In our Podcast series “Sh*t You Wish Your Building Did!”, Memoori explores the intersection between technology and commercial buildings through interesting conversations.
For Episode 32, we were joined by Mazen Jamal for an in-depth discussion on the business case for indoor air quality.
A whole body of scientific research now shows that CO2 levels impact cognitive function. Yet, indoor air quality often seems like an afterthought for smart building technology projects. Is it just reality that IAQ is lower in the technology “pecking order” than energy management, occupancy analytics, artificial intelligence, fire detection, etc, and therefore doesn’t get the same investment?
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The Simple Business Case for Indoor Air Quality!
James: Mazen welcome to the podcast.
Mazen: Thank you, James.
James: Real pleasure to have you here.
Mazen: I’ve been a fan of yours since 2018 so very it’s surreal that I’m here.
James: Wow cool well I’ve been uh following you know your writing and uh think it’s super interesting as well and I know especially I’m interested in your thoughts and opinions on uh indoor air quality and that’s something I know you’ve uh professionally has been uh it’s been something you’ve been working on for a few years.
Mazen: yeah absolutely what I try to bring to the table when it comes to my experience and air quality is not purely the scientific because there are a lot of excellent bespoke people such as Dr Joseph Allen speaking from a medical perspective what we’re trying to bring in is the just bringing the world of indoor air quality and the business aspect of it.
James: Exactly and that’s actually today what I want to focus on right because I think um you know podcasts that I’ve listened to I think it’s pretty well you know we’re not trying to do an indoor air quality 101 today right absolutely and and you know for those that want to that want to go and see it I think there’s a lot of good uh scientific research on why for example CO2 levels impact um cognitive function within within people and Workforce I think the science on that is pretty well understood at this point right exactly so as we’re going to focus more on on the business aspects of it and I think you know from my perspective in doing what we do in researching smart Building Technology you know what where do you see uh indoor air quality um fit into that landscape and also why you know my my sense again I could be wrong on this but the the often indoor air quality is is is seen as like a nice to have right as opposed to uh you know number one on the list of things that you you want in a in a in your smart Building Technology stack absolutely what do your thoughts on that.
Mazen: I think definitely Indoor air quality falls under the it’s a nice to have not a need to have and the reason is accountability and consequences so when you think about anything you want to put inside of your your building it either needs to be uh a necessity or an obligation so you need to have carbon monoxide sensors you need to have you know Security Alarms you’re not allowed to have a license to open up your building without those right so there are consequences to not abiding by those and then there’s the other stuff that falls under nice to have but they’re also universally accepted as must to have such as a coffee machine so it’s not a must have by law there’s no consequences of not having a coffee machine in the office yet there is no office without a coffee machine so there are consequences to that people would be pissed off angry you know they’re they need their coffee fix so you do not think twice about investing in good coffee or a coffee machine yet by law you’re not obliged to so indoor air quality Falls in that it’s it’s not obliged by law it’s not accepted by as by employees as a necessity to have so it falls between the tables in the gray area as it is important but whether we do something about it or not nothing’s going to change our employees are going to come through the office the government is not going to fine me how does it really affect me and that’s the wrong way of assessing what is indoor air quality but that’s the way it’s perceived in the market today.
James: Right yeah and sort of following on from that so someone who is you know let’s say writing the check for the technology that’s going to go in and in their mind like you said they’re thinking of all of those technologies that they have to have obliged to have right there’s that’s done they have to have that then they’re assessing let’s say the nice to haves and indoor air quality sensing and uh monitoring right and analytics fall somewhere in that space and I suppose a lot of those Technologies then will be assessed based on return on investment or the perceived value to the company or the or the employee is it really fair to assess indoor air quality on return on investment and sort of where do you think it sits within those that that group of Technologies?
