Indoor Air Quality

Mark Bouldin, is healthy buildings expert at Johnson Controls

Understanding occupancy

Mark Bouldin believes that to make healthy buildings a reality building owners and managers must focus more closely on the details of occupancy

The way we work has changed forever – and as businesses decide whether to move forward with remote, flexible, and hybrid working models or return to their pre-pandemic ways, the rule book for FMs and building managers has been thrown out the window.

To make healthy buildings a reality, there is one key area for facilities managers and building owners to focus on: building occupancy. Gone are the days where employees sat at fixed desks, five days a week. Now, workstations will need to be resized, and room space and bookings systems overhauled, not to mention changing the way we access, experience, and benefit from our workplaces. But that really is just the start.

To provide healthy and collaborative spaces for employees to work, businesses often begin with the solution. This is where we are going wrong. In fact, the core problem needs to be fully addressed first, so we can work out how best to solve it. ‘Good enough’ is no longer enough.

There are nine key factors that can affect health and productivity in buildings: light, noise, security, water, moisture, dust and pests, air quality and thermal health. While organisations are always looking for ways to increase performance and occupant comfort – and now mitigate the risk of infections too – these decisions must go beyond the impact on our productivity and happiness at work. They must also take into account wider issues like carbon emissions and air pollution. Not addressing these problems creates issues down the line that can be extremely detrimental to our health. Put simply, the cycle needs to be broken: unhealthy buildings lead to an unhealthy planet, which results in unhealthy people.

So, who is using your buildings and how are they using them? Where does occupancy even come in when we need to improve those nine issues? In order to improve, we

To provide healthy spaces for employees don’t start with the solution but find the core problem

need to be constantly monitoring and even predicting occupancy levels. To do so, the optimum levels of occupancy of an area need to be calculated, taking air ventilation and air change rates into account.

For those already in buildings, managers must have the necessary data and technologies to understand the rooms and layouts within their buildings, especially as this changes in light of the pandemic. Then, they can allocate spaces according to the air change rate – deciding who works where based on where it will be healthiest for them. This ensures the indoor air quality is optimal depending on the room’s occupancy, which elevates employees’ experience at work. Buildings have the most significant effect on high-thinking workers, and the right systems can increase the productivity and even the IQ of employees, benefitting businesses and their staff alike.

Variable air conditioning

For developers, meanwhile, building usage must be modelled into plans from the very beginning. Variable air conditioning should be implemented and built into air conditioning design, as this provides variability depending on the occupancy of a room. Rather than designing buildings around minimum occupancy levels, as is the current norm, developers will need to understand and cater for the maximum occupancy of a building. This small change could save lives, improving air quality for everyone. Once this is done, sensors should be installed to vary the air according to occupancy, meaning that the air quality will be at optimum levels no matter the number of people in the room or building.

It’s all well and good prioritising the technologies that will enable buildings to be healthier for people – but this can’t come at the expense of a healthy planet. Both humidity and temperature have an effect on health and comfort, but we wouldn’t encourage air conditioning to be on full at all times, as this will hinder sustainability and efficiency efforts. There must be a balance.

By focusing on occupancy rather than prioritising sustainability or employee experience, organisations can meet ESG and efficiency targets while also getting the most out of their employees. Here, sensors and other technologies measuring and predicting occupancy levels can do the hard work for us.

To get the most from buildings, however, the data coming from these sensors and the decisions they make need to be measured and understood correctly. Using building performance indicators and matching this against staff data can prove useful, for example to monitor staff sick days in comparison to building health data, to get a better overall picture of the impact of buildings on staff. Then, if anything is wrong, it can be fixed – prioritising employee health without undue costs or sacrificing the health of the planet.

Now businesses are reopening offices, the need to understand and prioritise occupancy is paramount. Organisations should revaluate how they will now use their buildings, what’s changed, and what measures are going to be put in place to ensure employee health and safety. After a year spent in our homes and outside, now is the time to take the buildings we work in seriously. If a business values its workforce, the occupancy of its buildings should be a main priority. 

