Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#51 - Tim Sharpe: Improving Home Ventilation - Architecture's Role, Usability Challenges, and Health Implications
A healthier home environment with Tim Sharp, head of architecture at the University of Strathclyde.
Our latest episode challenges the notion that energy efficiency can coexist with optimal indoor air quality without regular testing and innovation. Join us as we address the widespread misconceptions surrounding ventilation in both new and existing UK homes, emphasizing the necessity of systematic evaluations to enhance building performance.
We shine a light on the often-overlooked cultural and habitual influences that shape our ventilation practices. Learn how the construction industry can draw inspiration from other sectors by prioritizing user-friendly design and effective communication. We explore the transformative potential of home user manuals, akin to appliance quick-start guides, and the vital importance of improving public understanding of their living spaces to prevent pollutant build-up.
The complexities of maintaining adequate ventilation in older buildings and the challenges of meeting compliance standards. Our conversation with Tim Sharp highlights the critical role architecture plays in fostering healthier environments through collaboration among architects, designers, and contractors. As we navigate the intricate connections between ventilation, health, and building performance, discover how innovative solutions and environmental data can empower residents to make informed decisions for more sustainable living.
Tim Sharpe - LinkedIn
Tim Sharpe - Strathclyde
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Welcome back to Air Quality Matters. I believe we already have the tools and knowledge we need to make a difference to the quality of the air we breathe in our built environment. The conversations we have and how we share what we know is the key to our success. I'm Simon Jones and this is episode 51. And this is episode 51. Coming up a conversation with Tim Sharp, head of architecture at the University of Strathclyde. I first met Tim back around 2016, I think, as part of a network looking at the health effects of modern airtight construction the HEMAC network.
Simon:But if you follow indoor air quality and particularly standards, you will have come across Tim Sharp. He has been involved with and authored many important pieces of work over the years on the subject and been heavily involved in the development of standards. For example, in Scotland he was recently an invited member of the UK Government Advisory Group on damp and mould. And from SAGE to NICE, to the WHO, to standard groups, he is a sought-after voice in the sector with too many affiliations to list here. To be frank On this podcast, I have noted his work several times and it's always a really good conversation with Tim.
Simon:He has a holistic perspective to the built environment born out of architecture and a fascination, I think, for getting to the bottom of outcomes. This is one of those wandering conversations you only get to have on podcasts and perhaps over pints, and definitely there's a part two in there somewhere. Thanks for listening. As always, do check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet. This is a conversation with Tim Sharp. What's your sense of where we are in the UK generally, with ventilation From an academic perspective and domestic ventilation? When we look at the state of the art where we are today, what's your kind of top level view of it as a whole?
Tim:where we are today. What's your kind of top level view of it as a whole? Um, well, where we are is we don't know where we are. That that's the sort of problem. That's the fundamental problem.
Tim:I think there is a greater awareness of ventilation. Uh, for lots of reasons, um, you know, partly because of research has been done I mean, you done I mean, covid had a part to play as well in terms of raising people's awareness of issues of ventilation. But obviously we are having to do a lot of innovation in buildings, rightly so, for lots of reasons to make buildings more energy efficiency, the carbon agenda and so on, which means we are doing lots of reasons to make buildings more energy efficiency, the carbon agenda and so on, which means we are, we are doing lots of things to buildings and to try and make them perform better. But all of that focus has been about energy measures, and so the question has been what? What are the other effects? And so ventilation is one of those.
Tim:So it begs a question right, how are we getting that right? Have we got sufficient ventilation? Um, and I think part of part of my sense of it is that every time I look, or we look, or anybody looks, they find things which are not as they should be poor provision, missing provision, you know, lack of maintenance, lack of installation. So you know it feels like that. The overall picture is that in UK housing in general that includes both kind of new build and existing buildings that there probably isn't sort of basic provision which there really should be.
Simon:Yeah, and it's an interesting point you make this we don't know where we are piece. You get this sense every time it's looked at and it's very difficult in studies because of the cost of academic study and rigour, to look at things at scale. You know big studies in detail of ventilation and air quality. You might only get to 50, 100 homes, something like that. So at the scale of the built environment, like we don't know where we are at a at a whole build environment level.
Simon:I suppose the question is what is enough, like when, how much or no in knowledge? Like how much more do we need to know to know where we are, kind of thing you know. I know there's within academic circles there's always this hunger for more knowledge. So there's always going to be that. Do we know enough piece? But generally the sense has been outside of that question hunger for more knowledge, so that there's always going to be that. Do we know enough piece? But? But generally the sense has been outside of that question that we know enough to know. We're not getting it right enough. The question is do we have enough detail in that? I suppose?
Tim:well, I'll maybe. Yeah, okay, so I'll go back and say the reason we sort of got into this area at all is one of the things that construction industry doesn't do as a matter of routine is test its outputs, test its artifacts. If you think of any other sphere of manufacturing, design making, when you do something, you'll test it to see if it works and you'll evaluate it and iterate it and so on. Will you know, evaluate it and iterate it, and so on. Construction industry works has always worked on the basis of trial and error over long periods of time, right? So? So that's why buildings are the shapes they are, because if the building fails, the building doesn't exist anymore, right? Um, so that's, that's fine.
Tim:When you are iterating very slowly and you're responding to climatic conditions or whatever. However, that doesn't work well when you are having to iterate much more quickly, when you're having to innovate more. So in order to innovate, you need to test. You know, did that innovation work or not? And this applies to everything. So we got into this, really through looking at energy performance and things like that, and it's something which the construction industry doesn't do as a matter of routine. It doesn't monitor the performance of its buildings. So we don't know really what buildings are doing. And that's the bottom line challenge in terms of how we're going to do things differently or better, if we do things and don't go back to see if they worked or not so it's a it's a pace problem.
Simon:I mean because I often say this that within the bubble everything seems to move very slowly. But something like ventilation is actually a relatively new concept ventilation for the purpose of air quality in a building. We've had ventilation for stopping a building filling up with smoke and dying carbon monoxide and things like you know for combustion and cooking and things for a long time. But this idea of a building being sealed enough that we need to provide purpose provided ventilation for air quality outside of openable windows is relatively new. So so it's on the pace thing, I think that's a really interesting idea. At what point does innovation become fast enough that the iterations become fast enough that you need to start testing?
Tim:so yeah, so two points there.
Tim:Firstly, actually we did used to design buildings to be well ventilated, well lit, getting sunshine in, you know all those things.
Tim:That was a big bit of building design and you know, middle of 20th century it became much more focused and partly that's because you get, you know, you get inventions of heating systems and air conditioning and stuff like that, which allows you to design buildings differently so you can have a box in the middle of the desert, right, um? So the the problem with that, um, that ability to innovate rapidly, is that, as a result of the way construction industry has evolved itself, is that it doesn't have very much, if any, capacity for r&d. Again, if you look at, if you look at other industries and what they spend on R&D, it's a really big percentage of what they do In construction. It's virtually non-existent. Any big practice doesn't spend a lot on doing that. They are primarily commercial practices. They're doing what they do. So what that means is that there is very little A resource and B skills to do that type of evaluation, that sort of it's looking at the outputs of the experiment, and we just don't do that.
Simon:That's a really interesting idea actually, and I wonder because I come from industry and industry does innovate and put a lot of money into research and R&D often. So you wonder if part of the risk is the disjointed nature of how fast products and industry might be innovating but construction isn't. So you find products and materials advancing faster than the construction sector is able to. Yeah, sync with that it'll be a bit like a wheel manufacturer or a tire manufacturer advancing faster than the car manufacturers and sticking products on cars before the car manufacturer was ready for them. That just wouldn't work. Yet in construction we've got products hitting the market and companies spending huge monies on innovation and then piling into a sector potentially where the sector hasn't figured out how it joins those dots perhaps.
Tim:Okay. So the challenge there is yes, you, you have, you have products, but the products are part of a system, right? So it's the system which isn't really being I just don't see as well, but isn't really being designed and certainly isn't being evaluated. So the the potential, the bits of the system are probably very good at what they do, and the thing about that is, if you're a fan manufacturer, yes, you will innovate, you'll test, you'll have stuff on the bench in the factory, you'll do CFD modelling, it'll do exactly what you want that product to do. But what isn't known is what happens when you put that product into a system, because now it's just a component of a much bigger thing, and that's where things kind of break down.
Simon:Yeah, and kind of going back to your original point, the truth is we know very little about the performance of our built environment as a whole. Like the level of detailed understanding and knowledge of outcomes is a tiny fraction of the built environment, so I'm guessing that's part of what drove one of the recent studies you looked at, which was okay where are we in the UK generally with ventilation and that was a piece of work you did which was the national survey, wasn't it? Tell us a little bit about that. What kind of drove the idea behind that national survey and what were the kind of main findings that you found?
Tim:So the drive of that is, firstly, well, there are several things I mean, obviously, work which we've been doing leading up to that which had been various studies which had gone and, you know, done measurements and evaluation of of some, some housing in various places. But it's the same problem that you talked about earlier is that they will always be relatively small studies 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 houses, whatever, um in a particular place, in a particular location. So that's you can't, you can't extrapolate from that. Um, part of it was. However, when you look at all the studies similar studies they're all saying similar things. Actually, generally speaking, um, you know there's been some studies commissioned for building standards which had looked at things which have been innovated you know the mev and etc. But none of this was telling us what the big picture was. So so the driver I think to to do that survey is to try and get a picture across the whole of of the country in terms of who's got what. I think the other thing is that, um, it tends to be that a lot of the studies tend to be focused on particular housing groups and types. So it tends to be more social, rented housing, where investigations take place, because the access can be negotiated a bit more easily.
Tim:The single biggest challenge for doing any kind of study like that is getting over the threshold. That's what takes all the time and all the effort trying to get in. Once you're in, it's relatively easy now. So the motivation was so what does this look like nationally? Time and all the effort trying to get it once you're in, it's relatively easy now. But, um, so the motivation was so what does this look like nationally? Um, what, what, what has everybody got? Have they got fans? Have they got extra? Have they got triple things? Because we don't actually know. Weirdly, we just don't know. There is no, there's no database of that.
Simon:Um, so that was the the driver behind asking that, that question so so was, was the survey itself was conducted by survey organisations, but were the participants in those surveys completely random but spread geographically?
Tim:So this was using YouGo, so that's a polling organisation, so they have a panel of people who are representative of the uk or great in in in general, so you, you can ask them about a a variety of things. Um, and they are broadly representative of that population. So you know, normally that's about. You know what cat food they prefer or who they're voting for, and stuff like this. In this case it was just about asking, ask them questions about their, what ventilation provision they had in the home and and things like did they use it? And advice and so on. Um, when we did the survey, we we did test the respondents uh against, um, you know, things of distribution of house type, age and so on, and and, yeah, it was fine, it was, it was broadly, it broadly correlated so that it is a, you know, a reasonably representative group of of different types of housing across the uk and it's about 2 000 people, wasn't it about two thousand?
Tim:yeah, so so the so, the so. The way it works is the panel is much bigger and then people are asked would you like to take part in this survey? And then they are, and then they are screened for representativeness, if you like, and so you end up with a panel of 2,000 people who remain representative of the whole thing. So what you're trying to avoid is ending up with 2,000 people of one particular who just live in brand new homes, for example. You want that spread of age and demographics and age and you know peak person's age, and so on.
Simon:So some of that information is already known by you gov, so that they're able to construct, yes, the participants in a way that is exactly some of that.
