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Optimized Indoor Air Quality Software for Smart Buildings - SALLY R
102 Plays4 years ago
Optimized Indoor Air Quality Software for Smart Buildings - SALLY R
Welcome to episode 45 of the Green & Healthy Places podcast in which we discuss the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate today. I’m your host, Matt Morley, Founder of Biofilico Healthy Buildings and this episode I’m in Sweden talking to Fredrik Tunberg, CEO of Sally R, a cloud-based intelligent ventilation solution that uses algorithms to optimize indoor air quality while reducing overall energy consumption related to the HVAC system.
We discuss how buildings have traditionally had to make guesstimates about how much ventilation they will need, and then applies a blanket approach throughout the day, throughout the building, whereas the latest technology, sensors and IOT enabled software completely changes the game, opening up opportunities for far more tailored, efficient and cost effective solutions. Which is essentially what Sally R do.
As Fredrik points out, high quality indoor air does not need to cost more, quite the opposite in fact, once you can see the air in a building and map that against usage data, and feedback from a network of air quality monitors, it’s a complete game changer that also saves on energy use in the process.
Finally, they are also getting into Carbon capture in indoor farms, but I’ll Fredrik explain that part.
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Transcript
Introduction to Green and Healthy Places Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to episode 45 of the Green and Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of wellbeing and sustainability in real estate today. I'm your host, Matt Morley, founder of Biofilico Healthy
Interview with Fredrik Thunberg on Intelligent Ventilation
00:00:24
Speaker
Buildings. And in this episode, I'm in Sweden, talking to Fredrik Thunberg, CEO of Sally R, a cloud-based intelligent ventilation system that uses algorithms to optimise indoor air quality whilst reducing energy consumption.
00:00:39
Speaker
We discussed how buildings have traditionally had to make pretty much guesses about how much ventilation they will need at any one time of the day and in any one place within the building. Whereas the latest technology armed with sensors, IoT enabled software,
00:00:54
Speaker
and monitors throughout the building basically open up opportunities for far more tailored and efficient solutions, which is what Sally R do. As he points out, high quality indoor air on that basis doesn't really need to cost more. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It can represent a real saving.
Enhancing HVAC Efficiency with Modern Technology
00:01:10
Speaker
They're also getting into carbon capture in indoor farms, but I'll let Frederick explain that part. So here he is.
00:01:18
Speaker
Fredrik, let's start with the basics. So when you're describing Saliar or you're pitching it, you've got a short amount of time. Fundamentally, what's the problem that you're solving here around HVAC optimization? Is it a response to demand from the market or are you in a sense anticipating a future in demand and trying to sort of create a solution for something that is going to be more and more of a problem in the future or is it very real already?
00:01:46
Speaker
I think it's very real already, but it is definitely picking up some awareness as part of the increasing energy prices, of course, across Europe, across the world, as well as the pandemic, as we're hopefully seeing the end of. But I believe that real estate and especially commercial real estate and public buildings are
00:02:09
Speaker
once they're now starting to open up that will create some very important questions for the real estate owners as well as the city managers and how to tackle these though that's where Salyar can really make a difference.
Energy Costs and Airborne Disease Control Post-Pandemic
00:02:24
Speaker
So there's two pieces there you mentioned effectively the cost the energy implications of running a mechanical ventilation system in a building and also
00:02:35
Speaker
how that mechanical ventilation system relates to airborne diseases such as COVID. So let's look at the first one. So the energy costs, like how does Sally R get involved or integrate into that, start measuring it and make improvements? Like what's the process that you have to go through to do that? Yeah, and in our case, those two different pieces are very intertwined into each other. So overall, we're trying to really put to people that
00:03:05
Speaker
Well, an increased and more secure indoor air quality actually doesn't mean that you have to spend, you have to consume more energy. It's rather the opposite. It's a contradiction that clean air costs more. It's actually the other way around. So an optimized indoor air quality will actually provide you with substantial energy savings. And the way that we do it, well, you have to bear in mind that the traditional way of controlling HVAC
00:03:35
Speaker
It goes back quite a lot. So it's been very, very traditional and it has been sort of the same throughout many, many years.
Challenges and Modernization of Traditional HVAC Systems
00:03:45
Speaker
And with the help of other technologies or other technology breakthroughs such as big data and connectivity and wireless sensors and everything like that, we can now pick up a lot of data and we can manage the data properly.
