#57 - John Edwards: Preserving Heritage Buildings – Ventilation Challenges, Retrofitting Pitfalls, and the Path to Skilled Expertise

This episode explores the challenges traditional buildings face regarding air quality and moisture management, featuring expert John Edwards.

We discuss the skills gap in the construction industry, the need for training, effective measurement and monitoring practices for air quality, and the importance of adapting our approaches to heritage conservation.

• Importance of understanding traditional buildings and their implications
• Notable statistics about traditional building stock in Europe
• Essential training needs for construction professionals
• Tools and techniques for monitoring humidity and air quality
• The role of moisture management in health and building preservation
• Need for collaborative education and informed practices in retrofitting
• Effects of modernisation on traditional construction

John Edwards - LinkedIn

Edwards Hart

Chapters

• 0:00 Challenges of Traditional Building Ventilation
• 14:49 Understanding Challenges in Traditional Building Retrofit
• 23:34 Addressing the Gap in Building Expertise
• 36:46 Navigating Traditional Building Adaptation

Transcript

Simon: 0:00

Welcome back to Air Quality Matters, and 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 coming up a conversation with John Edwards, director of Edwards Heart Consultants and the Environment Study Centre. Older or traditional buildings present a particular challenge for the built environment. We care about their performance in this new world of energy efficiency. They present challenges with moisture risk, damp and mould and require skills and knowledge to handle and manage them sensitively and appropriately. And in certain parts of the world, like like Europe, they account for a sizable chunk of our building stock. So how should we view these buildings from a ventilation and air quality perspective? I talk about this and much more with John Edwards.

Simon: 1:16

He is an all-round chartered construction and property professional and chartered environmentalist. He has been in the Welsh government where he was responsible for managing their estate of some 128 historic sites and in this role he was responsible for estate management, facilities management, the management of direct labour workforce and a multi-million conservation and development program budget. He is the author of many publications, reports and training schemes, including guidance and standards in subjects ranging from retrofit to building standards to quality management certification schemes with the Chartered Institute of Building. He is an excellent communicator and frequent conference speaker within the UK and far beyond. He devotes a substantial amount of his time now to education and is also a professor at the University of Wales Trinity, st David. It is here he has a real passion for developing the courses that train the next generation of construction professionals, and this really shines through when you talk to John. We talk about traditional buildings and the challenges they present Damp, mould and condensation and moisture risk, as you'd expect, and much, much more. It's always a pleasure talking to John and I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did. Don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at air quality mattersnet.

Simon: 2:52

This is a conversation with john edwards, one of the fascinating things, um, and we talk about the built environment a lot on this podcast, but what I don't think is appreciated enough is that in some parts of the world, particularly europe, and even more so, arguably, in the uk and ireland, such a large proportion of our built environment is what we'd class as traditional, and we'll dive into how we might even begin to classify that at some point, john, but upwards of 30% to 40% perhaps of the European building stock could be considered as traditional building, and probably higher, 50% to 60%, arguably, in the UK and Ireland, and that's a lens that I don't think we grasp very well, and it presents some unique challenges and perspectives in how we manage all sorts of things within our built environment, not least ventilation and air quality.

Simon: 3:58

But much broader than that, and I thought it'd be really interesting to chat to you about that, about how we should be thinking about these buildings in general, and particularly when we start thinking about slotting these buildings into these grand plans of renovation and retrofit that we have. You know we need to substantially change such a large proportion of our stock. How do we broadly start to think about these, what we've classed traditional buildings in the broader context of the built environment?

John: 4:31

Well, I think when we talk about the number of traditional buildings around all countries, I've got different definitions and different age ranges. There are many European countries who'll say it's pre-1960. We use pre-1919 in the UK. But even that is incorrect and if we want to look at a decent definition of what a traditional building is, we have to look no further than the 2023 version, the past 2035, which I can't remember exact wording, but it words this effect. It says a traditional building is a building with vapor permeable construction, normally built before 1919, or a pre-1919 timber frame building. Now, when we look at these statistics of how many pre-1919 buildings there are, it's just under a quarter and it ranges uh. The range is quite wide around the uk. In northern ireland it's approximately 16 percent, in scotland about 20 percent, uh, england about 22 percent, wales about 34 percent. But those statistics change over a period of time depending on how many you you know how many buildings are being built, etc. In terms of the overall percentage that would be made up from pre 1919 buildings. But I but I think one of the problems we got people are confusing themselves and confusing everybody else by sometimes referring to past 2035 or past 20, and then they're talking about pre-1919 buildings. But I've already indicated that the definition of PAS 2035 doesn't just include a building built before 1919. It includes all those buildings which are vapor permeable building fabric. And if you look at that PAS 2035 definition, you marry that up with some data from the building's research establishment, you find it's not about a quarter, it's about a third. And if anybody remembers the UK Department for Energy and Climate Change before they disbanded at around 2015, something like that it did say words to this effect.

John: 6:41

Approximately 35% of dwellings in the UK are of traditional construction, so there's a great many more of them around than people think that there are. And it really tickles me really when people talk about this niche market, the niche area of traditional buildings. I mean how many buildings or dwellings are there in the UK? What? Over 30 million, and a third of them are of traditional construction. How can that be a niche? Over 10 million?

John: 7:14

I mean, if people are promoting their services and saying this is a niche area, then it does indicate to you that many people are really underestimating the number of traditional buildings and I think that's gone on for decades and decades and decades. It means that when we're training people, we're not training them enough in traditional construction. In fact, you know, most people's base education in construction doesn't include much about existing buildings at all. But if it does does, it's about modern construction. And if we also consider that traditional buildings are very different from modern construction and therefore need to be treated in a different way, it also indicates to you how many mistakes we're making every day and when. Where the rest of it of buildings are concerned, we're making huge mistakes, and those mistakes are primarily about using the wrong type of insulation materials which are incompatible with the existing building fabric, even though PAS 2035 says we need to use materials which are compatible. But when you can actually install these materials in a building and it still complies with building regulations, it tells you how deep this problem is.

Simon: 8:33

Yeah, and to give some perspective on it.

Simon: 8:37

You know we struggle fundamentally with skills and labour in the built environment anyway and you know, whatever you're looking at whether that's new build construction, engineering, the retrofit sector the european continent as a whole is desperately struggling for skills and labor in this sector and I don't think we're even scratching the surface of the gap when it comes to skills within traditional buildings to manage our aspirations. You know we've got aspirations for retro. In Ireland, for example, where I live, the goals are, by and large, approximately 50% of the residential housing stock needs some form of major transformation by 2050. That's the rough government targets. If we think that a third of those buildings are traditional buildings, where is the skills and labour to have the knowledge to deal with these buildings? Or are we writing these buildings off and that's just retrofit? You know that that doesn't take account of maintenance and deterioration, the general care that's required of those buildings, regardless of whether they're in a retrofit program. So there's an enormous challenge, isn't there in this sector to grasp this netball of traditional buildings?

John: 10:08

and we should not be writing these buildings off at all. Really. I mean, um, the greenest building is the one that's already been built, you know, as they say, um, but in terms of it's not just the lack of skill, it's a lack of knowledge. And we, you know, even if we go beyond retrofit and go back decades and decades and decades, these problems still existed. I mean, I, you know, I always say that you know the building. I mean, I first started investigating damp mold and condensation in 1981 as a trainee building surveyor and there was a lot of damp, mold and condensation around in those days for various different reasons.

John: 10:46

But there's a lot more of it around today, primarily because of the lack of ventilation and the wrong type of materials which have been used, and we've already mentioned the wrong type of insulation materials. But you know, going back to the 1950s and 60s, we started using cement, replacing lime plaster, if you like, on internal surfaces of walls and replacing with a hard, dense cement render, with a gypsum skim, the temperature of a wall plaster. With a modern cement based plaster system, the surface temperature is lower than a lime plaster, because a lime plaster allows moisture to move back and forth, so it's not storing moisture as such. And of course the more moisture we got, the cooler the temperature. And if we got materials which have got a lower surface temperature, then you know there's a greater chance of condensation on those surfaces if the temperature is at or below dew point. But even if it isn't, even if the relative humidity on those surfaces is is as high as, say, 70 percent most of the time, then it's certainly increasing risk of mold growth and the like. And then when we start replacing passive ventilation okay, we don't want leaky old homes, but when we start replacing passive ventilation which was good ventilation because there was a lot of energy leakage as well when we replace it with with ventilation which involves trickle vents and then extract fans that people pull the cord to turn the switch to turn on, then we're heading for major problems. We have been heading for those major problems for decades because in my experience I work a lot in lots of different types of buildings, from castles to council houses People don't turn the fan on and they close the trickle vents.

John: 12:35

A few months ago I did with one of my colleagues. There was a local authority housing department. We're going to retrofit I don't't know 100 or so homes in this particular area around the in part of the uk. And they asked us if we do a condition survey first, because they weren't particularly, if you're like confident that the normal past 2035 process would pick up all the issues. And I said we we haven't got the resources to survey 100 dwellings, but we'll do a reconnaissance survey, which means we're going to look at the outside. I will reckon the outside and we'll, we'll do a reconnaissance survey, which means we're going to look at the outside, have a record on the outside and we'll we'll do as much as we can in 12 dwellings on one day.

John: 13:10

And when we go in and we ask the, the, the residents, um, about their fattens, do they work or not? Most of them said well, we don't know because we don't turn them on, because they're so expensive. And even if they were turned on, are they any good? And all these properties had mold. Okay, all of them. They'd been retrofitted previously with cavity wall insulation which had been removed. Whether that was done properly or not is another matter. But when we tested the fans, only one of them worked to the right spec. Only one of them to the right spec. Only one of them. And that indicates the problem we got, and they were not traditional buildings, they were ordinary, everyday buildings, and that story could be mirrored everywhere on an almost everyday basis, and it does indicate to me that standards aren't good enough, and even if they were, would we be able to comply with them?

