#5.1 - Nathan Wood: Understanding the Unresolved Issues of Ventilation, From Industry Standards to the Promise of Future Technology

Nathan Wood - MD, Farmwood

Chairman of the Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) Indoor Air Quality Group and  Chair of the GCP Europe Indoor Air Quality Task Force.

Nathan is a straight-talking, no-nonsense practitioner providing ventilation and air quality services in the south-east of England across both residential and non-residential buildings The Farmwood team and in particular, Nathan, have a laser focus on quality outcomes and are not afraid to highlight the gaps we often see in our sector.

Much of what we talk about on this podcast, Nathan and his team are at the coal face implemented day in and day out.

He is also a prolific ambassador for the sector, not least through his roles in BESA, the indoor air quality group, and GCP Europe.

I always enjoy talking to Nathan; his enthusiasm for what he does, doing it right, and the legacy this work leaves for his customers, but also the pride he takes in his staff is infectious.

We talked about the gaps we see in performance out there and, how the sector needs to upskill his personal journey into the world of air quality and his passion for skills and apprenticeships.

Farmwood - https://farmwood.co.uk/
BESA - https://www.thebesa.com/
BESA Air Quality - https://www.thebesa.com/besa-focus-areas/indoor-air-quality
GCP Europe - https://gcpeurope.eu/
Ella Roberta Foundation - https://www.ellaroberta.org/about-ella

Chapters

• 0:15 Air Quality and Ventilation Status
• 13:51 Future of Standards in Ventilation Trade
• 20:44 Challenges and Opportunities in Ventilation Competency
• 32:12 Identifying Quality and Value in Firms
• 42:40 Ventilation and Air Quality Importance
• 54:00 The Future of Building Air Quality

Transcript

Simon: 0:15

Welcome to Air Quality Matters, and this is a conversation with Nathan Wood, managing Director of Ventilation and Indoor Air Quality Specialists Farmwood. Nathan is also Chairman of the Building Engineering Services Association Indoor Air Quality Group as well as Chair of GCP Europe's Indoor Air Quality Task Force. Nathan is a straight talking, no-nonsense practitioner providing ventilation and air quality services in the south east of England across both residential and non-residential buildings. The Farmwood team, and in particular, nathan, has a laser focus on quality of outcomes and not afraid to highlight the gaps we often see in our sector. Much of what we talk about on this podcast.

Simon: 1:08

Nathan and his team are at the coalface, implementing day in, day out. He is a prolific ambassador for the sector, not least through his roles in BISA, the Indoor Air Quality Group and GCP Europe. I always enjoy talking to Nathan. His enthusiasm for what he does, doing it right, and the legacy this work leaves for both his customers, but also the pride he takes in his staff, is infectious. We talk about the gaps we see in performance out there and how this sector needs to upskill, his personal journey into the world of air quality and his passion for skills and apprenticeships in the sector. I hope you enjoy this episode. This is Nathan Wood. Nathan, in addition to Farmwood, anybody that follows you on social media will probably know you as much as anything for the catalogue of horror shows that you tend to post up there. Is it the shit show that it looks like out there, and if so, why?

Nathan: 2:22

Unfortunately in my experience yes, it is that bad. I think we've got decades of poor installations, installations that may have been good at the time of installation which have since fallen down, had temporary repairs carried out, other manufacturers going in or contractors going in and making adjustments and tweaks. There's also a legacy of poor maintenance of these systems. The importance of ventilation within people's homes has been massively overlooked for generations from my SC. So unfortunately for us as a business, we've moved from doing lovely installations to constantly and it is constantly every day putting right other people's mistakes. So we're trying to beat the drum and change as much as we can to improve the situation, but it just seems that it's a very difficult place to be in right now.

Simon: 3:19

So there's probably a couple of silos that we could break that catalogue of horror shows into. One would be poor installation in the first instance, so poor ideation and design and installation of the product from day one. And then this kind of run to failure methodology we've seen with ventilation, where products are just put in and we only really get to see them when it stops making a noise or it starts making a noise or something encourages you to go and have a look, as if we start with the installation part, the why we don't get it right from day one piece, One of the things that are driving that. From what you've seen because I guess you get given projects to do from scratch from you you probably see the errors in the way that it's presented to you, but also you're going out to fairly new installations as well quite regularly and fixing problems, aren't you?

Nathan: 4:22

It is quite often done on a desktop exercise. It's very rare that you hear of a designer actually being able to go to sites. Look at the quirks and the differences between what's on a bit of paper or on your PC screen to what's actually in real life, and I think that's when the skill sets really need to kick in. We have daily tenders from small individual self-builders that need a bit of help through to the main developers as well, but overall I think it's because nobody needs an official card, skills card or a qualification that allows them to do ventilation. Anybody literally anybody can buy an MVHR, buy some ductwork maybe they're flexible ductwork as well and have a really good go themselves and the chances are it will get signed off, put through a building control and you could sell your property.

