#58 - Jeff Colley: Navigating Sustainability Challenges – Building Performance, Regulatory Evolution, and Global Perspectives

This episode emphasises the vital connection between indoor air quality and building sustainability, featuring insights from expert Jeff Colley. The discussion covers advancements in air-tightness standards, the importance of empirical data, the challenges of communication in the industry, and the necessity for robust regulatory frameworks that promote sustainable building practices.

• Discussion of the evolution of sustainability and air quality standards
• Importance of air-tightness tests in improving indoor air quality
• Need for greater transparency and data-driven decision-making in the industry
• Examination of the government's role in promoting sustainable building practices
• Challenges of greenwashing and superficial claims in construction
• Emphasis on the interconnectedness of air quality and societal norms

Jeff Colley LinkedIn 

Passive House Plus Ireland

Passive House Plus UK

Zero Ambitions Podcast 

Chapters

• 0:00 Sustainability Progress in Construction Industry
• 13:12 Challenges in Sustainability Implementation
• 27:03 Global Development and Sustainability Challenges
• 32:34 Building Regulations and Industry Evolution
• 43:46 Construction Industry Adaptation to Sustainability
• 52:24 Industry Change Through Bold Communication
• 1:08:04 Passion for Sustainable Building Stories
• 1:19:50 Building Performance Data and Post-Occupancy Analysis
• 1:29:06 Future of Sustainable Construction Movement

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. And coming up a conversation with Jeff Colley, editor with Passive House Plus and communications and strategy advisor and host of one of my favorite podcasts, zero Ambitions. Indoor air quality is inextricably linked to building performance and sustainability, and it is this sector that both influences air quality's future and perhaps provides some clues for us. Through both battles won and lost. Already. This was an easy podcast for me. Jeff is a friend and longtime collaborator of mine and our chats on the phone often look like and last as long as this podcast. You see, jeff is a rare breed, a brilliant mind and extraordinary networker and joiner of dots. His publication, passive house plus, has been the cornerstone of professionals coffee table reads for years and years, but it's his work behind the scenes that's also profound working with industry, lobbying the government and working directly with it. At times. He is a relentless environmental campaigner in the traditional sense of the word, or a climate warrior, as he puts it. This drives Jeff year after year, and anyone that knows him knows exactly what I'm talking about. Knows him, knows exactly what I'm talking about. Jeff very kindly agreed to be my guinea pig as I take Air Quality Matters podcast onto video and out on the road. So we met in Dublin to record the first episode of 2025 with this new setup. I hope you enjoy it and don't forget to check out the sponsors in the show notes and at airqualitymattersnet.

Simon: 2:25

This is a conversation with Geoff Collie. What I thought would be really interesting to chat to you about was because you're in quite a unique position as an editor of a magazine that looks at sustainability and have been in this industry front and centre for so long Hanging around like a bad smell.

Simon: 2:41

Yeah, exactly Pointy ventilation. Yeah, exactly Like what's your sense of where we are with sustainability. The reason I'm asking that, jeff right, is that every time I talk to the air quality community, the the feeling is that air quality still has to ride the coattails of sustainability for a while. It's so interlinked it can't stand on its own two feet quite yet. So I think it'd be interesting to kind of get that perspective from you as to where is that sector today?

Jeff: 3:10

So it's hard. I'm very close to it so it's hard to kind of step back for you know, and have a sort of a satellite view of it. But you know, I've been hanging around for 20 odd years in this space. I've been hanging around for 20 odd years in this space and, like, clearly, if I think back to where we were at in 2003, there's been massive progress. I can talk from a few perspectives. There's the day-to-day work of looking at the quality of projects that we get submitted to us.

Jeff: 3:40

People throwing things at us to write about, us people throwing things at us for, uh, to write about. There's, even then, the quality of um, you know, like a press release that you get sent from someone, um, advocating the next feckin magic bullet solution and that stuff hasn't moved on as much as you would hope. Um, in some way, like there's still a lot of nonsense being peddled and a lot of people who are approaching things from a fairly you know, maybe not openly trying to mislead, but misinformed position. That happens to some extent, but there's. Or you can look at it from the other perspective where you try, where available, you try and look at the data, look at empirical data which you know ultimately where you can access this. It's a great way of solving a lot of these kinds of these arguments, and there's certain data sources we can go to which enable us to compare the quality of what was built 10 years ago, 15, 20 years ago, to what's being built today, specifically in Ireland. We've got really good data in that regard through, for instance, the SEAI's BER research tool. It's a wonderful resource that we're using through the MAG and for data journalism purposes and through the consultancy as well, to mine it and interpret it.

Jeff: 5:03

And, for instance, one really good indicator is air tightness tests, right. So, as you will know, air tightness tests only came in as a requirement in Ireland, specifically for new homes in 2007. And even then it was only sort of a sample of new homes that were required to do it for schemes, and prior to that, the assumption was that the average air tightness was around 10 cubic meters per hour at 50 pascals. Now, that's a term that I don't know how. I don't expect that all of your audience will necessarily know what that means. Um in layman's terms, um, um. This is equivalent. This what this means is that on a windy day where you, if you, have like sort of 30 kilometer per hour, uh, winds hitting each face of the building, um, uh, at the same time, um, and you had all intentional ventilation closed, like vents closed down chimney not that you should have one, frankly chimney blocked. If you have one windows closed, and so on, you would have 10 cubic meters per meter square per hour of air changes.

Jeff: 6:18

It happens to again, that won't mean much to most people. It happens to be by a stroke of good luck, because there's two ways of measuring air tightness. There's that method I mentioned and then there's the air changes per hour, which is used in Passive House. It happens to be the case, by fluke, that with dwellings typically with dwellings the results are very similar but plus or minus 10% difference. So, in other words, a building that's at 10 cubic meters per meter square per hour is going to be in around 10 air changes per hour, and what that means is that the entire volume of air in that dwelling would change 10 times within an hour on that stormy day. Right, purely through defects in the construction we do have from back during the Celtic Tiger years indicates that the average was about 11 or 12, actually, and we've gone from that level back then, when standards were very poor to, on average, about two and a half now, and you compare that to the target for Passive House, which is at 0.6.

Jeff: 7:25

I should say the UK as well. They're not quite at the level that we are at in terms of their air tightness. The last time I checked I can't remember the figures now but they were, I think, in the three or four space in terms of you know. So, again, an air tightness test is a rare thing in construction. It's not someone's opinion, it's not something that an assessor can input, based on a drawing that an architect has shared, just to show how the insulation, for instance, should have been applied. It's an objective measurement from a machine under tightly prescribed conditions, so it's a good quality indicator. So what you'll tend to find, as you'll know, is that in some cases, well, bad builders achieve bad airtightness just because they're bad builders, and good builders achieve good airtightness typically sort of by mistake, almost because they're good builders. And you'll even find, with some older dwellings, I mean, the assumption often is that is, that older dwellings are are leaky inherently and therefore that ventilation isn't required. That's often bollocks.

Simon: 8:36

Um, I hope this kind of language is absolutely fine, yeah, yeah, there may be some glass ceilings to the language, but it depends how animated I get.

Jeff: 8:46

But the point is that there is some again empirical data with some older dwellings to show that their airtightness results of sort of two and three before anything's been done to them. So you kind of cast your mind's eye to airtightness results of sort of two and three before, uh, before anything's been done to them.

Simon: 9:05

So you're you, you kind of cast your mind's eye to airtightness, because it's a good litmus test of a technical component yeah, of a building that has been asked of an industry over nearly 20 years and we have empirical evidence of how that industry has reacted to an ask. Basically, I mean, what I was interested in is, when I asked that question to you, that your immediate recall was that, yes, we've come a long way and you went back to 2003 as your starting point. Why was that?

Jeff: 9:43

Because it was a total shit show back then, basically.

Simon: 9:46

Yeah, so it was based on the shit show that was the Irish construction sector back.

Jeff: 9:50

just yeah we built 90,000 homes in 2006. The historic average in Ireland is 25,000 a year, and you don't get up to that level of output without sacrificing some things along the way, such as quality.

Simon: 10:05

Yeah, like paying attention to the basics.

