Analysis: understanding air quality in your home can save you money, future-proof your building and improve your family's health
For the owners and residents of 70 Limerick city buildings, the past year has been spent finding out all about their building’s air quality. They joined a project to monitor their indoor air quality over the past year and what they discovered has had a significant impact on how they live and plans they may have for their buildings' future.
The SMARTLAB project has been testing the impact of smart technology by installing indoor environment and electricity sensors in city buildings and working directly with building users to assess results. In the beginning, people were first motivated to join the project to find out more about their electricity use – saving money on their electricity bills was a strong incentive.
But two years in, we've found that it's the indoor environment sensor and the information it has given people about their building’s air quality that has made the greatest impact. The sensors measure temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, and chemical pollutants in our air from sources like cleaning products and fuels.
They have a large screen which gives each reading, and a smiley/neutral/sad face as an overall indicator. When you have a sensor on your kitchen wall telling you that the air you and your family are breathing is unhealthy, it turns out you pay attention.
Few of us fully understand how our activities inside our homes and places of work are affecting the air, let alone how to fix it. On top of this, some common retrofit measures focused on making our buildings more insulated and warmer may be making our buildings less healthy.
Across the SMARTLAB project buildings, a cross-section of buildings found in a typical Irish city, humidity levels are very regularly above the top end of recommended levels. We know that relative humidity indoors should stay between 30% and 60%, and ideally around 50%. In every single building in our project, relative humidity levels are over the 60% threshold more than half the time. This can be a problem: if you have high indoor moisture levels and can’t keep the air warm enough to hold on to it, things start to get damp.
From SMARTLAB, Limerick building owner Maria on the findings from the project
There is strong evidence worldwide that damp indoor conditions have a negative impact on our health, particularly in respiratory conditions like asthma. This is true for both adults and children. Conditions can be exacerbated by mould and fungal growth that often develop in persistently damp areas.
Too much moisture inside a building can also be damaging to the building itself, with an estimated 75–80% of all problems with building envelopes caused to a certain extent by moisture. While you might see early signs of damage inside with paint or wallpaper damage and plaster beginning to deteriorate, prolonged damp will corrode building materials – wood, brick, cement - causing them to decay.
75% of project participants said the data from the sensors has had a significant impact on their future plans for their buildings
As a result of our findings, SMARTLAB participants have been testing things they can do to improve the situation inside their buildings. Behaviour changes are a first step:
Opening windows more often will improve not only humidity levels but also levels of CO2 and contaminants in the air. Excessive CO2 in the air can affect concentration and lead to headaches, and there are all kinds of compounds released inside buildings through cooking, cleaning, and maintenance which have implications for our health.
Using an extractor fan during cooking is sensible, as a lot of moisture is released by boiling and frying.
Avoid drying your washing indoors, because about three litres of water will evaporate from a full load of wet laundry while drying.
The next step up is to add new elements to your building and a dehumidifier is one option. While not ideal from an energy-saving perspective, a small dehumidifier will use a fraction of the energy a tumble dryer uses. If you have to dry laundry indoors, or you have a high occupancy building with underpowered heating or weak insulation, then a dehumidifier could help.
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There are many other ways to improve relative humidity throughout your building – improving your windows, for example, will decrease condensation. A good number of our Limerick participants have told us they are planning to install a mechanical heat recovery system, which filters and circulates air within your building without sacrificing temperature. SEAI will provide a grant of €1,500 towards a mechanical ventilation system and up to €4,000 for a complete windows upgrade as part of their National Home Energy Upgrade Scheme.
75% of our SMARTLAB participants have told us that the building data they got from their sensors has had a significant impact on their future plans for their buildings. This cross-section of Irish people – homeowners, renters, retail managers, small business owners, managers of cultural and heritage buildings – were empowered by smart technology that gave them a new perspective on the air they breathe.
As we work on a massive national retrofit programme to raise the BER levels of our building stock, more focus on indoor air quality should be prioritised. This will make our buildings not just more energy efficient, but more comfortable, durable, and healthy. Our findings suggest that indoor air quality is an under-explored aspect of the energy transition in Ireland and a powerful potential asset in encouraging people to reassess their buildings’ future.
The SMARTLAB project is funded by SEAI and led by the University of Limerick
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