Nathan: 5:15

I mean, most of the time these sort of nice self-build projects are people's homes that they're living in and they're trying to do the best thing they really are and they want to do the best for the eco style that they're aiming for. Passive house is becoming more and more popular. I see that creating more problems going forward as well, but in terms of design, more often than not it goes to a manufacturer that offers a desktop exercise. They will produce a drawing which to them looks like it will work, but in truth they have no real understanding of the practicalities of that ventilation system and how it will actually perform once people are inhabiting that space, and that's when it starts to fall down.

Simon: 6:00

And that goes to the heart of competency, I guess.

Nathan: 6:04

Exactly that key word that is banded around ever so much. But in terms of how we like to portray ourselves, we do things to the regulation and to the letter. Unfortunately, the value of what ventilation in a building is massively overlooked, still In our world, simon. We know about the health outcomes, we know about it can affect your moods, it can improve positivity and productivity within the workplace. An Englishman's home is his castle, as they say, but the life within a building is massively impacted by the quality of the air you breathe. And it's again in my world and in your world.

Nathan: 6:55

We know this and I like to think that since COVID that we've broken down a lot of barriers and a lot more people are talking about air quality and concerned about it as well, more so in schools. But it's just joining up that concern and that drive with associations and industry as well. A lot of people like talking about it Off the back of COVID. How many manufacturers did you see at the next expo that suddenly had ventilation and air quality added onto their little public displays? Dig down into it. They didn't know very much.

Simon: 7:27

Yeah, that's interesting and I suppose we have to be careful when we're talking about sectors here because they can be quite different. So you straddle the gap between both non-residential and residential. So when we talk about competencies in a non-residential setting for design, are you typically looking at designs coming from consulting engineers and architects and engineering firms when they're provisioning ventilation for non-residential buildings, and how does that differ perhaps for the residential setting, the kind of competencies you're seeing for designs for residential settings?

Nathan: 8:11

It's a mix. Sometimes we're getting very, very, very good, very detailed, up-to-date specifications coming through. More often than not, we're having years of photocopied standards that come through that are out of date and we're actually going back to them and saying thank you very much. But, however, this is outdated guidance. Now you should be on this and it should be doing that. And, as an SME with a relatively small team to some of these big companies and organisations, it's quite concerning that we're the ones telling them. It should be ideally the other way around. So we're learning, we're taking on that.

Nathan: 8:49

So, yes, with the commercial sector, there is a lot more drive for competence. It's part of the PQQs, your insurances and everything else and the competence of the person going. The skill card comes into play. Although there isn't a specific skills card for ventilation, it falls under more mechanical and electrical competence. So I think we'll come on to that a bit later. But certainly, if somebody come to my home and was to service my boiler or my distribution board, I would be asking for their certifications or their gas safe card or their NIC EIC competency card. Now, certainly, yes, a boiler can cause health concerns and all sorts of issues around that, and electrics as well. Very, very dangerous. But the quality of our head? It just kills us slowly. So no one's really worried about that. As long as it's not instantaneous, then who cares? That's what it feels like working within the sector and obviously living in an environment and working in the same sort of environments as well, so the competency is massively different between the two.

Simon: 9:57

And, I suppose, hamstrung to some degree by the fact that we tend to use minimum standard regulations as a design guide as opposed to just the minimum we should reach. So when we say we see designs from manufacturers, often it's the what's the minimum specification of a product. I need to put on a drawing to know that I'm meeting building standards right.

Nathan: 10:26

I have a real problem with that. So, Judith Hackett, don't do that. Judith Hackett, with the Grenfell Inquiry and the Building Safety Act and everything that came forward, why is it that we only look to achieve the bare minimum? I mean, certainly with my own children, with the apprentices at work and anybody that we've worked with and develop. I don't really accept a past mark. You always want to reign beyond that, you know.

Nathan: 10:57

Why is it that we design and build to a minimum? They're there to make sure that buildings are safe, in effect, but it's the bare minimum. I mean, somebody asked on LinkedIn the other day about some certain guidance around air changes per hour within the building and people were quoting I think it was an American ashray and everything else. My question was are you looking to meet bare minimum requirements or are you looking to ensure that you've got a healthy building? Because I think that they're massively different. They really are as much as I've seen really good improvements in approved document F of ventilation within domestic settings. So many builders and companies made sure that the spade was in the grounds before that regulation came out because they knew the additional costs that that would put to them if they were to proceed would be quite catastrophic in terms of their forward planning. So there have been improvements in regulations, but they are the bare minimum.

Simon: 12:03

And I think you touched on a really interesting point a moment ago and that was this repetition of standards we see included in specifications that you know historically that they're just trying to shorten the process of design every time they've got a farm out a specification for a project. So you're seeing standards, old BRE standards from 10 years ago, being noted and mixed with new regulation standards for part F, mixed with some Sibsie guidance, somewhere perhaps a British standard thrown in there for good measure. It's very difficult to keep up to date with all of these different standards and documents, and then they don't necessarily agree either, do they?

Nathan: 12:50

You can have because they had this very because of age or because of competency.