Simon: 14:12

And what is it about traditional buildings that provide that extra layer of complexity beyond, say, the buildings that we would consider non-traditional or modern buildings? I mean, there's a massive variety. In the first instance, I guess very big regional differences. Absolutely these aren't. You know, traditional buildings aren't built off of a pattern book in the way that we would do these days, so you can have variances in building from one building to the next one street to the next one building to the next one street to the next one town to the next, and so on. Um changes over time. So you're taking, when we talk about traditional buildings, you could be talking about anything from 200 year old buildings to 100 year old buildings or, further back, some parts of the world. Um, there's, there's this huge variability, um, but it's one of the challenges, the fact that these are buildings that are being used in a fairly different way to their original intention. So there's this we have to bring the people along with us, much more so in traditional buildings, perhaps, than we do modern buildings that we're just manifestly living in a.

Simon: 15:28

You know you're talking about extractor fans there and trickle vents a minute ago. You know they weren't trickle fans. You know extract fans and trickle vents. You know, in the in the 1850s. So these buildings were being used in a very different way, um, and it arrived at that construction typology over decades or even longer, in a very conservative way, in what worked for that particular area, with that particular material. And now, all of a sudden, the space of 20 or 30 years, we're washing and showering indoors, we're cooking indoors in different ways than we ever would do, we're using heating those buildings in different ways, shutting down fireplaces, removing drafts. You know we're fundamentally changing these buildings. It's a complex web, isn't it in these buildings, and how we move them from here to there.

John: 16:24

Yeah, well, it is complex, but your question identifies what we should first be doing when we're assessing a building, and that's probably understanding it and probably understanding its materials, its construction, the way those buildings performed originally, and also understanding all the changes which are taking place and understanding implications of those changes. And, yes, they were a lot better ventilated. We had open chimney floors with coal fires. You know drawing in the oxygen from internal spaces. You know drawing in air from around legal windows and, yes, so well ventilated. We had thermal mass to actually take advantage of as well. We're heating up the building fabric and, even if the fire went out, we're still storing some of that heat and all those different things that we don't really appreciate enough today when we're treating these buildings as if they are modern.

John: 17:19

And I think, yeah, there are challenges out there, but I think it's well. I say it's not rocket science. It may be a lot complicated than maybe many people think and therefore I think many people are oversimplifying what we can do to these buildings to make these buildings fit for the future. What we need to do is use proper knowledge and expertise to do this. To do is use proper knowledge and expertise to do this, and that means properly understanding buildings in the first place of how they can perform and how they were meant to perform, and understanding the implications of doing this, that and the other on the way those buildings are performing as buildings and also the sort of level of, if you like, health, healthy occupancy that will arrive in those buildings. And I've already mentioned the biggest thing is is that lack of ventilation and the use of the wrong materials. So if people were designing this work understood these issues and then specified them properly, that we would be in a much better place. But the challenge we've got for retrofitting buildings generally is if we're trying to reach energy ratings which to some degree are fictitious, okay, especially where traditional buildings are concerned, we're trying to achieve these goals of an NG rating, but we're not always going to improve the performance of these buildings to the same degree if we are building in problems when we are retrofitting those buildings and you don't have to take my word for it Every day of the week. Look on social media.

John: 19:04

If you search hard enough, you find a problem with buildings which have been retrofitted and if you delve into that detail, they come into two camps One is cavity wall installation and the other is traditional buildings generally, and you know I work with all different types of buildings but primarily my expertise is in older ones. But we all started off with modern ones. It's just we work our way into the older ones as we generate that interest and expertise. But where traditional buildings are concerned, we need to understand that we need to take a risk-based approach.

John: 19:50

I know some people shout me down for saying fabric first is not the right. Fabric first is the approach to take. But most standards and guidance you look at they don't even mention fabric first when all the buildings are concerned. If you look in, look in past 2035, it will tell you that always take a fabric first approach. But you know, make sure the building's in good condition first. You know, do the low hanging fruit like light bulbs, then maybe replace any distressed heating installations and boilers etc. And then it's fabric first. But what it also says and it said this in the 2019 version that where traditional buildings are concerned, a risk-based approach is usually more appropriate.

John: 20:33

And it most definitely is, because when we see things going wrong in buildings, it's usually to do with fabric measures. And and I'm not against doing fabric measures my latest project is a listed building and it's a Georgian terrace. We're putting internal wall insulation behind the front wall and the other external walls are external wall insulation. So I'm not against it. I'm just saying we've really got to know what we're doing and not taking too many risks, because it's not just risking the building itself. Let's bear in mind the climate. Emergency means we can't afford to do it twice. We haven't got the money first of all, but you know, while we're waiting to do it again, the building's going to suffer, cause more deterioration, not perform as well, and also people who are living and occupying those buildings are going to suffer the consequences as well. Also people who are living and occupying those buildings are going to suffer the consequences as well, and there can be quite dire consequences. So we what I'm saying is we should really know what we're doing, and if we don't really understand everything there is to understand and usually we're not, we're not in the situation where we do understand everything to the nth degree then we should be looking at the risks involved in doing all these things when we don't quite have enough knowledge.

John: 21:48

I mean, how often does hypothermal modeling be undertaken? Not often. We do it on all my projects. That's why I don't do that. Many people don't want to pay for that thing. Oh, we, you know we don't have to do that. We've done hundreds of other properties, john, and you know they're all okay. Well, I only get involved. We're going to do that. We've done hundreds of other properties, john, and they're all okay. Well, I only get involved if we're going to do it properly, and that involves material testing by material scientists local weather data, predictive weather data, if we can get it, and that's why we do it, because then I know I'm taking a proper, risk-based approach. But I also understand that most clients can't afford that or they don't want to do it. But what we can do is learn from the projects where that sort of in-depth research has been undertaken and and learn from that and learn from the outcomes of those particular things where do you think that knowledge comes from?

Simon: 22:37

where do we, where do we lean on that knowledge from?

Simon: 22:41

because, as you say, there are a few clients at the top of the pyramid that want to do this right and prepare to pay for hydrothermal modeling, are prepared to pay for consultants like yourself to come in and look at it properly and and then we've got this demand for large-scale retrofit where a proportion of that demand is going to creep into the traditional building sector, that scale of improving those traditional buildings over the next few years. Where do we lean on that knowledge from? Where does that come from?

John: 23:19

That's a very difficult question to answer. We turn down work every week. I've just had a trade federation email me. They've got lots of buildings in the UK. Will I help them out? Well, it's impossible. We're a very small practice.

John: 23:34

And I think the other part I mean I'll tell you where I came from. I first, you know, I first was a tradesman. I became a trainee building surveyor and I was primarily working on modern social housing. And then I got involved with older buildings, traditional buildings, which meant I was employing people who were experts in conservation. They opened my eyes. They opened my eyes to the science around buildings generally.

John: 23:59

But if that hadn't happened, I might, be like lots of other people, thinking, oh, this is simplistic, you know, we just crack on with it and we can't. And when we look at the qualification requirements in the UK for, say, I don't know, retfit assessors, retfit coordinators and other roles within RETFIT, certainly as well, in RETFIT we treat I mean, I'm kicking myself in the foot now, but we're treating education as a tick box exercise where you get this qualification, that qualification, and unless you're going to an educator and not just a trainer, then yes, you'll tick all those boxes, but you may not know an awful lot more, but people will be putting faith in you that you do know a lot of things that you should know about. Where traditional buildings are concerned, in our training courses and, as you know, I've been delivering the level three award two-day traditional building rhetoric course now for 10 years and we have lots of different people. We have loads of architects on that course, architects who are really, really, really, but they still want that extra little bit of knowledge.

John: 25:09

And I think if you can go to people who've got a good track record of working on older buildings, like the conservation architects, the conservation accredited building surveyors and the like, who've had that additional training, that additional training in retrofit, who've had that additional training, that additional training in retrofit, then I think they are the people that we should be going to, certainly as designers. But you find a lot of designers do not come from that background and they may be excellent. I don't know. I met some excellent people in my training courses, but you meet some people who think, well, I've seen what they've done and I'm not that impressed and that's why I've been asked to come around and have a look at this job. That's gone wrong and that happens a lot.

Simon: 25:54

And I think there's some analogy there to the healthcare profession and how you scale expertise. Um, at scale, you know you've got general practitioners which are architects, you know the people that see buildings generally. Um, you'd have specialists, you'd have consultants, you know, and so on, and and there's a process of whether it, whether it works well or not, is another argument. But there's a process of scaling to the right level of expertise depending on what your conditions are and how you know your health is. And within buildings, I I because we, because we don't have anything sitting over the top of it, in a kind of a way we do with paz and and some of the umbrella organizations that manage it, but there isn't really a formal way of escalating stuff and to kind of bring that point home, what you've just described kind of nails that for me, you know you've got architects that are very skillful in general architecture. I don't imagine for a second sitting on a two-day course. I don't imagine for a second sitting on a two-day course someone's going to come out the other side of that two-day course as an expert in traditional buildings, absolutely. What they might have is some of the language. They'll understand how to manage risk a little better and they might learn how and when to escalate it to the right chartered surveyors and building expertise and who to go to and what the roadmaps look like. Um, that, that therein lies the gap, doesn't it? And you know, before we even move into the indoor environmental environment of these traditional buildings, even from the building fabric perspective, in my mind's eye, the experts are people like yourself, that that have had decades of experience in traditional buildings or have come up through apprenticeships within traditional building construction firms and have done their time and have got a bank of knowledge of wall build-ups and junctions and building materials, and they can dip in at will to this experience over 20 or 30 years of building and managing buildings like that. But those people, people like you and those construction professionals that have done the time, the hard time, the traditional way, are as rare as rocking horse shit, you know. And so we've got this. This demand for scale and lots of experts, whether they're building surveyors, engineers, architects, all of the professions that have their bank of general knowledge in their area, are suddenly being faced or going to be faced with a fairly large bank of traditional buildings. And there's this gap, and what I don't see at the moment is the pyramid of of escalation.

Simon: 28:55

Clearly, and that's the challenge for me, and I've asked you this question before and I've got a good friend here, peter cox, in in Dublin who's a heritage building guy, and he says to me you know, he's the same, I don't have any more capacity for more work, I can't take any more work on. And when people ask me, well, who else do I go to? He says I'm looking out into a wilderness. Well, didn't he mention me? Of course he did, john. But you know, it's like that. It's like there are very few people at the top of this pyramid with a deep understanding of traditional buildings.