Mazen: I’m big I’m a strong believer that to purely box indoor air quality as a what is the return investment is like saying what is north of the North Pole it’s kind of defies itself the North Pole is the North Pole there is no beyond the North Pole and when you’re saying what is the return on investment of health and wellbeing it kind of like but you’re answering it in the question you’re saying why is it important to care about the health and wellbeing well you’re saying the answer it is you should care about health and wellbeing but today when you remove indoor air quality and you make it stand alone it just kind of feels unfulfilling it’s like you go to a good pancake place and you’re like here you go one slice of pancake on your plate and you’re going to just kind of look at it and you’re like well it just doesn’t look that appetizing so the future of indoor air quality within the sphere of smart buildings we’re not talking about the sphere of ventilation is the value it brings to the table is when it’s combined with other pancakes so when there’s a slice of space utilization and occupancy there’s a slice on data and Cloud analytics of visitor management energy optimization and indoor air quality it’s that fits so when you’re trying to put a strategy on indoor air quality it makes much more sense to put a strategy around smart buildings that has an indoor air quality aspect than a standalone just because it makes more sense and then it affects the other aspect so so you consume energy based on how many people you are you have in the building so space utilization occupancy affect your energy and the biggest energy consumption building is the ventilation Heating and Cooling so basically the indoor air quality affects most your energy consumption so they’re interrelated and if you take one it’s just kind of like reading a third of a book so to read the full story you need to look at the you quoting my friend Rupert Lane uh the Holy Trinity of proptech which is space utilization and occupancy energy optimization and indoor air quality so when you put them all together it makes more sense it’s richer and it’s easier to not kind of shrug it off as yeah really don’t want to put my money into air quality CU you’re not investing in air quality you’re investing in a smart Building Technology.
James: yes okay and I mean I think to draw that those um relationships with uh ventilation yeah heating cooling absolutely right because part of the same story 100% and I think you know you a air quality fits into the whole Wellness picture you mentioned Health right so I mean as I understand it right it’s a big part of for example the WELL standard absolutely how I mean how important is that to I guess it’s not you know it’s not my specialist subject but like is that something I’ve heard a lot about but is that something that is definitely on the the the map the radar of owner building owners and operators?
Mazen: As in the healthy building aspect the well standard absolutely so so when it comes to the the well building Institute and and well as a standard um there are there’s a there was a massive adoption of healthy buildings in Covid because people didn’t want to come to the office sure valid reason but company owners and asset own owners wanted to make it more safe if you want to call it and they don’t want to claim that it’s good they want third- party validation and that’s where well came in at the right place at the right time it’s a third-party validation albeit it’s proven so it’s not a gimmick It is Well proven it is it is proper there is a methodology to it it’s just from a business use case it was the right place of the right time and it generated massive awareness to the importance of healthy buildings which is which is great so that is great for the industry but today it just feels like the hype of healthy buildings has a bit subsided versus energy optimization for example and when we when we look at it um so let’s take it from a macro and micro perspective um the world used to be very siloed as in countries so basically the UK is the UK takes its own decisions in Germany Germany and Japan Japan we’re suddenly interated so what happens in Japan affects what happens in the UK and our decisions are collective so when it comes to what we want to do to implement uh a strategy to optimize we look at the whole macro world of what is happening around us and from there we extrapolate strategies to adopt and say this is what we’re going to do to to improve our health and wellbeing and when it comes to indoor air quality and when it comes to the to the world there are major problems today in the world when it comes to energy there’s a lot of changing direction towards renewable sustainable energy there’s a lot of focus on reducing your energy Bell and it’s it’s happening today the the the the spotlight was on under air quality in Co it was like we really don’t care about how much we consume energy we need to live through the storm MH today it’s like the the final boss if it’s a video game is energy so that’s taking all the attention globally and when you see all other companies looking at that there’s there’s more Technologies being driven created towards solving that problem so there’s less direction towards healthy buildings but I think that just like we will always care about our health and well-being healthy buildings will never die it’s just slow in taking up adoption it’s just going to continue being the sidekick to Batman.
James: yeah okay so we you know we’re on this kind of I speak almost like hype cycle right yeah where energy is taken over and it’s like you mentioned macro effects I mean I guess this several reasons for that but one being that like I think after Co like people just don’t want to be reminded of that anymore like they want to move on and now we’ve got issues around like having too much space in some in some parts of commercial real estate so yeah yeah but as you said it it’s not going away still going to be there as a as an issue.
Mazen: I definitely think so and I can see more and more change in rules and regulations and discussions around making it more mandatory it’s I wouldn’t be surprised if in a couple of years, you’re going to see that indoor air quality monitoring is uous in new buildings such as carbon monoxide and fire alarms yeah it it’s a future that definitely is likely to happen because it’s not that difficult what’s difficult today is taking old buildings and just kind of retrofitting thing not saying there’s no Technologies but people are weary of that but if they were to move into a new building and it does have all these bells and whistles part of it then you’re more likely to accept it and that just eventually irons out all the old buildings and years to come and then suddenly there’s everything is smart.
James: I mean you mentioned earlier about uh carbon monoxide I mean that’s something that is mandated right we have to measure that in a building it’s we’re not far away there from then measuring other types of um stuff that’s in the anyway right so it’s not that much of a stretch to think that will start also mandating uh measurement of other stuff.