Simon:We don't need to ask because it's already in their, in their system save time, yeah, so what was some of the kind of things you asked then in that survey? What were were the kind of questions? Because it's hard for lay people to understand what they have technically, so I'm guessing you had to pitch the questions in a plain English way that got what you needed, but people were able to comprehend what you asked.
Tim:Yes, so a couple of things. So, firstly, these people are part of a survey panel so they know they're going to get asked questions. It's not like grabbing someone off the street. So they are prepared to. They have said they are prepared to answer questions in this thing we were obviously asking them about. So the broad it was like 67 questions in total. It's quite a long survey but again, because people are signed up to do the survey, you know we're reasonably confident that they will complete it and we did screen for a little bit of people who were doing in 10 seconds too too long, and so on. Um, we were providing fairly simple questions about their provision, but we provided some guidance about that. So there was some maybe. So we were asking about um extract fans and trick events, and so we had pictures of those things as well. Have you got one of these? So there was, there was supporting information, which which we okay and you could.
Simon:Were you able to ask things like is it, is it a fan that stays on or just comes on or not? Were you able to start differentiating between the types of ventilation that people were broadly, broadly?
Tim:broadly speaking. Yes, so we did. We asked things about how is the fan control? Is it just an all off switch? Does it come on with the light? Uh, is it automatic in some way? Um, you know, I I think that's one of the areas where people may not know that stuff, if there's obviously a lot of people have don't know to those kind of questions. But, um, yeah, I mean it, but it was asking that that's the level, level of detail. Uh, so it's asking people fundamentally about what they have in kitchens and bathrooms in terms of extract provision and also what they have in terms of provision for uh background ventilation, which is predominantly trickle vents. Yeah, and then it was have in terms of provision for background ventilation, which is predominantly trickle vents. And then it was asking a series of questions about how and why, what the barriers and drivers were for using those systems and why they used them, why they didn't use them.
Simon:Okay, so there was a good behaviour element to these questions as well, as in what's your interaction with those vents? Have you ever serviced it? Is it something you also ask questions? Had you ever been given any advice or guidance on it, what it is or how to use it? Yeah, I thought that was interesting.
Tim:Well, it was interesting. I mean, you know, one of the things is, you know, it's sort of slightly inherent in the question you just asked is do people know what they've got and how it's supposed to work? So that was sort of the question Do you know how it's supposed to work? You know when should it be opened or closed, or turned on or off? So it was asking yeah, that was quite interesting the responses to that question have you ever had advice?
Simon:Yeah, and it's one of the kind of tropes within our industry that people have a good understanding, I think, these days that indoor air quality can affect your health, because there's been a lot of information about ambient air quality for quite some time but people haven't quite drawn the dots the line between the dots between ventilation provision in their own home and air quality outcomes. And I think behavior and use is an interesting part of the jigsaw puzzle, both in the. Do you even? Have you ever even thought about the ventilation in your home? Do you? Because there's a, there's a. This is the first time you've thought about ventilation in your home for 10 years. Is it something even is in your subconscious? Is it something anybody's ever presented to you Like? Have you ever been given a leaflet or a document on how to use it? Those kind of things are interesting questions to ask, because people and their use of ventilation is a critical piece in outcomes isn't it?
Tim:I mean absolutely. I mean OK. So so a few things sort of in the background of that. So so one of the one of the things is in in lots of previous studies when we've asked people about what they think about their indoor air quality, they generally think say it's fine, there's nothing wrong with it. When we measure it, it says something different, says actually it's not very good.
Tim:And part of the problem is here that we are, we are as humans. We are adapted to perceive comfort, thermal comfort. We know if it's too hot, we know if it's too cold, because we know we will die if they go. You know, or you know there'll be a health effect if it's too hot or certainly too cold. So we perceive that and we adapt accordingly.
Tim:So for most people the drivers, about opening windows are because it's too hot and the reason that they will close windows because they're worried about heat loss and being cold and drafty. It's those sorts of things we haven't. We don't have the same response to indoor quality, because a lot of that is completely imperceptible. Um, you know, it's stuff which you can't smell, you can't see it. Uh, you know, things have to sort of get quite quite bad before you sort of start to react to it, and everybody's had this experience. You know you're in a room full of people and it's fine. You go out, you know, to get a cup of coffee. You come back and it's like, oh, it's hell, it's really stuffy in there, it feels different. So that adaption is is a big bit of that as well. That's an interesting point. And it's really stuffy in there, it feels different. So that adaption is a big bit of that as well.
Simon:That's an interesting point and it's something that I was only talking about in the last couple of days. Is the interesting thing about thermal comfort and adaptive comfort is it's something that we tend to react to in the moment. We're tuned into adapting our comfort on an ongoing basis. I'm getting a bit warm, I'm getting a bit cold. It feels a bit drafted. I'm going to do. You tend to act on those cues.
Simon:Yeah, air quality is one of these things that clearly is perceptible because we have standards based on it. You know the, the likelihood of discomfort. Most of the standards that we use today are based on the 80 percent rule of time's gone by and it it's remarkably accurate from a from an air quality perspective when we re-look at it, but only from coming from a place of good air quality into a place of poor air quality. So we're we're actually very good instinctively of coming into a space that's poorly ventilated and going, oh this is stuffy in here or this is this is uncomfortable, but we're dreadful at being in an environment and having that adaptive reaction that you see with thermal comfort, we don't seem to perceive a deterioration in air quality around us in the same way that we perceive a deterioration in thermal comfort yeah and yet we can detect it if we come from a space that's well ventilated, into a space that isn't yeah, I mean.
Tim:Yeah, yes, I I mean that's because that's the point I was making. I suppose there are. However, even within that there are bits to do with. The primary driver is probably thermal perception. So when and and this crops up when we ask people about air quality because we use we use phrases like fresh, is the air fresh or is it stuffy, and a lot of people will interpret that as a as a thermal thing. So fresh is cool air, stuffy is warm air.
Tim:These things are related in interesting ways, you know, and people, you know, you know a lot of the responses in the survey are people will do things where something you know if you burn the toast, you know, you know, frying the bacon, stuff like that, you know a particular event will cause people to ventilate. Um, there was an interesting thing in in some of the previous studies is that I think some people sort of are aware of of air quality. There was, there's been, an interesting sort of 20 percent of people will always always want to sleep with their bedroom window open. They always have and always will, because they think it's better for them. They're probably right, but you know, they are, they have, they have this mindset which is they're prepared to sort of tolerate the thermal hit, it being slightly cooler in the bedroom in order to have fresh air. So there are some perceptions around this, but I think because we spend so much time now in controlled environments, our ability to react has been diminished in some kind of way.
Simon:I think you're right and I think that's it. We're adapting to a change in how our built environment is managed. Our expectations is that thermostatic control is going to control our buildings perfectly, and when it doesn't, we tend to react quite viscerally to that. You know how many of us that travel spent the first 10 minutes in every hotel room trying to get the flipping temperature just right for us. You know like we're kind of driven to get that comfort value right, um, and a lot of it is wrapped up in habits and culture and behavior, that that, how you sleep, whether you air your house or not, how you ventilate during cooking a lot of that is buried in very complex culture or habits or history of individuals, as much it is as it is reaction to a particular environment. Because we know sleeping in a bedroom that's several degrees cooler than our body or bedroom temperature is, um, is good for sleep. Like we said, you know it's clearly good for us to sleep in a bedroom slightly cooler well, when you say we know yeah do we know?
Tim:I mean we, I know that there are studies that indicate that.
Tim:I suppose, so whether people in a whole know that, because I think a lot of people are now so, so, so attuned to the concept of of warmth, of thermal comfort, that the concept of going to a bedroom being cooler, so you know, would suggest there's something wrong with the bedroom, that the heating's not working, or do you know what I mean?
Tim:It's like, you know, and I think, people's patterns of behavior, of what people will wear around the home, you know, all of these kind of things are are. Now we need to be careful here, because this ends up being a conversation about behavior, which which clearly is a big pit of it, but that's. I don't think we should be blaming people for that right in terms of ventilation, because, again, going back to the survey, the, the question which arises is is the house properly equipped? Does it have all the stuff in it which it needs to be, you know, to work effectively and efficiently and to give people kind of good health? Um, so, you know, just relying on people's perception isn't, isn't enough, then it has to be other other supportive mechanisms.
Simon:Now, yeah, and I think that I say well understood in the built environment, but it's well understood in the sense that we have standards and regulation to provide adequate ventilation, adequate background ventilation for the general health of the building and the occupants. That doesn't require user interaction all of the time. Otherwise we wouldn't have purpose-provided ventilation, we just have openable windows and people would just have to manage it themselves in the moment. So like there's a recognition within standards and guidance and practice that we need to provide ventilation for people to stop the build-up of pollutants and remove pollutants before they spread around the building. That's the intent of the regulations. It's just manifestly, whenever we look at this in any studies, we find quite a big gap between what we think we're getting and what we actually get, and that's a common conversation we have.
Simon:Is that as important as habits and behavior are, construction also needs to play its part. It's very difficult for us to talk to people about habits and behavior and culture. I mean the housing ombudsman it's not a lifestyle approach is. A good example of that is the. You know you shouldn't dry clothes indoors. You shouldn't take showers for too long, you shouldn't. You know people got to live in homes like it's not. If we want to engage meaningfully with people about having agency in their own outcomes, we've also got to play our part as well, haven't we?
Tim:well, it goes back to the point about earlier. Think about, about when we are trying to innovate more. So again, think of any other sphere of, of design or manufacture for for an artifact which is going to be used by someone, that doesn't take into account usability. You know, imagine your phone, which you know you couldn't use it. Well, it works perfectly well, but you don't understand how to use. You know it doesn't make any sense, but we do that for buildings. There's, no, there is very little concept given to usability, which is again which is why we asked the question about have you have advice? Have you? Is it usable? Do you understand it? You know those kinds of things because something has to, has to work, but people, you know it has to be. You know people need to be able to understand how it works easily. You know, without reading a 17 page manual, if you notice me.
Simon:I had Dan Hyde on the podcast about nine months ago and he's from the UX, ui world, so the user experience, user interface world and his take on this sector is really interesting. That in the production of everything, user experience I mean their company is called User Experience is Everything, or Everything is User Experience, because without you you can't innovate and iterate unless you understand the usability of those products. And that's where we fail time and time again in construction products and that that's where we fail time and time again in construction. And I've seen this in your studies year after year after year. The notable comments you get back from users of spaces, completely misunderstanding what they have. Yeah, well, you know my favorite ones is the control switch, for my fan is very difficult to reach because people think the isolator switch is the on and off for the fan that's a user experience problem.
Tim:Well, I mean I mean there are lots of examples of that, but when we did the study on on argument interaction with trickle vents for example, you know a lot of those trickle vents are just completely out of reach. You know you need to stand on a chair in front of a window just to get to the damn thing and it's behind the curtains and blinds and stuff like that. So any sense of that being a usable device is yeah. Forgive the pun out the window.
Tim:It's you know there is how has someone thought about that? You know, if you again, if you gave that to someone else to design and said well, you're putting this device in and people need to change it, well, how are they going to change it? Can they reach it? Do they understand what the implications are? I think it's really interesting.
Simon:What was interesting about the study was that some of the stuff is a bit sky is blue, water is red when it comes to outcomes here, that there's a gen generally a low level of knowledge and understanding of ventilations out in the sector.
Simon:Um, and and often people haven't been given information about the systems that they've got or the ventilation that they've got. What do you think is a path forward from here, from that side of things like where does that come from? Does that have to come from? I mean, I've got a bunch of o&m manuals that came with various white goods over the years in my house in a plastic bag on the top of one of my work units that I didn't look at when I got the unit and I haven't looked at since. In fact there's there's probably o and m manuals from the washing machine that I've replaced three times over since I moved into my place. Um. So how we provide information to people has to work as well, like how do we improve the general knowledge out there of these systems or the import of them to people? Do?