Jeff: 10:08

Yeah, or building houses where they would be of any use to people who might want to live in them, for instance you know, housing estates in the middle of bogs and whatnot you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Simon: 10:18

So there's not a turn in a regulation from 2003 or something specific. It was just really you have a mind's eye of what, a representative of what the industry looked like or felt like in 2003, and it's 20 years ago, so it's a good. It's a kind of a two decades time frame?

Simon: 10:35

yeah, um, but your gut feeling is, from a sustainability perspective as a whole, we've come a long way. Yeah, is that a sum of lots of component parts or is this? Is this something tangible that that says this is the progress over 20 years? Or is it just a collection of things like air tightness, use of materials, understanding of the lexicon? Like is it?

Jeff: 11:02

some messy parts. It's messy like there's lots of different um signs of it, um, and there's, um, there's. You know, we don't live in a kind of a an autocratic regime where it's possible for a government to just do something by diktat and everybody has to do it. Um, yeah, you know. And so, consequently, um, and we live in a country where, I remember, this I think, sums up some of the messiness in Ireland.

Jeff: 11:30

I've done a lot of lobbying over the years, unpaid lobbying for the most part. And when the Greens and Fianna Fáil were in government the first time 2007 to 2011, I chaired their policy committee on buildings. Time 2007 to 2011,. I chaired their policy committee on buildings. It was a sort of black ops policy committee on buildings to kind of advise. I'm making this sound much more exciting than it was to advise John Gormley when he was Minister for the Environment on changes to building regulations and you can get quite disenfranchised and think that you know politics, you can't influence things, but actually you can. In a small country like ireland, sometimes it's possible and that was one of those chances.

Jeff: 12:08

So in 2009, uh, the greens and finna foil renewed their vows, um, and I threw some ideas forward for the renewed program for government, uh, two of which got in, one of which got in literally verbatim, it was like a copy and paste job.

Jeff: 12:24

So it was one of those, probably one of which got in literally verbatim, it was like a copy and paste job, so it was one of those, probably one of my first experiences of there being no grownups in charge, if people are actually listening to me.

Jeff: 12:30

You know, and that was a proposal to get the building energy rating, you know, or EPC as it is in the UK, which had come in by that point, just come in. It occurred to me that it would be a great idea to include that in the advertising literature for dwellings and on for sale signs and so that you know. It's one thing that if you're looking to purchase a home that you see the rating, but if you can't walk out the door without seeing you know, you go to work in the morning and you see your neighbor in the adjoining semi-D has an F-rated house. It's going to make you think and spread general awareness. But after this got through, and although that particular requirement the advertising on signage after it went through consultation, the property industry objected to it on the basis that it would add too much to the cost of signs.

Jeff: 13:33

Can't do climate change Sorry, kids can't save the world because stickers. So when the rest of it came through, I went on to the myhomeie and daftie the main property websites in Ireland to look at where we were at in terms of implementation, and one of the sites, like myhome, had set up the system so that you could take the ratings. Daft hadn't even done that yet, but myhome had, like 15% or 10% or so, to begin with, had the ratings. So I went to the official I won't say his name in the department who was responsible for implementing this and I said you know what's the crack? This is meant to be in and enforced now, and yet it's clearly not. And his response was Geoff, you have to remember, in Ireland we have a very culturally relaxed attitude to the law, so that is something I mean. It's a thank you very much, simon, for your colonial heritage in the past. I have a bit on my side to be fair, but I think there might be a residue of British rule there, railing against the rule of law. I don't know, but that is something in the background that we have to deal with in Ireland. Two times.

Jeff: 14:47

You can still see a lot of people in the industry are a bit lax at times about things that they're meant to be doing, and people in the self-built community. While the quality tends to be pretty good generally in terms of because people are more invested in the end product, there's still a lot of disregard for things that people don't feel that will add value. You know so there's that, and I suppose the thing that would worry me now still is that, like there's a lot of established I think quite wrong-headed but well-intentioned convention and concepts of what a green building should be and what a sustainable building is which needs to be exploded, and some of it could be quite stubborn. I mean, if we talk about ventilation, you know the old tropes about stack ventilation will be a good example of that. You know Passive solar design. You know like maximizing passive solar, which is a really dangerous thing to do. Optimizing is a better word, but you know so.

Jeff: 15:55

You know, when we have in the industry we've had a lot of sort of unimpeachable, I'd say, authority figures in certain positions, even including in, say, the schools of architecture and so on.

Jeff: 16:09

It's changing, to be fair Now, who've been trotting out a lot of the same kinds of positions and arguments for a long time and not necessarily subjecting their beliefs and manifestos or whatever, or their hypotheses to the scrutiny of evidence. You know, like monitoring and whether it's the hard stuff, the hard data kind of monitoring in terms of using technology intelligently, you know, and having the framework to kind of actually not just throw kit into it but actually understand what you're getting with. It is one thing. And then the other part, talking to the great unwashed, actually sitting down and talking to people and having a framework to do that, to engage with people, understand what works for them or what doesn't work for them, um and uh and uh, adjusting your, uh, your theories and your advice accordingly yeah, I suppose the reason I'm interested in this subject matter is because I look at where the ventilation and air quality conversation is at the moment.

Simon: 17:14

Still right that we don't. There isn't really a lexicon for it yet out within the sector, within the construction and industry, within communities and within the great unwashed, as you say, that even within government circles there's a scientific understanding that this is important and some links to potentially bad outcomes, particularly health.

Simon: 17:45

So we know we've got to do something about it. And we seem to be at that point a bit like we were with sustainability at the turn of the millennium where you're getting some pioneers, you're getting some people starting to understand some of the science, apply it in buildings, start to monitor it and so on, but as of today, we don't have a standard or regulation for indoor air quality anywhere. Right, we're kind of there, a bit like we were in 2000.

Jeff: 18:13

But it's really hard. Yeah, there's a lot of greenwashing.

Simon: 18:17

You know there's a lot of we care about air quality and manifestos and documents of housing providers and organizations and so on. So it really is analogous to me to kind of 15, 20 years ago in sustainability and one of the things that's been clear with sustainability. I created this mental picture for an organization I was working with maybe 10 or 15 years ago where I said that it's a bit like a tidal wave, a tsunami, that what's happened with sustainability is that the sea started to go out and people were going oh look at this, there's something going on here, we might need to do something. And slowly but surely the first wave came and then the second wave came and then the third, and unless you're moving in the right direction, you're never going to outrun this stuff. Eventually you're going to get overrun by waves. And if you think kind of where we are with sustainability now, you've got eu taxonomy, energy performance of building, directives, levels, frameworks, uh, non-financial reporting you know the global, it's true you know there's, you've got a lexicon developing on the ground.

Simon: 19:24

You've got products and materials that are capable of delivering this. Now don't get me wrong. We'll come on to how far we've got to go with things like embodied carbon and scope, three emissions and so on, but you get a real sense that just year after year after year, wave after wave after wave has just washed over the sector.

Simon: 19:42

Yeah, and we're at this point now where, unless you're one of those companies moving in the right direction, you're going to run out of ground. So, like you've seen the industry turn and start to run inland a little bit right, yeah we're just not there in air quality.

Simon: 19:57

and that's what's fascinating for me is that sustainability, air quality is complex, you're right, but only know. If you remember back around that period, the kind of the natural step type organisations you know they were describing the same thing. They were saying, look, sustainability is complicated, but we've all got to agree on the basic principles that there's diminishing resources and increasing demand and somehow we've got to remember that funnel kind of idea.

Jeff: 20:22

Yeah, exactly.

Simon: 20:23

We've all got to kind of move in the right direction if we're going to win here.

Jeff: 20:26

Well, this is it. So, while we have made progress in sustainability, there's a difference between kind of spreadsheet progress and actual progress. I don't want to be too pejorative because there's great work going on, but there's a real risk, with a lot of the progress that we have achieved, that it's the risk of accountancy, sleight of hand and people may be getting the right results for an annual report but not subjecting it to the scrutiny of actual performance, but not subjecting it to the scrutiny of actual performance and sustainability in the round, like if a building doesn't work, it's not a sustainable building. If you've got poor indoor air quality, then the building isn't working, and that could manifest itself either in the consequence of damage to the building interstitially, as you know, or surface condensation or whatever, and or to the building interstitially, as you know, or surface condensation or whatever and or to the health and comfort and well-being of the occupants. So unless those facets are addressed, I mean one of the things that I would be concerned about if I look at, say, life cycle assessment and embodied carbon we can come onto this later is that while you can look at the projected emissions the emissions that you can know now by the point the building's built and the projected emissions across the lifespan of the building. But unless you have a really, really good handle on the quality of the building and how it's going to be used by the people occupying it, you don't know, you can't say with much confidence how well it's going to last, how long it's going to take for you know certain components that went into it to be replaced, because all those things factor into your calculation. You know the for for uh finishes, and for heating uh equipment and ventilation systems and so on, um, so, uh.