Simon: 29:32

And then a huge void between them and the mass, the general practitioners in the built environment, and what I don't see is a clear framework for addressing that bit in the middle, as we said at the beginning of this conversation, because manifestly up to a third of the stock that we might be interested in dealing with is flipping traditional. This isn't niche and this is the thing we we think about the built environment and kind of a bell curve. You know that we've got this normal building in the middle, somewhere that Paz tries to like all regulations and standards have to deal with. You know, typical buildings in a typical situation. We have to design standards for the masses and somehow, mentally, we consider traditional buildings as an outlier, as an exceptional case, and quite frankly it's not. It sits right there in the middle of the flipping bell curve in the built environment and we don't seem to have a structure below it to deal with it at the moment.

John: 30:35

Well, we don't. But the ideal people to deal with are people in the conservation sector. You know the people who've already got their expertise in older buildings. Maybe not enough of them have got any expertise in retrofitting those buildings. But when you look at that particular sector, it's a sector that has genuine expertise in specific building types and you know and if you work in the heritage sector, you know that you've got to build up specific knowledge areas, because usually you've got to get consent and demonstrate and evidence to other people who really do know what you're doing, and you do that on an everyday basis, whereas in mainstream construction and property you don't have to do that. So they're the ideal people, but there's not that many of them, and that's the problem. So we can't lean on them because, ok, I have lots and lots of conservation architects come to my courses. Them because, okay, I have lots and lots of conservation architects coming on my courses, but that's because of the sort of work that they're doing and their clients are requiring them to actually do this, that and the other and sort of engage more in climate change issues, sustainability and benefit.

John: 31:38

But and I I've sat around lots of different tables producing British and European standards and in the last few years I I mean I like to say, look, this is a standard, so let's forget about you know whether people can apply, can comply with those standard. This is where we need to go up there, because that's what the buildings require and that's what the people who occupy the buildings require. And then I get persuaded, quite rightly, but that's great to have that Rolls-Royce standard, john, but how many people can comply with our standard? So what we tend to do is lower it down a little bit because the supply chain, as you said, simon, the supply chain is not there and because we've ignored this factor for decades and decades. You know, when I did an apprenticeship I think it was four years, I think you become a gas engineer now in 18 months.

John: 32:33

You know we haven't really invested in skills and training to the degree that we should have done. So we haven't got those people, we haven't got the groundswell of knowledge and expertise there that we can to some degree even upskill to the knowledge area that's really required. And because you know, if you've got, if you are a, say, rat fit installation contractor, you need those guys are working on the buildings to bring the money into the company that keeps people employed, and I know there's subsidized training available in England, there's free training available in Wales, where I live, but you still got to take those people away from the workplace. How are we going to solve that one? Because we need a lot more money to actually do this properly. And yes, I mean I got my two-day course. I've been living for 10 years. I think it's a pretty good one compared to others and I am an expert who delivers that training.

John: 33:31

But it's not enough. I know it's not enough, you know it's. I'm not going to kid, kid anybody to say it is enough, but for some people it will be, who've already got a good background in that knowledge. But for many people who got no knowledge in that area, it's not enough. But still, those people will still be able to comply with the standards which are in place in the UK as a norm anyway. But is it good enough? Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

John: 33:59

What do we actually produce at the end of the day?

John: 34:02

There's some fantastic people out there, really good people, even people who just entered the market and to benefit.

John: 34:08

They're really, really good people. But there are some projects which do not go well and the question is is what could we do about those particular projects and delve into the detail and find out why did those projects not go as well as they should have done? Is it the governance of the project? Is it the actual day-to-day management of the project? Is it the fact that the people undertaking that project haven't got the right level of expertise? And it's only when we delve into the detail and properly analyse to find out why projects are going wrong will we really be in a good situation to do anything about it. But we need to do that because, you know, retfit hasn't got a great reputation, has it, you know? And the clever clients are very nervous now about who they're going to to get Retfit done. Hence, you know, there's an avalanche coming towards me of people who want us to get involved with their projects, and we can't possibly help all of them. In fact, we help very, very few of them.

Simon: 35:10

So you know we need to get better at this and I suppose another important party in this is that we build buildings for people and in every one of those buildings whether it's a residential setting or a workplace setting or public building there are people. Yeah, and people have been in those buildings, sometimes for centuries, and have found ways of managing those buildings and living in those buildings, sometimes well, sometimes not, but there's a history there and a bank of knowledge that perhaps we're not unlocking. I don't know, as a consumer. You find yourself as a tenant in a turn-of-the-century property or you're in a public building. Where do you go, as a non-technical person, as a non-construction person, to access that bank of historical knowledge in how to manage that building, about opening windows and managing heating and managing damping, so understanding when something has deteriorated to the point that it needs fixing or maintaining? Yeah, that for me, there's a huge side to this coin, particularly in traditional buildings where, my guess is, we require a level of engagement in the management of that building, more so than we would do. A modern building, modern buildings we expect to perform to our modern living standards. Within an older building, there's an element of adaptability or adapting to that building that you need to learn.

Simon: 37:00

I've lived in old buildings previously and most old buildings, you have to learn to live with the rhythm of that building. There's a DNA, a breathing, a pattern, a rhythm to an old building. You have to find common ground with an old building. You're not going to be able to force it perfectly to your way of life and equally, we want to bring it close enough that there's, that it works. But there's for me that when you look out into the world, where does somebody gain that knowledge from? If you're not lucky enough to have spoken to the previous tenants or it's been in the family for generations, you know you might have access to that. But most people are find themselves custodians of an old building for 30 or 40 years or less. Where do they go for that knowledge?

John: 37:57

just to understand how to don't all ring me because because I won't have time to pick up the phone. But but what I always say to people if they go any queries for older buildings, then there's a free advice line at the spab the society for the protection of ancient buildings and I and I refer people to them and sometimes I get a call back. They said ought to bring you. I said, oh, did you say you'd already rang me? No, you know, we do get that situation, but that's a free advice line that's paid for by Stark England. I think it's mandated.

John: 38:29

When I worked for Stark England that was one of the things I used to monitor as part of my role. But no, that's free advice. I mean you're not going to get all the answers. But quite honestly, simon, most people don't even think about those issues that you've been talking about now, because they put their faith in builders, they put their faith in the retrofit installers and they just crack on and sometimes they're lucky and sometimes they're not. But where they're going to get that knowledge from I don't know, because I think people have a mindset now that they've got to reach this energy rating come what may, even though that energy rating getting there might be quite damaging to the building and that's a problem. Yeah.

Simon: 39:12

Yeah, and if we move it on slightly to the kind of the ventilation and indoor environment discussion, we have expectations about the indoor environmental quality we want to achieve in buildings. Those expectations, I think, have to be adjusted slightly. In older buildings You're not necessarily going to get the comfort levels you get in a modern, airtight building. You are probably going to have to manage moisture slightly differently in an older building to a modern building right.

Simon: 39:46

Uh, you'll be very lucky to get full balanced mechanical ventilation with heat recovery into an 1850s building right. So there are all sorts of challenges to create the the environment we want. Do you find yourself in discussions with clients about their expectations of what they want out of environmental quality and air quality and how to manage what they have and what the options are to get those buildings to where they need to be?

John: 40:25

Well, it depends what type of client it is I mean, very often in my own projects there's not that many of them, to be perfectly honest, not these days Then, of course, that's what we endeavour to achieve, but I still find it difficult to persuade clients to do this, that and the other. I mean the only way I get my own way sometimes is to say, well, do you want this to build this? And they hate me then because all I'm saying is you've got to spend more money that they don't want to spend or they haven't got at all. I think this is what you've got to do to demonstrate an evidence that you've got to create a building that's going to be fit for the future. I've spent a lot more time analyzing projects which have gone wrong, involving traditional buildings and other building types as well, and I've also been delivering a lot of training for surveyors, who need to understand buildings which have already been retrofitted. It's a minefield because you don't know how well those buildings have been retrofitted and when. That when I'm asked the question well, if it's been retrofitted to past 2035, do you think that would be good enough? And I say no, I don't think it will be good enough, because if you look at the retrofit assessment. We're talking about indoor air quality, etc.

John: 41:47

If you look at the requirements of PASS 2035, the retrofit assessors are not required to use a hygrometer, so they're not required to actually see what the relative humidity levels are in that building at all.

John: 42:01

So you know, they could go into a building, they do a visual inspection. Or I can't see any damp or mold or anything like that, or I can't see condensation, so that must be okay. You go and retrofit the building, you do your post-occupancy evaluation and people say they don't feel very well in the building and it's all to do with this retrofit that's been undertaken Well, is it or not? Because if you haven't taken that data at the very beginning, that very basic data like relative integrity levels, and you're only taking them once things have gone seriously wrong, at the end, when people start complaining, you've got nothing to compare it with and there's no way in any of my projects that we wouldn't be taking all that data right at the very beginning. It's not a requirement in past 2035, certainly not in the 2019 version. It mentions it, as you know, an option in the 2023 version.

Simon: 42:58

I mean, we're talking about the very basics now and I started doing this in 1981 and I find all these years later, people are still not doing it this way and I find I find this so hard to get my head around, john, because, like construction is a risk-based puzzle, you know, like you're not in control of all outcomes, so you can't be precise. You have to approach it from a risk-based approach and all risk-based approaches follow roughly the same pattern and that is what does this risk look like? Unmitigated, what? What? What's my starting point? How do I frame this risk if I don't take account of it at the beginning? What's the current level of mitigation? Is that enough? And if there's a gap, how do I address it and who's responsible for that? That model of risk management can be applied across any risk almost right, and we've understood the hierarchies of controls very well within the built environment for years as well. Risk works very well in construction. But you have to go back to first principles and I've had this conversation over and over again in the radon community.

Simon: 44:19

With retrofit, people are having homes retrofitted all over the country, particularly here in Ireland where we know we've got high levels of radon. Undoubtedly we're fundamentally changing buildings that are in areas of high levels of radon and we have no idea what the performance of that building was before we started and I am picking up already work where people are going. I've had retrofit work done. I've got high levels of radon in my building.