Tim:you think?
Simon:What's that look like?
Tim:Well, I can sort of tell you exactly what it looks like. So we did a bit of work for Building Standards some time ago and it was about how people are given information about how to use their home, and what that resulted in is this idea of a quick start guide. So it's this thing, you the thing you've just referred to. So when you buy that white good, everything you're going to learn about that white goods you'll learn in the first 10 minutes of opening the box. Right, you won't remember. The next time you'll go back to the manual is to find the phone number of the call center to get it fixed or the fault code, or, in fact, you don't even do that anymore because you Google it.
Simon:You go I've got a Samsung, blah-de-blah, we'll take a picture of it. I've got an F12 coming up on the screen. What?
Tim:does that mean, so we're?
Simon:not even accessing those documents for the troubleshooting anymore.
Tim:So the idea of the quick start guide it was a very simple, it's an A5 format. You know, you see that actually now In a lot of stuff you'll get the quick start guide and it's five steps. You know seven key things you need to know about your watch or your phone or whatever the hell it is, and so that was that's part of building standards. I mean, what's interesting is that that, I think, is useful in terms of that initial point. But interestingly, I was in a house recently which had a problem of overheating and the person in it was possibly the second or third occupant. I said you haven't been given a quick start guide. He said no, I haven't seen it. So that's not being handed down from person to person. So that wasn't coming with and it was a rented person, so that wasn't coming with the new tenant the quick start guide. So that information is probably lost somewhere.
Simon:So just back up a tiny bit that quick start guide that you did work with building standards Scottish building standards, I take it a while ago Did that get enacted? Yes so it is part of the stat that there is a quick start guide. That's part of the handover pack for any new home or any home that comes under the regulations.
Tim:Yes, okay and what?
Simon:what format did that? Did that? Was that an a5 for each system within the building? Or is it just a one pager that says this is how your house works.
Tim:It was, it was an a5, so it was a. It was, you know, maybe four or five pages or something a5. You know images. The key thing is is that it had to be specific to that house. Um, because, again, you've probably seen those manuals and and have you got the 27b model or the 37f model, you know, and so you know. So that was the idea. It had to have pictures of the actual device in the home. This is your fan switch, you know, this is your thermostat, and here is a picture of it and this is how you turn it on. That's the idea behind it. You know, it is an instruction for that house in that place with that set of kit. That's the idea about it and I think it's interesting in the sense that why did it need regulation to require that? Why would somebody who's designing something not want to provide that anyway? In terms of if design's doing for for you, this is the best way to use it.
Simon:Who has ownership over that? Is that the developer or the? The? The builder has to provide that, or is that something that's because it's? If it's, how specific I guess it has to be, it's not something building standards aren't going to have a library of no, it would be no, it would be the whoever produces the home.
Tim:So it would be the build, builder, developer, possibly the housing association.
Simon:Yeah yeah, I mean it would be interesting would be to understand, uh, historically, how you access those quick start guides if, like you say, if you're renting a home or you're it's an airbnb or it's. I was only actually just talking about this on about my holiday in spain there recently. Um, we were in a flat, a modern flat, in the south of spain, and, being the building nerd that I am, I I was constantly fretting about open windows while air conditioning was on and how to balance this versus that, and you know, I didn't know how to work that home yeah, it was an air conditioning device.
Simon:There were windows, there was a balance to be had at certain temperatures about what to do when, but there was nothing I could access.
Simon:That said, this is the best way, if this is how to get the most out of the space you're in quickly yeah and you repeat that tens of thousands of times across the south of spain in holiday season and you're getting massively poor uses of those spaces from an air quality outcome perspective and an air conditioning in any use, because infrequent visitors to those buildings don't know how to operate those, build, those individual buildings. The same can be applied for the built environment everywhere that people are in buildings not understanding intuitively quickly. Yeah, uh, how to get the best out of that? Like back to that spend the first 10 minutes in every hotel room. I mean trying to figure out well does the window open?
Simon:what is it? Fresh air? Is it an air? You know how do I, how do I get the place comfortable for me and make sure I don't suffocate?
Tim:yeah, yeah well, yeah, I mean, you know favorite hotel games like how's the air conditioning work? Where is the hair dryer? Yeah, yeah, check the filters on the how does the?
Simon:coffee machine work yeah all these good things, yeah, I just go back to your point.
Tim:I mean I'll count that slightly because I think in a lot of there is a thing about a lot of rental homes. Actually you're over at home and there's a folder on the table and there actually is some information about this is how the heating system. But press that button. Don't press that button because it'll go off. So actually you see people going into, you know, an airbnb or a rental home. Possibly get some better information than someone who's renting a home yeah, maybe sure, who hasn't?
Simon:got that information um yeah, that's a very good point.
Tim:So I think, you know, I think, you do get that in in place to place? Yeah, you don't get in the hotel, it is the. You just press input buttons at random.
Simon:But yeah, and you know that that's a good point in case that your people, you know how often we've gone into apartments and you you say to somebody oh see, you've got an mvhr system in your house. And they go I've got a, what now? Yes and I said well, you see these in the ceilings, that's that's giving you air. And they go, that's it. I thought that was something, the smoke alarm, or something you know and and then and you go. So where is it?
Simon:and they go I don't know there's a cupboard there with something in it that I've seen once, but the clothes are all in front of it now. And you know like those conversations happen far too frequently with people where you go oh, you've got one of those systems and they go, do I?
Tim:Yes, no, I mean again, that's very common. Interestingly, the other side of that is who else needs to know that information? So the other people who need to know that information are the people who are responsible for maintaining that home. And so when someone phones up and says something's gone wrong with my NVHR, the person at the end of the road says what's an NVHR system?
Tim:You know, like you know. Do you know what I mean? Or you know? I think that's an interesting sort of problem, which is that you know, people who are responsible for keeping homes maintained this is particularly sort of mental homes in this particular case also need to have a very good idea of what's in that home, how it's supposed to work, what its maintenance schedule is, what to do when it goes wrong what its maintenance schedule is, what to do when it goes wrong.
Simon:I'm terrible for using the car analogies, but I find it so analogous in so many different circumstances. But you think of how everything works around vehicles. You go into your local MotoFactors because you've got to replace a light bulb or a windscreen wiper or the fog light or anything. All you do is you give the reg number to the guy behind the counter. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Oh, you got that model. You need exactly that version of that thing.
Simon:There's the thing you need, right so it that that product could be made by any number of people and there could be any number of universal products at some stage for that car, but one reference number, and that person has access at his fingertips or her fingertips to everything you need to know about the right thing for that particular car. You go into a garage. First thing the guy or girl does is plug the car in and will tell you knows exactly how it's performing, what's needed, whether it needs servicing yet or not, and so on. Yet the biggest asset we have in our entire lives, or the biggest assets we own as organisations, we're nowhere near that like, not even a million miles from that in a lot of cases it's staggering really.
Tim:No, I mean, what we are effectively doing is selling cars without speedometers. Yeah, it's that level of lack of knowledge.
Simon:Yeah, we don't even have anything to plug in. Ian Maudit always says, you know, he dreams of a world where he turns up to houses and there's a USB plug. It would be wireless these days. But he was thinking of this 10 years ago. But he was thinking it wouldn't be lovely to be able to walk up to a house with the laptop, plug your laptop in outside and all the information come up about whether the boiler was working properly, whether the ventilation was doing it. You know, like, but how we're not even there. Yeah, it's staggering. But like, say, we don't even have an oil warning light equivalent.
Tim:Yeah, I mean, that's sort of where we are with it. We're expecting houses to perform in a certain way, but we don't even have the mechanism to. Well, we do, but we are not rolling those out on a sufficient enough scale. I mean, it is much easier to do all that stuff now. It's certainly technically possible, you know, and there are inroads happening about that in terms of better performance, monitoring and so on, but it's not something we do as a matter of course yet in buildings.
Simon:So back to the study, like generally, what were the outcomes from the study? What were you finding from a perspective of the deployment of ventilation generally across the stock?
Tim:So the overall picture is that there was. Was it surprising? There was a surprising lack of ventilation provision. I think most people, a lot of people, are aware that it's extract fans in kitchens and bathrooms. I mean, they've been part of building standards for nearly 40 years now and people are aware of that as a thing. Right, the idea of trickle vents some people are not familiar with them but they are a reasonably familiar common thing. So, you know, I think the kind of big picture is a surprising number of houses didn't have that provision.
Tim:Um, I don't have the figures in front of me so I don't know if you need them or not, but, um, you know. But but a large number, you know, didn't have extract fans in in bathrooms. Uh, you know, a number didn't have extract fans in bathrooms. A majority didn't have them in kitchens Actually, it's not the other round, it was the majority didn't have them in bathrooms. And then quite a large number of homes didn't have trickle fans as well.
Tim:And if you combine those things, something like two number of homes didn't have trickle fence as well. And if you combine those things, you know something like two-thirds of homes didn't really have what's seen in building regulators to be basic provision some means of getting rid of warm, moist, stale air from kitchens and bathrooms and some means of resupplying that air without necessarily opening windows, because you can't rely on windows for opening, because there are lots of reasons that people can't and don't open windows in terms of noise, security, whatever, um, and then if you combine that with the number of people who have had advice, that's a. You know something like only 11 percent of people have got the right provision and have had advice on on the best way to use it yeah.
Simon:So, even even though this is a tiny fraction of the built environment and, as you said at the very beginning, we don't we don't know a lot about what we've actually got the sense from this is if this was generally representative and expanded out across the built environment so that general consensus is you're more likely than not to not have ventilation that meets current building standards yeah, that's, that's basically.
Tim:That's basically it now. Now, of course, you know what people say and it cropped up in the reviews, rightly so is well, buildings built before that was a requirement, you know, wouldn't have it right. Um, which takes us on to a slightly different thing, which is to do with if you have a new standard for buildings. Um, that only applies to new buildings. So the case in point in the study is that a lot of post-war stock by the 70s, 80s, thermally very poor changes in heating, electric heating, fuel crisis couldn't afford to heat it. Lots of problems of damp and mould, and one of the things is that the the requirement to introduce ventilation was driven in part by that problem. And so that's how extract fans in kitchens, bathrooms and trick events sort of became part of regulations.
Simon:So the big irony is that that's fine for new buildings, but all those houses which still had that problem, it wasn't required to be retrofitted and there's not, and there's nearly not, one of those older buildings that hasn't had some form of renovation or remediation over the years that will have impacted the original performance of that building. Yeah, so, while it may not, I mean there's this thing within regulations that a colleague and friend of mine in ireland is always very keen to point out in building standards that the you can't impose any regulation on somebody that may have met a previous regulation. You know if you're building met a regulation from 1991 and was built in 1994, I can't impose 2021 ventilation regulations on you unless your building has changed so dramatically it has to comply. So it's a difficult.
Simon:We can't impose new regulations on old buildings, but the reality is for the built environment, the way buildings were used and worked and performed in the previous century, in the 20s and the 50s and the 40s and the 60s, is very different to now and almost almost all buildings, at the very least, probably need a fan in a bar, in a wet room or a kitchen and nearly all buildings probably need some form of purpose provided background ventilation. Because if you don't, you're probably at one of the scales where you're looking at major renovation anyway, like you, unless you're in a heritage building or an old building. Very few buildings won't need some kind of purpose, provided ventilation or mechanical extracts in wet rooms to function properly.