Mazen: A lot of buildings do already monitor temperature and humidity for example it’s it’s it’s monitored pretty efficiently in in a lot of buildings CO2 is becoming more and more available I would say I would say voc’s so the five Usual Suspects of Indo quality or temperature humidity which are the thermal Comfort aspects then CO2 which is the cognitive skills and and concentration aspect and then there’s the health aspects which are voc’s and PM 2.5S now those two are rarely monitored you can walk into tons of buildings and see that they’re monitoring temperature humidity a lot CO2 but PMs and voc’s it’s kind of a niche thing and eventually the technology is going to get better cheaper and it’s going to start being adopted in buildings just like CO2 temperature and humidity sensors.
James: yeah Okay I uh one of the things I wanted to do today was also to kind of talk about uh you know we said the business model right but also like um advice for people right about implementing it like so in your opinion what is like a cost-effective way of doing um indoor equality for those that want to do it?
Mazen: I’d say the number one fear about adopting and indoor air quality strategy is what is my strategy the monitoring side is the easy part there’s a lot of excellent Solutions out there that can monitor and send the data seamlessly up to the cloud so gathering information of what you need to do is easy it’s the what I need to do which scares many people it scares them in multiple aspects so for example you get the buildings that are old and have natural ventilation so there’s no ventilation system that scares them they’re like oh my God but I can’t do anything about it I don’t have any systems my building is old and then there’s the part where we have systems but we don’t know what to do about it then there’s people that have BMS and say look I have a BMS it can solve all my problems but well it’s kind of like it’s a it’s something it’s there but it’s not always working correctly mhm and um and then there’s the the demystifying of analyzing what is air quality what is good air quality so it’s not like all right so so let us compare the other aspects of smart building the big ones so when we look at energy right you’re consuming x amount of Mega or or kilowatts right you adopt a strategy and then you can you can monitor it and now you see a Delta positive or a Delta negative right if I do this I consume more power if I do that I consume less power so analyzing what the data means is easy it’s very binary when you look at space utilization and occupancy it’s either binary occupied or not so this room is occupied right it or that room is empty so it’s it’s empty so it’s not occupied it’s easy to interpret what is it or it’s person so there’s 30% occupancy on this floor well when it comes to air quality there’s 450 PPM of CO2 with low humidity high levels of PMs and then you you can combine a lot of different variations of these five you know forget all the other hundreds of voc’s and people are like overwhelmed with what they need to do so if we were to take a cheat shhet and kind of simplify this right the biggest thing the biggest concern are co2’s and voccs and PM 2.5S right um because temperature it’s it’s it’s easy to understand there a lot of people know you know it’s too hot or too cold to humid it not so it comes to CO2 the biggest problem in CO2 are meeting rooms so you put two people just like us in a meeting room and they’re having a long conversation and they’re breathing the doors are locked and the ventilation is poor so the CO2 starts creeping up and we start feeling it so we have buil in sensors in our body that tell us right I’m flabbergasted I’m sweating I’m just I can’t breathe you know so it’s easy just by when you’re monitoring just to put some kind of alarm doesn’t need to be sound alarm it could be a visual alarm or it could be an SMS or a message type or a slack message even right you just get a message CO2 is too high right take a coffee break 5 minutes just open the door go out grab a cup fresh cup of coffee for 5 minutes come back and this you do would have subsided so it’s you don’t need to connect to a BMS and ventilation system you you should right but if you don’t have and you’re scared it’s an easy strategy when it comes to to PMS you you need to understand I mean if the doors are open the windows are open then you’re getting PMS from somewhere right you close them you don’t get them so they a lot easier strategies to do that uh an interesting use case that I worked once on is looking at temperature over 24 hours so it’s a such a simple methodology to understand that you are over consuming power so let’s just say you’re trying to maintain a good 19° C inside the office and then you leave on Friday and you come on Monday and you look at the graph and it shows that it’s 19° after you’ve left on Saturday morning on Sunday and it’s flat 19 it’s like okay something’s wrong here why are we cooling our office for 247 and you buy just switching off like you’re consuming power um 247 instead of 8 hours a day or 9 hours a day for 5 days a week so you’re talking about more than 50% over the limit just by looking at your temperature data you can see that anomaly and you can just go down to your facilities team and say fix it right it’s their job they know how to do that just change the program on the BMS but sometimes people think that it’s working but it’s not really.
James: Yep good stuff um so also more advice in that okay so that’s the kind of like the business case that’s how you can you know you can think of it within the context of different environments but what about like as someone who wants to implement it within the organization how can you sell indoor air quality like within the organization?