Simon: 44:47

I think it was the retrofit that caused this, and the first question a bit like your moisture on was well, what was it before you started? Well, nobody did a radon test before we started doing the retrofit. Well then, we have no idea whether the retrofits made it better or worse. Um, the problem is for the professionals and the supply chain is. They're now sitting on a building that they're fundamentally altered and they now have a result they don't want and they've got no idea what their liability is in that. And the same applies to moisture risk, the same applies to air quality risks. We are not putting enough emphasis on initial assessments, um, and measurement, measured assessments in retrofit, if nothing else than to protect the supply chain down the line when there are unintended consequences, because it you can't manage what you don't measure. And the reality is, if you don't know what you started with, you're in the wind.

John: 45:47

And I don't know how we ended up in this situation. I mean, I've sat around BSI tables saying this is what we should be doing but you find very few other people agree with you and it doesn't go into the standard. But you know, if you're doing any conservation project for example, a conservation project at Cardiff Castle I started in the late 1990s we all these defects in painted, you know high class decoration why have we got those defects? Well, we're going to do chemical analysis, do a survey and inspection analysis to the envelope of the building. We record the use of the building and we'll record. We'll do environmental monitoring for 12 months which is going to give us an idea of what the problems are. And then we've got to weigh forward because if we know what the causes of those problems are, we can go and put them right and then we can continually monitor that building to make sure that you know those, what caused those problems don't come back.

John: 46:48

It's not rocket science, it's just common sense. It's about joining the dots and closing the circle. But I'm afraid in the way we retrofit buildings we're not doing that. I've been told it's about the cost of doing this. I've been told it's about the cost of doing this, but, quite honestly, we're taking risks when we don't. I think you'll find that one standard I'm working on at the moment is BS 4104, which will be a lot more robust than what you see in past 2035 at the moment, past 2035 at the moment. You know, and um, and I think what I'm trying to say is that it's not that me and you know everything and nobody else doesn't know anything. There's a lot of people around out there who know exactly how to do things, but there's a greater number of people who don't.

John: 47:39

Yeah but I would also say that, as we go through time, the standards we are developing are getting better and better. We haven't taken huge leaps, but certainly the 2023 version of PAS 2035 is better than the 2019 version. The reticent assessment described in BS4-104 will be much better than the reticent assessment described in PAS 2035. So we are getting better and better. But there are some people out there, some people who will end up listening to this, who will disagree, and they say well, the risks are not that great. You know, we don't have to do this, we're only doing these measures. Well, I know you're going to get into that debate here, but I come from the world whereby we develop projects. We do them on the basis of knowledge, on the basis of risk, and I always produce a risk document on all my projects and if my client doesn't take any notes of it once I've departed, then that's up to them.

Simon: 48:40

That's the way I do it. I'd like to borrow your attention for just a moment to discuss ACO, a partner of this podcast. Aco, an EI company, specialises in pioneering new technologies in fire, carbon monoxide alarms and Internet of Things technology. Many know them as the go-to company for these products. In fact, this year they're celebrating 35 years in business. I particularly know them for their outstanding work in the housing sector, with their Homelink offerings aiming to solve some of the industry's most serious challenges. The technology incorporates environmental sensors and a gateway to offer connected home solutions, which has a proven track record in helping landlords reduce operational costs and carbon emissions while improving residents' well-being and safety. Issues at the heart of the housing sector, like damp and mould, fuel poverty and energy efficiency, are all in the crosshairs of ACO. I've been amazed at how they are innovating here with a laser focus on unpacking some of the complex nature of these challenges in a way that answers the what next question we so desperately need at the moment. They have a great network of experts and installers. If you're in housing, they are definitely worth talking to. Trusted is an overused word, but not here. Ask around and ACO are synonymous with it. Details are in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet and at ACO. That's a-i-c-ocouk.

Simon: 50:18

Now back to the podcast, and I think accountability has a large part to play in this as well. Nothing concentrates the mind when you know you're on the hook for something, and particularly in a risk-based world where there are so many confounding factors that influence a final outcome. An air quality, an indoor environmental quality, is a really good example of this. So this is a conversation I have so regularly with organizations that are trying to come up with strategies for ventilation and air quality is that we're only in control of such a small part of the final outcome. When it comes to air quality, outcomes say in this case, what people bring into their homes, homes, how they manage their homes, how they interact with the systems, the level of occupancy, the external factors, things like your ability to heat the home in the cost of living crisis all of these things that we don't have control over are going to influence the outcome. So there's huge that there's huge risk in the built environment, and always has been like. That's never going to change. So we have to develop processes and internal rules that enable us to play our part with confidence and have a collective accountability in the outcomes of the things we have control of, because when the inevitable shit hits the fan, as it always will do to a certain proportion of the building stock for one reason or another, we need to be able to stand over our part in that. That's the game, that's the game of the supply chain.

Simon: 51:59

Whether you're a social housing provider or a construction organization or a retrofit organization or a heat pump supply, it doesn't matter. Our job is to do the best. What's the classic risk statement? Have I done everything that can be reasonably expected of me today to mitigate the risk with the resources that I have? Like, you have to imagine yourself in the dock, don't you? It's standing there and going. Can I stand there with confidence and say I did everything that could be reasonably expected of me? Uh, in this process and that's the fundamental problem we have is that collective accountability within construction is? We're not there yet, particularly in ventilation. None more so in ventilation, I'd argue, is that there are very few circumstances where people are going to be able to stand in a dock and say with confidence that we did everything that we could reasonably expected to do um because, as you and I know, every time we go out and look at this in buildings we're seeing ventilation falling short for one reason or another yeah, I agree.

John: 53:11

I mean, I think um, a lot of client organizations need to be very worried because they should know that there are problems in their buildings which they're not doing much about. We find a huge demand for training in damp, mould and condensation these days, after that poor little boy from Rochdale, you know, suffered his death from mould and it was a wake-up call. But it shouldn't have needed to be a wake-up call because these problems have been around for decades and, like I said, I've been doing this since 1981 using all the right equipment, all the equipment that many people don't even know exists today. But if this problem has not been far enough up on top of the list of things to do within organizations, I would say but when people like me pointed out, when people like you pointed out, then it's up to them.

Simon: 54:10

Well, let's come back.

Simon: 54:12

Someone will not no, absolutely, and let's come back. I do want to come back onto damp and mold specifically, because there's definitely some questions I want to ask you about that. But one of the things you mentioned a short while ago was on a project you were on, you did some environmental monitoring, some kind of longitudinal data acquisition of the performance of that building for, I'm guessing, a whole range of reasons. Colleagues, in heritage buildings, that seems to be a much more common practice now than it was just because of the potential. Now that to monitor buildings has improved with the technology, yeah, that's. That's got to be fundamentally changing the landscape of heritage. Well, has, has it not that our ability to see buildings in a way that we've never been able to see them?

John: 55:01

I mean I, I hear people saying, oh, now we can do monitoring the buildings, we're in a way that we've never been able to see them. I mean I hear people saying, oh, now we can do monitoring of buildings, we're in a much better place being collected. I was monitoring buildings in 1981. Uh, we were taking thermohygrographs around buildings in a social housing. Now you'd either leave it upstairs or downstairs or both, to record the temperature at community levels and then you'd have a discussion with the tenants about. You know, I noticed there's a lot of moisture upstairs. You know it was the bathroom being used that time and then we can focus. Well, there was that moisture event, there is a moisture problem. So we'll have a, you know, a discussion with the tenant and say what was going on at that time. So, and that was in 1981.

John: 55:43

Now these days you can get small data loggers and they have been around for a long time. Believe me, they've been around since the 1990s. On the project I was working on, they were being imported from the USA at that time. So it's not something that's just, you know, automatically happened in the last few years. With digital technology today it is much easier to record that data. But you know, if you're just going into any building at the moment in time, it is just at that moment in time. But when you're recording data, you know 24-7, over a week or more then you can collect some really good data to know what's going on, obviously to help you understand lots of things, including whether there's enough ventilation in the building.

John: 56:28

And, going back to historic buildings, this has been going on for decades and decades and decades as well. You know, if you speak to a conservator who's an expert in artwork I mean, the first person I met like that was a conservator called elizabeth hurst, the first conservation I learned so much from that person. You know so much. Um, you know doing a survey automatically. You're going to take all this data all the time. You know what is about humility, what is the temperatures and all the rest of it. And on the project I was dealing with at cardiff castle, that monitoring took place over one year. So we knew exactly what the situation was.

John: 57:09

And if you look in BS 7913, of which I'm the lead author, which is the British standard for building conservation, it says that if there's any changes planned in a building, then you should be doing environmental monitoring first in a building, then you should be doing environmental monitoring first and then you know. Then you might understand the impact of those changes when you do further environmental monitoring. It is the norm. You know what I mean. It is the normal way of doing things because you know, okay, if it's a dwelling, you've got to think about the health of the people occupying the dwelling, but if it's a building, it's an economic asset. If it's a historic building, if it's a historic building, it's a heritage asset. These are all important things.

John: 57:53

Why waste time and money, paying somebody who do not know what they're doing to go around and doing all these things, the buildings what's the point of doing that? If it's all going to go wrong, you're taking the risk. So you bring in the right level of expertise. You can train people in these things. You can train people in these things. You can tell them how valuable it is. You can tell them how to do it. They can go and get the equipment and do it themselves. A lot of people doing it these days, but not enough.

Simon: 58:19

Yeah, and I think for me that's the interesting thing about environmental building, particularly in the heritage building stock, is that it just explodes open the potential to understand the fingerprint and the patterns and the rhythm of those buildings. Yes, and the way data is like, like I, like you, remember 10, 15 years ago wandering around with fairly clunky data loggers trying to capture this data and then having to arrange access to go back, or, if they had to be powered, they might get unplugged because somebody plugged the PlayStation in or something you know like. So there's all it's. It's a different world. Now you know like. So there's all the it's. It's a different world. Now you know you can run around sticking little sensors on walls that are beaming up data to the, to the cloud, like we've never been able to do at a kind of a cost level where it's inconsequential virtually, particularly in older buildings, like you say, because the value of the, the asset that they are, I think that just it just changes the narrative for me and particularly for homeowners and we see this very much in social housing, with companies like AECO and Switchy and others that are doing fairly basic environmental monitoring but have found ways of taking that data and presented it in a way that has real value, day-to-day value, both in the providers of those assets but also for the users of those assets. That means there's a business case for deploying them anyway. And then you have this rich source of information about the fingerprint and performance of those spaces.