Tim:I would be surprised yeah, I mean those things. You know they may. It depends on the building in the context. They may not be absolutely necessary for some building types. You know the the load may be. The moisture load may be very small or intermittent or it's a big volume, you know. You know a. You know a high ceiling space probably got less of an issue than something which is a very small volume and hard surfaces.
Tim:But there will be lots of things which will have changed buildings over time and that pace of change is changing. So there'll be. You know, most people at some point will have had kitchens and bathrooms redone and it would seem reasonable to sort of say at that point well, let's put something in there, let's put an extract fan and stuff like that. The vast majority of of buildings will have had the windows replaced at some point. Now, interestingly, when people are replacing windows, they may or may not come with trickle vents. But no one is designing that as part of a ventilation system. They're just saying here are some windows, do you want a trickle vent or not? That's the only question. They're not asking how big the room they're going into or anything, anything like that. Um, you know there are.
Tim:And then the other thing is a lot of of measures in buildings are designed, quite rightly, to improve their thermal performance. So insulation, draft stripping, uh, you know other things will will change the the performance of the building, um you know, and they will change its air tightness. I don't think a lack of air tightness necessary is good ventilation, although it is assumed it is. It's assumed that there is a background level and maybe you don't need trigger vent if your building is very leaky. Where that leakiness is is completely unpredictable and it's probably in the wrong place and it's where you've got service penetrations and so on. So the fact that you've got a leaky building doesn't mean it's a well-ventilated building. It just means it's a leaky building.
Simon:Yeah, and likewise the other way around. Because you've got a fairly airtight building doesn't mean certain places aren't leakier than others. I mean, there's a there's a truism to air leakage.
Tim:That doesn't always equate to good outcomes yeah, and, of course, and the issue being that, again, quite rightly, because we are, you know, trying to make buildings perform better and you know, the reality is that the major problem is our existing buildings, that's the vast majority of our stock. It's all pretty poorly performing, so that's where the attention is going to be needed in terms of decarbonisation. So stuff we are having to do to those buildings is, yeah, sure it has a really important agenda about trying to save energy, but we need to make sure that we don't the baby out with the bathwater in terms of then causing harmful effects in terms of poor ventilation.
Simon:Although we may complain about the quality of new construction and there's good reasons to do that, particularly at the high production end of the scale, theoretically at least, they're relatively well thermally performing buildings, which means the FRSI values are generally pretty good. The coal bridging should be dealt with relatively well. The risk of things like condensation should be lower in some of those new constructions because theoretically we're starting from a more modern perspective. But in retrofit theoretically it's harder to deal with some of those challenges. So ventilation has an important part to play in mitig with some of those challenges. So ventilation has an important part to play in mitigating some of those risks like how do you see that playing out that kind of theoretically?
Simon:That's where the challenge is retrofit, that there's more risks there. A new build we should be able to get it right off plan almost. You know, as a good friend of mine says, joseph little, that you shouldn't need ventilation to control condensation risk. In a modern building all of the surface temperatures should be above dew point all of the time. There is no reason to have any ventilation in a modern building for the purpose of controlling condensation risk. And he's right theoretically every every surface temperature in a modern building if it's compliant with frsi values should be above dew point.
Tim:Okay so I'm stacking up a whole bunch. I bet you are. Yeah, okay, first one in that the thing you just said. There there were quite a lot of shoulds and maybes. Yeah, right yeah they should they?
Tim:They might be. We don't know if they are. So you're saying buildings should be better performing, they should not have cold bridging. We don't know if they are because we're not evaluating. That's the first thing to say. Second thing, which we may come back to so when we did the survey, we were also asking buildings built after the regulations have been applied and find a substantial proportion didn't appear to have that ventilation provision. So that's a missing bit of the jigsaw as well. I'll come back to that.
Tim:But the point you're making about existing buildings yes, so they have more difficult problems to solve. So if you are doing stuff to a new building, it's more difficult to do. You've got to work around existing fabric. It's more complicated. So yeah, there are those challenges as well in terms of trying to improve the thermal performance, but also trying to avoid those unintended consequences which often exist. And I think that's one of the difficulties about retrofit is that you can't deal with it in a piecemeal way. You are bolting something onto an existing system, so you have to take a systems approach to that. You can't just put there's no silver bullet, there's no one magic device which will fix things.
Tim:The thing which, again, I keep coming across is this interaction with heating and ventilation is incredibly important. So one of the things I see a lot in existing buildings is you go and then someone's put a heating system at some point. They've redone the heating system to take out the coal fires, they put gas central heating in. The radiators are probably placed where it's most convenient for the plumber to put them and most cheapest, so they are on internal walls, so the runs are short, which means that the window, which has got a space for the radiator that's why that little alcove is there that's for the radiator to go it's cold. So you've got cold air coming through the trickle vent or next to the window, that cold air. You've got cold air coming through the trickle vent or next the window. That cold air is dropping and it's coming across the floor. So people say my windows are drafty, it's really cold and my feet are colder than they are on the other side. You've got that radiator.
Tim:So people yeah, everybody tries clothes on radiators. They put that some washing on them. That warm washed air gathers a lot of moisture, it goes across the ceiling, hits that window, cools and condenses and drops down, you know. So it's that idea about? Where do you, where do you put heating in and how do you, how do you get it to interact with the ventilation? Everybody's doing their own little bit of thing without understanding the plumber has. No, no offense to plumbers, but you know, I know lots of them and my brother-in-law's plumbers, but they are not ventilation designers. They're not having an impact there.
Simon:I think that's one of the things the likes of Passive House would argue that one of the advantages of that is it is a systems approach to building and that's why you get consistently better. You know Kel's surprise If you think about a building as a system, you get consistently better. You know kel's surprise if you think about a building as a system, you're more likely to get a good systemic result out the other side of it. One of the points I wanted to pick up on the the trickle vent side of things was that there is this perception and there's a bit of truth to it that often the provision of trickle ventilators were there to help avoid condensation on the windows, that originally the placement of radiators below a window was because they performed very badly thermally. They that's often where the cold air came in before there was a trickle vent there. So, having a radiator, there was a way of creating that thermal screen and creating, you know, stopping the condensation mold in that danger spot it also.
Tim:It also means that when you have got ventilation, air which is coming in, which will be cold, yeah, it mixes, yeah, so it tempers that air, that's that's a good thing, it's and when we, when we improve the the performance of windows.
Simon:I think a lot of the provision of trickle vents were there to supplement some of those condensation issues and bring air in the same spot. You know, because that's where air was generally coming in and trickle vents were. Trickle vents historically have not been part of a systems approach to buildings. Like you say, windows either came with them or they didn't. You know, one of the biggest failures for continuous extract systems when we look at non-compliance is the provision of trickle vents in rooms that shouldn't. Provision of trickle vents in rooms that shouldn't have a trickle vent? Yes, because nobody the window manufacturer doesn't sit down and go. How do I coordinate my trickle vent provision with the ventilation provision? That it's easier for them, because it doesn't cost them anything to have a hole in a window, to provide a trickle vent on every window. You know. So we've seen a lot of the failures with mev being short circuiting with the provision of trickle vents.
Simon:Um, one of the interesting points I wanted to raise with you was that this study, because it was a questionnaire, couldn't really answer the performance of the existing, of any existing ventilation. Now we have some idea about that from other studies. But there's another layer to whether or not there's a good outcome here. Already it's quite staggering how many houses are missing important elements of ventilation. But even if they have those elements of ventilation our experience teaches us there's a good chance they're probably not performing where they need to either. So there's a layer of shittiness here that extends below whether you were provided with ventilation or not.
Simon:What I guess you weren't checking was was there enough free area of the trickle vents to meet the regulation? You maybe counted trickle vents, but you could make some guess as to whether there was enough there, unless you could clearly determine the difference between continuous ventilation and intermittent ventilation and be able to work out whether there was enough background for the two is another question, and almost certainly you weren't able to check whether the fans were doing what. If they did have a fan, whether it was getting anywhere near no so this was so.
Simon:There's a whole, nother layer below this. Isn't there a performance?
Tim:well, exactly so. So the survey is just asking, I mean, yeah, so the the the survey is asking about ventilation provision. It's asking about ventilation, right. So we're not. We are not saying these houses are badly ventilated, we're just saying they haven't got the kit in the kitchen. And so one of the eye-opening was a pretty large proportion of the homes built after regulations were introduced, people were reporting that they didn't have all the stuff which they should have had. So you know they didn't have some extracts or trickle vents or whatever.
Tim:Some extracts or or trick events, whatever, and that you know there are. You know there are. There are credible reasons for that. Stuff has been taken out, it's broken, uh, windows have been changed, yada, yada. You know a lot of. One of the common things, for example, is um and we sort of asked the question about um extract fans in kitchens. What a lot of people think they have is an extract fan over the hob. What they've actually got is a recirculating fan, right, so it's a grease filter and stuff like that. It's not giving you any fresh air. It's not taking that waste air out of the building.
Simon:Yeah, there's those kind of questions. Did you look at things like air transfer, like undercuts and things like that? No, it was just the basic stuff.
Tim:It was that. So, to go back to your previous point, so then, okay, so let's just say, for the sake of example, some people may you know, there may be quite a few, don't knows, and and but in, in some of this we've done and other people have done, every time we have gone and actually tested those extract fans, we found a good proportion 60, 70, 80 percent are not performing as they should do.
Simon:And not by a little bit either, by a significant amount.
Tim:So although the kit may be there, whether it's doing what it's supposed to do is an entirely different question supposed to do is is a.
Simon:You know, an entirely different question and I think that that's that's something I've been talking about quite a a lot recently is is what we've not been very good at understanding in studies and also for data labeling use as well is uh I've been coining the term a level of shittiness score, but we tend to view buildings as either being compliant or not. It's quite a binary. You know 75 of the homes in the study did not have ventilation that met current regulations. But you know the the bays study or dlc I can't remember what it was that looked at natural ventilation in modern, airtight homes. 95 of the homes were non-compliant, but you only had to have one undercut missing under one of the doors to effectively be quote unquote non-compliant. Yet some homes at the other end of the spectrum may have had catastrophic failures of compliance.
Simon:And what we're not very good at is understanding that level of shittiness. Yet, because that's very important to understanding outcomes. Yes, when we're looking at big data sets, when we're looking at big studies, regulatory pieces of work, data from the built environment, from, like these, social housing sensors and so on, what we're not getting a very good perspective is is why we're seeing the outcomes we're seeing. Yes, we might be miss a fan, might not be working, but we don't understand the broader context and I think that's a really interesting piece of all of this. Is the, the nuance to this binary, compliant or not, or missing or not? How bad is it and how is that impacting outcomes?
Tim:well, yeah, no, I do know what you mean. I I mean one of the questions about things like compliance is when does it comply? So a lot of things may comply at a point in time which is normally around handover, but whether they continue to comply over time, and one of the really significant issues here is maintenance. So how do you keep things mechanically, how do you keep it running, how do you make sure it's looked after or all those sorts of things. I mean that's a really significant problem.
Tim:There is a different question, which is is this leading to a problem? Because there'll be huge variation in homes and one of the big differences will be things like what the occupancy load is on the home and how many people are there. What's going on in the home? I don't mean that as a behavioral thing, I just mean there's a lot of people living in a home. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of cooking and washing and breathing, so the moisture load of that home is different from one where it's one little old lady, even though the regulatory requirement is exactly the same. So there is something about what's the problem you're trying to solve in this home versus that home.
