorities
And so it's all a balancing equation between these different parameters, and also bouncing between sustainability, or carbon footprint, and the health and wellbeing of the occupants.
chemicals used in Cleaning & building operations
Changing the hours in which cleaning takes place, this is one of the highest potential highest ROI things that you can do. A lot of companies had cleaning schedules that were in the morning, and especially with everything COVID related, those cleanings became very thorough, deep cleaning even, which is of course, a great thing, except that a lot of the chemicals that are used in the cleaning process are not necessarily very good for the people that breathe them in.
The reality is that we are quite often using these toxic cleaning materials on on tables or floors and then they're off-gassing chemicals into our air, so we're breathing those toxic gases in throughout the rest of the day.
So without having continuous monitoring, where you can see this 24 hour trend, you wouldn't necessarily see that you have by cleaning at 6am in the morning created an enormous spike in chemicals at 8am when everyone comes into the office.
A very simple change, clean at 6pm instead of 6am. It's outside of working hours, but that spike happens when there's nobody in the building. And then it drops throughout the rest of the night. And as long as you turn on, maybe there's still some residual chemicals in the air at, let's say 6am.
But as long as the ventilation system comes on at 7am, one hour before anybody enters the building, they're walking into a clean, healthy environment rather than one that is potentially quite contaminated.
Matt Morley
Therefore we have what happens before the occupants enter the building. So that might be construction and interior fit out phase. And then what's going on during the operation and building management phase. So you sort of think of it in two major blocks.
You've mentioned the low carbon footprint and energy efficiency piece. I just wanted to dig into that a little bit if we could just to establish the connection between your indoor air quality monitors and energy efficiency - how do you join the dots between those two?
Energy efficiency and indoor air quality monitoring
Liam Bates
So maybe some background data, first of all on the just the impact on the planet of buildings, our mission is very human driven, but it's also very much driven by wanting to have a positive impact on the planet. And so some of the you know, some some of the facts here that really shocked me when I first learned were, number one, just the impact that the the impact the planet that buildings have on our planet.
The operation of buildings, so building operations account for approximately 28% of all co2 emissions, which is an enormous number.
It's just running buildings is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. And that number is not really going down because we're building more and more buildings. We build a brand new New York City in terms of buildings every single month.
So over the next 30 years, we are going to be adding a huge number of buildings to this planet, and all those buildings have operations going on. So there's, there's this this huge impact on the planet. And when it comes to building operations, the single largest contributor to energy consumption.
We spend so much of the world's energy, just moving air around a building and heating it up and cooling it down. So enter in any, any optimizations that we can have on that front will have a huge impact on the planet.
But the reality is that making the buildings in which you live and work slightly more energy efficient is going to bring far larger returns in terms of impact on the planet than driving an electric car, or or becoming vegan.
In the same way that when people are in a space, we want to make sure that the air is optimized, and their health is prioritized. And so that can mean things like having low levels of pollutants, when people are not in a space, we don't need to spend that, that same amount of energy, ventilating or filtering that space.
The question is, how can we utilize this data to make more intelligent decisions run and essentially optimize how we run the space to save on energy. And so the simple way to look at it is, if if somebody is in a space and the air quality is poor, then we should be taking actions to improve that air quality. And quite often that, that that's by increasing ventilation rates, for example.
Well, just like we would do that if if the air quality in a space is already optimal, or if there is nobody in the space, then we don't need to continue filtering more air and bringing in more fresh air from the outside. So it's really just about understanding what is at the most basic level, essentially demand control ventilation. That's sort of the most basic example here, which is that if a space is already great, let's not waste energy, trying to make it even better.
So an example would be if you're recently on the West Coast of the US, for example, we've seen a lot of examples around where there were there's pollution coming in from the outdoors from wildfires. And it's actually quite a complex process to work out what is the the best thing to do from a building perspective, when that's going on? Should you bring in more air from the outside and try to filter it should you re circulate more air internally, should you have some combination of the two of these.
If you simply have a very basic kind of control algorithm going on, you might be essentially noticing that the air is bad and just pumping more and more and more air from outdoors inside to try to clean it. But at the end of the day, just bring in more smoke. So it's really about having optimizing the logic in the system to not trying to clean when that doesn't essentially not try to ventilate more when it doesn't make sense.
That wasn't a great example, let me share another another one from a concrete example from a project that I was just looking at a couple of days ago, where the the ventilator ventilation system was essentially being turned on and run at levels that were unnecessary about 27% of the time. And this was often tied to parts of the building not being occupied, or people and not having a clear idea in real time of which parts of the building were actually being utilized in which way but by looking at the changes in indoor pollution, and that could be a combination of co2 and VOCs, you actually start to identify this part of the building, that building is being used more than other parts.
The second floor right now, even though it was planned to be used has three people in it and it's being ventilated for 100 people. And so it's just about shifting, where some of that that load is going maybe from one air handling unit to another and the result is that you get better overall air quality and lower overall energy consumption.
I think that does clarify and particularly within the context have the sort of extreme example that you gave of this sort of perfect closed building with with no ventilation at all. And in many ways, sometimes I think some of these other buildings that are just not smart in any way, are effectively managed in that same way. And there's just no visibility, there's no transparency around what's going on inside that space.
