How much water have you already drunk today? Assuming that you follow the rele­vant recom­men­da­tions, this should be up to three liters a day. In turn, three liters of air flow through your lungs in just 20 seconds. In 24 hours, humans breathe 15,000 liters of air. Given this situ­a­tion, it is surprising how little we concern ourselves with the issue of air quality in compar­ison to the quality of drinking water — at least as long as the air doesn’t smell. For example, if the air in a room is polluted with formalde­hyde given off by furni­ture, then those affected will act accord­ingly because they can smell it.

Air quality is invis­ible

“The greatest obstacle to a greater aware­ness of air quality must surely be that we can’t see it,” says Dr. Seema Bhangar, explaining the psycho­log­ical back­ground.

Seema Bhangar wrote her thesis on human expo­sure to air pollu­tion at the Univer­sity of Cali­fornia in Berkeley, devel­oped the next gener­a­tion of indoor sensors when working at Aclima as a Senior Scien­tist and Product Manager, and has worked as Senior Indoor Quality Manager at WeWork in San Fran­cisco since 2019.
Here, she is currently driving forward the use of new tech­nolo­gies to improve health and produc­tivity, and the energy effi­ciency of build­ings. In this article she is speaking as an inde­pen­dent expert, not as an offi­cial ambas­sador for WeWork.

At the Univer­sity of Cali­fornia in Berkeley, Bhangar wrote a thesis on human expo­sure to air pollu­tion. “But Covid-19 has lifted the veil of invis­i­bility from the issue of air quality: although the virus isn’t visible in a phys­ical sense, it is visible in our imag­i­na­tion.”  This example empha­sizes that the priority must, first and fore­most, be to raise aware­ness of the issue.
Raefer Wallis, founder and CEO of RESET, the world’s first stan­dard for air quality based on real time data, is in agree­ment: “In Western coun­tries, there is only a low aware­ness of air quality. Here, the notion is that it’s a problem for people in far-away coun­tries — like China or India. But this atti­tude has been completed altered by SARS-CoV-2 and has outlined the complexity of the matter.”

However, you don’t need a dangerous virus to substan­tiate the nega­tive effects of poor air on indoor spaces. An addi­tional 35 micro­grams of fine dust per cubic meter of air increases the risk of a stroke by 35 percent, and the risk of suffering from lung cancer by 10 percent.

Admit­tedly, these kinds of long-term effects are quite abstract. But there are also more imme­diate tangible effects: for example, if the CO2 content is elevated by 400 ppm, it can reduce produc­tivity by up to 21 percent. A ratio that should make any employer sit up and take notice.

Setting the right bench­mark

There are a number of factors that affect indoor air quality: climatic condi­tions such as temper­a­ture and humidity, the envi­ron­mental condi­tions outside, the number of people in the room, the furni­ture, tech­nical equip­ment, and the building construc­tion mate­rials. “When it comes to energy, it’s easy to set a bench­mark: you measure the consump­tion value and then you set a target to reduce this value.

Air quality is a much more complex issue, and there are many different bench­marks,” says Bhangar, outlining the diffi­culty in finding the right approach. “That’s why almost every company has an energy manager, but hardly any of them have an air quality manager.”

She refers to a frame­work with four basic prin­ci­ples for good air quality indoors presented by her former super­visor Bill Nazaroff, to make the subject matter easy to access. These are: Mini­mize indoor emis­sions — Keep build­ings dry — Provide good venti­la­tion — Keep polluted air out.

Turning knowl­edge into actions

These prin­ci­ples need to be trans­lated into effi­cient actions. But that requires the right tools. “Tech­nology has evolved at an incred­ibly rapid pace over the past few years,” says Bhangar, on the subject of solu­tions. “The possi­bility of measuring, digi­tal­izing, processing, and visu­al­izing things has arrived.”
Welcome to the world of Raefer Wallis. For 15 years, the qual­i­fied archi­tect has been working on indoor air quality stan­dards, and from his work has devel­oped the inter­na­tional RESET stan­dard.

Raefer Wallis is an archi­tect and has been working on the topic of air quality moni­toring for 15 years. Over the past ten years, he has defined air quality stan­dards which have now been incor­po­rated into the inter­na­tional air stan­dard RESET, of which he is also the founder and CEO.

“Air quality is not a do-it-your­self issue. It’s far too complex for that.” He explains that there are so many different vari­ables, some of which are actu­ally contra­dic­tory — for example, how do you venti­late a room prop­erly if the air outside is polluted? In this case, solu­tions imple­mented without being rooted in data might not be very effec­tive. In Western coun­tries espe­cially, moni­toring air quality indoors is largely done through “guessti­mating,” i. e. using a broad rule of thumb guide­line. “It’s like a doctor who prescribes a treat­ment without being able to make a reli­able diag­nosis.”

Wallis is there­fore in favor of intel­li­gent, auto­mated systems — which he also applies himself. “Most people don’t know that suit­able tech­nology has been around for a long time.” RESET uses the data recorded from sensors mounted on the walls or installed in the venti­la­tion system. This is an area in which Wallis also works with ebm-papst, who offer not only fans with certi­fied sensors, but also a plat­form for processing the data.

With the sensor data, the air quality can be analyzed in real time and subse­quently opti­mized with the help of the plat­form. Wallis says that anyone fearing having to make a major invest­ment for this tech­nology can rest assured: “The devices that we work with came onto the market in 2008 and have been designed as smart solu­tions since 2016. They are now sophis­ti­cated, quick to install, and cost-effec­tive.”

Seema Bhangar empha­sizes that it is not primarily about money: “It’s about making things smarter: take a look at the whole picture, and improve what you already have with this knowl­edge.”