Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into teaching and learning methodologies
for professionals like you.
This episode brought to you by Haven.
Haven is your home's ultimate clean air solution for active air management.
Visit HavenIAQ.com.
So today we're hanging out with Kevin Hart of Haven IAQ.
Kevin, how's it going today?
It's going well, Clifton.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
So Kevin, you are the founder and the CEO of Haven IAQ.
Yes, I am.
Yeah.
I like to introduce myself as Kevin Hart, the Canadian, not the Hooligan.
There you go.
I started off as an electrician, actually.
Ah, nice.
Yeah.
And then transitioned into business and entrepreneurship, then went down a 10-year journey of learning
how to build a company.
Absolutely.
And it's quite the journey, isn't it?
I love to learn in doing that.
It's been a roller coaster.
Yeah.
If you like late nights and lots of learning, this is for you.
Lots of hours of commitment, but for all of the right reasons.
So we're here today to talk a little bit about IAQ, and you have really come to the forefront
in understanding and controlling IAQ.
So tell me a little bit about how you got into the air quality side of our industry.
Yeah.
Well, actually, as an electrician, we would be on work sites and we'd be wearing respirators
with these big purple cartridges to filter out these crystalline silicon dust in the
air.
And that's carcinogenic, so you don't want to breathe that.
You don't want cancer.
So we would have safety meetings every Thursday over lunchtime, and they would just tell us
how dangerous the particles in the air are for us.
But as soon as they would drill this concrete dust, within 60 seconds, it would be invisible.
And so you just take the mask off, but you're in a confined space.
It's still there.
You don't want to go out your work.
Great.
So really, for me, that was the light bulb moment of we care about the water quality,
the food quality, but we really haven't connected.
Most people haven't connected.
The light bulb hasn't turned on about, hey, the air we breathe makes a difference.
So that set me down this journey of, is there a way to monitor and detect these particulates
in the air that are harming us?
And that created this 10-year rabbit hole of, hey, there's much more to indoor air quality
than just particles.
There's chemicals.
There's mold.
There's all these different contaminants that we're breathing in.
Sure.
Absolutely.
One of my first encounters in the industry of not recognizing exactly what these chemicals
were, I started out in a small family-owned refrigeration in HVACs.
We did residential and commercial HVAC.
And I can remember Bob Torrance, which is the owner of our company, he's having some
respiration issues and he's like, it's part of working in crawl spaces and attics.
And it wasn't until later, until I became a little bit more educated with the circumstances
that we do work around, the environments that we're in all the time, that we paid a little
bit more attention to it.
And now you're at the cusp of the time to be involved with air quality.
Here in, I'm in the Midwest and we've had a significant amount of smoke due to the wildfires
that we've had up in the Northern part of our country.
So you've sent some photos out.
I've seen some social media links that had some pictures in your area.
That's very much what it's like here.
People are starting to pay more attention to air quality, not just on their indoor environment,
but the outdoor environment.
And that's where you really shine as you come into understanding what that environment looks
like.
Yeah.
Just one thing to say about that.
The reason why we chose the space we did in residential is we spend over 60% of our time
in our homes.
Think about that.
Yeah.
And most of our homes weren't built with health in mind, right?
From the point of construction.
And so when they say there's a forest fire, get inside, get in your home.
Well, do we know that that's actually our home is protected?
Right.
Okay.
I know for myself growing up in the industry that I was taught to be an air conditioning
technician, right?
What does that actually mean?
We were taught to troubleshoot equipment and become technicians and have solutions for
equipment that wasn't running properly or maybe not running at all.
But when we get into IAQ, indoor air quality, now we become a new type of technician.
So one of the reasons I wanted us to talk about this was as educators, as we are bringing
up our next generation of technicians, it's very important to educate on what we are doing
for the quality of air, just not the quality of the equipment that we're working on.
So I'm looking forward to this and I'll give you the reins and let's just dive into IAQ
a little bit deeper and bring us a better understanding of this piece of a technician's
role and responsibility that it may not have been as comfortable with in the past.
Yeah.
Thanks, Clifton.
Just to riff off what you just said, I've really come to the conclusion that one of
the main obstacles for IAQ is that the technician and the aptitude of the technician getting
into the trade is they're a problem solver.
That's right.
They diagnose the issue and they solve it and they offer a service to the homeowner,
which is a wanted service.