Nathan: 12:55

Yeah, we had this really recently whereby we was questioned a report about the minimum, the maximum distance of flexible ducts work used in a ventilation system domestic ventilation system and we had part F put towards the latest guide which referred to a 10 year old Visioia document. One said the maximum run was a meter, the other one said 1.5. But the one that stated maximum distances of 1.5 meters said that you needed you needed bracketry and supports every 600 mil, which doesn't sort of add up. And again, why are we still talking about flexible duct work? It's a big no-no. Anyone in the industry knows it's the Bodger and Scarper, it's the stuff from the local wholesaler that gets you around, that still beam. That wasn't shown, for whatever reason, in the drawings.

Nathan: 13:51

And the other issue I have with standards is the massive cost implications.

Nathan: 13:56

You spend hundreds of pounds downloading documents that refer you to other documents that are only going to cost more money.

Nathan: 14:02

You need to be aware of this information and it allows you to have that level of competence that you can refer to standards. I mean, there's some really good people in the industry that spout off BSENs and part Fs and everything else like no tomorrow and I quite often scribble them down. We've got a massive library of documentation and it's only when we have to put forward our reports, whether it's a report on a poorly installed system and then the questions come back to say, well, is this best practice, is this guidance, must we, should we, or can we get around it? What must we do? And it's ambiguity in how people decipher the regulations and what's been said, which I understand, is very, very difficult to comprehend between somebody that's been in the industry and somebody that's got a bit of overview knowledge on a lot of things. But we should just be installing systems and maintaining them to the very, very best of our ability. That's the end of it. We shouldn't be cutting corners. So if you cut corners, the health impacts can be huge.

Simon: 15:11

And I understand there's a big need for backstops when it comes to standards, because you have to have something that assures that things don't fall below a minimum. I'm just not sure how you move from that being a design criteria to what it was actually intended to be and that is a backstop. And perhaps, as we move into the future with more monitoring of indoor spaces and more connected products that are providing information on their performance, that we move much more to performance based outcomes, that we can stand over products and say, look, it doesn't really matter how we got there. The important thing is this is delivering a certain outcome and we will know if it falls below that. And that's really the space that I know Farm would look to in operating. Is that performance based space, isn't it?

Nathan: 16:10

Yeah, we as a business we're extremely niche, I feel, in the servicing and the responsibility that we offer. I mean we've been going over 22 years now. My father started the business. He was working with various M&E companies who just so happened to look after some ventilation contracts and he was given the opportunity to work with one of the manufacturers directly. They'd set up with another small business up north and they offered him a position and he literally said I'm leaving, now let's have a chat.

Nathan: 16:48

And in those years everything's been driven around the values of a family business. We can't afford to sit back and rest up and I'll be honest with you take the piss. It's very easy to earn money from what we do, but it hasn't always been health outcomes. We've always wanted to put our badge on things and put our family name on the work that we do. Farmer is my mum's maiden name and Woody is my dad's surname. That's how that came about, the pride in putting your name and your family's name on the systems that you're working on or things you've constructed and maintained. It was that pride element in the beginning. Then I think once I set up my LinkedIn profile when my youngest boy, rory, was born, nursing him in one hand one night and setting up LinkedIn in the other multitasking dad. That's when the whole IAQ thing came about. Mainly from people in the States, I was connecting with anyone under the hashtag HVAC and everything else. That's when the health outcomes became apparent about what we do and what our team does and what the administration team does as well. It's all about ensuring that people's health outcomes are improved.

Nathan: 18:10

Once we've finished what we're doing whether it's an installation, whether it's maintaining a system All of the team understand it. It's not me being the crazy IAQ guy ranting at them saying we're doing this, we're doing that. Everybody understands it and everybody really does care. I'm not saying that no one else in the industry does care. They clearly do, but we're not driven by targets and performance and we've not got crazy growth goals for the next five years. As a company, we'd like to grow, but grow sustainably and organically, but I think by.

Nathan: 18:46

I think, as you mentioned earlier, our DNA is that we do care about what we do and if something isn't right, we go way beyond our contractual remit to try and put that right. I've spent many hours battling, trying to get through to the right people in organisations. To explain what they're doing is fundamentally wrong and, at the same time, really trying to praise people that want to do the right things. It's not just about bashing people, it's about praising and raising the profile of people that genuinely are looking at doing the right thing. So I think, being a family organisation, being dragged up right from a young age as well by the old man, and just wanting to do the right things by the industry, and then learning about IAQ, all of the health outcomes and everything that's joined on the back of that side of things yeah, I put out a post the other day that we are the physicians of buildings and that we have more of an influence on people's health than their own doctor, and that's very, very true definitely.

Simon: 19:52

And that gives a sense of purpose to the trade. And I think perhaps that's an interesting missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle for the ventilation trade is it perhaps has an opportunity to have as greater legacy in what it does. As any other trade you can provide health outcomes and health and wellbeing outcomes for people for their lives, which is a great legacy to have. But ventilation I mean perhaps for our listeners further afield than the UK. Ventilation isn't really a trade in of itself, yet is it Particularly in the UK. It sits in this strange middle ground.