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Simon:Now back to the podcast I I use this point all of the time in the workshops that I do that I work with an estate just to the east of Dublin. It's about 300 homes on this estate and I know for a fact that every single one of those homes in that estate is non-compliant Because there's a systemic failure on that particular estate, both in the design and the implementation of ventilation. That means, without question, according to standards, every single one of those homes is a significant failure, right. Yet on that estate, about a third to a half of those properties, on the face of it, are absolutely fine, so are they compliant? Well, so there's a. There's a big difference between prima facie compliance and outcomes, and it depends what how you measure an outcome. So, while it depends what your evidence, for fine is as well absolutely, and one of the things
Simon:so when you say fine, what do you mean by that? Well, this is this is the point I was going to make. The context that I was originally engaged in this particular project was because of a damp and mold problem visible damp and mold. So about a quarter of those properties to a third of those properties on that estate have a significant problem with damp and mold and it's as a direct result of significant under ventilation, regardless of occupancy level, that whatever's going on in those properties, the building is not able to manage the build-up of vapor loading in those buildings. It's causing problems.
Simon:There are, of course, other contributing factors poor insulation, provision, insert and all of the usual stuff that goes with damper mold problems. But what was confusing the the owner of this particular project was the fact that, well, a half of them are fine. Does that mean it's the occupants fault? Is it something we're doing in some of them and not others? And you're saying, well, what's your benchmark for a good outcome? Because while the little old lady in one of the units may not have a damp and mold problem, she may be exposed to all sorts of other pollutants because of under ventilation that you're not using as a unit of measurement of success yeah yeah what is fine?
Simon:and I think what whatventilation does and I think it's an important thing for people to appreciate is it amplifies problems, whatever they are. So it's not, and mold or particulate matter, whatever it is, you're allowing that to build up and you amplify that potential as a problem. And that's the challenge and that's where it gets hard to measure, because at the moment, particularly in housing, and rightly so the focus is on damp and mould and our physical check for that is is there damp and mould, yes or no? And if there isn't and I can hear a fan making a noise the checkbox is ventilation is fine, no damp and mould. And that's not the answer to the question, I suppose.
Tim:Yeah. So I guess there's two bits to that, so one of which is yes, that that is, is there visible damp and mold, you know. So it has to have got to a certain point before you you get that happening. So the other point, you know, the point I was making is is there anything else which is which is potentially harmful here? Now, you know, what we can say is that we don't know, and we should know that. That's the point. I think that we're sort of making it in terms of we, we know, we sort of know that things are not working as they should be in terms of provision and so on. What we don't know is what the potential effect of that is.
Tim:Um, and these things are hard to demonstrate, um, you know. So, for example, there is plenty of really good literature, you know, making relationships between um, between, uh, poor ventilation and and ill health. But demonstrating causality is incredibly difficult in in this situation because you've got so many other kind of confounding factors. So, that issue of the damp and mold in those homes, yes, it's probably ventilation's got a lot to do with it, but there may be some thermal bridging and there may be some other moisture. There may have been a leak somewhere.
Simon:You know, although these are difficult things to sort of to tease out into single entities how do you think you balance that, that challenge of perfection being the enemy of the good, and the need to have and make good decisions, because that you know, that's. That's a similar argument we can make with sustainability, with energy efficiency, with all of these things. You know, I tend to sit on the side of the fence, as you'd probably expect that. We know enough to know this thing called. You know, poor air quality causes poor outcomes, regardless of the confounding factors. Generally speaking, at a population level, we understand that poor air quality is causing issues and, for listeners, tim's got his hand up and he's getting animated.
Simon:So there's a balance. And the other part of this equation is agency, and Douglas Booker makes this point very well is that one of the riskiest things we can do is cause alarm and not give people the agency to do something about it. Yes, yes, right. So from a public health and mental wellbeing perspective, there's no point scaring people and not giving people agency to be able, and there's any number of examples that we can create for people in poor housing and social housing, where there's no point telling if you can't give them the agency to fix the problem, you've got to come at it another way. So where do you sit with that, that balance between knowing enough to be able to drive a better outcome and waiting to have more information to be able to draw these lines between air quality outcomes and health outcomes?
Tim:Well. So there are different bits to this. So, firstly, there are some clear relationships between, you know, between some things some chemicals, damp mold, pollutants, stuff like that and health. We, you know they, they are demonstrable relationships. However, to go back to a point you made, the trouble is we don't have data at a population level of indoor air air quality. We've got, you know, odd, odd, you know some examples in various places, but we don't have that complete picture. So, you know, when you have, you know a, a, you know a uky map of outdoor air quality and you can map that onto population data sets, you you can say, right, all these kids living next to the M6 in Birmingham are having there are demonstrable health effects of people who live close to motorways, because you can map those two really big data sets and control for all your other variables On those maps. All the spaces in the maps are buildings and we don't know what's inside those buildings and that's the problem. Yeah, henry Burridge makes that point really well.
Simon:He says look out maps of buildings and we don't know what's inside those buildings and that's the problem. Yeah, henry burrage makes that, makes that point really well. He says look out that window there. When we talk about ambient air quality, mentally your head goes. I'm looking at the space out there and he says now look at that same space and think of the built environment, just the picture out of that window alone. We've got residential buildings, commercial buildings, warehouses, places of work, places of education. I'm looking at out this window. It was in london at the time, 10 000 homes, 20 000 homes in my horizon that I can see there. Every single one of those boxes has a different layout, different use pattern, different, you know, different behavior, just different pollution generation. That's the challenge of the built environment.
Tim:The question is and that's one of the challenges, because you have got such variability there, there are so many variables to control, for that it's very difficult to make make to. You know, to make that that link you need, you know it's only when we've had really big picture things. So asbestos, for example, or radon, are things where there is a really clear link and we can measure it in the building and if it's, if your building's got asbestos, it's got radon. You know there are obvious kind of links with other other things. It's harder and one of the challenges here is that there are so many things which might be part of that smorgasbord of what we refer to as indoor air quality which could be harmful, you know. So it's different chemicals or pollutants or bacteriological agents or what you know what the hell it is. So there are, you know, huge number of things which we have in buildings which, yeah, we, yeah, we can look at the WHO guidance for these things and say levels above X are terribly bad.
Simon:But we don't know if they are or not. But still, man, the other side of that argument for me, you could make the argument, or make the argument for me, that it's such a complex scenario, the built environment, that you'll never have enough information to demonstrably say one thing or the other. So at some point you've got to make a call. Right, tim Sharp is in government and he's got a budget and he's got to make a call on whether we do certain things. At some point you've got to make a call on whether we do certain things. At some point you've got to make a call okay right so still manning the other side of that?
Simon:um, we can't obfuscate forever. We can't let perfection be the enemy of the good. Do you do we think today that the built environment is causing harm to people's long-term health and well-being? And if so, what does what next look like in that circumstance? Right, or do I sit on this for another 50 years and wait for environmental sensors to be deployed into it? And what percentage of homes do I need to understand?
Tim:Well, you don't need to wait 50 years. This is happening already. There are plenty of examples, you know, and particularly for social housing, who are actually deploying low-cost sensors as a means, you know, fundamentally as a means of asset management, but also as a tool for occupants to get that feedback, that thing we talked about earlier. You don't you perceive thermal comfort, you don't really detect poor indoor air quality unless it's terribly bad. So a sensor in a home and it's one of the reasons that the work we've done for building standards introduced CO2 sensors in bedrooms, because people weren't particularly aware that those spaces were really badly ventilated. So you can give some people some clues. But on the other end of that wire is someone who can say well, I've got 10 000 homes here, 500 of them seem to have a real problem. So that's where I need to focus attention and resource.
Tim:Uh, you know if that, if we're trying to fix problems or trying to spot problems before they start, more and more important, because the thing about that sort of model is that, yeah, so what you could do is not do that and just wait until they become damp and mouldy and then try and fix the problem. And it's too late If you're seeing some homes which actually you go and look and they look fine, but they look to be badly ventilated. Moisture levels are consistently high. You can say look at some point. If we don't do something here, it's going to be a problem.
Simon:Don't do something here, it's going to get, it's going to be a problem. Yeah, I mean I I make the point quite regularly that this thing is a bell curve or not. Not bell curve, it's something else, but I use the principle of the bell curve. Is that for every our bishop level of damp and mold or catastrophic building failure that we see, there are a multitude of people that are just getting by, yes, that are washing stuff down, living in environments that are suboptimal you know, their life is terrible.
Simon:Yeah, you know, and I I recall this story of a mum called jen. People listen back, they'll probably hear on the podcast. But it's this idea that for every property that you go into where there's somebody that's clearly in a in a building that is straight line from out outcomes to poor health right, there's no question's clearly in a building that is straight line from outcomes to poor health right, there's no question, they're in an awful environment. You and I and anybody that's involved in housing, has been into a multitude of those. But for every one of those properties, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of people living in homes that are not quite that bad. Yes, they are Right.
Tim:Or not demonstrably bad yeah.
Simon:And the question it goes back to that question to you in a way is that we say that Everybody, I think, gets a sense that this is causing poor outcomes. We can't quite draw the lines. I get that, but you've got to make a call, like at some point you've got to say do we know enough to say we think poor ventilation is causing poor health outcomes? I don't need to know necessarily whether it's PMs or TV, whether it's limonene or isopronine or benzene that's causing it. I just need to know that poor ventilation in those homes is causing a poor outcome. I need to act in some way.
Simon:There's that hunger for knowledge, but the goal here, ultimately, is better outcomes for people. So what does that? What next? Because you've seen that in your study, your broad national survey, the consensus is most homes don't have ventilation. More homes than not, I would say, would have ventilation. That means then, don't meet minimum standards, and the point that I always say is that this isn't don't meet gold standards or lofty height. This is minimum benchmark stuff, like manifestly we seem to have a problem with ventilation.
Simon:We think there are poor health outcomes as a result of it. Do we know enough to make a decision is probably the question, like if somebody's in an elevator with you, tim and going does, does it? Does indoor air quality in the home cause poor health outcomes?
Tim:So you've used the word cause, yeah. So again, that demonstration of causality is difficult in an individual situation. There are certain things. So we've known. You know there were studies done 30 years, 40 years ago about the health effects of damp and mold and they were, you know, cohort controlled studies, you know, as a result of which, you know, stuff started to happen about improving housing conditions to address that particular problem.
Tim:You raise an interesting issue here, which is what's the mitigating factor? So there is a thing about source control versus versus ventilation or not versus as, as well as so is there some stuff which is occurring in homes which really shouldn't be there? Uh, you know, because people may not be aware of it, certainly wouldn't be aware of the impacts. Again, you know, because people may not be aware of it, certainly wouldn't be aware of the impacts. Again, you know, when things we do with people say we're doing a thing at the project at the moment which is sort of saying to people, you know, have you looked at the labels on in the back of your kitchen cabinet to see what it says? And you know what they'll say is using a well-ventilated room, have you got a well-ventilated room? You know, it's those sorts of things. What is a well-ventilated room? I sit on the fence a little bit with this right.
Simon:I get the sense of that. That's why I'm kind of pushing you a little bit on it.
Tim:I did the same. So I'm in lots of homes which have very significant problems of damp and mould and because there is a clear evidential basis of those conditions and health outcomes, you could say that there is a cause and effect here. You know this. I can say that you know the effects on occupants' health of these conditions is well established. We need to do something about it. Where it's a little bit harder is where you've got things which don't yet have that clear evidence basis in situ.