And I think one of the main issues today with the way IAQ is approached is it either isn't
approached or it's approached as a sales tactic.
Right, not as the solution that it actually is.
Exactly.
And a lot of these technicians don't want to be salespeople.
That's not why they got into the trade.
And so I think there's a big disconnect between the owners of the company who might attend
an event like this and get amped up about IAQ and then create some sort of commission
structure for the more of these things you sell, the more pay you're going to get.
I think they're just a disconnect between the whole function.
So I was in building automation.
So I was a mobile engineer.
So I did refrigeration, HVAC.
I did the electrical.
I did energy monitoring.
And a big part of that was understanding the quality and the efficiency of the environment.
And when we started migrating these controls into residential, that was what opened up
my opportunity to get involved with the residential side because we've been doing this in the
commercial and industrial environments for a long time.
It's just now becoming popular in the residential industry.
Yeah, there's some really obvious logical automations that exist in a commercial building
that you sort of scratch your head and go in a home, we use a thermostat is hot and
cold.
It's dry bulb.
It's sensible.
It's an on and off switch.
It's like having an accelerator, but just having no control over any of the other parameters
in the home.
Exactly.
And a lot of people just aren't informed of what that thermostat is doing.
They assume that is doing work, but a lot of times, even if it's a digital thermostat,
it is typically just switches.
And till we get into communicating systems, but a lot of our legacy systems really aren't
doing as much work as we would think that they are.
Yeah.
You set this up nicely.
The time is now there's emergency.
What have we had?
We've had pandemics, airborne viruses, you know, how can we get back in control and how
could the buildings we live in maybe be the masks that aren't so comfortable to wear?
You know, how could they protect our health and exchange the air and do these functions
for us?
You know, and then you see flooding and you see mold and you see a lot of restoration
companies coming in as well as just the whole Southeast being covered in mold as a result
of the high humidity.
Absolutely.
As well as forest fires that, you know, I'm on the West coast, I'm in Canada and Vancouver
and all the way down to California, we've gotten wildfires pretty bad, but I think this
is the first year I was just in Wisconsin and Illinois last week and took some of those
photos you saw on our social media channel.
But I mean, now everyone really, yeah, people are more aware now.
Right.
And every person has either encountered or has very close first-hand or second-hand experience
with all three of these within the last few years.
So the consumer is much more aware of the impact that is in their structure than what
they were say five years ago.
Yeah.
And that's really, first of all, what we stand for as a company is turning homes into these
safe havens because our buildings and equipment should protect our health.
Absolutely.
You know, and we're raising families and there's children and there's people with sensitivities
and they have immune systems that are compromised.
So this is important to a lot of people.
And like you said, awareness is at an all-time high.
The one thing I'm totally certain about more than ever is that you or your team, and these
are speaking to the audience here, you're going to find yourself in a discussion with
your customers about indoor air quality.
Yes.
So my question is, are you prepared?
Right.
Are you choosing to see that that is an opportunity to take care of your customers, to be the
stewards and the custodians of their air, of their home, of their comfort, to be an
expert that they trust and rely on for the comfort and safety of their family, and to
win quotes over your competition?
Or do you simply see it as an area of responsibility that you sort of never signed up for, never
agreed to, maybe even a liability that you don't want as part of your company?
And we could definitely go down the rabbit hole of how tough this job is right now.
It is a very tough job to be in heating and cooling right now between the extreme temperatures
that technicians face, as well as the talent shortages.
I know people are working 17, 18 hour days right now.
Very rough.
Frigerant changeover, having to learn a lot and private equity consolidation, you know,
and on and on and on.
It's not an easy job.
So you'd be justified.
But I have a feeling that the type of person who showed up to this webcast is the type
of person who clicked into this webinar because they don't hold that perspective.
That's right.
That this is a live.
They want to know more.
They want to understand, you know, the things that they can do to make an impact in people's
lives, not just in the equipment, not just in efficiency and comfort, but in quality.
We see that it's it's three things.
It's the three pillars, which is filtration, ventilation and humidity control.
Now I've seen different versions of these pillars where people put four or five different
pillars here.
But really, when you consolidate some of those pillars, these are fundamentally what they
are and they rest on the foundation of airflow.
So as we were saying, you know, the circulation, the equipment being on, if you think about
filtration, you can't filter if the air is not moving through the filter.
