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Welcome back to Teaching the Unteachables, where we dive into teaching and learning methodologies

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for professionals like you.

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This episode brought to you by Haven.

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Haven is your home's ultimate clean air solution for active air management.

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Visit HavenIAQ.com.

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So today we're hanging out with Kevin Hart of Haven IAQ.

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Kevin, how's it going today?

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It's going well, Clifton.

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Thanks for having me.

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Absolutely.

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So Kevin, you are the founder and the CEO of Haven IAQ.

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Yes, I am.

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Yeah.

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I like to introduce myself as Kevin Hart, the Canadian, not the Hooligan.

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There you go.

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I started off as an electrician, actually.

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Ah, nice.

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Yeah.

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And then transitioned into business and entrepreneurship, then went down a 10-year journey of learning

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how to build a company.

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Absolutely.

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And it's quite the journey, isn't it?

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I love to learn in doing that.

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It's been a roller coaster.

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Yeah.

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If you like late nights and lots of learning, this is for you.

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Lots of hours of commitment, but for all of the right reasons.

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So we're here today to talk a little bit about IAQ, and you have really come to the forefront

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in understanding and controlling IAQ.

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So tell me a little bit about how you got into the air quality side of our industry.

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Yeah.

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Well, actually, as an electrician, we would be on work sites and we'd be wearing respirators

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with these big purple cartridges to filter out these crystalline silicon dust in the

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air.

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And that's carcinogenic, so you don't want to breathe that.

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You don't want cancer.

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So we would have safety meetings every Thursday over lunchtime, and they would just tell us

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how dangerous the particles in the air are for us.

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But as soon as they would drill this concrete dust, within 60 seconds, it would be invisible.

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And so you just take the mask off, but you're in a confined space.

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It's still there.

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You don't want to go out your work.

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Great.

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So really, for me, that was the light bulb moment of we care about the water quality,

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the food quality, but we really haven't connected.

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Most people haven't connected.

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The light bulb hasn't turned on about, hey, the air we breathe makes a difference.

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So that set me down this journey of, is there a way to monitor and detect these particulates

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in the air that are harming us?

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And that created this 10-year rabbit hole of, hey, there's much more to indoor air quality

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than just particles.

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There's chemicals.

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There's mold.

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There's all these different contaminants that we're breathing in.

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Sure.

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Absolutely.

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One of my first encounters in the industry of not recognizing exactly what these chemicals

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were, I started out in a small family-owned refrigeration in HVACs.

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We did residential and commercial HVAC.

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And I can remember Bob Torrance, which is the owner of our company, he's having some

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respiration issues and he's like, it's part of working in crawl spaces and attics.

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And it wasn't until later, until I became a little bit more educated with the circumstances

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that we do work around, the environments that we're in all the time, that we paid a little

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bit more attention to it.

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And now you're at the cusp of the time to be involved with air quality.

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Here in, I'm in the Midwest and we've had a significant amount of smoke due to the wildfires

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that we've had up in the Northern part of our country.

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So you've sent some photos out.

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I've seen some social media links that had some pictures in your area.

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That's very much what it's like here.

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People are starting to pay more attention to air quality, not just on their indoor environment,

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but the outdoor environment.

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And that's where you really shine as you come into understanding what that environment looks

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like.

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Yeah.

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Just one thing to say about that.

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The reason why we chose the space we did in residential is we spend over 60% of our time

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in our homes.

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Think about that.

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Yeah.

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And most of our homes weren't built with health in mind, right?

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From the point of construction.

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And so when they say there's a forest fire, get inside, get in your home.

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Well, do we know that that's actually our home is protected?

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Right.

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Okay.

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I know for myself growing up in the industry that I was taught to be an air conditioning

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technician, right?

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What does that actually mean?

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We were taught to troubleshoot equipment and become technicians and have solutions for

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equipment that wasn't running properly or maybe not running at all.

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But when we get into IAQ, indoor air quality, now we become a new type of technician.

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So one of the reasons I wanted us to talk about this was as educators, as we are bringing

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up our next generation of technicians, it's very important to educate on what we are doing

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for the quality of air, just not the quality of the equipment that we're working on.

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So I'm looking forward to this and I'll give you the reins and let's just dive into IAQ

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a little bit deeper and bring us a better understanding of this piece of a technician's

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role and responsibility that it may not have been as comfortable with in the past.

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Yeah.

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Thanks, Clifton.

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Just to riff off what you just said, I've really come to the conclusion that one of

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the main obstacles for IAQ is that the technician and the aptitude of the technician getting

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into the trade is they're a problem solver.

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That's right.