Simon: 1:00:05

Now, in my view, like there's no other way, with heritage buildings or traditional buildings, to understand them than with real data, because it not only helps us understand going into a change in that building, we can also start to map deteriorations, changes in patterns, changes in performance. We can measure efficacy of interventions more accurately and if we can provide ways of presenting that data to the users of those spaces, that helps them manage those spaces more effectively. Because, as we said in this conversation, we have to engage the users of these spaces much better. Well, what better way than providing them with information? Say, oh, by the way, we're coming into the autumn season, you need to manage this building in a slightly different way than you do in the middle of winter or the middle of summer, and we can start to help people manage those spaces better, because we can now see how those buildings are reacting to changes in seasons and weather and and so on. So for me it's quite exciting. What would be interesting over time would see how the traditional building set up sector picks up that value.

John: 1:01:24

Well, I don't think it's just traditional buildings. I think it makes total common sense. Now we know that retrofit increases moisture risks and other risks as well in terms of air quality, and so why wouldn't you want to monitor a building? Sensible organisations are doing it now. Ten years ago, when I was going around delivering my courses and people didn't even have hygrometers or anything really, but these days, sensible organisations are to some extent monitoring the buildings which are being retrofitted.

John: 1:01:57

Other organisations say, no, we haven't got the money for that. I say, well, think about the cost of the risk. What is the impact of mold growth growing on the walls? You know, what about the? You know they might about the residents, the tenants and the building. What about your reputational risk? Isn't it sensible to do that?

John: 1:02:17

And there are some people who are still not receptive to it because they think it's going to cost too much money, but to me, it's all part of, you know, professional property management. Um, for all the reasons we've mentioned, we've mentioned previously, it's the right thing to do and, as we know, it's not that expensive to do it and it will knit problems in the bud. And when you, when you, when I go and visit housing associations and I deliver up-to-date courses for them and I meet teams of people now who are called mold removers and they never existed in the past. Somebody was removing it. Now they've got mold removers. They're being sent on my courses to give them some knowledge of how this occurred in the first place and some knowledge how to remove it. Then it tells you, tells you, something wrong. So if you can manage your property better, so the mold never occurs in the first place, you're nipping in the bud. How cost effective is that? That's what I say.

Simon: 1:03:13

Yeah or, if it does, you can look at the data and understand why and save yourself from a yeah, spray and pray organization coming in or a mold wash company coming in and actually it's fundamentally a ventilation problem or a building fabric problem. You know you've got something to work with. You know, absolutely. There's a great lady in I think it's North Devon, rosie Wills. She's really into the data for managing damp and mold in her building. It's really interesting to see organizations really taking the nettle in hand and looking at data and understanding how to fix the problem based off evidence.

John: 1:03:55

Like I said, I was doing it in 1981. It's nothing new.

Simon: 1:03:59

Yeah, this isn't new building physics. Quite frankly, there's nothing new here. It's all very well understood what this data our ability to capture it so prolifically has done is just expanded the opportunity to see buildings like that as opposed to you and I wandering around with a suitcase full of data loggers, deploying them and then having to arrange to go back and then trawling through sheets and sheets of spreadsheet numbers trying to figure out patterns and what's going on. Like that, that can all that's all done now by third parties and you know presented to you in a way that's useful.

Simon: 1:04:36

You know, it's that the the lifting's a lot lighter technically for this stuff, yeah, yeah yeah, how did you end up here, john, specifically in, because you kind of hinted at this a little bit um, with your kind of pathway into traditional buildings, like how have you ended up doing what you're doing? What did you start out doing?

John: 1:04:59

I was a bricklayer when I left school. Um, I I suppose you could call me a stone masker. I worked on brick and stone but I qualified at Vancecraft level. Then, in those days, an apprenticeship was an education, so I moved into doing ONC, hnc, and I got a job as a trainee building sphere in 1981. I'll keep the story short, but I did that. After a few years I did get.

John: 1:05:25

I was brave in my decision-making it put that way and that was recognized. I would take responsibility and I was very inquisitive I still am and I had a few rapid promotions and I suppose by my late twenties I was responsible for three teams an advisory team, a project team, mechanical, electrical team and I had the opportunity to do all these different things, which was great. And I had the responsibility for older buildings, which I had a great interest in, and I employed some fantastic consultants, some fantastic contractors. And I'll pick anybody's brain I mean I'm even picking yours, simon, right now and that's the way you learn. You go on the basis that you've got something to learn every day and all of us have you know. And so I went on from there and I mean I got a postgrad diploma in building conservation and upgraded that to a master's degree. A project came along that that I was initiating at Cardiff Castle, which is a great project, new developments at a scheduled monument, lots of very involved and very complicated and challenging conservation work. And then I went on and worked for a major building consultancy practice national firm or international I suppose. Then I went to work for what is now Historic England and then I went on to be assistant director in Caddo who was responsible for managing their estate plus their lead on conservation and sustainability issues, and I left there 11 years ago.

John: 1:07:16

But what I've always had was an interest in education. Education is a passport and it's a great passport in the construction industry. I remember when I was doing my apprenticeship, going to Brick Lane College, one of the lecturers said to me he said you can do this. I said do what he said teach people. So you must have seen something in me at that particular time. But so I've been involved in part-time lecturing since the mid-1980s and I've had an external examiner role etc. I have a part time professor role at the University of Wales in Swansea and there's there's one person who really needs to know what he's talking about, or she knows what she's doing and that's the person standing at the front of the class and that drives you to make sure you do know what you're talking about.

John: 1:08:05

But because of my interest in that area, I've always been invited to work on panels producing guidance and standards, and I produced my first guidance on retrofitting buildings with the late Andrew Townsend, fantastic guy, who died at an early age in 2011. And that was for the CIOB and it went over there. But, quite honestly, when I talk about retrofit, people say it's new. It's not new at all. I've been retrofitting buildings since the late 1980s building fabric and building services. But in the late 1980s, a low energy lamp was a fluorescent tube and the most frequent retrofit in terms of heating was putting dual-fuel burners into boilers so we can burn gas or oil, depending on what's the cheapest. It was all about saving money and not saving the planet.

John: 1:08:56

So, cutting a long story short, that's who I am today, but I spend a lot of time in education these days, when you reach this stage in my career and I'm not going to retire for many years to come but some people said I am. That's not true I think it's time for me to pass on the knowledge I've got, and that's why I do so much training, and I know that. So when I left Caddo, I was contacted immediately by CITB to to develop this two-day course and then, after I developed it with them and got it approved as a qualification, you know, set it all up. You know that's what I did. They said oh, there's, there's no, uh, there's no demand for this course, john.

John: 1:09:40

So we decided not to go any further and the passing shot was and I've gone very well with them, I'll tell you this now they said well, why didn't you just deliver it yourself? So I did, and I still am today. I think I was right. There wasn't demand for it. That's how I ended up. Where I am today, I suppose, is being very inquisitive and wanting to do things. Find a better way of doing things, if we can.

Simon: 1:10:09

Yeah, and I think you hit on a really interesting point and it's one thing that has been a personal journey for me as well, as I've taken on more and more teaching and lecturing roles and developing course roles as I've got older is there is something about the rigour that's required if you want to do it the right way, making sure you have the knowledge to impart it correctly to people. I've never done as much learning as I have done since I started teaching which is kind of an irony, but there's also something about being forced to explain your knowledge to other people.

Simon: 1:10:46

That makes you systems think. Process is true, so it's been. For me it's been a fascinating personal journey over the last half a decade or so. It's been taking on increasingly more time teaching. Is that the the process you have to go through to do that?

John: 1:11:27

absolutely. I mean, um, I've done a lot of project management as well as lots of other things, and project management is going from a to b and etc. Until you get the end and working out what routes you're going to take. But that's the way to teach as well, because what I don't like is when I go to a lecture and they've got this fantastic project that's being described, I said, but how did you develop that project? And I've been in a situation where I've been on awarding panels for judging competitions and they said, well, it's a great project, but how did you start it and what stages did you go through? And people said simply can't explain it. And so, well, how can you, how can you actually create a situation whereby you're going to impart your great knowledge of how you actually develop something if you're just telling us it was great. And look what we produced. How did you produce?

John: 1:12:22

And there was one project I, um, I was assessing for constructing excellence many years ago. What a fantastic project. And it was just. It was just. They were just lucky. I thought that that they, that some really good, some contractors and a very good monitor from the lottery who seemed to do more than monitoring, and they produced an excellent project, but I wasn't too sure it was about the overall approach and management of it. It's just that they got lucky and you can't rely on luck so what like map out your week for me?

Simon: 1:13:00

these days, john, what are you spending most of your time? Teaching and developing courses and standards?

John: 1:13:05

How much?

Simon: 1:13:06

time are you consulting now? Because you've got your consultancy firm, so you're involved in the training side of stuff as well.

John: 1:13:13

Yeah, I'm turning down a lot of consultancy work at the moment in order to do more training. To be honest, there's a much bigger demand for me to do that, although there's a big demand for me to do that, although there's a big demand for me to do projects as well, and at the moment, um, there's a project in Swansea which I'm departing from, um and I'm also dealing with. Uh, I've been retained by Somerset House in London for over 10 years, so they had a fire there last summer, if you may recall. It's all over sky news, um, and I'm working on the on the reinstatement of the fire damage there. But that's about dampness and mold because the building's got to dry out, and that's the major thing that's going on at the moment is drying that building out. Uh, the fire service came and poured a lot of water on top of it to put out the fire so that's very much related to the subject.

Simon: 1:14:09

Yeah, I was going to ask is that moisture management challenge the putting out of the fire or the fact that the building's now open to the elements?