Nathan: 20:44

Yeah, and it's really frustrating because I preach a lot and I'm quite happy to go out there and say that things are wrong and things are right. And more recently I got fed up and sometimes when I get fed up it can be quite dangerous because I generally rant it straight on LinkedIn and cause a bit of a stir. The word I use is sort of positive disruption it needs to come down to, and I've learned over the years that you can kick and stream, scream and spit your dummy out and throw your toys out the frame as much as you like, but why not get the associations involved that actively lobby for change within government and government rules and regulations? So more recently I've done just that. I won't name the organisations because there's a lot of conversations still going. So I met with four, five key players and hoped for a really positive meeting and just got extremely frustrated about how long things take to change.

Nathan: 21:42

And I think as an SME, as a small business, for us to change. We're quite agile. We can create change overnight. But for organisations and governments that are this big oil tank again in one direction, trying to change the angle, even the small amount, is quite a difficult task. But I understand the processes around that.

Nathan: 22:01

So, in terms of true ventilation competence, certainly there are two day competency courses, which at the moment are sort of the best thing. There's CPDs that people can do I'm a huge fan of CPDs, as long as they're delivered in the right way. There's manufacturers guidance and training courses that you can go on, but there is no ventilation training centre that is recognised as a NOZ, a National Occupational Standard, and in the eyes of the Building Safety Act you need to have a NOZ, an MVQ, a city and guild equivalent, that is recognised, that allows you to have this level of competence. So right now, officially, myself and all of my team and anybody in the HVAC world in the eyes of the law wouldn't necessarily be deemed competent. However, we've got the very best that we can offer.

Simon: 23:01

So at the moment that competence comes from a mix of electrical competency and plumbing competency, and perhaps refrigeration competency Amalgamates together, depending on the sector, to ventilation competency, national quality at a national qualifications level, because, let's face it, a two day competency course does not make a competent person. That's really an introduction to some terminology and ventilation and perhaps some simple calculations. But when it comes to competency on the ground to effectively install and commission and manage ventilation, there isn't a trade as such that exists in the UK that you can go to college and do an MVQ two and three in which is a international level four and five.

Simon: 24:02

I guess qualification to come out the other side with us with the trade skill is that yeah, and that's what allows multi trades to do the ventilation installations in the first place.

Nathan: 24:15

I mean, certainly for our apprentices, they have to do an advanced one, the apprenticeship in electrical, mechanical maintenance. That's how we cover it off. It covers a bit of fabrication as well. And then in house is where we do the ventilation training and competence. They do go on the two day training courses, they do attend the presentations, the CPDs, but it's the, it's the worldly knowledge that we are able to give them on a daily basis.

Nathan: 24:39

I mean, we are registered as a, as a mechanical and electrical company, we do that as well, but our core is ventilation. So when we, when we attend these difficult site meetings with building control who are there with their book flipping through me, I do it. I can't remember everything. You do need a reference. But then you pull out your rotating vein and anometer and the building control officer says what's that? Then you sort of think to yourself this is why so many builds are being handed over with with no true ventilation system performance in place, if the very people that should be signing off the work don't even know what the test equipment should look like.

Simon: 25:23

Indeed, and I think quality of outcomes in the construction sector always has to be bookended with competency and design. You have to have a design that you know is going to meet the out, the intended outcomes or the design brief and we've discussed that it can fall between the cracks of manufacturers designs and engineering designs. Spending on the type of project, you can't always guarantee the quality of the design. It has to be bookended with accountability, whether that's accountability through building control or accountability through third party independent assessment of ventilation systems. That's a significant missing piece out there at the moment, isn't it Across the board? Is that that bookend of a final accountability on a project? The trouble is as well.

Nathan: 26:16

We're seeing I mean even in Europe, you know, the renovation wave and the retrofit that we talk about in the UK. Even the big businesses are getting it wrong. You know, they're working with housing associations, with councils. Buildings are being clad, insulated, new windows without trickle vents, they're changing the internal doors, the fire doors, the roof. The roof is being insulated. And then somebody says, what's that silver Box doing there? Oh, that's just the ventilation system, you know. Oh, should we be doing something with that? Let's refer to the regs. Oh shit, yeah, we do, we should be looking at that.

Nathan: 26:54

And that's when we get invited in and we sort of eyes wide open, going you know, 90% for a project here. How has this been missed? But even then, on this one occasion, our report that went in, I think they thought we was just trying to spin the. I think they thought we was just trying to spin a quick buck from it, if you like. So then they paid for an independent building control officer to go out and check it and he just turned around and went, yeah, what they said. And then they come back to us and went what can you do? And we're like, well, ok, well, who's? Who's designing this? You know who's responsible for everything else, and that's a multi, multi million pound organisation in the UK working alongside a big housing association, and they're getting it wrong.