Tim:So WHA will say stuff about particulate pollutants and so on, but in that house, with that level of particulates, what happened to that person? And part of that is because a lot of these things are chronic conditions. Uh, you know they. They don't. They affect over long periods of time. So it's very hard to make that that cause and effect. I suppose my the point I would make, uh is that it's better to be, it's better to be prophylactic, it's better to be to just make sure you've got the right provision. What harm does it do? Just to make sure that the minimum provision of ventilation is there? Yes, that may not be enough. That goes back to the conversation about demand control or particular loads. But there are other mitigations in terms of is there stuff we should be avoiding in homes because of the nature of homes these days?
Simon:Yeah, no, and I think you're right. And, at the end of the day, one of the best ways and it's one of my favourite subjects is risk is that we've got a very well-established hierarchy of control for managing risks. You know, and eliminating a pollution source from a building is by far and away the most efficient way of limiting your risk to that pollutant.
Simon:Yeah, right, clearly yeah so if we want to, if we feel that products of combustion are a significant pollution source in the built environment, electrifying the built environment is a good way of removing those pollution sources. Changing gas cookers over time for electric or induction hobs great way of removing a source of pollution from the kitchen. So that we've got very well established ways of dealing with risk and substitution of risk. Risk again, particularly with building materials, reducing formaldehyde formaldehyde over time and reducing voc particular vocs in certain materials over time, is a great way of doing that. The challenge is is that the next one is engineering controls, which is what the subject of this podcast really. Is that what happens if that pollution is going to exist?
Simon:because some pollution will always exist and I think the challenge to go back to your point with the with the health outcomes piece is that instinctively we tend to roll back to a case study um, so we the the challenge of pollution to causality at an individual level is always so difficult to track because of the confounding factors that might happen, and the best example I have of this is smoking. Like we know, smoking is a significant risk to your health. If I have lung cancer at the age of 70 because I've been smoking for 40 years, obviously one of the contributing factors to that lung cancer was probably smoking. But I can't say that my lung cancer could be because I've been working in worktop production for 20 years as well. So we can never say with with 100 certainty that certain pollution is going to cause a certain outcome, and that's the job of epidemiology, I guess.
Tim:well, that's the point yeah, I mean, you know this, this isn't the right statistic, but it's something like 70 percent of smokers don't get lung cancer. Yeah, right, so, yeah, yeah, but but when you look at it at a population level, you can, you can make those links, you can, you can firmly establish that that's a really bad thing to do, right, um, so again it's, it's how you provide that evidence basis for change. And this is a, you know, this is a challenge. This is a challenge in making the argument for change and doing stuff. And this is the conversation we had with building standards.
Tim:A bit of work we did found that quite a lot of buildings were badly ventilated, or, yeah, were poorly ventilated, and said perhaps you should change the standards. And they said, well, yes, but nobody died in that study. No one's dying in those studies because they're badly ventilated. It's hard to do that. If it was a different type of study, if we'd been doing some on handrails and the handrail had broken and someone had fallen off and died, then they could do some change. And this is one of the problems about the way that building standards and this isn't the chrism of building standards exactly, but it tends to react to to significant events- yeah, and for listeners outside of the uk, I'm going to say something now that's triggering for everybody in the uk.
Simon:You may not have context outside of it, but I'm going to say show me the bodies. You know that has particular resonance in the uk about standards and fire safety and to your point, it takes an event sometimes to shift the standard. I recently interviewed the head, the head of building standards in the uk and we've been having quite a philosophical conversation about the purpose of standards and regulations and the intent behind them. And and what's missed, I think, with standards is what they're for and the work that has to go in behind them to systems, think the consequences of often very small changes in those standards.
Simon:It's easy for you and I and I completely get where you're coming from with the not show me the bodies but show me the evidence piece that yes, it's look, it's easy to say poor air quality outcomes lead to poor health outcomes, but it's difficult to prove. It's easy for me to. It's easy for us to say here and say, look, we need sweeping changes to regulations or even minor ones to improve this, but even a minor change to national building standards could wipe out whole sectors of an industry. It's not our job to think that through. The regulators and government have to think that through. But there are consequences to changes, both positive and negative, no matter what you do, and I think we all have to appreciate that. It's easy for us to sit here and spout tropes about poor air quality and poor health outcomes, but at the other side of that are livelihoods, careers, directions of industry, costs to society. All of this stuff has to be costed out. Sometimes there's a balance in all of these things.
Tim:Yeah, I mean gosh okay, costed out. Sometimes there's a a balance in all of these things. Yeah, I mean gosh okay. So I'll just go down a little kind of rabbit hole here. So so it's about regulation.
Tim:Um, so one of the problem, one of the sort of problems about regulation, is that it's entirely well intended and well meaning and it's right that we have regulation. Right, that's the first thing to say. One of the issues, however, is that, um, the regulation becomes the standard, becomes both the minimum but also the maximum standard, and that's a. That's a really big problem. The other thing is that what the guidance to regulation does is become the standard as well. So for people designing buildings, as long as they have done what the guidance told them to do, their hands are clean, right, they've done what they were told to do, and in my view, that somewhat that slightly infantilizes design in a sense that it takes the decision making out of design. It just becomes a specification thing, and if you've ticked the box to say, the fan will do 30 liters per second at the design stage, problem solved. You know, no one is trying to think about the problem as a, as a, as a system, as an operation. So I think that's that's a challenge.
Tim:I think the other thing to say about, about regulations, it's a bit like so 70 mile an hour speed limit is the regulation, right. So the people who make the regulation don't necessarily stand with speed cameras, right, they just say it's better that we don't drive faster than 70. Um, there may be some people whose job it is to try and catch people doing that, and so you might equate that with building standards. People who have a point of handover will check that. The thing is the equivalent of not speeding, if you know what I mean.
Tim:But fundamentally, the person who owns the building is the person who is speeding, who's owning a building, running a building which doesn't comply with building standards. So it's sort of their problem. So the reason I'm saying that is because I think those people should be asking more questions I think we talked about last night. They should be asking more detailed questions of their designers, their contractors, about what it is they are producing for them. Is it going to work, how do I keep it working? Uh, you know, how do I make sure that people understand how to work it?
Simon:because I think that's a bit which is which is missing just ticking the box to say the fan is there and it's been installed isn't, isn't enough yeah, and we we must come on to that, because I think you've had some particular experience of that approach through your involvement in the deployment of co2 sensors, so noticing there was a problem, arguing the case, seeing the deployment under regulations of sensors in the residential sector, and having been able to go back and look at the successes and failures of that venture and the insight that we got for that.
Simon:So I want to come back to that. So don't let me forget, um, but we're going to keep talking for hours here and not get through our list of questions, which I knew was going to happen. Um, but it'd be great for people to get a sense of who you are and what you do here at Strathclyde, because you've been involved in air quality now for as long as I've known you and way before that. What brought you into this space, what's your background and how have you ended up as a professor doing what you do now here? I think it'd be really interesting for people to understand that, that trajectory, a little bit yeah, so so right.
Tim:So so I, I trained as an architect, did architecture courses, um, I, at the end of it I went and did a phd, which wasn't the normal thing you normally go into practice. But I then went back into practice after doing my phd. My phd was about participation design and at that point the stuff which was happening is there was lots of stuff about post-war housing failing in various ways and the big problem was, you know, after the fuel crisis, poorly performing homes, big problems of damp and mold. So the practice I worked for was called technical service to technical services agency. It was a it's almost like a little bit like an Big problems of damp and mould. So the practice I worked for was called Technical Services Agency. It's almost like a little bit like an architectural version of legal aid. So we were publicly funded or differently funded, so we would do free works for tenants, organisations to give them advice about what's going wrong here, what's a mitigation, how can you fix it. And there were big challenges because most of it was council housing. There was big pushback and again it was its behaviour, its lifestyle, all that kind of thing. They said, no, there's a technical problem, there's a big thermal bridge. There's no insulation, no ventilation and so on. So it's trying to explore what the technical challenges were about making buildings more energy efficient, warmer, all that kind of stuff. So one of the interesting things which happened at that point I mentioned it earlier is that there was some work done which started to look at the health impacts of those damp and mould houses and made very clear causal relationships between houses with damp and mould and outcomes, particularly in children. So one of the things that happened then is because people could make that link, they started taking their landlords to court and winning right, because it was an open showcase in a sense. Look, this house is damp and moldy, my kid's really ill, he's got asthma, copd, whatever, fine, you need to fix it. And when it started to cost people a lot of money, there became an incentive to try and find solutions. So that led actually to a lot of changes in building standards, improvements in thermal performance and all that kind of stuff. So that became a journey into trying to make buildings more energy efficient. So that was probably what the main thrust was a long time. But ventilation was always a key part of that, because the thing that we always knew is that part of efficiency is is ventilation is a big component of energy loss, so you had to get that right because there are these other effects. So that ventilation was always a big bit of that. So we I read I was at the school of art then and my colleague professor colin portis we ran a research unit which did stuff on.
Tim:It was called um, environmental architecture, which was deliberately a broad term to encompass things which were sort of eco or you know, before sustainability was a word, energy efficient, but also the health dimension was always really important in terms of one of those impacts. When was this the time threshold? So that unit? I can't remember. I mean it was maybe 25 years ago that unit was first initiated. So we did lots of projects for housing associations and various kind of people and it was about how do we make buildings more energy efficient and it was technical and a lot of it was solar. One of the things that we always did with those projects is that we always, because we were doing them as research projects, we always went and monitored them, so someone was doing some intervention. It's a solar space, sun space. One of the big projects we were first involved in practice was East Hall Solar Demonstration Project. It still exists to now. So if you look at it it's sort of equivalent to Passive House, but this was 1980, 1985, something like that.
Tim:So the monitoring of the building, of the end thing was always a really big thing, and so we were always looking at that. And one of the things which changed, I guess, in the when, was always a really big thing, and so we were always looking at that. And one of the things which changed I guess in the when was it 2012, 13, 14, something like that. What was then the Technology Strategy Board, now Innovate UK, ran a big program on building performance evaluation and they were looking at there was code for sustainable homes then and passive house and a lot of innovations in making buildings more energy efficient, um, so we got involved in quite a lot of the projects there and I was one of the evaluators in that program. So we were going and looking at innovative low energy building to see if they were doing the business, and a lot of that was about building performance and so it was looking at energy.
Tim:But when we were monitoring those buildings, we were also monitoring ventilation and it was a bit iron. We were seeing really poor ventilation across the piece, you know, consistently. And so that took us down the rabbit hole of right. Why is this happening? What are the problems? So that took us into this whole remit of ventilation and health. So established a network, my colleague, gronny McGill. We established a network. It's called Health Effects of Modern Airtight Constructions. I remember it. Yeah, it's a slightly contentious title because it should have really had a question mark at the end of it, but it was looking at that. So the important thing about that network is that it brought together other disciplines. So we're bringing in people from medical and clinical backgrounds.
Simon:That was the first time I met Kath Noakes.
Tim:Actually, exactly, she was part of that and there was people who ran asthma clinics, so it was trying to get this bigger picture of that. So we then started to spend more time looking at what are the health impacts, what are the issues of ventilation, why is it so poorly performing? What are the impacts on on energy efficiency? Because it's a, you know, we have this really difficult tension between having really efficient you know, energy efficient homes and liberal ventilation, and it's a difficult challenge. One of the questions I often have is what's worse? If you've got a building which is thermally very poor, it's going to be a difficult environment. It's going to have problems with damp and mold, so I'll make it better insulated. It's warmer, so it's going to be better from that perspective. But if it's poorly ventilated, does that undermine the health effect? I'm not sure. I think it's better to have a warmer building, frankly, to begin with, and then look at those things Anyway. So that's where that all kind of ended up.