Jeff: 22:33

We've got to the point now where I feel like, um, and this will be good for the for the whole kind of air quality sector too, you're not going to be able to spoof it anymore.

Jeff: 22:45

There's going to be a need to, to, to, to. I feel and hope, perhaps delusionally, that that that you know in that regard, something like whole life carbon could be the like Trojan horse that could get a lot of other stuff in. But it hinges on the quality of the robustness of how we set the targets for that, to make sure that you don't allow. I mean, look, you know the first Sterling Prize winning project which is built what 25 years ago is apparently going to be demolished. You know, I mean, you know this is the problem that you're facing. There's broader cultural issues there. You know informing all of that, and you know there's lots of buildings that get torn down for a bunch of different reasons, but some of it is down to, you know, the utility of the building, how useful it is to people and then the quality of it. So we need to tackle these things because we're moving into very different kind of waters now.

Simon: 23:44

Yeah, and you know I cast my mind back to the early parts of kind of 2000s 2010s, like the industry was really wrapping its head around quite progressive regulation changes here that were meaning they were having to build very different buildings to what they were building before the crash. Yeah, so they were paying a bit more attention and trying to understand what airtightness detailing meant, what final energy use of the building meant. You know the the basic headline numbers, stuff. Yeah, um, and it's kind of done that I mean the industry now to a degree is building manifestly fairly airtight homes that are pretty energy efficient. Yeah, by and large, you're going to be difficult to. It's going to be difficult to get into fuel poverty in the majority of modern buildings. They're low enough energy that, largely speaking, heating isn't the problem right and I live in one of them.

Simon: 24:44

I'm renting, yeah right, apartment like that yeah, so we have come a long way. It's very, very true, um, but that was always the window dressing in sustainability, wasn't it the the primary energy use of a building?

Simon: 24:58

we've always I'd say it's more than the window dressing, but yeah yeah, maybe I'm being unfair, but it's that that the grown-up conversation comes when you start having to think about the materials you're using, the, the life cycle of products, the embodied carbon, the localization of construction and materials all of the stuff that we know, because at the end of the day, I can't remember what the stats were, but the stats for the use of materials worldwide from construction is just eye-watering, like it almost makes the primary energy use of the building look inconsequential. It's not, and particularly in Europe, where a large part of our stock is existing anyway. Yeah, yeah, but I think something like 90% the footprint of the built environment in non-European countries is going to double by 2050. I mean, that's just astonishing.

Jeff: 25:59

Like double, literally double in the space of 20 years, and we're already at a point where I think it was the last year a couple of years ago where the total, the weight, I think, of man-made substances, is now greater than the weight of biomass. That's right, yes.

Simon: 26:19

It's bonkers.

Jeff: 26:21

It is.

Simon: 26:22

So we do have to be careful when we're talking about embodied carbon and keeping buildings the perspective, the global perspective of the use of materials. But it's true, particularly in this part of the world, that what is it? The majority of the buildings, 90 of the buildings that are going to be standing in 26 2050, yeah, so we've got a a duty to understand how to deal with this existing infrastructure, and I think it's broader than that too, actually because it's interesting.

Jeff: 26:51

So I'll be close to people like Andy Simmons, the former CEO of the AECB, who's got this nascent cool buildings program that he's working on in the Global South, in Tanzania I thought it was pronounced Tanzania, but apparently it's Tanzania. In Tanzania I thought it was pronounced Tanzania, but apparently it's Tanzania and looking at its application in, I think, pakistan and maybe Afghanistan as well, I think certainly Pakistan. But there are some really interesting points here, because you've got a country like, say, tanzania, where the economy is growing very quickly and where people want, quite rightly, the things that, uh, that they see uh people in I hate these terms, but the global north um have had, have enjoyed, or you know, um, or at least this this don't get me wrong there's been an awful lot of actual benefits for people you know more. Look at wealth, mortality rates and so on. You know all all these kinds of things in wealthy countries over the last century or so. But there's a risk. There's a very real risk of people in those countries, as they seek to build at an enormous kind of scale, that they repeat a lot of the mistakes that we have made rather than circumventing them and finding better ways of building that. For instance, there's a new research in the States published in the last couple of weeks talking about how unhappy car dependency makes people. So all that kind of stuff Not designing your settlements around, around the motor car, for instance, would be a good starting point, whether it's for, you know, sustainability or, frankly, air quality too, you know, um.

Jeff: 28:36

So there's there's broader kind of conversations that need to be had, and part of that, what it comes down to, too, is it's like it's like you need a post-American dream or something you know, like you need another narrative, another meta-narrative to latch on to, to build to, rather than telling people you can't do this, you know, because we can't afford to. From the planetary perspective, there's got to be a positive narrative. To learn from the if I can, the who is it again? Louis Bernays, the father of modern advertising and PR, you know. Learn from the people who, from those kinds of concepts that sold people into, frankly, unsustainable lifestyles. Learn from that and apply it to the kind of decisions that we need to take, because a lot of the things that we're talking about doing I mean, who doesn't want to live in a home that's always comfortably warm and not too hot, not too cold, who doesn't want you know, want fresh air all of the time.

Jeff: 29:45

Who doesn't want nature, outside birdsong and all that kind of stuff and who doesn't want to be spending time, more time with your family, less time. Michael Douglas, falling down style, stuck in traffic.

Simon: 30:01

Yeah, or decoupled from rising and falling fuel costs and things because all these kinds of energy yeah, yeah, no, I get that completely.

Simon: 30:09

It's, uh, it's very similar in ventilation and air quality, the I think douglas booker points it out when he's talking about environmental justice and air quality justice that you've got to be very careful when you're framing the challenge, that you're not framing a risk that people don't have agency to change, because there's nothing more disempowering than knowing something's not good for you and not being able to do anything about it. And sustainability has learned that it's gone down those dead ends where fear mongering and stuff we know just doesn't resonate. You've got to sell the upside the benefit of these buildings because, as you point to a lot of this, actually this question is going to ask you. You mentioned quality, right?

Simon: 30:54

yeah and quality so has been so intertwined with sustainability, and I'm wondering if part of that is because when you introduce a new concept or something that requires more technical diligence, let's say, people tend to apply themselves very carefully, and I wonder if we'll lose that quality and sustainability as it massificates in the industry, where people just think they know how to do it now and they stop paying the attention. Because we saw that, didn't we? We? When the regulations change, right, yeah, we saw people suddenly paying attention to things like is this building going to be compliant with ventilation and air tightness regulations and actually being quite diligent, whereas you don't get.

Simon: 31:37

You get the sense that that's relaxed a little bit now. People aren't paying, there isn't the scrutiny on it that there was five or ten years ago. Um, I wonder if there's an element of that within sustainability, that what drives that quality narrative? I mean we'll come on to passive house, yeah, later, but in sustainability in general, where we've seen that level of quality rise here, particularly in the irish large house builder market, over the last few years.

Simon: 32:05

Is that because it got difficult and they had to pay attention? I wonder. Yes, or is something fundamentally changed underlying that?