Simon: 27:40

So I was talking to Tyler Smith last week on the podcast and that value in ventilation is coming in the non residential setting because businesses recognise that there's an impact to the bottom line on getting ventilation right, both in performance and absenteeism and financing through ESG. There's a whole number of things that increase the value of ventilation. That means that there's a there's a carrot there to do to do something right and then you rely on the stick of regulations and accountability and responsibility to drive it from the bottom up. But in the residential setting we haven't been very good so far at presenting the equivalent of what would be a business case in the non residential setting so that people understand why we're doing this. We haven't been very good yet, have we, at linking ventilation performance to indoor air quality performance to health outcomes and valuing that properly.

Nathan: 28:44

We do quite a bit of commercial and residential. We tend to dip in and out of different manner of different associations or different builders and for the majority of them, the ventilation systems or the heat recovery systems, they're just a pain in the backside for them. Now we have to do this because regulation says and we've got our SAP scores and everything that comes through with it we was working with an off site manufacturer, which everybody's pushing forward as the new way. They've since gone bust, you know. Let's be honest. They had an amazing factory offsite facility. The people installed in the ventilation systems had no training on ventilation whatsoever. They had a drawing. They had the ventilation manufacturer sales rep attend and just go this is good or this is bad. We was invited in on behalf of the manufacturer of the ventilation equipment and we was just like stop what you're doing. That's not right. This isn't right. Why are you doing that?

Nathan: 29:52

We sorted everything out in the modular space. Then we found that there was a problem when the assembly of the pods, if you like, were being put together. The first floor was put to. The first floor was connected to the ground floor and they connected it using flexible ductwork. So of course there's this lovely long sort of wooden trunk with a few meters while someone can get in there and put it together, great, connected. Now lower it down, no access to see what happens after. Then we put a little endoscope camera in there and, sure enough, it was all crushed and damaged. Now it was only through us offering our services to maintain them going forward that we was flagging up that there was flow rate issues once they were handed over and then the typical mold and damp issues come from there.

Nathan: 30:40

So there is a business case commercially. There should be for residents. I mean, if there was a house builder that was promoting healthy buildings now if there's a development one side of the road that's a healthy building and the other side is just a building, they might look the same. But how could and should that affect your mortgage rates or your insurance or your own health insurance? Is there an angle there? I mean, certainly the big insurance companies have got an angle with the commercial portfolios and the loan to value based on the healthy building and their scores, depending on which accreditation they've been looking at. Why haven't we got that in residential spaces?

Nathan: 31:22

So much more building of residential homes in the UK needs to happen. I think somebody said was it 600,000 in so many years? Just to stand still, just to keep up where we should be? And we're not quite there yet. So the speed in which they need them to be built, people naturally cut corners. Looking to different posts on LinkedIn is the simple thing of a brick tire. People are reducing the amount of brick tires they put in to try and earn another quarter of a 1% profit once the build's finished. So there's a bit of a broken system and I do think it's going to take a long time to get that change. And once I think the consumer, the residents, learn more about it, I think there will be a drive-in demand. Hopefully that will change things.

Simon: 32:12

What's the difference between firms that are getting it right and getting it wrong at the moment? In the absence of those drivers either side, what do you think fundamentally makes the difference, and how does somebody engaging with a firm find out about that? Get to the root cause of this is an organisation I'm going to get a good outcome from. What makes that difference and how does somebody identify that in an organisation they engage with?

Nathan: 32:45

That's a really good question. I think it's quite apparent from the off with us, straight away, we know whether or not someone's looking for a race to the bottom. I don't care what system goes in. Does it meet the spec? If there is a spec, how cheaply can we do it On paper? We are an expensive organisation, expensive company to work with.

Nathan: 33:07

However, if you look at the return to put things right, if you look at the quality of the workmanship that goes in I mean the days of the clerk of works that would come round and have a really good understanding of what your guys were doing on site you know you'd get that phone call Years ago. We would get that phone call. You know if your guys are late or what's going on, or there would always be that one guy on site, the appointed person, that would check up on everybody. Don't see that these days. It's the engagement process from the off that would instantly give me a shiver down my spine or confidence in what we were doing, going forward and, to be honest with you, I've turned down some amazing companies and options and opportunities to work with people because it doesn't align well with our re-foss of what we do For a business to know who's good and who's bad. I think that's what the question is in terms of understanding. If they're going to get value from who they're engaging with, it should be their ability to question the specification. It's very rare that we just take a specification to read. We always go in accordance with part F. This MbHR should be able to modulate the ventilation rates in accordance with outside air quality. It's not got any IOT capabilities to how you're going to meet part F with this. Or you see the inlets for the MbHR near a car park rather than coming in from a green internal courtyard space. So there's a few red flags that we can look for, but I think more and more businesses are engaging with all due respect, the Tree Huggers Society and I mean that in a really positive way those that generally care about sustainability and the planet going forward and their legacy of what they leave behind.

Nathan: 34:59

Unfortunately, the term value engineering comes in. You can have all of these things at the start and you're thinking this is a great project and somebody comes in and wipes a load of the nice stuff out. Or do we need that? No, yes. Is it compulsory? Yes, no. Well, let's see what happens. So it's a real balance what could be a really interesting project. I can't wait to get my teeth into this one. This would be amazing. We're doing this, we're doing that. Change the spec on that. Let's change the way we put the inlets through there. You get right near the end and then someone changes the design on the external fascia, where you've got sorry architects, where you've got this lovely louvered grill that might look really aesthetically pleasing on the outside, but it massively hinders the performance of the ventilation system, whichever system it would be, because it's just going to spiral and cause turbulence and noise. And that is still happening. That's nothing old, that's changed, it's new, it's happening all the time.