Tim:And then, of course, one of the things that happened we ran quite a lot of projects which did that sort of stuff, so it did quite. So we did projects for building standards because we had flagged this issue of look, these new buildings are performing badly in lots of ways, um. So we did two or three projects around that. So one of them one of them, um resulted in the Quick Start Guide. One of them was the one which was looking at occupant interactions with triple vents and pointed out the fact that people weren't particularly aware. Although we were measuring poor indoor air quality, poor ventilation, people were not particularly aware of it. So that led to that introduction of CO2 sensors in bedrooms as a way of giving people some insight into something which they weren't otherwise aware of. And then we did another one on DMEV systems, again not quite for the reasons you spoke about earlier short-cutting and flow paths and so on.
Tim:I got a phone call from Cath in sort of March 2020 saying look, I'm just setting up this group. It's just looking at environmental issues around sage. I'd worked with her on the HEMAC project and we'd done a thing on antimicrobials and bacteria in homes. Would you be willing to be part of it? That's fine. A month or so, two years later, we're still going to One of it. But that's fine, a month or so, two years later, we're still gonna.
Tim:But the so one of the key things about that it was looking at what the potential infection risk is in buildings of covid transmission. Again, what this was telling us is we don't have a clue what's going on in buildings. So we were looking at outbreak settings, you know, three weeks after there'd been a big outbreak, and had no clue about what the building was doing. Was it ventilated? What's the ventilator system? No one knows how it works, how many people were in.
Tim:So that was a, that was a. You know, that was a big sort of gap in knowledge, which really told us something important. And we're still pursuing that in terms of we really need to know what's going on in buildings, you know, for the next one, um, part of that is that we got involved with the protect project, so this was funded sort of through the health and safety executive and it was a whole series of things looking at risks around covid. But the bit that we were looking at is what was going on in some particular building food production sites, because they were continuing to run over covid. So what's the risk there?
Simon:and that was quite interesting so we saw some big outbreaks, particularly in refrigerated food production places.
Tim:So the issue was being that everybody's still having to do food production. So what's the risk? Yeah, what's interesting there is that, yes, the factory floor is fine, everybody's got the hats there, you know, it's well ventilated, it's stuff like that um and then, and then the whistle goes nobody goes for lunch, and it's a bit like that opening scene in the simpsons. You know, he's in the eucalypt plant and the bell goes and he takes his hat off. It's like everybody goes and sits in the canteen and chats to each other, uh, so it's those sorts of things which were interesting. But we did other places. We did stuff in uh, in prisons, uh, in care homes, in primary care spaces Again just monitoring the performance in terms of ventilation and frequently finding poor ventilation in these spaces.
Simon:And today, ventilation and air quality isn't your only gig, I mean broadly. If I was to ask you what, what your job is today, what, what are you both researching in general and what is your role here?
Tim:well, yeah so. So one of the so part of that story is that I'd work, I'd um, I'd worked at school of art in the department of architecture. There's where I'd set up MIRIN McIntosh Environmental Architecture Research Unit, so I'd ran it for a number of years. We had always. I was a graduate of Strathclyde, did my PhD here and we worked closely with lots of people here colleagues in Esru and other places so knew it very well.
Tim:In 2019, I got a call saying as a head of department gig going are you interested? And, long story short, I decided to come a bit like coming back. So the kind of sting in the tail is that I started as a head of department here in end of February, middle of February 2020, so three weeks later we're all online and so there's people I didn't meet for 18 months, but my role is head of architecture and part of that gig is really trying to get the department more engaged in research. We, you know this is a we're part of an engineering faculty. It's a research driven institution. I think architecture has some, some big roles to play in terms of it's where a lot of individual disciplines connect. You know, engineering, social science, humanities, behavioral science, all these things. They all work in buildings. You need a multidisciplinary approach to that. So, yeah, that's my day job is running the department and doing other research projects.
Simon:Perhaps a slightly contentious question to ask you is recently heard a talk from Sir Stephen Holgate at the Institute of air quality management conference and he said something that resonated with me was that if and there is an if, but if the evidence suggests that air quality has an impact, whether it's ambient or internal, it has an air has the potential to have an impact on every organ of the body.
Simon:It's a significant challenge for health and wellbeing in society that the medical community needs to step up at this stage, that it's not actively enough involved in the outcomes here, that it's taken too backseat a role, and I would agree with that. There's a multidisciplinary element to the built environment that we need to put in. Could you make the same argument of architecture and architectural practice, that it's taken too much of a backseat role in outcomes in the built environment, that it needs to step up in some way? Because, as you say, it's a central point at which a lot of the technical aspects of the built environment come through. It's a conduit for outcomes. Has it been missing in some way here If we're seeing such poor outcomes from a ventilation perspective, regardless of whether we can link it to health or not, but if, if, genuinely, 75 of our homes probably aren't ventilated well enough, it? Does architecture have a role to play here? That it's not today, do you think?
Tim:yes, no, it absolutely does. But the problem is a different problem, right? So a problem is is how a lot of procurement works for architectural practice, so most so. It used to be something like I can't remember the exact number, but something like 50 of architecture used to be people in in public architecture, in local authorities and councils, stuff like that. Pretty much all architecture now is private practice, commercial practice, so they have a significant commercial imperative.
Tim:One of the things I mean there have been quite a lot of changes in the way that architecture is sort of managed and organized and so on, and you might, as a generalization, characterize that as a lot of things becoming sort of parceled out as specializations. So architects used to do a lot of stuff, but now M&E engineers, structural engineers, project managers, the BIM specialist, the BREEAM specialist, all this kind of stuff. One of the challenges is that architects don't get paid very much. When I worked in practice, the RIBA had mandatory fee scales. If I was doing housing, there was a level of fee which I had to charge and I couldn't handle less for it, which meant I had sufficient resource to do the job properly when those fee scales were abandoned.
Tim:It becomes a competition now, so it sort of becomes a race to the bottom in terms of small fees, which means that people really don't have the time available to spend doing the detailed stuff, so they therefore inevitably tend to rely on others. So if someone's doing something about ventilation, they probably rely pretty heavily on the manufacturer to do some counts and stuff like that. So there is limited resource for people to spend the time. But the chicken and egg situation there is that people therefore haven't got those skills anymore. They're not doing that type of stuff.
Simon:Is part of that. A perception problem is that when we think about architecture, we think about large practices, famous practices, named architects. Um, so the view is that it's a cash rich industry, like for the general construction. But it is the reality of architecture that actually there's a workhorse side to the industry that you just don't see. That's that's a race to the bottom market that's squeezed to the limit, that is struggling to handle the liability and culpability. Well, yes, is that, is that the real politic?
Tim:that's the challenge that commercial practice faces. So several, several things about that. Firstly, there are some big multidisciplinary practices, but there aren't that many of them. The vast majority of architectural practices are very small. They're probably less than five people, small practices doing really interesting stuff, but at that level. So they don't have that range of capacity or skills to do stuff, particularly not on the fees that they can have. Um, the other bit and it goes back to the thing I just said about sort of not necessarily having the skills is that the way that pi works, professional indemnity insurance works is that you can't do something to which you are not trained to do. Uh, which means that you know people would be very reluctant to try and do any sort of calculation about ventilation systems, for example, because that's not their skill set. So if that's needed, they'll probably try and get an M&A engineer on the project if it's sufficiently driven by that, or they may rely on the manufacturer to do some calculation or something like that. So that's the big challenge.
Simon:I mean, you know, just they're trying to keep bread on the table yeah, and the view of architecture has typically been your black polo net wearing thick rim glassings, arty design person that draws nice shapes, that it isn't a particular tech, it isn't a particular apart from the skill of drawing, that it isn't a particularly technical endeavor. I mean, that's the kind of public view of it, or the trope of architecture is that kind of artistry. But these days it's such a technical endeavour that it's become specialist within itself, not just the outsourcing to engineering and surveying and some of the other parts of this, but actually within architecture itself. You've got people that specialize in sustainability and circularity and embodied carbon in energy efficiency and you know in well standards, in you know like it becomes an incredibly not I don't know siloed's the right word, but there's a lot of technicality within architecture itself. Isn't there? I mean there is. I mean you know if siloed is the right word, but there's a lot of technicality within architecture itself isn't there.
Tim:I mean there is. I mean, one of the things about architecture is that it is an extremely broad church. So we may be banging on about architects need to know much more about ventilation design, but someone in the other room is saying architects need to know much more about structural engineering, and someone else is saying they need to know much more about space, about planning and and placemaking, and do you know what I mean? So there are lots of things that architects need to know a lot about, and that's one of the one of the very rich things about architectural education. You get to see a really broad set of stuff and it means you are dealing with a breadth of knowledge rather than a specialization now a bit like general practice in medicine, like you, yeah are the smaller practices your gps?
Simon:they probably are.
Tim:Yes, I mean I've tried to make this analogy because we've talked about, you know, should we be developing specialized sections and there are some big changes in architecture, education which may, which may drive that, but it's whether they're. If you specialize, is there a market there for you? That's the, that's the triple you. You may say, well, I'm going to specialist in, in in health care facilities, now everything there is to know about that. But there aren't that many jobs, you know, and they are few and far between. So you've got to do stuff in.
Tim:In between that there are practices who care a lot about this stuff, about sustainability, about health, about, you know these elements, who, you know who, who will get into this in significant loads of detail. We've worked with a lot of practices commercially through things like ktps and stuff like that, and that's been interesting. So we did, you know, one of the one of the really interesting ones we did a project with john gilbert architects developing their capacity to understand building performance, which they've just used. Now that's part of their, their standard model, and they've been able to commercialize that.
Simon:I was going to raise them because they're literally spitting distance from here and you know they're a very good example of an architect practice that may not specialize specifically in certain elements but haveised generally in sustainability and heritage in a certain pocket within architecture.
Tim:When I was talking earlier about that stuff in the 70s and 80s. So there is a thread there. So one of the really early researchers here was Raymond Young, who he was the first person to look at retrofits of tenements in Glasgow because they were all being demolished and he said well, no, we could retrofit them. That led to the formation of an architect's practice called ASIST and they were sort of at the fourth, you know, one of the forefronts of the of the participatory movement, of which technical service agent was part of that, and then that morphs into the housing association movement, morphs into scottish homes, uh, you know. So you get this, this, this thread. So assist, uh, that one of the people used to work for cyst was john gilbert, who eventually left. Assist, former john gilbert architects. Matt bridgestock joined, chris morgan joined, so that that, that that golden thread continues. But it comes from those first movements in terms of here's some crappy housing which we need to find some technical solutions for in order to improve people's health and well-being.
Simon:Yeah, absolutely.
Simon:One thing I want to touch on as we finish up is and go back to this CO2 thing, because what I think is really interesting here is your insight in doing research that opens a question about people's understanding of the performance of a certain space, a critical space in the home, which is bedrooms and the use of ventilation.
Simon:The pitching of that idea or that problem to building standards or them understanding it. What seemed a fairly significant change in regulations at the forefront I mean, it's the first that I was aware of anywhere where there was a mandatory requirement put in place for CO2 sensors in new homes and, consequently, you being able to go back half a decade later effectively, because I think it was a 2015 amendment, wasn't it? Yes, so it was nearly half a decade later, so plenty of time for that to have been enacted and, in theory, implemented, he says with a smile on his face and for you to go back and see the implications of it all in the midst of a covid pandemic. Um, so you have some really interesting insight more than many do, I think on understanding the value of environmental monitoring in the residential sector, that being implemented at a regulatory level and then being able to go back and see the outcomes of that. Perhaps a very brief summary of did I get that right roughly as a pathway, and then perhaps what you found going back later.