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They diagnose the issue and they solve it and they offer a service to the homeowner,

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which is a wanted service.

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And I think one of the main issues today with the way IAQ is approached is it either isn't

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approached or it's approached as a sales tactic.

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Right, not as the solution that it actually is.

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Exactly.

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And a lot of these technicians don't want to be salespeople.

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That's not why they got into the trade.

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And so I think there's a big disconnect between the owners of the company who might attend

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an event like this and get amped up about IAQ and then create some sort of commission

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structure for the more of these things you sell, the more pay you're going to get.

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I think they're just a disconnect between the whole function.

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So I was in building automation.

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So I was a mobile engineer.

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So I did refrigeration, HVAC.

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I did the electrical.

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I did energy monitoring.

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And a big part of that was understanding the quality and the efficiency of the environment.

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And when we started migrating these controls into residential, that was what opened up

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my opportunity to get involved with the residential side because we've been doing this in the

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commercial and industrial environments for a long time.

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It's just now becoming popular in the residential industry.

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Yeah, there's some really obvious logical automations that exist in a commercial building

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that you sort of scratch your head and go in a home, we use a thermostat is hot and

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cold.

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It's dry bulb.

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It's sensible.

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It's an on and off switch.

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It's like having an accelerator, but just having no control over any of the other parameters

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in the home.

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Exactly.

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And a lot of people just aren't informed of what that thermostat is doing.

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They assume that is doing work, but a lot of times, even if it's a digital thermostat,

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it is typically just switches.

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And till we get into communicating systems, but a lot of our legacy systems really aren't

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doing as much work as we would think that they are.

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Yeah.

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You set this up nicely.

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The time is now there's emergency.

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What have we had?

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We've had pandemics, airborne viruses, you know, how can we get back in control and how

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could the buildings we live in maybe be the masks that aren't so comfortable to wear?

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You know, how could they protect our health and exchange the air and do these functions

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for us?

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You know, and then you see flooding and you see mold and you see a lot of restoration

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companies coming in as well as just the whole Southeast being covered in mold as a result

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of the high humidity.

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Absolutely.

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As well as forest fires that, you know, I'm on the West coast, I'm in Canada and Vancouver

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and all the way down to California, we've gotten wildfires pretty bad, but I think this

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is the first year I was just in Wisconsin and Illinois last week and took some of those

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photos you saw on our social media channel.

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But I mean, now everyone really, yeah, people are more aware now.

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Right.

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And every person has either encountered or has very close first-hand or second-hand experience

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with all three of these within the last few years.

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So the consumer is much more aware of the impact that is in their structure than what

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they were say five years ago.

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Yeah.

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And that's really, first of all, what we stand for as a company is turning homes into these

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safe havens because our buildings and equipment should protect our health.

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Absolutely.

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You know, and we're raising families and there's children and there's people with sensitivities

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and they have immune systems that are compromised.

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So this is important to a lot of people.

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And like you said, awareness is at an all-time high.

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The one thing I'm totally certain about more than ever is that you or your team, and these

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are speaking to the audience here, you're going to find yourself in a discussion with

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your customers about indoor air quality.

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Yes.

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So my question is, are you prepared?

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Right.

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Are you choosing to see that that is an opportunity to take care of your customers, to be the

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stewards and the custodians of their air, of their home, of their comfort, to be an

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expert that they trust and rely on for the comfort and safety of their family, and to

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win quotes over your competition?

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Or do you simply see it as an area of responsibility that you sort of never signed up for, never

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agreed to, maybe even a liability that you don't want as part of your company?

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And we could definitely go down the rabbit hole of how tough this job is right now.

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It is a very tough job to be in heating and cooling right now between the extreme temperatures

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that technicians face, as well as the talent shortages.

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I know people are working 17, 18 hour days right now.

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Very rough.

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Frigerant changeover, having to learn a lot and private equity consolidation, you know,

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and on and on and on.

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It's not an easy job.

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So you'd be justified.

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But I have a feeling that the type of person who showed up to this webcast is the type

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of person who clicked into this webinar because they don't hold that perspective.

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That's right.

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That this is a live.

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They want to know more.

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They want to understand, you know, the things that they can do to make an impact in people's

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lives, not just in the equipment, not just in efficiency and comfort, but in quality.

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We see that it's it's three things.

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It's the three pillars, which is filtration, ventilation and humidity control.

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Now I've seen different versions of these pillars where people put four or five different

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pillars here.

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But really, when you consolidate some of those pillars, these are fundamentally what they

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are and they rest on the foundation of airflow.