Nathan: 35:58

We actually worked at a university brand new STEM building. It looked incredible, absolutely incredible. Two of the floors were complaining of headaches and nausea. So we was called in. We'd done an air quality test. We said the CO2 is high. It's not really high. And they said well, actually we've still got some people working from home because of the headaches and stuff, so we'll get them in for a week. Let's get it packed out for a week like it would normally be. Monitor the CO2 off the scale. Yet they had a commercial supply and extract system.

Nathan: 36:33

We went outside and looked at the grey clad fascia panels that couldn't be removed because they were glued in place, not mechanically anchored. Got a scaffold set up? No, we had a mobile platform set up put for our endoscope cameras. The original brick with the louver with the fly mesh behind it was completely offset against the external insulation and the vents. So the air that should have been coming out was just short circuiting inside this sort of plenum, if you like, and being sucked back into the building.

Nathan: 37:07

This was five years after the building was put in play. The builders weren't available anymore whether they gone bankrupt or whatever, I'm not sure so the university had to pay itself to have all of the cladding removed, all of the insulation removed, the external grills removed, the fly screens removed, the ducts cleaned because they hadn't been cleaned. Since all of these changes were carried out, we highlighted fire compartmentation issues within the building and they had to go all again, put it all back, seal it back up, put it back in and the units. It was about 30, 35% reduction in speed, I think it was. We could have done the energy workings as well across eight units and it's like how can that happen? Surely the person putting the faces on would have gone. Hang on a minute. That doesn't look right. That's not marrying up with this, or is it? I'm just paid to do this. There's a saying in the UK not my job, mate and it's almost that we need to change that narrative.

Simon: 38:06

So I suppose a lot of the things that drive quality of outcomes is what the client decides they see as important. And if they see as important the cheapest possible price, then you'll get the quality that you pay for ultimately. But if you're somebody that's trying to find a balance as everybody should, for economies of scale and good value but also quality of outcome, I suppose it comes back to basic due diligence, does it? And then there's the question for references, knowing enough about your brief to be able to ask questions to get a sense whether that person cares at all or whether they just unquestioningly discount prices and go with the flow regardless because they just want the work. I suppose it's just the classic signs you have to look out for. You know what you can deliver and you know what you want in a client, but it must be quite difficult for clients to come and contact us, the ones that are gonna pull you up and go by the way. That's not going to work and we can't stand over that, as an outcome.

Nathan: 39:17

I quite often tell new customers and people that come on board about the value add that farmers can bring. I mean, I do a lot of work for associations. We've worked with World Ventilate Day and Clean Air Day and we were fully aware of the health outcomes and all of this information and some of them just go and I'm like well, I know we're doing this and I know a lot of other people are doing a good job as well and they're more happy to preach about them as well. But it's very rare that people go oh right, do you wanna come in? Oh, you do see, pete, do you wanna come in and tell us about everything else you do?

Nathan: 39:52

But I do think the need for overall competence within an organization, because quite often than not, certainly for commercial maintenance contracts, the heating is lumped with the ventilation, where I think they should be separate. So you get big heating contractors go after it and then they subcontract out the ventilation side of things. But we come across what people call maintenance is removing plumb blocks, changing bearings and painting the housing. What about the performance of the system? What about what's happening actually inside the buildings, inside the apartments? You might have a metal box on the roof wearing away. What exactly is it doing other than just probably costing you energy? And that's when a lot of our work comes into play.

Simon: 40:38

I want to come on to a farward in a second, but I did think of another question to ask you From a conversation I'd had with Max Sherman a few weeks ago. We were reflecting on the ongoing need for checking the performance of ventilation systems. If you were lucky enough to have it commissioned properly in the first place, then that's no guarantee. Obviously Almost certainly nobody is doing annual or bi-annual checks on ventilation performance, and I was speaking to some French colleagues of mine in Cerema in France who have been looking at this subject matter now for several years and they effectively came to the conclusion that it was pointless trying to check the performance of existing ventilation systems because they were never set up to be checked.

Simon: 41:35

In Ireland we've just introduced a code of practice for indoor air quality in the workplace and part of that is, if you have a mechanical ventilation system, that you should have a ventilation performance check done at least once every two years to show what I thought is a reasonable request, and that is that meeting room over there is getting X10 litres a second per person based on its use, and that open plan office space is getting its design flow rate and at the very least you should expect as a building owner or operator that the ventilation system is doing what it should do to meet very reasonable standards. But the reflection from my French colleagues were good luck with that. Have you been brought into those scenarios much of Nathan? Would you come in and check the ventilation system? Has there been some fairly awkward conversations to be had with building owners about the likelihood of getting any results, or not, from it?