John: 1:14:13

and there, was no, oh no. It's not open to the elements now because it's been tented over, but it's drying out that building and drying it out in the most appropriate way, only removing things that should be removed and working out. You know you've got lots of charred timber working out. You know how much is that, because some of that can remain just put additional supports in and working out all of that with the design team and that's what we're doing at the moment. But again it's it's very much related to this issue of moisture in buildings.

Simon: 1:14:48

And what a fabulous segue onto something I definitely wanted to spend some time talking to you about because, as you can imagine, I mean we stay relatively in lane here on this podcast in the sense that we're in ventilation and air quality conversation broadly, um, but it doesn't sit in isolation, that conversation, and none more so than with condensation, damp and mold. You know, ventilation and the build-up of environmental moisture is, without doubt, a critical pillar in moisture balance in buildings, um, but it's not the only pillar, obviously, um, and I know you spend a lot of time teaching how to manage damp and mold in buildings, and there's a whole other swathe of stuff to do with building fabric and water ingress and maintenance and leaks and all of this stuff and rising damp, and it's a it's a complex field, isn't it? And I suppose the way to frame the question to you is, and it's the it's the challenge I have as an expert in ventilation and air quality is when I'm asked to look at some a problem with dampen mold, I can give very good advice on ventilation performance and environmental moisture and risks of condensation and mold and so on, but I am no way qualified to give an opinion on whether something is rising damp or not, or or something else. And that's the challenge is that particularly moisture management in building encompasses such a broad spectrum of building performance and maintenance and management. We end up in trouble a lot, don't we?

Simon: 1:16:34

In this space, I see very experienced surveyors doing very detailed surveys of moisture in walls and then holding a bit of tissue up to a fan to measure the ventilation performance, and vice versa. I see a lot of experts saying, well, you need to put a PIV into this property to solve the damp and mould, and haven't gone anywhere near the fabric and looked at where that might. So it's an odd space, isn't it? Well, the damp and mould space, because it's such a broad spectrum.

John: 1:17:06

It is a very broad spectrum, but it comes back to what we talked about earlier really is understanding what is causing the problem in the first place. It could be lack of ventilation, it could be lack of ventilation amongst the many other things, or maybe ventilation is not the issue. So it's having a proper understanding of that building, its materials, its situation, its use, the change in which have taken place and all all those things, and and that's that is a challenge for many people. It must be a challenge for many people because I go into so many properties which have been spending lots of money on trying to eradicate these problems but they've never been able to. So, yes, it does involve a proper analysis of that building in the first place, using the right tools and equipment, and when you meet people, I mean what we are delivering now is a practical course. So if people want to know what it's like to go and do a survey, myself and my colleague, matt George, we go out and we actually teach people how to do that on site with all the different types of equipment. Why we use it? Because we start off with a, an online introduction to what this subject is all about, so people know what to do, and I've done that in the past, but I'm not going to name any clients.

John: 1:18:26

But uh, when I've, I remember going to one housing association with a morning session and I say, well, going out on site in the afternoon, make sure you take all your gear with you. You know all your equipment. And then we go out on site and I said I thought you're going to all take your equipment with you. They said we've got it. I said where is it? Then he said this is it a notepad pen? And that's what they were using.

John: 1:18:51

And I met so many organizations over the years because I've been delivering courses on damp molding conversation for well over 10 years that people are just not using the right equipment. Is it their fault? Not really. You've got to look at the organizations they're working for. What about the people above them? Do they have enough mouse to realize they're not doing it properly? But they're spending all this money on paying people to go around and actually analyze all these issues and they haven't funded their resources in order for them to do it properly in terms of knowledge or in terms of the equipment. So you need to know what you're doing and you need to be well resourced, I would say, if we are going to be doing that properly and similar to the traditional building question.

Simon: 1:19:35

John, in your mind's eye, who is that? If I'm presented with a bunch of houses on a street that are presenting a uh, let's just say, a mold problem? Uh, undescribed that there's, there's ongoing issues with damp and mold in this property, who's the person that should be going to do that? It's not your piv manufacturer salesman. It ain't your mold wash company like. Who's the? Who's the person that should be going to do that? Proper assessment and again is there enough of them? Are they properly trained?

John: 1:20:17

it's a funny old area really because it goes. But you know, if you do, I don't do pre-purchase surveys in the residential sector any longer, but when people do them, if they find a problem with damp and mould usually they're well not so much mould but damp they say, go and get a PCA member to do this survey. Most of their members are contractors. Most of their members are contractors. I would say go to an independent surveyor who's an expert in damp. Some of them are very, very expert, even though they may not be chartered surveyors.

John: 1:20:55

I work with somebody who's excellent. He's not a chartered surveyor but he's absolutely excellent. He's been doing it for decades and decades, including flood remed, all the rest of it. He knows an awful lot and we do work together. But you've got to pick and choose who you're going to. It ain't necessarily a charter surveyor, you know. It's somebody who's got experience and expertise in that area and it's very difficult but it is a surveyor, you think like oh, yeah, yeah the starting point is somebody's whose job it is as a surveyor is to survey buildings yes, absolutely not.

John: 1:21:34

Somebody who's already equipped with the, with the drillers, drills and the pumps to actually pump in the damper, of course, because it may not need one. Usually it doesn't. So, yes, it's got to be an I would say in my view I know other people disagree with me, I mean I get slaughtered for saying it by some, because I know I will, because I usually do, but it's got to be an independent surveyor who's got experience and expertise. That's right, yeah.

Simon: 1:22:06

And if people contact us, we can tell them who to go to. Yeah, but I'm guessing. I'm guessing you don't know nationally at scale who to go to. How do people navigate that environment? What are the kind of things that you'd be looking out for when looking for a surveyor that are producing green lights for you to say this is the kind of person I'd want to be having a look at this property for me.

John: 1:22:29

I would want to see their credentials in terms of what they've done previously. Looking at their reports and see if they make sense, see if they're sensible reports, see if they went through the right process.

John: 1:22:43

That's what I'd want to see yeah I mean, we we've delivered training to lots of people who are independent dance surveyors, in fact, um, we've got a suite of courses which are available now. We've got an introduction. We got an on-site, um, our on-site practical course over one day. We've got a one-day course we deliver in-house to clients, plus coming on stream now in the next few days or week. We've got a self-paced course which achieves a qualification, a Level 3 award in understanding damp, mold and condensation buildings, and we've already had people come to us who want to do that course and get a qualification. So, simon, you said you're not qualified. This is the way in which you can get qualified. I'm saying it tongue-in-cheek now, mate, but I'm saying if there is that qualification, there's off-qual registered. Anybody or any part of the world can actually do the course and get that qualification. I think it's I can't remember now I think it's 15, 20 hours of learning, probably 20 hours of learning something like that.

John: 1:23:54

And many independent dam surveyors have actually done training courses that we've developed and delivered, and so see what training they've done. Have they done training delivered by an independent organization? Training providers got expertise. There are some really good people out there, believe me. There are some really really, really good people out there doing damn surveys. There's others who may not be so good, but independent. I think is is is the way. Is the way? Are they independent?

Simon: 1:24:27

no, I agree completely and and there are. You know I'm connected regularly with some really fabulous knowledgeable people in this space, both across the traditional and modern yeah, absolutely, you know there really are some very good people.

Simon: 1:24:41

I, I think the I I. There's a challenge, obviously in the number of those and finding and accessing them. I think that's one problem and and like that will work its way through I think the. The other challenge for me is is that moisture balancing building can be such a deeply ingrained problem that it isn't necessarily fixable first time round or within a short period, like if you're dealing with a housing association that's got 50 000 properties right and right and 20% of them have got a condensation dampen mould challenge. Let's say this isn't about the knowledge and technical capabilities of looking at a property, diagnosing what the problem is or the combination of problems because often it's not just one, it's a number of things and producing a roadmap for that particular building or having the funds to fix all of the things on the list to get it to a point that you can be confident in solving the problem, let's say, but at a strategic level, at a stock or an asset wide level.

Simon: 1:25:57

The big challenge for me is is that the, the, the, our bishak motivation, that that young lad in rochdale that died and the consequential impacts that's had on the social housing sector. There's this perception that this is fixable and the challenges is that this winter, when there's still damp and mold, and next winter, when there's still damp and mold, and for the next decade or more when there's still damp and mold in social housing, we erode trust over time because we've done the governance thing, we've done the stock condition survey thing, we know the scale of the problem. We start to deploy strategies to to fix the problem of lack of investment and so on. And next year and the year after and in five years time, when damp and mold is inevitably still raising its head, um, we start to road trust over time and and for me that's the challenge at scale in buildings. There will always be mold in buildings because there's always mold spores, there's always moisture and we hold buildings at a temperature that mold grows like. We are never going to eradicate mold from buildings. That's just the nature of the world we live in.

Simon: 1:27:21

What we're not really grasping the net love, I don't think at scale is what this investment track looks like and how do we navigate the scenarios where we we may fix one measure that has an incremental improvement on outcomes but doesn't solve the problem. How do we set expectations for the supply chain and homeowners and building owners of what this trajectory looks like over the next 10 or 15 years, because that I don't see happening. Yet there's been this knee-jerk reaction, as there rightly should have been. It was a slap across the face, particularly for social housing, that you're not grasping the nettle here. But this is not an easy fix, is it? And even if a surveyor can accurately identify the range of measures that are a problem, that doesn't mean the council or the housing organisation can afford to fix all of them this year.

John: 1:28:23

Well, I think the first thing we should stop doing is patting ourselves on the back and say aren't we a wonderful sector? We're doing things really well, because we're not. Many buildings are in poor condition. Many buildings are not being repaired properly. Many buildings have seen changes taking place which are unwise not just retrofit and many buildings lack heat, lack ventilation, but where the latter is concerned, why do they lack heat Money at the end of the day?

John: 1:28:57

And when I've been involved with private the private sector, some big landlords in the private sector I won't mention who they are, but they didn't have any problems with damp, mould and condensation in their properties because the heating bills were included in the rent. Now, that is not a very good situation from a climate change point of view because people waste energy, but they didn't have a damp, mold and condensation problem. All their properties. I only visited a few, but I was getting involved in some building conversions for them. They had continuous mechanical extract ventilation with boost on humidity. They didn't have any problems.