You can't humidify or dehumidify if the system's off.
Right.
And you can't move air in and out without moving the air.
So fundamentally, we see that airflow is the foundation of air quality.
If they are stagnant, something called sick building syndrome.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
You know, it didn't hit me in the beginning.
I was all about particulates, particulates, you know, they're the physical things getting
into your lungs.
And absolutely, particulates are shown to be one of the one of the worst in terms of
impact to human health.
But actually, humidity makes filtration and ventilation so much harder, you know, from
the scores and the inability even even the volatile organic compounds will off gas at
a higher rate depending on the humidity level.
So humidity is really important.
So one word of caution.
There's a way of explaining the approach that we would recommend and sort of as a word of
caution, it's to avoid the world of chemistry.
You do not want to become a chemist of the air in your customers' homes.
Instead, what we found to be effective is to be a mathematician.
And that is instead of the complicated scientific world of the periodic table of elements, we
propose the simple work of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Addition often comes down to removing unwanted contaminants or components of the air that
aren't beneficial to human health and in some cases adding humidity and adding some factors
that are missing from the air.
Now be very careful with the approach of using electronic means to zap shine and manipulate
the molecules of your customers' air.
And I'm not saying that these technologies are all snake oil or are all ineffective.
I'm saying that we have decades of evidence of what is most probably going to work versus
technologies that are in some cases inconclusive and have produced mixed results.
And one of the biggest factors here that steers us away from these technologies at Haven is
the ability to do harm.
Simply put, some of the changes these products make to the air, while there may be a primary
effect that is desired and is in the marketing material.
Right, a secondary effect.
It's the second and third order effects that create unintended consequences.
And we're only starting to understand those because they require millions and millions
of dollars of equipment and research.
Yeah, we really understand these.
One example I have that I really like, it's actually from a book called Healthy Buildings
by Joe Allen from Harvard, is that a chemical called limonene that is the lemon scent that
is common in all of our homes and cleaners when interacting with ozone, even small amounts
of ozone creates as a second order effect, formaldehyde.
And formaldehyde is one of the most toxic chemicals for human health.
That is very interesting.
So just an example of ozone, one could argue is okay in small quantities, although I've
heard counter arguments that it's not.
And the lemon scent is on its own fairly harmless.
So when the two interact, you're doing chemistry, you're doing unintended chemistry in your
customer's homes that could do harm.
We want to avoid that.
You know, here's really the punchline is in Clemson, you're going to be dealing with different
issues, often insufficient ventilation, excess moisture, connoissee clogging, and lower air
velocities because the amount of CFM per ton, the units moving is typically dialed back
in the case of air conditioning to get more of the latent load.
Insufficient moisture in the dry climate zones means you're going to be humidifying.
Ventilation issues could just be that it's often very hot in certain places, and then
you're bringing in dry air and you got combustion in some of the northern climates.
So now you've got to deal with the combustion gases, which becomes a risk to the IAQ.
Interestingly in some of the marine and in particular in the Northwest here, you get
just low run times.
Often it's not hot enough for air conditioning.
And so you might have three, four months of the year where your system's just not turning
on at all.
So you're not getting any IAQ, any filtration, or any ventilation.
And you get more forest fires typically on this side.
So let's go into the first pillar.
This is filtration.
So what problem should it solve?
Particulate matter.
This was the first one I became familiar with, PM 2.5.
Can you explain that a little bit?
Because a lot of people are confused with the PM 2.5 and the PM 5.0 and what these actually
represent.
Yeah.
First of all, I like to think about particulates as everything physical in the air.
So think about it like if you moved all the air in your home through a filter, that stuff
left over on the filter, that's the physical stuff.
Those are the particles that you'd be capturing when it goes from white to a black filter,
gray filter.
Those are the particulates in the air.
So gases are going to pass right through that filter because they're not physical.
They're not something you can capture.
And so PM 2.5, that is the two and a half micron, micron being a very small size, maybe
around the diameter of a hair on your head.
And so these are very small.
Often you can't see these with your eyes.
Sometimes you're in like a movie theater and the projector is projecting light and a dark
green, all the dust floating in the air that when the lights go on, you can't see it anymore.
So those are typically more like PM 10, 10 micron particles.
You get things like dander, pet dander, for example, pollen.
These are between 10 to a hundred microns.