Jeff: 32:13

no, it's fundamentally uh, it's, uh. It's things like the 2019, the iteration of part l and part f of the building regulations, um and uh and the requirements that that broaden and, I suppose, b car, the Control Amendment Regulations that we had here in 2013, which assigned so for your UK and non-Irish audience. We have a strange setup in Ireland whereby we don't really have much in the way of local authority building control or any other kind of independent building control. There are moves afoot to kind of change that and great work being done by the National Building Control Authority in this regard. But fundamentally our system is reliant on an architect, engineer, surveyor certifying that the building complies with building regulations and them being on the hook in the event of something going wrong with the building, them being on the hook in the event of something going wrong with the building. So when that change came in, I think you know, while that's got its own problems as a system, it does put a bit of the fear of God into, hopefully, the assigned certifier as a useful kind of a tool to kind of to stop bad things from happening. You'll still find, because the regulations are complex and in some cases almost seemingly contradictory, I suppose, and because you've got a, you know you also have developers having a lot of influence on the market too. So you'll have certain situations where it is still possible not to comply with building regulations. It's also, if you take, in Ireland, with our Part L of the building regulations. So the tool that's used to determine compliance with our Part L, which is the energy performance, as you know, part of the building regulations that tool is also used to generate a building energy rating which you're required to have prior to sell a house or prior to occupancy. But if a building is non-compliant with Part L, it's found to be non-compliant from those calculations.

Jeff: 34:17

The assessor is required to notify their client under the existing statute of that non-compliance and that's it right. The building control authority doesn't get that information. And if your client is a developer, for instance, and suppose your developer then sells that whole scheme turnkey to a local authority or housing association, you are, as an assessor, not entitled to tell them. You are, as an assessor, not entitled to tell them. They're none the wiser. They could be being sold a home that's clearly non-compliant with. That's clear evidence that it's non-compliant with building regulations and they don't have access to that. But yes to your question. There are those risks of people relaxing a wee bit. I think the flip side to that is that we are starting to see, because of new drivers, like the taxonomy, like the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, we're starting to see the biggest developers starting to do things that I never expected to see them doing and really seriously trying to engage and not just to make a token effort. Cairn Homes would be the kind of case in point with their Passive House move recently.

Simon: 35:34

Yeah, as one CEO told me once, you know, up until a few years ago, a vanilla sustainability report cut it from an accessing green finance perspective. Not anymore.

Jeff: 35:47

Yeah, we don't we don't necessarily know that that's always going to be the case, because these things, you know, they're dynamic, um, and look at the direction europe is going in at the moment. We don't know what, politically, uh, um, is going to happen. What I take comfort from is that the finance world seems to have moved and it seems to be seeking to do something, you know it's like it feels like.

Jeff: 36:10

It's such a big sector you know, behemoth that once finance moves it doesn't feel like it's going to move back. Maybe that's delusional, I don't know, but the pressure now that the likes of the Cairns are coming under to report on their environmental impacts and their social impacts and, of course, air quality we come into I am is how an organization like Cairn so since we started the consultancy business that I do, this is a strategy and communications consultancy Cairn would be one of the companies that we would have worked with, and I've just been amazed by the attitude that I've. You know I've been poking around in the company and I haven't found where the bodies are buried. You know they've been poking around in the company and I haven't found where the bodies are buried. You know they're doing good work. They really seem to be sickeningly positive and committed to trying to do good things, and my well-worn kind of preconceived notions about house builders don't apply in that case at least. So it's amazing to see.

Simon: 37:28

Yeah, and you wonder why that's the case? Because there's no two ways about it. The big house building game is a numbers game. It's a fine margin. Big numbers project, and these guys are not sentimental, but they're not allergic to doing bad things. No, big numbers project and these guys are not sentimental, you know, but they're not allergic to doing bad things.

Jeff: 37:50

They're not allergic to doing good things, they're certainly not allergic to doing bad things. But you know, they're not bad actors who are, I would say, for the most part, talking more generally, who are trying, who are in business to try and screw, screw people's lives. So you know, yes, their priority may be the bottom line, but the senses, with the likes of Cairn, I think there are values within that company that are probably, you know, informing how they're approaching things, but there is still a general sense that they recognize that they'll have a better product at the end of this. Now, it kind of depends. You know, the developers bigger developers, I suppose, have to think about the longer term sort of cycles and there's no guarantee that a project that's been planned now, you know, obviously things look good in the Irish market, you know, in the near term, but there's no guarantee that you're necessarily going to be able to that it'll be as easy to sell a building in five years time, you know, by the time your project is being sold.

Simon: 39:05

But think about where the construction industry has been over the last few years, where these ideas have obviously fermented. You know, this isn't something that the likes of Cairn Homes have suddenly come up with in the last 12 months right.

Simon: 39:16

So they've arrived here through a period of time of almost unprecedented material costs, unprecedented fluctuations in fuel prices and energy prices. Yeah, um, it's been a very unstable period of time for construction professionals and organizations. Margins have been absolutely obliterated in many cases. Yes, particularly in ireland and also in the uk, there's this underlying demand for housing. So you know, if you build it, it will sell largely you know somebody's going to buy it, whether it's so.

Simon: 39:50

You know we've had the approved housing bodies buying up whole chunks of those, those units as well. So there's definitely an underlying green light there driving this. But it but it's come for a period of time of unprecedented uncertainty in a lot of other ways and yet still seems to be here, and I think part of that is this tsunami thing You've got. You know we're talking about a 20-year time frame right in our conversation. That's a generation, that there's a new generation coming up through these construction firms in senior management positions yeah that weren't there 20 years ago.

Simon: 40:24

They were a very different breed. I always remember going into that. You know sorry cif for this, but the construction industry federation. You went into the construction federation boardrooms 15, 20 years. It's probably still the same actually, but it was oak paneled. You kind of had this perception of old guys in gray suits smoking pipes in a paneled boardroom type era. They were the board 20 years ago. You look at the makeup of the boards of these organizations now it's another generation, literally, and give it another 10 years, it's a gen z is going to be in those positions like.

Jeff: 41:02

It's true, and they're having to.

Jeff: 41:03

Some of those organizations are some of the ones that are, uh, slowest to change positions, but they're starting to um uh, when we rebranded the magazine because it was originally called construct ireland uh, with a very small for a sustainable future subheading 2003 was you know, you had to kind of try and smuggle the vegetables of sustainability into the mouths of the builders hidden under layers of bad things, you know, like making grated carrot for my children and a pizza hidden under the cheese, you know.

Jeff: 41:35

So we had to be quite stealthy back then.

Jeff: 41:37

But when we did that change to Pacifist Plus in 2012, lenny Antonelli, one of the journalists who worked with us for many years and still does on a freelance basis, he did a review of changes to the building regulations in Ireland and the Construction Industry Federation has been objecting to building regulations, as he found looking through the records since beforeing to building regulations, as he finds, looking through the records since before there were building regulations.

Jeff: 42:02

So you know there were object. He found an article from 1978 where the then managing director so what the position was back then of the CIF, thomas Reynolds the late Thomas Reynolds argued against changes introducing building regulations because the first talk around building regulations came after the oil crises of the 70s On the basis adding insulation to homes because it would increase house prices, and they've trottered out that argument ever since, and they didn't need to do it because builders were doing it anyway. So there you go. So look, it is changing, and what I'm really interested to see now is this top-down dynamic of the very biggest developers starting to do quite radical things, not just in terms of Passive House, but in terms of, you know, biodiversity.

Jeff: 42:57

Yeah, community building all this kind of stuff, all this kind of stuff, yeah, what effect that has on these institutions. You know like it must be quite unsettling for people who are used to saying no and objecting. And, in fairness, these organisations are changing, you know, so we can't assume that their position will always be no, but to see what impact it will have on them when, when, uh, the, the biggest of the big are changing. It's the next level down that you'd worry about. It's the, um, the, the, the medium to smaller house builder. They're, they're, uh, in in that case, like there's some great builders, don't get me wrong, but that's where it'll take a while longer for some of these broader sustainability targets and quality focus to hit through.

Simon: 43:46

I think you look at things like site safety ppe security, health and safety on sites. Construction's got a very rich history of adapting very quickly and very well to changes when it's put in front of them yeah because it's so process orientated.

Simon: 44:11

At the end of the day, it has a singular focus construction, that is, to build stuff, and and they, if, if you put a obstacle in the way, they, they figure out very efficiently how to work around that obstacle, you know. And so construction, like you know, is turned on a dime. It seems, time after time after time, and I think there's this fear sometimes that it yes, it is a very conservative sector because it's generally changed through iterations, over generations, because that's the best way to be safe, because very tim sharp was talking to me about this on the podcast very few feedback loops. In construction we don't do a lot of post-occupancy stuff. It's one of those sectors that's very big but does almost zero follow-up, understands almost nothing about the long-term performance and functionality of its product build it and cut and run.