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So as we were saying, you know, the circulation, the equipment being on, if you think about

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filtration, you can't filter if the air is not moving through the filter.

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You can't humidify or dehumidify if the system's off.

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Right.

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And you can't move air in and out without moving the air.

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So fundamentally, we see that airflow is the foundation of air quality.

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If they are stagnant, something called sick building syndrome.

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Oh, yeah, absolutely.

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You know, it didn't hit me in the beginning.

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I was all about particulates, particulates, you know, they're the physical things getting

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into your lungs.

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And absolutely, particulates are shown to be one of the one of the worst in terms of

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impact to human health.

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But actually, humidity makes filtration and ventilation so much harder, you know, from

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the scores and the inability even even the volatile organic compounds will off gas at

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a higher rate depending on the humidity level.

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So humidity is really important.

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So one word of caution.

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There's a way of explaining the approach that we would recommend and sort of as a word of

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caution, it's to avoid the world of chemistry.

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You do not want to become a chemist of the air in your customers' homes.

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Instead, what we found to be effective is to be a mathematician.

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And that is instead of the complicated scientific world of the periodic table of elements, we

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propose the simple work of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

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Addition often comes down to removing unwanted contaminants or components of the air that

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aren't beneficial to human health and in some cases adding humidity and adding some factors

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that are missing from the air.

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Now be very careful with the approach of using electronic means to zap shine and manipulate

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the molecules of your customers' air.

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And I'm not saying that these technologies are all snake oil or are all ineffective.

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I'm saying that we have decades of evidence of what is most probably going to work versus

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technologies that are in some cases inconclusive and have produced mixed results.

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And one of the biggest factors here that steers us away from these technologies at Haven is

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the ability to do harm.

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Simply put, some of the changes these products make to the air, while there may be a primary

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effect that is desired and is in the marketing material.

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Right, a secondary effect.

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It's the second and third order effects that create unintended consequences.

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And we're only starting to understand those because they require millions and millions

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of dollars of equipment and research.

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Yeah, we really understand these.

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One example I have that I really like, it's actually from a book called Healthy Buildings

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by Joe Allen from Harvard, is that a chemical called limonene that is the lemon scent that

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is common in all of our homes and cleaners when interacting with ozone, even small amounts

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of ozone creates as a second order effect, formaldehyde.

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And formaldehyde is one of the most toxic chemicals for human health.

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That is very interesting.

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So just an example of ozone, one could argue is okay in small quantities, although I've

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heard counter arguments that it's not.

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And the lemon scent is on its own fairly harmless.

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So when the two interact, you're doing chemistry, you're doing unintended chemistry in your

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customer's homes that could do harm.

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We want to avoid that.

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You know, here's really the punchline is in Clemson, you're going to be dealing with different

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issues, often insufficient ventilation, excess moisture, connoissee clogging, and lower air

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velocities because the amount of CFM per ton, the units moving is typically dialed back

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in the case of air conditioning to get more of the latent load.

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Insufficient moisture in the dry climate zones means you're going to be humidifying.

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Ventilation issues could just be that it's often very hot in certain places, and then

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you're bringing in dry air and you got combustion in some of the northern climates.

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So now you've got to deal with the combustion gases, which becomes a risk to the IAQ.

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Interestingly in some of the marine and in particular in the Northwest here, you get

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just low run times.

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Often it's not hot enough for air conditioning.

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And so you might have three, four months of the year where your system's just not turning

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on at all.

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So you're not getting any IAQ, any filtration, or any ventilation.

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And you get more forest fires typically on this side.

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So let's go into the first pillar.

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This is filtration.

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So what problem should it solve?

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Particulate matter.

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This was the first one I became familiar with, PM 2.5.

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Can you explain that a little bit?

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Because a lot of people are confused with the PM 2.5 and the PM 5.0 and what these actually

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represent.

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Yeah.

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First of all, I like to think about particulates as everything physical in the air.

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So think about it like if you moved all the air in your home through a filter, that stuff

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left over on the filter, that's the physical stuff.

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Those are the particles that you'd be capturing when it goes from white to a black filter,

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gray filter.

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Those are the particulates in the air.

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So gases are going to pass right through that filter because they're not physical.

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They're not something you can capture.

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And so PM 2.5, that is the two and a half micron, micron being a very small size, maybe

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around the diameter of a hair on your head.

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And so these are very small.

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Often you can't see these with your eyes.

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Sometimes you're in like a movie theater and the projector is projecting light and a dark

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green, all the dust floating in the air that when the lights go on, you can't see it anymore.

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So those are typically more like PM 10, 10 micron particles.

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You get things like dander, pet dander, for example, pollen.