Indoor Air Quality

Tom Wodcke is product manager at Vent-Axia

Healthy air, healthy lives

Tom Wodcke explains how improving ventilation in social housing is key to improving indoor air quality and so resident health

Keen to improve housing stock in recent years, many social housing providers have undertaken energy efficiency improvements to help provide better-insulated, warmer homes for their residents. But, if ventilation hasn’t been considered when these improvements have been made this can lead to condensation and mould and have a negative impact on IAQ. Not only is this bad for resident health, it can lead to damage to the fabric of a building. Add to that the risk of disrepair cases and landlords need to ensure that they have addressed this to keep residents happy and healthy but also to meet the requirements of the Homes (Fitness for Human Habitation) Act. Landlords have a duty of care to ensure residents are living in a healthy environment.

This act sets in stone the importance of effective ventilation in social housing. The Act makes it a legal requirement that rental properties, both social housing and private, are fit for human habitation at the beginning and throughout a tenancy, including the need for effective ventilation and freedom from damp. This raises the importance of good indoor air quality in the home with its many health benefits.

There has been a raft of research into the negative effects of poor IAQ on the nation’s health including a 2020 report by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and the Royal College of Physicians which cited growing evidence linking indoor air pollution to a number of childhood health problems and behavioural problems. ‘The inside story: Health effects of indoor air quality on children and young people’ also warns that IAQ tends to be worse in low quality housing where properties are poorly ventilated. And with 3.6m children in the UK living in such housing, this is a major issue that needs addressing.

Robust standards for IAQ

The report recommends that where the building owners have a duty of care towards occupants, such as with social housing, there should be standards for maintaining IAQ. To do this, it advises revising the Building Regulations by setting robust legally binding performance standards for IAQ including ventilation rates and maximum concentration levels for specific pollutants.

The Royal Colleges’ report followed hot on the heels of the publication of the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance ‘Indoor Air Quality at Home’. This guidance confirms the critical role ventilation plays in removing potential pollutants and improving IAQ and advises people to ensure rooms are well ventilated by extractor fans, trickle vents, cooker hoods or by opening windows, especially when undertaking activities that lead to poor IAQ. For local authorities the NICE guidance recommends prioritising IAQ and embedding plans for improving it into an existing plan or strategy.

To help tackle condensation and mould effectively in social housing there are a range of solutions available. For refurbishments, Positive Input Ventilation (PIV), such

Many options are available to tackle condensation and mould in social housing as Vent-Axia’s Lo-Carbon PoziDry Pro and PoziDry Compact Pro, works with the natural air infiltration, controlling the air path through the home, preventing the migration of damaging humidity and pollutants, such as VOCs. Other options include bathroom and kitchen extractor fans with the latest fans offering powerful, quiet, efficient ventilation while being quick and easy to install, low maintenance and reliable.

For example, there are continuous running filterless unitary fans available such as Vent-Axia’s intelligent Lo-Carbon Response 7. This type of fan boasts quiet, efficient ventilation, providing good IAQ.

For properties where a longer duct run is needed, variable speed fans with increased airflow performance are ideal as the fan speed can simply be turned up as required, providing efficient ventilation whilst still maintaining low noise levels.

Meanwhile, fans that have a digital control menu help speed up install and commissioning. A settings lock is also beneficial to prevent tampering. Plus, this type of fan features a datalogger that tracks fan usage to ensure it is used as intended. This includes data such as days run, hours on trickle or boost, and even more specifically, hours run on boost triggered by the humidity sensor. If a fan has been switched off and mould appears, the landlord will realise why and can discuss a solution with residents. This helps landlords make homes safer for residents by helping to avoid condensation and mould and helps with record keeping for disrepair cases.

But it’s not just about installing the right ventilation for each home. Where ventilation such as PIV and mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) is installed, a planned maintenance schedule is essential.

With the importance of good IAQ established it is important for landlords to utilise all the tools available to them to help ensure they provide healthy homes, free from condensation and mould. And with a range of mechanical ventilation options designed specifically for social housing available, housing providers should be able to find the right solution for each of their properties. 