Jeff: 45:05

Yeah and run away and hope that, hope that uh change your phone numbers and hope that no one can.

Simon: 45:10

Yeah but I think, I think that focus of esg and you know requirements of empirical evidence of performance of space and stuff is changing all of that slowly. They recognise they are going to be held accountable for this product beyond the sale.

Jeff: 45:26

That's part of what drove Passive House in Cairn and it's what attracted us to Passive House in the first place back in 2011-12, when we were looking at rebranding. So Stephen Lachey, the head of sustainable construction in Cairn, talks about the fact that when they report on emissions across the various scopes that they have to report on as a big PLC, they one of the things they have to. So scope three emissions includes because there's various scopes, as you'll know. Scope three emissions includes because there's various scopes. As you'll know, scope 3 specifically is all emissions upstream and downstream of the buildings that they build. So that means upstream emissions would include all of the emissions embodied in the materials and in the construction process of the buildings, and downstream is the operational energy use related emissions, and they're factoring in, when they do their annual reporting, 50 years worth of projected operational energy emissions, energy related emissions for heating and cooling and so on buildings 50 years after the point that they've handed them over and when they were building to the nearly zero energy building standard the current building regulations that we have in Ireland. The research that Cairn were referencing indicated, I think, a 39% performance gap that notionally A2 rated homes were performing more like A3s or B1s, they were using 39% more energy than predicted and we've seen loads of evidence of this that there tends to be for most dwellings in an Irish context, uk context, similar F4G rated homes tend to use a lot less energy than predicted.

Jeff: 47:24

Because people suffer the discomfort, or maybe because it's also a risk in some cases that the rating system is inaccurate. There's certain benefits of some older buildings that may not be adequately recognized in the tool, but a large part of it will be people just underheating buildings or under-ventilating them and so on. And then with new homes, people taking back the amenity of a warmer home by cranking up the heating, having higher expectations of it. There's all of that stuff that comes into it. Or in some cases, certainly with you know, a lot of the B and C rated homes out there and some even of the A's. They might have a good rating but the actual quality of what was built may not reflect that. So there's all of that. Or there could be flaws in the calculation methodology. There could be, you know, conceptual flaws in the whole approach. So what attracted them to Passive House was the evidence from postdocs, because loads of the people involved in Passive House have been green building nerds.

Jeff: 48:23

Of course over the last 30 years, and they tend to be you know, if they can tell you they love you with a graph, they will. And they tend to be the kind of people who are monitoring buildings very carefully. And consequently, we have like it's not a magic bullet Passive House. Um, there's still things that can go. You know that you can get wrong with it. Um, you can still, you know, uh, misuse them and so on, um, um, but uh, objectively, I think, when you look at, at, uh, at how buildings actually perform, it's the it's, it's the standard that, on a globally has has, uh, uh, globally is a clear standout in terms of buildings that actually work. So they moved to Passive House because they recognized that, from a reporting perspective, they really didn't have to worry about the performance gap when they built the Passive House. And here's the other thing that's really fascinating about it the way the building regulations have changed and to a slightly lesser extent in the UK, but it's been moving in this direction too.

Jeff: 49:23

A lot of the extra cost that you have to factor in in terms of construction cost is already there. So you know, in the case of Cairn, they, for instance, they're not increasing the cost of the first developments they're building for their social network clients at all. I think there has been a cost uplift. But they're learning as well on. You know this is their first project, the processes they have to learn to kind of, you know, in terms of upskilling their staff and finding the ways to value engineer in the true sense of the word, not kind of cutting the arse out of the project and, you know, finding ways around it. Those kind of processes now will help them, I think you know, even drive costs down further. But it's got to a stage now where they can offer the product. You know the schemes of fuel poverty give them homes that should benefit their families enormously for decades.

Simon: 50:46

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Simon: 52:21

Links are in the show notes, at air quality mattersnet and, of course, at erico spelt. A e r e c o dot, co dot, uk. Now back to the show. I mean, this might be a tough question to answer for you, but if you had the, the levers of power back in 2003, knowing what you know now, knowing what's shifted the dials over the last two decades, where would you have focused your resources back then? Like, looking back where you've got a bit of a clusterfuck of a construction sector, yeah, um, we'll keep that one in as well. A bit of a clusterfuck of a construction twice yeah we.

Simon: 53:04

We know roughly what we want to do but we know, we still don't know exactly what yet, but we know the direction of travel. There isn't the lexicon and the language yet we don't have the the measuring tools and regulation requirements that we have now. You, basically it's a green canvas of 2003. From a sustainability perspective, how would you have moved faster or more sustainably than we have done, say if, if you knowing what you know now?

Jeff: 53:38

that's a very interesting so 2003. I mean, it was hard to get anyone to listen to anything then because, uh, the, you know, the, the frenzy was so, and that's part of the problem now as well yeah, that's why I asked you that, because I could have said 2014 and the reason everybody listened and changed in 2014, because we just weren't building houses choice.

Simon: 53:57

I mean yeah, it was a great opportunity.

Jeff: 53:59

So when we got in into that, when we listened, when we were saying I'm non-partisan as much as I tend to vote for the Greens and hold them in very high regard we kind of always tried to be non-partisan. But when I chaired their policy committee in buildings, when they got in, then we brought in 40% energy reductions for new homes and I worked on that and mandatory renewables and mandatory air tightness testing in 2007 and then ran up to 60% reductions in 2011 and then a further 10% NZEB was a further 10% production. On that. I think what I'd say about that was that we achieved that in part through bloody mindedness, in part because the construction industry was too busy fighting its own bankruptcy and insolvency to lobby against it much. I think I'd tell the officials to be bold. Lobby against it much. I think I'd tell the officials to be bold. The pissing and moaning that you'll get from industry will only tend to last as long as the idea is a proposal.

Simon: 55:13

Once you ram it through, people just fucking suck it up, why they think they can change the direction of the shit. They'll fight the moment they realise it's gone through, they'll adapt.

Jeff: 55:24

Exactly, and some of that's like almost muscle memory that they'll just keep on objecting the way that they have institutionally done forever. So I mean there may be an argument for trying to work on people and win hearts and minds. I think I would like knowing what I know now. I would like, I wish that we had been a bit more diligent in looking at evidence-based approaches and, so much as possible, I wish I'd been paying more attention to pacifier, frankly, even back then and now again, I think so. Evidence-based approaches, whether it's looking at post occupancy evaluation in the context of actual measured you know, whether it's temperature or particulates or CO2 or whatever it is that you're looking at. Looking at that and accepting that, just how would you put this? Forget about the rail politic for a second and just just just try and focus on doing things right, um and uh, and. And you'll find that if you have the courage or convictions about that, um, that um, the industry will just get on with it. I think so. I mean the other thing. I think that we need to get much better at and this is probably links to the consultancy too um, to work is, um, is, is communication, um and uh, uh, um, kind of trying to depoliticize this stuff. Um, because you know we are in the middle of um, a kind of increase increasingly kind of polarized uh environment, increasingly polarized environment politically. And the idea that a heat pump, for instance, something as boring and important but boring as a heat pump, can be part of the culture war, is just absurd. So we need to find ways to depoliticize these subjects and part of that is through focusing on story. Part of that is through simpl on story. Part of that is through, you know, simplifying the language that we use and being consistent with it.

Jeff: 57:47

I know when Jay Stewart was the chair of the Building Regs Advisory Body in Ireland, the last chair of that before Phil Hogan, big Phil and his wisdom decided to call it and in fact the last chair of that before Phil Hogan, big Phil in his wisdom, decided to call it. And in fact that's something the department absolutely should do is reinstate the Billingriggs advisory body because I think it had a budget of 10 grand a year, that kind of order, and yet as far as Phil was concerned, that was one quango gone. So when he was in charge of, when he was the chair of the building rights advisory body, he was trying to get this campaign for plain English into the building regulations. You know, we don't have.