John: 1:29:43

So you know what the main problem is. Don't you money? Money if you have enough money, if people have enough money, I mean if you've got much damp, mold and condensation in your property. I haven't, because I I'm fortunate enough. I I don't mean it's too warm, to be perfectly honest. My wife likes it very warm and I'm not too keen on being very warm. We haven't got that problem, maybe around the bath, but we can clean that off, no problem.

John: 1:30:09

So I think money and poverty is the is the biggest issue we've got. Some people don't turn the heating on. They can't afford to do it. They don't turn the fans on and they find a way of disengaging the continuous mechanical extract because they fear that they haven't got the money for that. They won't open the window because they don't let all that heat out that they are paying for. So it's a difficult one and I suppose if you're looking at the, the cost of all these problems and the cost of removing mold and the health costs with the health service, you know I'm not bright enough to think about what the equation would look like. But if we think about putting some money into actually making these buildings better and maybe finding a way of actually making sure people got enough money for their fuel bills etc. Maybe we're not going to spend so much money on people removing mold and people going to inspecting mold and people in the health service having to treat people who've been affected by all this stuff.

Simon: 1:31:09

I don't know, thinking outside the box without yeah, it's a definite, definitive answer at the end of it and that's a really important point that you make is that there are, there are consequential costs to, uh, poor environment or environmental quality, beyond impacts on the building fabric I mean, that's mostly what we've been talking about here but impact, the cost, on health is enormous absolutely, and this is the challenge, I think, within the built environment is it generally embedded within the energy departments of government, which means the focus isn't on health and maintenance and so on, and and so we concentrate on the wrong things often.

Simon: 1:31:49

Um, you know, we see that we see this so often in large social projects that were built in the kind of 40s, 50s and 60s, you know, you kind of thames, meads, concrete jungle type places. They were invariably built with centralized heating systems when they were first built and they didn't really have a damp and mold problem because people controlled the heat in the the buildings by opening the windows yeah yeah, it's already paid for and the buildings were unbearably warm generally, and the way you controlled it was by having the windows wide open right now.

Simon: 1:32:30

A disaster, obviously from an environmental perspective. Um, and what happened over time is that those buildings were the central systems were shut off and those those tenements and blocks had individual boilers put in. People now were paying for the heat. Windows were replaced over time and became more efficient, so the big source of air renewal was removed and all of a sudden they've become mold boxes. Yes, you know, and that's the legacy we're mopping up today. And and highly predictable.

John: 1:33:02

I would say yeah yeah, yeah, just physics.

Simon: 1:33:07

Frankly um economics and physics you know, and that's the reality we live in.

Simon: 1:33:13

For a lot of people and you know, don't get me wrong like if you're trying to make a decision over to whether to heat your home or feed your kids that week, damp and mold in your property is, as surprising as it might seem, for a lot of people is the least of your worries. You know, sending your kids off to school, not hungry, is some people's day-to-day challenge, absolutely, and that's that's what we have to be mindful of. But also a big, a big thing that I always very keen to point out is that we often think in terms of the extremes, because they're when we see visible damper mold and you touched on this earlier, actually, which I thought was nice is particularly with surveyors we think of building problems in the extremes. But for every extreme case there are dozens and dozens of buildings that are just getting by, that are not optimal, and particularly with air quality.

Simon: 1:34:17

The risk here is that they don't make it onto an HHSRS health rating and get acted upon. They'll get by for years and years and years and this has an eroding effect on people's mental well-being, their health, long-term chronic issues. Um, so there's a cost to that part of the built environment. That isn't a disaster, but every year they're getting by with a bit of damp and mold and under ventilation and other pollutants that are building up in the property as well. And I often tell this story of this lady, jen, that I went into and that it's kind of very, very long story short, this house was perfect, visibly, but there was an unmistakable smell of mold in the background, high levels of fragrance and bleach. We've all been into those properties, haven't we job where people are doing their best, it sounds a lot better than the properties I've been in yeah, but they're doing their best

Simon: 1:35:21

and they'll never make it onto the list of problem properties to be sorted out, but, without question, those properties are damaging the health of those tenants and people in those properties long term, and that's we do always have to be mindful of that when we're having these conversations about them. Damp and mold. Our, our viewpoint goes to those properties where we're scraping mold off bedroom walls and things, but for every one of those cases, there are hundreds of cases of properties that are causing problems long term. Yeah, but we're not capturing Because we're just not getting fundamentals right.

John: 1:35:58

Yeah, well, my test is that when I go into a property use a hygrometer, good housekeeping by the, by the tenant or the owner occupier, where they're continuously decorating and making the place look good, but they're hiding all the problems. But, using the right equipment, we can go in and we can see that there are problems here that need to be resolved. You go, you go to the apartment next door. Oh, it's terrible, but we can see it the way it really really is in all the apartments because of the way that building's been retrofitted. This is what we see. But if you're taking your PAS 2035, if you've got your PAS 2035 hat on, you're not going to be able to see any of these things because you're not made to use all this equipment. Yeah, you can't see it on. You're not going to be able to see any of these things because you're not made to use all this equipment.

Simon: 1:36:57

Yeah, and from a ventilation perspective, one of the challenges I see regularly is that I don't think we've quite thought through the impacts of the, the wording in things like pass 2035, where it started, on all these standards now and I noticed the um, one of the chartered surveyors organizations, just brought out a retrofit standard as well and again, they're saying yeah, right, you know that ventilation should be measured effectively, um, but nobody's got the skills yet or the equipment to actually measure ventilation effectively and and and this is that you know, I I think the standards are getting there slowly, incrementally, as you say.

Simon: 1:37:37

Every year we see more and more focus on building performance, which I think is really important, measurable performance. But when you look down the road at what that practically means I mean, I've had conversations with some of the authors of that standard that's already been flagged of it well, we're not being paid to pull out a pressure compensating wind vane anemometer and measure ventilation flow rates, like most of our work is paid to be. Checkbox, you know, is there visible signs of damp and mold? Is a fan making a noise? Check you know or not you know? The assumption is if it's making a noise and there's no damper mold, like you say, there's no problem. But that's not really surveying.

John: 1:38:20

No, that's just. That's just. I agree with it, you know, and one of the problems we have we talk about doing this stuff properly, but most people have not got the basics right and that's the problem we've got. And, um, you know, on our one day course or we go out to site, we use a vein anometer, we use thermal imaging, we use different types of damp meters, we use the carbide meter, we do all those things to show how to do it properly. But I tell you what hardly any of those people who will come along have got that equipment, so they won't be able to do it properly, because that takes an investment, but it's a good investment and that's what people are not seeing yeah, no, I agree completely and that there are levels of this.

Simon: 1:39:03

You know we have this conversation in ventilation, that I'm not expecting everybody to go out there and invest in a three and a half grand pressure compensating wind, vane, anemometer right.

Simon: 1:39:17

But even right, very few right. Yet, realistically, that is the only piece of equipment that's going to give you a reliable reading yeah, assuming you know how to use it and it's been calibrated, uh on what ventilation is doing. Now you can use what they call the conditional method, which is the unpowered versions. They're your 300 or 400 quid ones which people are even not investing in and they have their challenges, but they'll get you in the ballpark. They will tell you if a fan that's supposed to be doing 15 litres a second is at least close and not doing two or three liters a second, which is what we regularly see.

John: 1:40:00

That that would be better.

Simon: 1:40:01

We use yeah, and that would be better than what we see mostly, which is uh, is there damp and mold? Yes, there's a fan. Does it come on with a light switch? Check ventilation's good, you know, and that's where we are generally in the industry at the moment from a surveying perspective, um, and I've even had conversations with good damp and mold surveyors that don't have that equipment.

Simon: 1:40:26

And I'm going. You're doing all this fabulous, you know, investigative work on damp and mold problems in this property, yet you're unable to understand what contribution the ventilation is having to the conditions, why what's stopping you that doing that next step? And, like you say, even people that are spending money in the right spaces maybe aren't don't have all of the equipment that they should be having. And that's the challenge is finding people that have that holistic approach, that kind of building pathology approach to to them yeah, and a great many people have got an interest in all this, but obviously not doing it I suppose they need.

Simon: 1:41:09

It needs to be paid for by somebody. Strangely, considering how costly this is to society and to the built environment in maintenance doesn't seem to be the market there.

John: 1:41:26

The other strange thing is that people look upon this subject as a specialist area, but it shouldn't be. I would say all social housing landlords, for example, should be training their people up to do all this work and to have all the equipment to do it properly on an everyday basis. And usually the only time you're going to get anybody to do it properly and use all the right equipment is when you bring a consultant in to do it. Well, you know, the problems are so great in terms of quantity. Organisations need to train their own people and resource them properly, and that is what I would say is professional property management.

Simon: 1:42:07

Yeah, so what do you think? In your view? How does the next kind of five or 10 years pan out, john? Firstly, from the perspective of traditional buildings, let's say, and retrofit. At some point this has got to come to a head right, that we realize that traditional buildings are a big part of this retrofit journey and we're not dealing with it well enough. What does the next step beyond that look like then? Do you think?

John: 1:42:37

I don't think it looks too good, too good at all, to be honest. I mean, if you look at big events which are taking place, how often do you find somebody talking about traditional buildings on the platform? Not very often. Who are the? If there is anybody who are they, are they? If there is anybody who are they, are they experts in retrofit or not? You don't see this. I mean, I speak at lots of events and usually I'm speaking to people who will agree with me anyway, because they're people like me.

Simon: 1:43:06

Nothing like the echo chamber. Huh, Exactly.

John: 1:43:09

So we're all working in silos. I'm working in this so-called niche area that many people think is a niche area. It's not a niche area. It's massive but it seems to be. Mainstream is in one place. This niche that I'm working in is in another place, but with so many traditional buildings out there, you know it should be part of mainstream.