TALKING HEADS

Paul Atherton

Paul Atherton is chief executive officer at Heat Wayv

Heroes or villains of heating?

Paul Atherton believes that heat pumps may play a smaller role in the future heating of our homes. Alternative technologies, such as microwave heating are beginning to find traction

The simple act of heating our homes has long had a huge impact on the environment. As a result, a central component of the UK Governments Net Zero strategy is to phase out all gas boilers with the aim of reducing the UK’s growing CO2 emissions by 14 per cent.

Although a necessity, decarbonising home heating presents one of the biggest energy challenges to date, with the transition causing housebuilders and millions of homeowner’s disruptions and requiring significant investment to upgrade systems.

Heat pumps are the proposed alternative to accommodate the nationwide shift in home heating methods, with owners of new-build homes facing the stark reality of prospectively having to choose heat pumps over boilers due to the approaching gas boiler ban. However, heat pumps come with their fundamental limitations and problems, the appliances are prohibitively expensive to purchase, installations are excessively costly, challenging, and extremely disruptive and in most cases simply not practical or possible in older properties. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that more than 60 per cent of the UK’s housing stock (16m households) could never accommodate a heat pump even if they wanted to. However, if heat pumps are not the long-term solution, new alternatives must be explored to ensure a seamless, cost-effective transition from boilers.

Financial savings can evaporate While the initial purchase price of a heat pump is high, that is really only the tip of the cost iceberg. The installation process also causes major issues for those householders undertaking a retrofit project. Significant structural work and disruption to houses and gardens taking many days and sometimes weeks is required, as existing wet wall-mounted heating systems have to be replaced, new, expensive replacement radiators have to be purchased to take advantage of the low heat that is generated or staggeringly, an underfloor heating matrix must be installed both downstairs and upstairs, something which most properties simply would not be able to handle.

Heat pumps are most efficient in newer, well-insulated passive properties where very little heat escapes from the house. Older properties with less effective insulation would thus require a larger, more expensive heat pump. In fact, some older houses may require higher temperatures than a heat pump can generate therefore making heat pumps as a replacement for gas boilers impossible.

A more significant and potentially fatal issue is that the majority of heat pumps have an operating temperature limit of 50°C - 55°C, this is not high enough to protect from waterborne pathogens, such as Legionella bacteria which causes a pneumonic infection. Legionnaires’ disease contamination is found in domestic hot water and air conditioning systems where water is being stored and distributed at temperatures below 55°C - 60°C. Moreover, if heat pumping technologies alone cannot deliver the high temperatures required in order

‘Heat pumps will form a smaller part of the energy mix for UK homes’

Atherton: '60 per cent of the UK's housing stock could never accommodate a heat pump' to thermally kill legionella, then the water must be heated an extra 5°C - 10°C by an electric immersion heater, thereby adding a level of inefficiency and additional cost.

Alternatives gaining pace There are serious alternatives which are gaining pace, such as microwave technology. This technology uses the exact same principles as a microwave oven, where electricity heats the water which can then be pumped through existing radiators and to taps, showers and baths. This tried and tested technology which is already in our homes aims to offer a simple drop-in replacement for existing gas boilers, costing the same to install and with virtually no maintenance costs, a microwave boiler can directly replace existing gas, LPG, oil and kerosene boilers to deliver on the zero emissions criteria for home heating.

Removing gas boilers is a necessity if we are to meet the global 2050 Net Zero carbon reduction objectives set by Governments. However, complete heating system replacements are costly and under the current system it has been estimated the cost of heat pump insulation could be up to £20,000 per household, with higher costs in older, rural homes, none of this can be achieved without substantial government support costing potentially tens of billions of taxpayers’ money.

Simply put, whichever way one looks at the economics or structural viability, heat pumps will form a smaller part of the energy mix for UK householders than is being suggested and this has to be acknowledged quickly by government and industry thought leaders, such that viable alternatives can be brought into production to meet the 2025 gas boiler ban for new build homes, as well as the ever-growing demand for a green-energy replacement to fossil fuelled boilers, to ensure that Net Zero targets can be achieved for everyone and in every home. 