Jeff: 58:27

In fairness to the officials in these government departments, they tend to be under-resourced, they tend not to be enough officials, they tend not to be. You know, there's a few people carrying a lot of burden in terms of trying to get quite, really, quite complicated changes through. But so I understand that. But you can't, you know, if you just produce a regulation and a guidance document or an approved document and leave it, you publish it and leave it, that the industry then therefore has to meet it, without thinking about how the industry works, how designers and tradespeople and so on, actually how they work, how they consume information even, and how are you going to get them to actually understand this and understand what you're trying to achieve? I think that part of it is essential and if we want good achieve, I think that part of it is essential. And if we want good outcomes, I think that level of understanding so to try and summarise the original question I was asking you because we always digress.

Simon: 59:31

No, not really. I mean what you're effectively saying is be bold with standards, because as much as industry whether that's a ventilation industry or a construction industry or whatever will moan and obfuscate and kick the can down the road the moment it crosses the line, they turn on a dime. We've seen it over and over and over again. So have some confidence in the direction of travel was one thing you'd have changed. Yeah. Depoliticising it as much as possible, yeah, and finding ways to better communicate and understand how people understand some of these things, because you've got two sides of a coin. Really, you have what Passive House did very well was put a number on good. Yeah, right, a simple number or a simple set of numbers, that even a rudimentary understanding of building physics and I'm being grand with the term physics here, but even a rudimentary understanding of building physics and I'm being grand with the term physics here but even a rudimentary understanding of numbers. You kind of got what they were talking about right. Were there watts per metre, squares per annum and all this stuff yeah yeah.

Simon: 1:00:50

So you set a threshold, you set a benchmark. So if you weren't doing that, you were somehow sub that right. You created a narrative that this is your target folks. You define good for people in a way that's understandable and, like you say, find the champions and the people that actually look at the performance of the buildings and objectively say we are closing this performance gap.

Simon: 1:01:16

But the other part of that is the storytelling, which is a very long way away from those numbers, because yeah you've got to frame this in a way that most people understand and absorb information and 99.99 of the people you've got to steer yeah are never truly going to understand what they don't need a square meter per annum.

Jeff: 1:01:33

They do not need to. Yeah, I mean, you know in the same way that you. You know when, when you buy a car, you don't need a degree in. You know whatever kind of advanced mechanical engineering you would need to manufacture a car, you know, or to design it. I think this comes back to the depoliticization too. If you focus on, you try to give people a sense of how it could be and that could be the end result of the building from an occupant's perspective, that could be the experience for the industry.

Jeff: 1:02:14

Even this is part of the work that we've been starting to do with Cairn is stakeholder engagement, trying to understand. We're dealing in an industry where, which is the construction industry, has had a pretty bad reputation in a bunch of different ways. That trope of the cowboy hairy ared builder is stubborn, you know, and that, in turn, you know. So the culture of the that informs the culture of the industry. It makes it harder to broaden the pool of people coming into the industry, which feeds into exacerbating the housing crisis and so on. Right. So, if you can, construction now what we're having to do in terms of sustainability and building physics. I'm glad that you mentioned that as a term. It's a million miles away from the perception of what construction is that many people have. Construction now, sustainable building, construction now, sustainable building is really a STEM subject. So from a kid's perspective or from people who are looking at exciting, dynamic careers that are part of the climate fight and that are helping to benefit local communities and improve people's lives, this is a great opportunity.

Jeff: 1:03:40

There's great prospects in the sector and there's, you know, there's a chance to. If you take the case of Cairn, like talking about the people working on sites, I've got many guys, unfortunately still on sites, unfortunately still on sites. They're not used to being praised for or having bars to aim for, like standards to aim for in terms of the quality of their work. An air tightness test is, as I said. It's an objective quality indicator. The kind of level of air tightness that you're required for pacifier to meet, for instance. You don't do that unless you're doing excellent workmanship and everyone involved in many, many facets of the building have to kind of be working together to achieve that. So one of the pitches that we are kind of putting forward for them is that if you're achieving this level, you're working on a world class building.

Simon: 1:04:37

Yeah, that kind of concept. This is, this is, this is high tech, this is deeply scientific, this is advanced engineering. Yeah, it may. It may turn into, ultimately, processes on site and somebody's still got to drill a hole or put something together. Yeah, but it's by design. This isn't, like you say, the hairy ass builder knocking, whacking holes in stuff and dust and shite everywhere. I mean you, you know these sites when you go on to them, that they're immaculate, they're full of processes and safety and you know quality control and they're they're a world away from where. I mean, we used to have this. I used to we call it sight bashing.

Simon: 1:05:18

When I first was a plumber, many, many years ago, there was a game when there was a big boom in london building apartments. We'd have a game where somebody would screw a small bit of two by two onto a random bedroom wall in an apartment block as we were building it and everybody knew what the game was. When the plot, when the plaster borders came along, they'd plasterboard over the bit of two. It's just randomly screwed at a at an angle on a wall and they'd plasterboard over it and then it would be painted over and then there'd be skirtings put up and the plumbing would be finished off and the game was to see how long it took for the site management to pick up something on a wall, because it was very easy to fix. You know somebody just had to pull it off and you know it was fixable. But it was a game and it was incredible how often it got to hand over to people buying apartments and questioning the estate agent.

Simon: 1:06:22

What's that detail on the in the middle of the bedroom wall number two, because nobody had ever even been in that room from a project management perspective, like that's where we've come from to something that's a completely different endeavour now. Where we've come from to something that's a completely different endeavor now.

Simon: 1:06:45

my concern is when we try to de-scienceify stuff and create narratives and stories yeah we can also then end up in the world of populism and and oversimplification, and that can slip into politicization really easily, that's true. So it's a fine line sometimes, actually, isn't it trying to present stuff in a way that appeals and more people can understand what the goals and objectives and the framing of a sustainable built environment is, without introducing tropes and narratives that can be shot down and picked up and create division. And that, I think, is a difficult one to tread, and I think that's one you've been very sensitive to over the years, because your magazine has been both a technical magazine yeah, yeah but also had to appeal to readers, for people to for it to be on a coffee table, not not an academic I know publication.

Simon: 1:07:49

No, we're not, and you've always trod that line between the technical and the presentation of and framing of.

Jeff: 1:07:55

I know and I always see of this and I always feel like we're kind of failing, but failing a bit better than we were in the past. Our magazine you still want to be pretty engaged in the subject to read it. For the most part we hope that it won't send you to sleep and that it won't be too painful. But even with oh God, do I have it here somewhere? I have a copy of the magazine. I won't even bother showing it now, but we have.

Jeff: 1:08:21

Even with the way we structure the magazine, it's like you start the mag with lighter content, like a pictorial feature, the big, the big picture where we have a nice looking, striking looking green building from somewhere in the world, and we tell the story through sort of expanded captions. That's the principle of how it's meant to work. You start with that and opinion pieces and then the case studies. And even within each case study and it nearly kills me every time we put a magazine together because it's a lot harder now than it was 20 years ago, because I know to kind of scrutinize things that I wouldn't have picked up on in the past A claim that an architect is making whatever that maybe isn't right, or an embodied carbon calculation I'll typically make the mistake of asking for the calculations and drilling down into them and seeing things that are wrong. So there's all that too. But even within the case studies we'll start it with. You know, we, many years ago, took the decision of taking all of the formula and stuff, all of the kilowatt hours per square meter per annum and stuff, and putting them in a panel at the end of the case study so that it's there in a standardized way for reference for people who do want it. Because ultimately, you know, because ultimately you know this magazine it's targeted at, you're trying to reach specifiers, you're trying to show them in great detail, because the detail matters in this. How to design, do is you? You focus wherever you can, um, the, the, the main article. Therefore it isn't cluttered up now with you. Values and air tightness, uh, measurements, for the most part, um, and you focus instead on the story.

Jeff: 1:10:10

Ideally, where possible, we try and wait until the building's been built for a while, um, so we get to talk to the occupants. I love like I can't actually take the readers of our magazine and drag them through a house, you know and get them to feel the temperatures and experience from a sensory perspective, whether it's the acoustic qualities or the temperatures or the air quality, all this kind of stuff with these buildings. So we try to kind of bring it to life as much as we can. It's hard at times but, um, you look for the little nuggets, the little anecdotes, the stories of like.