Mazen: A lot of times what people get stuck on is is the the bill right that’s that’s it right it’s going toost it’s going to cost something so the first thing like right you’re doing a lot of things which is great and we understand that it’s important but how much is it going to cost us and that’s what people get stock on so there’s that perception that it’s expensive there’s there’s two misconceptions here so the first misconception is if we found out they have bad quality it means me we need to consume more power to fix it so there’s that misconception that I’m consuming more power to fix my air quality that goes against my sustainability goals but the reality is majority of time the air quality in the office is pretty good it’s when you need it to be good that it’s not so those are the times where you need to consume more power but a lot of times you need to consume less power so the overall you can consume less power so that’s the first myth the second one is that it’s expensive so I made a study analysis once which is we compared how much it cost to have unlimited cup of coffee in an office which was an average of around 48 pounds per employee per year per per per month sorry British pounds yes yeah okay Bridge PS so that’s a coffee machine beans servicing water all the all the stuff needed for it right it’s going to cost around 48 pounds per month which is something like no one would probably complain there’s no one thinks about okay and then when you take how much it costs you to put sensors to monitor your indoor air quality per employee it costs less than one pound per month per month per employee and when you when you put it this way and you tell someone tell me it’s expensive and it’s not but when kind of people look at it just a lump some oh so it’s going to cost us £50,000 or £100,000 or a million or doing a global roll out right but when you break it down by buildings by floors by employees it’s it’s really nothing it’s it’s really really cheap but you it’s the problem is we’re selling it incorrectly we need to sell it correctly for people to accept it right.
James: It’s the perception that it’s uh I wouldn’t even think that there’s probably a perception out there that it’s expensive I think the perception is probably that it’s more work right there’s something else that they’ve got to do and they’ve got enough on their plate but also that it’s um you know just something that isn’t really important because there’s not enough understanding about it.
Mazen: There is that shrug off that again we go back to the first question it’s it’s labeled as a nice to have thing right and once you break down a lot of the walls around it of complexity it starts becoming an easier pill to swallow right it even if it’s a even if it stays within the realm of nice to have but if it’s so simple and seamless a lot of people would be willing to you know to try it and then from there start building strategies around it and from there start seeing tangible results but when it’s complex and perceived as expensive and perceived as it’s a headache you just you’re putting too many obstacles so you need to remove as many obstacles as possible and then from there even nice to have things can be adopted at scale.
James: Yes exactly and you kind of mentioned before like about viewing it in this context of other kind of um Services yeah do you I mean I think this is probably happening already but I mean selling that as a package is that something that you know we’re going to probably see more of do you think that there are going to be more companies rolling up services to offer as a as a a package kind of trying to simplify things like I think with a lot of Technology yeah it’s uh it’s not easy to sell sometimes but it can be too complicated selling process.
Mazen: I think the the the power to make a difference is in the the master system integrators such as the schneiders and honeybells and Bosch and JC of the world because when you look at the individual prop tech companies out there trying to solell separate Solutions separate data clouds separate security Stacks um subscription so softwares or service front ends and and you look at the plethora of use cases you can add to a Smart building it is definitely overwhelming so when you get an easy picking such as indoor air quality it’s the first you throw out the window mhm just because all right but there’s so much to do we don’t know where to start but the big system integrators they have the power to combine them all as a one solution so you can get someone like Schneider going into a saying I’ll take care of everything for you you pay me one subscription one integration one front end One Security protocol all the data combined and we can bring the power of all of these different use cases and then we can see links between them that you couldn’t see by looking each each St separately so I think that the future lies within the big system integrators not the small ones.
James: Interesting thanks before we go I wanted to ask you I always try and end with this is there one thing you want to one point one topic you want people to take away from this conversation today?
Mazen: If I was to help people understand indor air quality just to kind of simplify it in a manner I’ll go back a a couple of million years ago and I I I there’s this story that I that I love it’s a thought experiment that I came up with so you get this caveman in the cave dark cold scared hungry and then there’s just one lucky genius caveman discovers fire just grabs this stick back to his cave and he’s like now I can stay warm safe from Beasts I can cook on it it keeps me safe and it’s the best thing ever couple of minutes later he starts coughing and his internal air quality sensors are flaring up it’s like what is this I I can’t take the smoke I’m I’m suffocating but I don’t want to throw away this magical invention I want to keep the power of fire but it contradicts with my lifestyle and that pushed humans to leave caves become Hunters gatherers because in the Open Spaces there’s no Suffocation from carbon monoxide so to me it just feels like indoor air quality is as old as Mankind and we’ve have all these built-in sensors that keep us safe and alarm us when something is wrong now they’ affected our our progress and evolution so when you think about air quality it’s a lot more native to us than than all it’s a new trend that’s just that that’s that’s the story that I find to be fascinating.