Nathan: 42:31

It's not normally an invite to check the ventilation. It's normally an invite because there's been a modification carried out or there's been a change of use within a building. We had an amazing one for a media company in London who had completely refurbished the floor but only sort of the internal walls and the spaces, and we was asked to go in and commission the fancoral units and also the ventilation system, and what we found was an office space that would have had supply and extract. In that space A petition had been moved to. Now one room only had supply and one room only had extract. We're like well, we can't sign that off. What do we need to do? We need to change. We need to put the ceilings down. You need to change it all around, put additional grills in. It's like oh well, they've got doors on these and mostly the doors are left open, so surely that would be enough. And it's like well, this was designed in one way. You've modified it beyond that scope.

Nathan: 43:27

We also found in the fancoral units they had no supply air from the outside, so they were constantly recirculating. And we've only got to look back a few years into COVID. You know the risk of recirculating there and the massive conversation that came from that. So it's more of a. I think you've got this one wrong. We're gonna have to look into this, and then you give them the reasons why.

Nathan: 43:50

And then the question comes back well, must we or have we got enough air? If you do the overall calculation, have we got enough air changes per hour for the amount of people we've got in this space? And the majority of the time is well, no, you haven't. But I think because if the light switch wasn't working in the meeting room then you had to go into the meeting room next door to turn the light switch on. They would pay for that change to happen, because it's an inconvenience If to get tap out of the gents you have to go next door into the woman's and turn the tap on. You'd certainly change that, but it's only air, you know who cares, and it is that it's intangible.

Simon: 44:28

Yeah, and how practically difficult it is it to actually find flow rates and ascertain performance levels in some of these spaces, because there's a hell of a mix of grills A lot of architectural grills can be very awkward to measure. You're not gonna be able to stick a hood over a lots of things. You have to check flow rates and do calculations, and it's not an easy task, is it sometimes to determine performance in some spaces.

Nathan: 44:56

Yeah, it's not an exact science for sure. I mean. We a great example of this one again. We was asked to cover a previous contractor's work on a block of flats for a communal ventilation extract system, and they measured the performance of the ventilation system of the accessible ducting on the roof. So they carried out a PTO traverse, measured it all the performance of the system. Everything was great. Nobody actually went in and visited any of the flats to check what the actual air flows were and the extraction rates from the apartments. It was only when mold and damp started to occur that we was invited in. We went well, you're getting well below flow readings. And they said, well, the flow on the roof is fine. I said, well, be that as it may, there's lots of straws, basically, that are connected together through this building that are all probably leaking. And it's at that stage that we realized that the system itself was undersized when you took into accountability of the amount of extracts within the building. And it's the same for commercial office spaces. They can only.

Nathan: 45:59

Normally we don't want to be seen in offices, people don't want to see engineers walking around their offices their dirty boots on and everything else, and there is a bit of a stigma there. I think we should touch on later in terms of the mind's eye of an engineer. But I think we want to be in the service store in the back up the service lift onto the roof, tinker with what we've got to tinker with. Nobody wants to see us on the floor unless it's out of hours. But if anything, I would be assured, knowing what I know, if I was working within an office and somebody was actively going around and checking with a balometer or a hood what the actual air flows are around me and being inquisitive to it. I mean, certainly sometimes we have carried out surveys in live offices and people go what are you doing? Or we'll go in and install an air quality monitor, or what's that, what's that do? Or we've got those, what does this figure mean? And then you've got the value of air quality monitoring. But certainly there's ways in which businesses can actively look to prove the performance of a system to get paid. There's a bit of a dirty word called retentions but I do think performance-based retention. I have no problem with no problem. Keep back 5%. I'll come back in six months time. I'll stand there with an independent commissioning company and we'll make sure that the flow rates are still doing what they were at the time of testing.

Nathan: 47:23

I mean, some people refer to the ventilation certificates just being a pointless exercise. It's just like an MOT on your car. It's pointless and I'm like so you don't want to make sure that all of your wheels on your car aren't going to fall off when you're driving down the road or the brakes are going to fail? Yeah, but it's just the time of testing. At the time of testing it's a pass or fail. There's no guarantee in years to come or months to come that people won't have tinkered with the system, changed the performance outlays or moved it around. But surely you can take an educated view on that. And again, I think a bit like in Ireland. Correct me if I'm wrong, but independent testing of ventilation systems is a must. But there's so few people within our industry. How long will their independence last?

Simon: 48:08

Yeah, I think true independence is a hard one to maintain, depending on the sector, but it is possible. Yeah, that's really interesting and I think we've got to figure out both how to get good outcomes at the point of handover but also have enough importance in ventilation and air quality outcomes that there is a demand to check that these things are still delivering year on year on year, that it isn't a fit and forget and run to failure where you only get a phone call when the fan call starts making a bit of a knocking noise or somebody starts complaining with the rooms a bit stuffy An actual fact you find out the ventilation stopped working six months ago. We need to find ways of moving beyond that. And, just as you say, the same value you see as somebody coming around doing the smoke detector tests once every six months. 12 months.

Nathan: 49:06

You want the same thing.