Jeff: 1:10:46

There was a retrofit in cork we featured a while ago where the, the family, had lived there pre-retrofit and they talked about how, um, you know, uh, the the difference now, how before the retrofit they had to microwave the Nutella to spread it for the kids, you know. Or Barry McCarran, the MD of Core Retrofit, now talking about his Enerfit, his Passive House retrofit and how his bald head, the back of it, would be frozen like a snowman and the face would be melting off while watching the telly because of this kind of balance between the heating system and in a freezing house. You know those kinds of stories where you kind of you know, and the experience of like getting up in, the experience of like getting up in the middle of the night and being a man of a certain age in a low energy building and not cursing, you know, as you try to cross the tiles to the toilet or whatever that kind of stuff is. It makes it real and I think it tells you a lot more than a graph ever would you know.

Simon: 1:11:57

Apart from the perpetual agony of getting a magazine to print yeah, which I know if it's pending on what time of the month or quarter I'm ringing you you're either in a state of absolute despair trying to get something across the line, or what relief that you've done so.

Jeff: 1:12:17

Usually despair.

Simon: 1:12:18

Usually despair. What still drives you to be producing this magazine? Because you've been doing it for how many years now it's?

Jeff: 1:12:25

22 years now. January 2003 was the first issue of the magazine.

Simon: 1:12:32

What makes a good magazine for you? Now, when you produce one and you go that's a doozy, right, that's a, that, that is a great addition so what still drives that passion for you?

Jeff: 1:12:45

I mean I have to be interested in what we're writing about, um, and I mean, you know like it's what we get when people are trying to um, when advertisers are trying to approach us, they ask us for things like, say, a features list. Um, now I'm dysfunctional and we've never done things the way that you're supposed to work things in a magazine. We've never had a features list, because it would bore the hell out of me to know that we're going to have a feature on piping in November. I don't want to know that, I don't want to read that magazine. So it's curiosity, I suppose, and it's trying to.

Jeff: 1:13:18

I'm one of those kind of annoying people who kind of probably wants to be right more than I want to be liked.

Jeff: 1:13:23

So, where you know, so even within Passive House, for instance, one of the things that I want to get into more now, we did an article a couple of years ago where we interviewed Max Sherman from Berkeley Laboratories and Ben Jones from the University of Nottingham on indoor air quality and cooking, and that was a real eye-opener for me looking at, you know, because we look at different sources of emissions in buildings, whether they're generated within the building or whether they're to do with outdoor pollution or whatever, and you try and kind of you try and address all of these things, but cooking is one that many people have really not given its proper dues and not paid proper attention to, and anyone who's ever burned a chili when cooking knows the impact that these things viscerally can have on you. So even Passive House as a standard, I don't think has done enough to address this as an issue. And, anecdotally, we hear good stories, we get good data on indoor air quality levels in Passive Houses, but I would be a little bit concerned about wanting to have more powerful extract. You asked me a question about what excites me, and I'm talking about, yeah, cooker, cooker hoods. Well, it's a good example.

Simon: 1:14:44

It's a something. Something sparks in you where you want to go down the rabbit hole. I think that's what the magazine does, is that you pick up a. You know you've done fantastic articles over the years on moisture risk in building fabric. You know, with j Joseph Little you've done amazing stuff with who's the lady in?

Jeff: 1:15:02

Kate de Selincourt, kate de.

Simon: 1:15:03

Selincourt on mould and health risks in housing. You pick up on something that's important to the sector, and there's both the story there but also a deeper dive than you'd see in in other than an academic publication into a subject matter to try and understand it and frame it for people, both objectively but but also tell the story well, that's it like.

Jeff: 1:15:29

I feel like, uh, a burden, you know, um, when, um, if, if our magazine is successful, um, it's going to inform how buildings are designed and constructed, and we have to.

Jeff: 1:15:48

Therefore, we have to be really careful to make sure that we're trying to give sound advice to people, that we're focusing on examples that people can. We probably should be doing more if I could do it without getting sued. I mean, the late great Neil May, I think actually when he was in town to meet you, said to me at one stage many years ago that we should publish more case studies on bad buildings, and we do need to find ways to do that actually without getting sued. I feel like showing the industry how to do it is something very gratifying in that, in terms of specific subjects, one that I'm a broken record about over the last few years, that I'm very worried about and that I think we need to take account of at the, we'll be overheating um, which I mean I guess I've just talked about to some of your um occasional kind of um co-conspirators, like ian maudit about heat can be a pollutant. I suppose you could say you know um so um.

Jeff: 1:16:56

There are real risks here. I saw um a listing the other day. I was sharing with a couple of colleagues a property listing on social media for a 1976 passive solar house in Kilmeconic in County Wicklow. Now it might be wonderful, but it's a greenhouse. It looks like a greenhouse to me and I'd love to see some post-occupancy data on it. But we see examples coming up now and there there are real risks of this with, with, uh, with um, people sort of half paying attention and doing low energy building and regulations that don't adequately capture this there's morbidity associated with this.

Simon: 1:17:32

I mean it's serious yeah like there are some big blocks of apartments around the place in london and elsewhere that are creating internal conditions, that there are serious acute outcomes associated with it, and like that's no joke. Yeah, but like I often talk about this with the, the damp and mold crisis, there are those extremes, but for every one of those extremes there are countless properties of people that are just getting by. Yeah, and overheating, high levels of humidity, damp and mold, exposure to high levels of pollutants all of these things. For every extreme case we've got a a chronic general poor condition for large swathes of the built environment. And overheating is a particular concern because you then start to get increased uh vocs and properties and changes in air chemistry and all sorts of stuff going on.

Jeff: 1:18:29

So let's look what's happened to rod stewart in the last few years. He, um, he, um, he apparently um owns a apartment in lansdowne place in dublin. Um and um, it's, they're the most expensive. Uh, included within that development is some of the most expensive apartments ever built in Ireland. And when you put rich people into buildings that are suffering some sort of suboptimal outcome, you've got problems because rich people won't put up with it. So it's been in the papers over the last couple of years that the residents are taking legal action against the developer over overheating. And you can see like they're airtight buildings. They're highly glazed and they've got a communal heating system delivering high temperature heat throughout the building. So that's their perfect conditions for an overheating problem. And Rod just, I don't know, he just looks like somebody unkindly put it, he's starting to look like your nan now. You know it looks like he's been melting, I think, there in the last few years.

Simon: 1:19:35

A slowly dehydrating raisin.

Jeff: 1:19:41

So I think you know those kinds of examples are helpful because, as you know, one of the problems, um, you feel like, um, like you can feel like the boy who cried wolf with some of the stuff at time. Um, one of the problems you face with a lot of these issues is that, um, generally, when there's a problem with the building, it's in no one's interest for it to go to court because the owner of the building, for instance, it'll devalue the property, the developer or the professionals, the design professionals involved, or whatever. They'll suffer reputational damage. So it always tends to get settled out of court as a general rule. There are exceptions and consequently the press tends not to pick up on it and therefore you're left to enthusiasts and nerds and people in the industry more involved in this stuff, hearing the horror stories from people doing expert witness work or whatever on buildings that are failing and trying to explain, without revealing specifics, the learnings yeah, exactly, but they're there.

Jeff: 1:20:49

Those problems are out there, whether it's mold, whether it's overheating, whether it's other kind of air quality issues or broader construction. I mean, jesus, I know one expert witness who's talked about are of broader construction. I mean, jesus, I know one expert witness who's talked about a low energy building, where you know a new low energy building dwelling in Ireland where I think the roof effectively sliding off the building because of thermal bridging issues. You know like it's extraordinary the problems you can run into.

Simon: 1:21:18

And I think some of those structural problems problems we do need to be able to figure out how to post occupancy, understand them and the failures and improve. But a lot of our built environment, an indoor environment and energy use of those buildings is now digitally captured. Yeah, and that's changing everything. You know that. You know. I know of certain developers that have had issues with their properties because homeowners with a rather prickly whatsapp group, oh yeah, suddenly started putting environmental sensors in their own property.

Simon: 1:21:55

So, rather than a developer now getting just complaints is being presented with swathes of data saying manifestly my building is not performing in an optimal way yeah, that changes the narrative of everything, and I think the onus is on organizations that are constructing the built environment to embrace that data now, because it not only helps them build better buildings, it provides that ongoing feedback loop. And if they don't do it, yeah, the trouble is somebody downstream is likely to do it, whether that's an echo or switchy or somebody yeah, yeah you might find data coming out about the performance of your building, whether you like it or not.