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These are between 10 to a hundred microns.

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But the reason we care about two and a half microns is the size, the diameter, the aerodynamic

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diameter of that particle is so small that actually it's like a ninja gets through your

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cilia of your nose and it gets through all the obstructions of the airway into your lungs

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and into the avioli and into the bloodstream at a certain point.

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And particularly as this gets smaller into sub micron, which is less than one micron

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of size, these are actually getting into your bloodstream, which means they're getting into

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your organs.

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And we've found particulates that end up in the brain into the fetus and are doing severe

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damage to people, to humans.

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And so this is sort of the most obvious dangerous air pollutant because it's like physically

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infiltrating your body and doing harm to your organs.

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Listen, what I tell people is you have two filters in your home, the filter in your system

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and the filter in your lungs.

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That's it.

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That's your two filtering capabilities.

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Which one do you want to look dirty?

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Yeah, but yeah, it's a challenge.

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Homeowner education is a challenge.

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So ventilation, what problem should it solve?

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So volatile organic compounds.

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Now that's a bunch of garble for most people.

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And the T there stands for total.

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So there's a ton of these volatiles there.

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You know, just think about them like they're the majority of chemicals.

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They're sort of like the chemical soup in our home.

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It's the way I like to think about it.

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Now within those TVOCs are the specific chemicals like your formaldehyde or your benzene or

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your tulin ethanol.

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You know, so the TVOC comprises a lot of different chemicals, but it's sort of like a good measure

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of just how many, what is the chemical soup in your home?

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Yeah.

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A lot of people don't realize that that new car smell may not be such a good thing after

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all if you actually knew what that new car smell and that new home smell is.

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You know, it's a release of chemicals that are decaying and that we are inhaling.

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Yeah.

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And I think a lot of people stop there and are like, okay, yeah, that doesn't seem good.

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But if you really go into the human health effects of this, like you almost need a biology

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degree to really get into this world.

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And again, I would highly recommend reading the Healthy Buildings book by Joseph Allen

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because he goes deeper into this.

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There's chapter seven, the global chemical experiment where I've taken a lot of inspiration

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from.

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But he really goes into like, what are these chemicals?

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Where are they coming from?

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How are they regulated?

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How many have actually been removed from the market and banned?

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How many have actually even been tested?

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You know, out of like 50,000 chemicals in use, only like a few hundred have even been

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tested and only like a dozen have been banned.

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And so we just, we don't know.

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We're just playing this experiment with human health.

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And a lot of these chemicals, you know, they're in our bedding, they're in our carpet, our

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paint, our drywall.

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You know, there's some famous cases of this really doing harm to people, but it's there.

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And if you have good enough ventilation, you know, maybe it doesn't matter.

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But one of the problems is that we're moving towards having tighter homes.

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And so if we have tight homes and then we have all, this almost sounds like a conspiracy

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theory or woo-wee or something, but like all of the materials in our homes are off gassing

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some chemicals at some rate.

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If we don't have ventilation to remove those and replace that with fresh air, then we're

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breathing increasingly high levels of chemicals that like flame retardants and other ones

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will cause harm, will create cancer, will tax our immune system.

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And some of these create irreversible damage that can even be passed on from generation

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to generation.

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It's scary stuff.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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So the last pillar, so now we're coming up on time here, is humidity control.

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Much simpler.

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You know, why is it related into air quality condensation?

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We talked about the dew point, the relative humidity.

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There is an effect on health here.

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There is just a humidity at which it's too dry for a respiratory system.

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You get coughing, you get static shocks, and there is a human health impact of it being

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too dry.

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You know, your skin, etc., but too human also is an issue.

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You get things growing, you get insects, etc.

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You get more.

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And interesting enough, some of those insects, you know, there's insect feces and dead insects,

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and you breathe that in like dust mites.

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So that's what we know.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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People are highly allergic to those insects.

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So if you can reduce humidity, get rid of those insects, you're actually reducing one

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of the main human irritants in the air.

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So, you know, baths, showers, obviously the majority of humidity typically comes from

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just the climate zone, which is why we talked about the climate zone.

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But stovetop, cooking, laundry, floods, etc.

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Kevin, we really appreciate you joining us, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, because

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I'll bet I'll run into you at the 2024 National HEACR Education Conference, which is going

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to be in Las Vegas again, and get a chance to see some of your equipment in action sometime

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in the near future, hopefully.

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Definitely.

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Well, Clifton, I so appreciate you having me and being able to talk about what we're

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passionate about doing here at Haven.

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Thank you.

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Absolute pleasure.

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Once again, everyone, go to HavenIAQ.com.