But the reason we care about two and a half microns is the size, the diameter, the aerodynamic
diameter of that particle is so small that actually it's like a ninja gets through your
cilia of your nose and it gets through all the obstructions of the airway into your lungs
and into the avioli and into the bloodstream at a certain point.
And particularly as this gets smaller into sub micron, which is less than one micron
of size, these are actually getting into your bloodstream, which means they're getting into
your organs.
And we've found particulates that end up in the brain into the fetus and are doing severe
damage to people, to humans.
And so this is sort of the most obvious dangerous air pollutant because it's like physically
infiltrating your body and doing harm to your organs.
Listen, what I tell people is you have two filters in your home, the filter in your system
and the filter in your lungs.
That's it.
That's your two filtering capabilities.
Which one do you want to look dirty?
Yeah, but yeah, it's a challenge.
Homeowner education is a challenge.
So ventilation, what problem should it solve?
So volatile organic compounds.
Now that's a bunch of garble for most people.
And the T there stands for total.
So there's a ton of these volatiles there.
You know, just think about them like they're the majority of chemicals.
They're sort of like the chemical soup in our home.
It's the way I like to think about it.
Now within those TVOCs are the specific chemicals like your formaldehyde or your benzene or
your tulin ethanol.
You know, so the TVOC comprises a lot of different chemicals, but it's sort of like a good measure
of just how many, what is the chemical soup in your home?
Yeah.
A lot of people don't realize that that new car smell may not be such a good thing after
all if you actually knew what that new car smell and that new home smell is.
You know, it's a release of chemicals that are decaying and that we are inhaling.
Yeah.
And I think a lot of people stop there and are like, okay, yeah, that doesn't seem good.
But if you really go into the human health effects of this, like you almost need a biology
degree to really get into this world.
And again, I would highly recommend reading the Healthy Buildings book by Joseph Allen
because he goes deeper into this.
There's chapter seven, the global chemical experiment where I've taken a lot of inspiration
from.
But he really goes into like, what are these chemicals?
Where are they coming from?
How are they regulated?
How many have actually been removed from the market and banned?
How many have actually even been tested?
You know, out of like 50,000 chemicals in use, only like a few hundred have even been
tested and only like a dozen have been banned.
And so we just, we don't know.
We're just playing this experiment with human health.
And a lot of these chemicals, you know, they're in our bedding, they're in our carpet, our
paint, our drywall.
You know, there's some famous cases of this really doing harm to people, but it's there.
And if you have good enough ventilation, you know, maybe it doesn't matter.
But one of the problems is that we're moving towards having tighter homes.
And so if we have tight homes and then we have all, this almost sounds like a conspiracy
theory or woo-wee or something, but like all of the materials in our homes are off gassing
some chemicals at some rate.
If we don't have ventilation to remove those and replace that with fresh air, then we're
breathing increasingly high levels of chemicals that like flame retardants and other ones
will cause harm, will create cancer, will tax our immune system.
And some of these create irreversible damage that can even be passed on from generation
to generation.
It's scary stuff.
Yeah, absolutely.
So the last pillar, so now we're coming up on time here, is humidity control.
Much simpler.
You know, why is it related into air quality condensation?
We talked about the dew point, the relative humidity.
There is an effect on health here.
There is just a humidity at which it's too dry for a respiratory system.
You get coughing, you get static shocks, and there is a human health impact of it being
too dry.
You know, your skin, etc., but too human also is an issue.
You get things growing, you get insects, etc.
You get more.
And interesting enough, some of those insects, you know, there's insect feces and dead insects,
and you breathe that in like dust mites.
So that's what we know.
Yeah, absolutely.
People are highly allergic to those insects.
So if you can reduce humidity, get rid of those insects, you're actually reducing one
of the main human irritants in the air.
So, you know, baths, showers, obviously the majority of humidity typically comes from
just the climate zone, which is why we talked about the climate zone.
But stovetop, cooking, laundry, floods, etc.
Kevin, we really appreciate you joining us, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, because
I'll bet I'll run into you at the 2024 National HEACR Education Conference, which is going
to be in Las Vegas again, and get a chance to see some of your equipment in action sometime
in the near future, hopefully.
Definitely.
Well, Clifton, I so appreciate you having me and being able to talk about what we're
passionate about doing here at Haven.
Thank you.
Absolute pleasure.
Once again, everyone, go to HavenIAQ.com.