Jeff: 1:22:36

Yeah, so you might as well get on that train and start capturing it in some way and the other, the other risk you have here, not to defend the indefensible, but sometimes, when you have kind of vigilante monitoring happening, you know people who've got a bit of kit and are monitoring their own home.

Jeff: 1:23:01

There's not necessarily much in the way of proper kind of scientific process and scrutiny in their approach, so people can come to false conclusions. You can have a temperature sensor that's sat in direct sunlight, for instance you know getting the wrong results. A CO2 sensor in the wrong place, whatever it might be, you know. So while that stuff is great and democratizing this is is broadly a very good thing, um, I think what we really need, uh is you need a proper grown-up kind of quality assurance approach. You need systems in place, uh, to bake this stuff into buildings in in a way that, uh, you know. And again, the sustainability reporting can help in this regard, because for the big developers, if they can show more accurate data that they're capturing on how their buildings are performing, there are benefits for them.

Simon: 1:23:52

Yeah, and they get to understand more of the context of the building as well. You know, it's fine if a building has a 20% energy gap from what you expect it. If you have environmental monitors, they're saying well, that property is actually being held at 25 degrees average temperature for winter. You've got context you wouldn't have otherwise, yeah, you know. Or when you're trying to understand poor cop performance on a heat pump that you're getting feedback on understanding that these are the conditions that it's being used under or this is this is it, this is its performance comparatively to the other 40 heat pumps on the estate yeah all of a sudden you've got information that's valuable.

Simon: 1:24:30

So this is the world that's kind of coming. Is this this large data model world where we have a picture and a landscape of that built environment that we've probably never had the luxury of having before? I always laugh with the poor data thing. As most PR people know, if you're explaining, you're losing, so it doesn't matter whether the sensor was put in direct sunlight or not. The moment you're in that argument, it's not going anywhere. Good, generally speaking.

Jeff: 1:25:00

Yeah, you're right.

Simon: 1:25:04

So you've got to get like you say, you've got to get control of that process, that there's a uniformity in the capture of data, the labelling of data, the understanding of locations of sensors and so on, so that everybody's getting a fair landscape of the performance of that space.

Jeff: 1:25:17

And you need an understanding of the context too. I mean, there's a great example. We featured a deep retrofit project in Wexford a couple of years ago called College View. There's 12,. It was terraced single story units. They're tiny, like 30 square meter units for sheltered housing, and Shane Coakley at UCD did a post-occupancy evaluation study.

Jeff: 1:25:42

I connected him with Bill Bordas and Adrian Lehman, the guys behind the Usable Buildings Trust and the Building Use Studies methodology, and he applied that. So this is a framework which looks at trying to take the qualitative stuff that you know people's actually you know, finding out what occupancy buildings, what their experience of the building has been. How is it? Is it too stuffy, is it too humid, how is it too drafty or whatever? How is it in winter, how is it in summer? You know, in terms of temperature, air quality, noise, all these kinds of things. And he looked at energy usage. And this is a decent retrofit externally insulated heat pumps, triple glazed windows. There was no air tightness, massive oversight, but this is the way SEAI schemes were designed. At the time there was no air tightness target to meet, so they're all in around five, which is okay but not great. And he looked at the energy ratings. They were all in and around A2s and A3s, In fact A2s and A1s, I think, in terms of their actual calculated energy performance, but their actual usage was higher and one of the cases it was really like a D2 or something in reality.

Jeff: 1:27:00

But, engaging with the occupants and understanding the context, you would think that this occupant would have been very unhappy. But no, this is an alfala who must have been of the order of 80 or so and the temperature data was showing that he was at 25 degrees or so all year round. The whole house, right, that wasn't a massive house, but 25 degrees all the time. It's going to you're going to run up some, some bills. He was fucking delighted though, um, because you know that's what he wanted, that's what his preference was, um, so is that a bad outcome? I don't know that it is.

Jeff: 1:27:37

Um, so you know, I mean, if they'd gone better on air tightness and built to, you know, to say, enerfit standard, I think he could have been equally happy at 22, 23 degrees, maybe less, you know, without the draft and all that kind of stuff with warmer surfaces.

Jeff: 1:27:54

So you wouldn't have had the gap between energy use and, you know, calculated, an actual energy, and he would have had the comfort. But understanding that context is because you know we've got, when you have a standardized an asset rating tool like our national methodology and same thing in the UK, and you've got standardized assumptions being made about how buildings are used which don't take account of different occupancies, the way people live their lives and so on, and which have, frankly, quite miserly assumptions about temperature in terms of how a new home will behave, you know, if you're assuming people are achieving much lower temperatures in reality and using much less and for shorter hours than is likely likely to be the case in many cases, then you're going to create dissatisfaction. So I do think, I think one you know post-occupancy is is essential and I think having credible, credible ways of assessing buildings, that uh, to give people realistic expectations of what the building will actually be essential as well yeah, you know, yeah, interesting we're to wrap up.

Simon: 1:29:06

We're just coming into what seems like another half decade political cycle. We've got a labour government. We're just about to have a new government here in ireland probably the same, very much similar flavor. Unfortunately not with the greens. In this time around we're getting into a new, god knows what happens in the us and canada political cycle. Yeah, yeah, what's your hope or expectations for the sustainable building or construction movement over the next kind of five years? Where would you like to see us in the next cycle?

Jeff: 1:29:42

well, I think uh. So, from a european context, the the recast energy performance buildings directive. Uh, that's just been through, and fair play to kieran cuff, as before he got turfed out of of uh parliament. Um, what an achievement yeah, hell of an achievement fair play you know, so that's got within it opaquely worded, I think deliberately.

Jeff: 1:30:04

It has an embodied carbon requirement in for the first time, so it's whole life global warming potential is the way it's termed. So there's going to be a requirement, first of all, for member states to start calculating the embodied carbon and the whole life carbon of buildings so whole life being both the embodied in the building and the operational energy related emissions. And then there's going to be a requirement to start setting progressively lower targets towards this ultimate target of a net zero carbon building stock for Europe by 2050. So that's a huge achievement and it'll be very hard to get it through. The UK you'd hope similar things will start to happen. You know, with a more Europe-friendly government in place it doesn't make sense to have completely different standards and criteria in the UK, to make it harder for businesses in the UK to trade with European businesses and so on. And why reinvent the wheel when all that good work is being done elsewhere anyway? So the more alignment you get there, the better. So I'm expecting and hoping great things as embodied carbon. I expect and hope to see more emphasis within the industry on um, you know, uh, on getting away from the kind of the dinner party. Sustainability stuff, um, the, you know the, the grand design style, uh, 400 square meter, uh, you know, two million pound, um, uh, eco house yeah, it's a fucking joke of an idea, um, and that needs to be killed. So, getting towards, you know, understanding, uh, the cognitive dissonance inherent in ideas like that towards, um, towards um, um, understanding that an overly large or isolated house is not a sustainable house, that the most.

Jeff: 1:32:07

I was thinking about this as a slogan the other day no building is greener than no building. And getting the industry to kind of accept those points. And towards finding ways to cut resource use more generally. But I mean, where are we going to go? I think we're getting enough, we're betting in enough now with proven, evidence-based approaches to deliver certainly comfortable, energy-efficient buildings that they're not just kind of theories anymore, and I think the success of those projects as we learn from them more will help to accelerate things. You know, we've always kind of had this view that if you're advocating for things that you believe are the right things to do, eventually things will come your way and that is happening. It's been infuriatingly slow at times, but it's kind of snowballing and I just hope that kind of continues to be the case and that the more we focus on the benefits and the stories of how this is enriching people's lives and creating sort of sustainable careers for people in the industry as well, the more hopefully successful it'll all be, yeah, fair enough.

Simon: 1:33:42

That's brilliant Geoff. On that note, I think we'll end it. It's been brilliant chatting to you, as ever. I appreciate you spending some time with me. Thanks for having me and, yeah, the first of the podcast live from a venue, so I appreciate you being the guinea pig for me as well. Thanks a million.

Jeff: 1:33:56

No worries.

Simon: 1:33:56

Thanks a lot for having me. Thanks, cheers. 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. 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.