Tim:No, so this was I mean again. Given the choice again, I wouldn't be trying to get into people's homes in the middle of a pandemic right.
Tim:Sure yeah, so, yeah. So this standard was introduced in the middle of a pandemic, right? Yeah, um, so, yeah. So this, this standard was introduced in the 2015 uh iteration of the regulations. Uh, we were asked by building standards to say, could you go back and look at homes to see if it's been a measurable impact, not a big sample size. You know, limited kind of money with these things, so we're trying to get 30 hours. I think we got 25 in the end. Um, so that's always a. You know, that's the same challenge we've tried to get in. I guess the key key, the key things about that is one of the things that we, when we were we were trying to get a list of homes which were built to a new standard so they potentially so we just picked some that we could get to that we get into. So we picked homes which had got uh energy performance certificates dated 2019. That's fine, it's fine. It's long enough after the regulations, but not so new that the houses are brand new and people haven't yet understood them.
Simon:You might have had a winter or two with people in them, kind of thing.
Tim:So, in a sense, the most eye-opening bit is quite a lot of the housing In that cohort it was just slightly random, so it was a mix of owner-occup. That cohort we weren't, it was just round slightly random, so it was a mix of uh owner occupiers and social housing and so on. Um, a fairly big uh subset were uh developer homes and what we found is that they didn't have the co2 sensors. Uh, and the reason for that was that they had been built to the previous regulations even that you know, because they had been.
Tim:You know so. So they had. Well, perhaps I mean, I don't know that for sure, but they were certainly only getting the epc certificate in 2019, which so that may have been at some period after completion, but then and they might have been on site for a couple years it just meant there's there's quite a lot of homes being built or finished in 2019, being built to a previous set of regulations. So you do get that that, um, what's the word I'm looking for? Is that that sort of lag in terms of a new regulation?
Simon:happening so too soon. Do you think to have done the study in retrospect?
Tim:well, perhaps, or or you know it might have yeah, perhaps, and I think there's some changes in regulators. I think the ability to hold back is changing a little bit. You know, it is this thing about. What are people's motivations for doing things? And you know, most people are working commercially. Architects are working commercially, developers are working commercially. So the primary thing is we need to be able to make money on this. Second thing is we need to be able to make money on this. Second thing is we need to be able to avoid liability on this unnecessarily. So it's a perfectly viable commercial decision to say there's some new regulations coming in. It's going to cost us some money to do those.
Tim:Therefore, we'll try to avoid it if we can. Yeah, I think it's a problem in terms of if we are trying to do things better and what's the speed at which we do. I think building control are aware of that. It's not new knowledge. There has always been this slight lag and there's a reasonableness to that, because when you get a new set of regulations, it takes a while for the industry to gear up a little bit. Set of regulations, it takes a while for the industry to gear up a little bit. You know this is one of the debates around things like the potential provision of something like a passive house standard. Is the supply chain ready for a new regulation like that? The flip side of that is that people only develop that supply chain if they're guaranteed a market for it.
Simon:Yeah, and at any point, some will be and some won't be, won't be. So, yeah again, perfection be the enemy of the good. But I mean there were some I wouldn't say definitive outcomes from the study, but because obviously there was a challenge of covid, but there was certainly some insight, shall we say, from that about people's perception of what co2 sensors were, whether they used them or not, whether they understood the link between what was happening and the space. What's your general feeling? So my general sense of it?
Tim:is that because the numbers we had, this is more of a kind of case study rather than a statistical thing. But there were some people who weren't sure what they were and didn't seem to have had any advice, or the handover process didn't explain what they were so they weren't particularly aware of it. Um, those people who did know what they were uh, what they were for, actually were positive about it. They said no, I, I look at it in the morning, I open my window, you know I they do some stuff.
Tim:People were responding to the availability of that, of that information interesting and you know, we've seen that in other places as well if you, if you give somebody something which tells them something, then they they will act on it. They will act on it within the parameters of which they were, they are able you can't manage what you can't measure.
Simon:So if you give somebody the tool to see the outcome of something, you give them a chance at least. If they don't have that, they don't have that chance.
Tim:We had a little bit of this during the Pan-European as well, in terms of advice about managing ventilation, and part of it is people are balancing things, so primarily people are balancing their thermal comfort and energy consumption against ventilation, so things like CO2 is high. I'll open my windows for a bit, but I can't keep it open for very long, but at least I can do something.
Simon:You've given that talk Exactly, so yes, Well, the good news is I'm here visiting with you in Strathclyde. As it happened, I went and saw a new development with a local authority there yesterday of some 60 or 70 homes, and CO2 sensors were in all of the master bedrooms working away and and I suppose the question is did the people who lived in those homes know what they were for?
Tim:and several questions like did they know what they're for? Had they been given advice about what to do if levels were high? What did all the equipment they have in the home work? So yeah, that's the systems.
Simon:Absolutely yeah, and and we? I don't know, because this was a show home, so there was nobody in this particular one. What I can tell you was was that the VOCs were very high in the property because everything was new furnished and actually your eyes were watering by the time you came out. I think there's an argument for high ventilation rates in the first year or two of new builds. For sure, um, and that's a conversation for another day, um, but I think interesting to see, because there aren't many other jurisdictions where you'll go into bedrooms and mandatorily see co2 sensors in those rooms. Do we know if the types of sensors that are being deployed have any capacity to record?
Tim:no, I mean that was one of the that was one of the sort of debates around the time is that that really needed to be as as easy, you know, and as low cost measure as possible at that time, because it was a bit of a of an experiment in terms of it was seen to I think it was seen to be that this is quite a cheap way, I suppose, a quite a bearable way for the industry to do something which might have an effect, rather than changing the size of trickle vents or making some physical change, change like that.
Tim:But I mean, you know, one of the things is the ability to do that is now much cheaper and easier than it ever was before. We're working with, you know, a number of organizations. You know we're doing stuff with ACO, so they are putting sensors into social homes, you know, and one of the reasons for doing that is for the landlord. It's a useful tool for asset management. For the landlord it's a useful tool for asset management. They can see which of their homes may have poor performance so that they can deal with the problem before it starts. And then the other thing is that it's also a tool for occupants with the phone, with the app, to say the ventilation's not very good. I should maybe open a window or turn the fan on or something like that.
Simon:I've been making the case to developers for a long time that if they deploy environmental sensors, they're part of the broader picture. Again, to use a car analogy, a car manufacturer will deploy sensors that others use because it has value to others, but it enables them to capture data that enables them to improve their product product through iteration over time. Yeah, so when you take your car for a service, the guy plugs it into a computer. He uses that to provide a better service, but that data also goes back to the manufacturer to help them understand how to improve bearings and fuel pumps and everything else.
Simon:Right, we don't do that in housing, but as we start to move into this world world by regulation and by demand through things like social housing sensors there's value downstream to that data and clearly there's going to be value to that data. There's also value upstream to that data. But if you're not the one deploying that those sensors, you're going to find it very difficult to access that data downstream, whereas if you're the one deploying those sensors, you can provide that data for people downstream, as you're more likely to have access to it or be part of the ecosystem. And this is the. I think this is. The big question is is that I think undoubtedly we're moving to desk doesn't mean it complies in practice?
Tim:And what we should really be interested in is does it do what it says on the tin in use? That's challenging because there are multiple variables which affect that performance, and occupancy and behavior are a significant part of that. That's not a reason to do it. All that does is give you an understanding. What the data will tell you is what you want to know what.
Simon:But you know there is also the why of that and I think that's that's important also and and the risk is is, if you don't become part of that, you lose control of it. Others will do it anyway and answering questions about performance gaps without access with other parties having access to the data and you not is a much more vulnerable position to be in. And that's the reality of the world we're in and you know you and I have both been involved in cases where the providers of a product, housing or are fighting the cases and other parties have access to environmental data and going you sold me or I'm living in or renting something that's not performing. Here is the data and it becomes a very uncomfortable place to be as the provider of housing. When it's not just anecdotal of one person saying I don't think this home is healthy, where you're looking at spreadsheets of data points, you know that says so. It says a different world for sure I think you know some of this.
Tim:You know some of this is also the ability to to be preventative about stuff, and I sort of meant to say that, in terms of your provision, it's not just solving a problem, it's preventing a problem from happening in the first place. But certainly the ability to use data to stop something bad happening in the first place is highly vulnerable. It's not how a lot of the world works, because often, if you make a very cynical medical analogy, you know it's it's better to find treatments than cures.
Simon:Yeah, or you know I mean so um, yeah, you can and you can see, like you know, and again to use the car analogy if through data you're seeing wear and tear or degradation in performance of products early, you can not only change that through iteration in your manufacturing. You can deploy through maintenance fixes for that before it becomes a problem for you. Downstream, there's all of these benefits to having a feedback loop for the built environment that we don't currently have.
Tim:That makes everything easier for people I mean just to call that last thing. What I said was, in inverted commas, it's better to find treatments rather than cures. I mean that's a cynical point saying why don't we find cures for things we did? I was involved in a niceICE group looking at indoor air quality at home. So normally what NICE do is look at the cost of a particular treatment against its value in terms of increased quality of life and those types of things Briefly explain NICE to people.
Tim:It used to be National Institute of Cleaning Collections, but it's not something now and it doesn't stand for NICE.
Simon:Okay, but it's known as NICE anyway. Yes, it is. What's its primary role, then?
Tim:So what they do is I'm summarising slightly here they look at. One of the things they look at is new drug treatments and they look at the effectiveness of those, the cost of them, whether something should be made available on the NHS in terms of does it have a tangible effect? How many people is it? Over what period of time? Is it a useful connection? They're in the world of QALYs, exactly so. So the interesting thing in the discussion around that is that the there are clearly benefits to improving people's health nationally in terms of costs of the health service. But the challenge in this situation is the cost of introducing those benefits is not borne by the health service. It's other people have to pay for it. The construction industry has to pay for the improved performance of buildings, but they don't get the benefit of it. Health service might get the benefit, but it's downstream, so it's very hard to make a cost justification hard the other way.
Simon:I mean it's the it's. The big complaint we have in the built environment is that most of the money and research and and drivers for change come from departments of energy because they have specific targets to reduce footprint right at a national level. Uh, yet nothing beats energy efficiency like no ventilation. So it's always been very hard to drive because the benefits of those changes benefit the health service. So the drivers for the changes aren't impacting from a ventilation and air quality perspective, often aren't impacting the department that's funding and measured on those changes. So there's always that problem, isn't there those cross-departmental costs and benefits?
Tim:And you see that, in terms of the fact that there's different sections of the regulations for energy and ventilation, so they sort of talk to each other not terribly well. And there are some really important drivers in terms of energy efficiency, carbon reduction, zero carbon. They are all really important drivers. But if you just wanted to improve energy efficiency, you would. You would reduce your ventilation to as little as possible, right, and that's a good outcome for energy, but it's a really poor outcome for ventilation. So it's trying to understand what again, it's what the unintended negative consequences of, of very well-winning things, you know, standards and so on are.
Simon:So much to do, tim. Look, this has been absolutely fascinating. I kind of knew, coming into this, there's probably going to need to be a part two at some point. It's been absolutely fantastic talking. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.
Tim:I'd really appreciate it. I'd like to have a chance to vent a little bit more.
Simon:Pun intended. Brilliant Tim, Thanks a million.
Tim:I'll speak to you soon. Take care.
Simon:Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favour? If you enjoyed this podcast and know someone else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with 21 Degrees, lindab, aeco, ultra Protect and Imbiote all great companies who share the vision of the podcast and aren't here by accident. Your support of them helps their support of this podcast. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet. See you next week.
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