And it's, in a sense about taking responsibility from the building management side, right to say, Well, look, there are things we can do to make this a healthier space for the occupants. But there's also things we can do to reduce the, the carbon footprint of just keeping this building alive and keeping it going as an occupied space. And, you know, stepping up and getting a handle on what's going on in terms of indoor air quality is is both good for the people and for the planet. I think that's, that's the message that I'm that I'm getting and that we want to try and communicate out there.
Indoor Air Quality monitor installation
Matt Morley
So if we kind of go a level deeper, and we actually think about this whole process of how Kaiterra get involved, how they monitors are planned installed, and where the value is delivered over the sort of short to medium term, it took us through like how typically, who's bringing you in? Like, who's your contact person within the building project or real estate management team? And what are the steps that you then go through in terms of installing your, your hardware and software?
Liam Bates
This actually ties quite nicely to your question, but also the last point that you were making.
A really interesting example. So okay, so I guess, to answer that question directly, we work with a few different groups, typically, this initiatives around the indoor environment, could be coming from sort of a sustainable sustainability perspective.
So often, that would be we'd be working with the, let's say, the director of sustainability. It could be coming from facilities management, who are receiving a lot of complaints. People are complaining, either people are either complaining because they they, they just feel bad in the space.
Or it's simply that they they're concerned. And there's no transparency. And that's that's definitely a major issue this year, especially as with all the news that's that's been around around the transmission of viruses. What is my facility doing to prevent this? And what is the quality of air because there is a well known correlation between these two things.
And the third direction that we often get brought in is is from a call it sort of an employee experience, perspective. And so that might be driven by HR head of people. It depends on the firm, but really trying to say what can we do to make sure that our occupants are happy and healthy and productive, and they feel great coming to work. And I think this is really being this is becoming more and more important in the future, because a lot of companies still want to have their people come into the office, at least a few days a week.
Indoor air quality post Covid
But it's not, it's you know, it's not like things were before and things have changed, the world has changed. And if you're, you know, if you're asking me to come to the office, or you want me to actually come to the office, because I want to it hopefully, you know, it needs to be a pretty good office, it needs to be better than my home, right? I have to want to go into the office and of course, have human interactions, but also be in a physically comfortable, mentally stimulating environments that maybe I don't get in my living room.
And so that's also a big piece of what what is driving sort of initial reach out with us. And often we come in sort of interact with these, these different groups together. A really funny example was a project in, in the US in the Bay Area that we were working on recently. And we were analyzing some of the data and working with the customer and looking at it and saying, Well, you know, we can see that your, you have excellent air quality when when the space is occupied, and the air quality isn't great overnight. But that's fine, because there's nobody there.
They said they're saving energy and the air is great when people need to be there. However, on the weekends, from the data, it looks like the HVAC system is still running. And you have great air quality throughout the weekend when there's nobody there. And this is a really interesting sort of discussion that takes place between facility management and the sustainability people and the employee experience people were nobody had realized that they had set this facility management had set a timer to try and optimize for occupant experience and energy efficiency to turn on the ventilation system at specific hours.
The building was most occupied. But no one had bothered to turn it off on Saturday and Sunday. So this building was running, you know, full power for two days a week when there was nobody there. And that is just such low hanging fruit.
That, you know, just kind of observing this conversation is really interesting, because you've got the sustainability person that's going wait, we're doing what, why there was a, I don't know, just set up this way.
Our solutions were were installed in the project, we work with multiple different stakeholders. And within a very short period of time, I've been able to find some some really obvious problems that you wouldn't otherwise see.
Obviously air is invisible. It's not like you can't see it without a sensor, you really have no idea what's going on. But once you see it, suddenly your eyes are opened, and there are changes that you can make that have very rapid impact on again, both people and sustainability.
Matt Morley
I think it's a crucial point to get across - buildings are not necessarily healthy places to be, especially if the installation, the furniture, the paint, etc, haven't been chosen for low toxins or toxic qualities, etc. So I think that's one thing.
The other thing is that the game has changed Post COVID. The world is not going back to how it was. Employees are just asking a lot more questions. HR teams are rightly asking more from the buildings they inhabit.
You reference the connection between the transmission of airborne diseases, ie COVID, amongst others, and indoor air quality. So let's try and quell any doubts, how do you stand on that position says there's a lot of confusion out there around this. What do we need to know about airborne diseases in indoor air quality?
Airborne diseases and indoor air quality
Liam Bates
I mean, there's a reason that we put, you know, you put a mask over over your mouth, because there are particles that are coming out when you breathe, and they spread throughout a building.
If you have, if you have an HVAC system that is recirculating air, that's obviously not great. So it's really important to take the right strategies, when it comes to how you handle air quality and how you handle your air because viruses are in the air, they latch on to particles, if if there are physical things floating around in your air, which there always are.
Air is not just molecules of oxygen and nitrogen floating around. It's also all these particles, and a lot of things stick to those particles.
So in summary, I think there's absolutely no doubt that air quality and the air is tied to the transmission of viruses. There's plenty of evidence that shows this, both when you look at the particles in the air, but also the importance of having the correct levels of humidity, relative humidity, and so on. All of these things have an impact. And there's, there's there's really no doubt anymore at this point.
Matt Morley
I really encourage everyone to get a handle on this. Because if we're out there in the world of interiors and real estate, you kind of need to be up to date with what's happening.