Simon: 49:07

When was the last time the ventilation guy was in this office checking that the ventilation system is still doing what it's supposed to, is the kind? Of conversation you want to see happening.

Nathan: 49:16

Yeah, one thing that we mentioned with our own office. We've got an appointed fire officer and they do the fire alarm test on a certain time in a certain morning and it's a real pain in the backside. It's normally when I'm trying to do something like this and then there's alarm going off. We know about it. Why don't we have that for ventilation and air quality?

Simon: 49:33

Yeah, you know fires.

Simon: 49:36

To be fair, that's what the codes of practice for the Health and Safety Authority in Ireland are trying to establish that look, there's a very reasonable demand that employees provide adequate ventilation for their employees. And if you have a mechanical system, the logical way to determine that it's doing what it should do is, at least once every couple of years very similar to an MOT, really, like you say Just making sure the seatbelt still work and that there's enough tread on the tire and that the headlights aren't going to blind somebody coming the other direction. It doesn't mean that stuff isn't going to deteriorate over those two years, but, like you say, you want to know that you can drive down the road without the thing falling to pieces or veering into somebody. And with ventilation it's a similar thing, because you and I know from the horror shows that we go to you can turn up to systems seven, eight, 10 years after installation because somebody thinks it's not really working anymore, and you find completely blocked filters, ducts that you'd want to wear, hazmat suits to go anywhere near and fans that stopped working probably five years previously and now have fish swimming in them.

Simon: 50:55

It's unbelievable what you'll find if you don't have those regular checks. If there isn't, at least at a very basic level, the requirement to check that these things work. Plus the fact that you've hinted at it, we're moving into a data world where you're going to be found out anyway. I think somebody said to me the other day if you have 300 employees in the office, there's a good chance. At least five or six of them will already have an indoor air quality monitor on their desk. You know, at some point an awkward question is going to be raised.

Nathan: 51:26

Indeed, definitely, and I think there's a few things just to touch on quickly when I don't like you talking about COVID, but it's important. When the British government were calling out for manufacturers to build ventilators for hospitals, they couldn't make enough. They were calling out. We had the general public actively googling ventilation or ventilators, which are two completely different things. The amount of phone calls we was getting asking if we were able to make ventilators for the NHS and explaining to them that what we do, we do ventilation but we don't do that, and it was a bit of a moment where you think Christ the general public, and there was a lot of calls for a small company. You know we're on Google and all the rest of it, but we was getting all of these calls Trying to explain to people what ventilation is and the awareness around that word, which is why I think we do need to make ventilation visible and the best way to do that is with active monitoring and air quality monitors, whether it be like an MOT, somebody comes in and does an audit, does a check whether or not your building is part of a sort of green label.

Nathan: 52:41

I won't name names, but there's all sorts of wellbeing, play the stamps and green credentials. I mean, we've spoken before, simon, about if you go to a restaurant you look at the hygiene rating or you look at the ratings on the Google reviews. Why don't we see that with air quality? I mean, I do see someone LinkedIn because I'm connected in our own little sort of bubble of air quality people, but I quite often go up against, you know, big hotel chains when they're showcasing their latest and greatest check this out. It's got a five-star review and everything else and it's fresh food and I'd say, you know, oh, great, fantastic.

Nathan: 53:18

You know how are you monitoring the air Tumbleweed moment? You know you and I would certainly know to be happy to pay for accommodation that offered monitored air quality. You know you don't want to know just that the towels have been changed, the carpet's been hoovered and the bedsheets have been changed, but the time between client A moving out and us moving back in there's been so many air changes and the filters have been changed routinely and that the air quality is monitored that when you have a good night's sleep that the CO2 is below 800 to 1,000 ppm. That should be pretty standard, right? That's what I think anyway.

Simon: 53:57

Yeah, and I think we always have to be careful. We're stuck in our own, as you say, micro bubble. We think about this stuff. The general population generally doesn't. We assume a lot of this stuff is taken care of wrongly.

Simon: 54:14

I think as a general public you should assume really that if there's a hygiene label on a restaurant, that that includes air quality. But that's not necessarily the case. I think sensors are going to become so ubiquitous in these standards and we can name them because there's half a dozen or more of them at this stage, between well and reset and fit well and Bre-Am and LEED and air rated, and it goes on and on and on. We will see more and more of these labels front and center on our buildings and it will raise awareness in the background. There's probably a natural Rubicon that will be crossed where it becomes the accepted standard. One would hope that you're looking for hotels with a decent air quality label on them at some point, because you get a good night's sleep in the hotels that provide decent air quality that you can go to the restaurant and not come out with a cold or a flu Doesn't have to be a pandemic, you know, and all of that stuff.

Simon: 55:24

So yeah, I'm hopeful, eternally optimistic, and I think that it feels like it takes a long time when you're in the store for these things to change, but we're only a year or so post-pandemic. If you think back how well air quality was even being discussed five years ago or 10 years ago, we've come a very long way.

Nathan: 55:50

The technology's moved a very long way.

Simon: 55:54

In the grand scheme of things, it's moving pretty rapidly.