John: 1:43:30

If a third of our building stock is of traditional construction, then it should get a third of the air time, and it isn't at all yeah, and that's the starting point really is, is that that awareness, like like all problems, recognizing you've got one in the first place is the first challenge and we're not doing that really and I don't know how that will change, to be honest, because, um, I could say a lot of things which I'm not going to, but you've got to see how all this has been framed within the rapid sector and who is, if you like, influencing and controlling, and therefore I don't see it changing much, to be perfectly honest but, as you've pointed out several times, there's a market here, like fundamentally.

Simon: 1:44:19

There's a market like in the proportion. Yeah, manifestly there's a market because you're turning work down on a daily basis and, like I said, the reflections from colleagues over here in ireland, exactly the same. I cannot take this work on and I don't know who to give them to frankly, like so there's a, there is a demand here, even if you would consider it niche. Um, and for me I always find some of the most fulfilled people in construction are the ones that have specialized in traditional and heritage buildings, because they're fascinating. There's all sorts of building materials, there's history, there's people living or working in these buildings. They're complex and nuanced and challenging and, like there's always a place for new build manufacturing line.

Simon: 1:45:19

Knock it out fast and cheap construction. If that's your bag and you like turning up to a clinical site every day and knocking out as many houses as you possibly can in a week, good luck to you. And probably even in the retrofit if your vision of retrofit is to be doing retrofit at scale and taking on blocks of apartments and streets of houses and racking up the same insulation and windows on 50 properties and that's the business you want to build, good luck to you. But there's also an entire industry where you get to work with buildings that have got centuries, sometimes, of history embedded within them and you're dealing with custodians of buildings for periods of times and chain taking, challenging and nuanced buildings on a journey, on their next incremental journey of their lifespan. That, if I was starting out now as a young engineer or young surveyor or young professional in that space, what a career, if there's money in this, what a career to have. I mean it'd be fast because you've got history, you've got building technology, you've got data.

John: 1:46:41

It has everything, everything the only thing is it takes more time and when people only want to spend x amount of money that the same sort of money they would spend on a modern building, I think that's where the challenge is getting people to realize the value in doing this properly I agree.

Simon: 1:47:04

But to steel man that argument slightly, I would say every sector has its challenge and the traditional sectors challenge clearly is getting people to spend the right money. But if you go and work in the, let's say, the scaled retrofit sector, you've got a different problem there. You can't convince people to do enough fast enough, yeah, and if you work in the new build sector, you can't get the government to invest in tax incentives fast enough on land value, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whatever it is Like I said, it doesn't matter what sector you're in, you're always going to have trouble convincing people to spend some money. But when you do, boy, is that an interesting place to work.

John: 1:47:50

Absolutely right. I think the challenge we've got at the moment is that many traditional buildings are coming under schemes like ECO, the Energy Company Obligation Scheme and the others as well, whereby the same approach is being taken and, whereas past 2035 says usually a risk-based approach is being taken, usually a risk-based approach is not being taken, is being taken. Uh, usually a risk-based approach is not being taken, usually it's a fabric first and, um, you know, when you see the problems which, uh, which you know properties which are going wrong, it's because they've taken that fabric first approach when they should have been taking a different approach, because that's the approach that they've been taking on all the other properties no yeah, and, and some installers you know their main line of work may be wall insulation, so that's what they want to do anyway, and if they're not doing that, they probably don't don't want to do anything.

John: 1:48:41

So you're right in what you say. Um, I'm one of those people who like working on older buildings, but, um, but, the way it's all been set up, uh, is geared against all that, I would say where mainstream rhetoric is concerned, and so, john I I I, you have the levers of power at your disposal in the welsh government oh, no, no what, what, what do you do like?

Simon: 1:49:07

so it's all of a sudden right. You find yourself in a position of power with a big budget and we say, right, john, how do we, how do we do this right? What does that look like if you had the budget and the control of the levers? What would, what would that look like over the next decade to start to get this right?

John: 1:49:26

well, I used to work in the welsh group because I worked for caddo and I did used to interface with a particular person there. I did use the interface with a particular person there and that person agreed with me let's spend more money on each property. We do less properties, but we do it properly. Of course, that's not a politically sensible thing to do, because you've got to please as many people as possible if you're a politician, not just a few. But it needs to be done properly. Proper analysis uh, in terms of what's happening in wales at the moment, we got the, the low, the welsh zero carbon hub, and I've been developing, delivering training for them in this, in this particular area. So there is a will to do it properly. How far we get in doing it properly is another matter altogether. I always say that there is a much better chance of changing things in a small country compared to a larger one. But it depends how big the voices are. Is my voice bigger than others?

Simon: 1:50:31

No, what about the skills and labor part of this puzzle Would you do? You think it's the. Are the personnel there now we just need to retrain them, or do we need to think from the ground up? Is there a? Should we be developing apprenticeships within traditional buildings? Should we be educating people in a different way? How do we in, in 10 years' time, if I want to be working with a resource that's capable of dealing with traditional buildings, how do we get to that resource? Do you think?

John: 1:51:05

This, for me, is a very, very old chestnut. One of the responsibilities I had when I worked for what is now Historic England was skills and training, and we used to fund organizations who had a bit of a mouthpiece, and I used to disagree with them when they were trying to develop apprenticeships in older buildings. I said what you need to do is upskill everybody, everybody, not just apprentices, but everybody working in a workplace. If we want to change what's happening out there and where we've got apprentices, we should be training people in what they end up doing. And I don't know whether you're aware of this, simon, but apprenticeships in the UK slightly different. In Wales it's only about new construction. So you train your apprenticeships in new construction and over half of them then work on existing buildings. So the only way they can learn about how to deal with an existing building is from the people that they're working alongside who've been trained the same way they have. They're a bit like the blind leading the blind to some degree, um, and that's not good enough. So have they got any knowledge of traditional buildings? Only what they've learned on the ground. And they may be working with some very good people and their end are very good and what you find out is, if they've given the additional knowledge and training, then some of them are very good at it. But along the way they may make, they may make many mistakes. I mean the number of times I've seen you know sort of um, I don't know, um, uh, line rendering on buildings fail because people really didn't know what they were doing. So there's a long way to go, but we should be changing the way we train people generally, um, and what we're going to think about as well. There is this climate, but it's not just retrofit that's going to actually that we should be focusing on where any building is concerned, but especially the traditional one. But it's the way we treat the building generally, the way we repair them, the way we maintain them.

John: 1:53:12

And, as it says in BS 7913, damp building fabric can be over a third less energy efficient than building fabric with a normal amount of moisture. Well, that's obvious really, isn't it really? A moisture is a conductor of heat, um, so if we want, the first thing we got to do with a wall, if we want to make it more efficient, is repair it, make sure it performs very well in terms of moisture. That's the first thing we should be doing not the retrofit with the wall installation, but of course it's only with the retrofit measure. You're going to increase the energy rating and that's another foolhardy road. We're all running down at the moment the rating for, not the real performance. But people should have enough knowledge to understand all that and then to influence governments and others to say, look, the way we're doing things at the moment needs to change somewhat so we can get a true picture of what the real performance of a building is. And I and I think in england, I think they're going down that road right now.

Simon: 1:54:11

To be honest, yeah, and sometimes knowledge is about knowing what you don't know as much as about knowing what you know is knowing where your limitations and glass ceilings are, so that you know when to ask for the right advice.

Simon: 1:54:24

You know neil may, who we both know yes always had this great visual concept for me, and that is practitioners, people in buildings, practicing the art of construction, have this toolkit with them, a mental toolkit the whole time with them, that they they need to be able to access that, that they either have that knowledge, they understand it, they've got experience of that wall, build up that fabric, measure that junction, and they know the right approach, or they don't. And if they don't, who do they ask? What information is available where? How do they access the right decision making process? And that's kind of where we've got. We've got to build that framework for people where they understand what they know and they don't know, and then the structures and information sources to access when, or the training to access, to build up those skills to answer those questions the next time. Because that's the great thing about construction there'll always be a new detail, there'll always be a new scenario, there's always something to learn and a lot of the training in retrofit measures is very good.

John: 1:55:37

You know, past 2030, I think is quite a. I know not everybody will agree with me. I think it's quite a robust document and I haven't got any major concerns about it. But the issue is that may be very good, but when those people start working on their traditional building, do they know what to do then? Because if you look at some certified systems and the certificates, many of these certified systems, um, are not very robust, to be perfectly honest, in terms of construction detailing, but but I'm talking about wall insulation now but but if you look at the materials which are in those certified systems, on many occasions they do not say that these materials are not suitable for a traditional building.

John: 1:56:22

So people will install them and then it complies with building regulations. But the people installing them are putting great faith in the certification of these systems. Are they going to argue against the certification? No, then they're just going to automatically go and do it in accordance with that certified system, because then they know it comply with building regulations. So it's not just in the, in the people who are implementing the work. We need the knowledge. We need the knowledge within the manufacturers and and the and the system developers and the certifiers. There's a lack of knowledge everywhere to some degree, even though it's a third of our building stock.

Simon: 1:57:01

Well, thank God you're doing the training, john, as I suspected. John, we've chewed up two hours here without even trying and there's probably another two dozen questions I could ask you at some point. But um, what we'll definitely do is include some links in the show notes if people want to access them, to both your training and some of the organizations we mentioned, like I think you also work with the stba as well.

John: 1:57:30

but, spab, I'm a board member of the stba.

Simon: 1:57:32

Yeah yeah, so we'll put some of those links, yeah sure, in the show notes as well, and links to the consultancy and the training if people want to find out more, particularly about traditional buildings, damp and mold and some of the conversations we've been talking about today. John, thanks so much for your time today. It's been chatting to you, being very generous with it indeed. Thanks a million. Great Thanks, simon. Thanks for listening. Before you go, can I ask a favour? If you enjoyed the podcast and know someone else who might be interested, do spread the word and let's keep building this community. And do check out the YouTube channel by the same name and subscribe, if you can, as there will be additional content posted here quite regularly. Subscribe if you can, as there will be additional content posted here quite regularly. This podcast was brought to you in partnership with ACO, ultra, protect, imbiote and Aeroco All great companies who share the vision of this podcast. Your support of them helps their support of the show. Do check them out in the links and at airqualitymattersnet. See you next week.