00:03:59
Speaker
and we can create new data based on what we actually picked up in a very fast way, so that we can control buildings, very complex systems within buildings easily through a proper data management, which is basically what it actually is. So for someone who's perhaps not familiar with, say, traditional building management systems or facilities management,
00:04:27
Speaker
You said it's a bit of a dinosaur and it hasn't sort of really upgraded. So what does that look like for someone who's not familiar with it? Obviously, natural ventilation is where we came from. And then at some point we started creating sort of like pressurized and mechanically ventilated buildings with HVAC or air conditioning systems. And over the last, say, 20 years or so or more, how has that, what's that look like? The management of an HVAC system? What is it that you're upgrading, basically?
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah, and obviously this is different depending on what kind of building you're talking about and obviously also what kind of country you're in. But from our experience, from Sweden, Scandinavia and Europe, is that a lot of buildings, once they were built, someone from the BMS system provider or their partners, they were in the building and programming a unique solution for that building. And that was obviously based on a lot of assumptions.
00:05:25
Speaker
And these assumptions goes hand-in-hand with what the building would be intended, its intended use, and all different kinds of things.
Case Studies: Success Stories in HVAC Optimization
00:05:35
Speaker
So one practical example would be one building that we implemented our solution in very recently, where 25 years ago when the building was built, the HVAC system was programmed, and it was programmed based on the assumption like, all right, let's do 40% return here.
00:05:54
Speaker
And it was just an assumption that that would work out and that that was a good level. It is not based on any kind of facts and figures because, and to be honest, like 25 years ago, you couldn't do that. And what we can do now is that we can allow the building to choose its own level of return here, depending on how it is being used, what is happening on the outside of the building and taking into a lot of different factors concerning the indoor air quality into account.
00:06:22
Speaker
in order to calculate optimal performance for that system. And that's okay. So then that links in with the idea of the big data, right? Because you're then using global benchmarks to understand how it should be done comparing that with what's actually happening and trying to find gaps discrepancies between the two and then making the adjustments to how the air ventilation system is operating. Is that right?
00:06:48
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So that's one way to look at it. And then there's other types of buildings, like we're optimizing a large shopping mall in Stockholm. It's the largest one in Scandinavia, for Mall of Scandinavia. So it has a good name. And that building was built in, I believe it was finished in 2015 or 2016. So it's very new. It was a huge investment, obviously, for the real estate company. So it's very sophisticated, everything that is within the building.
00:07:18
Speaker
And still, we managed to save around 40, 42% of the energy being used in the HVAC system, simply because we were more reactive to whatever was going on. And this was especially so during the pandemic, of course, when the building had a lot lower people, occupants passing through, right? And again, it was based on assumptions on how it would be used in the building.
00:07:46
Speaker
Yeah, so there's a lot to be done. So if I can create an analogy, would it be basically like someone going in to a building, turning on all the lights at a certain point on the dinner and saying, well, that's it. That's how we operate the light system between, I don't know, nine o'clock and five o'clock. And you're saying, well, actually you might need certain different intensities
00:08:13
Speaker
during the day and you might need perhaps a little bit on a weekend or you might need some later in the evening because that's actually how the building's being used. Would that be a fair analogy
Traditional vs Optimized HVAC: A Lighting Analogy
00:08:23
Speaker
to draw? You're trying to connect the usage by the occupants in the building with the amount of air ventilation and circulation that they need. Is that... Yeah, absolutely. That's definitely a huge part of it. And then we also have different ways of analyzing the building as well.
00:08:41
Speaker
So we are measuring and we're constantly calculating the loads within the building, and not just the heating load, but also like the load concerning CO2. And we can calculate any kind of load. We can calculate and monitor a VOC load, for instance. And by doing it that way, we can predict what will happen a lot better than what would normally be the case as well. So there's a lot of different things, but that is definitely a good analogy as well.
Integrating Software with Building Systems for Air Quality
00:09:11
Speaker
So VOCs volatile organic compounds, basically the nasty chemicals that are off gassing from things like adhesives, glues, carpets, furniture in an office. So for listeners who perhaps aren't aware that chemicals can be found in office furniture, the reality is they often can, especially in paints and cheap
00:09:32
Speaker
ceiling panels and what have you. So the importance of what you've just described is really, I think, critical for improved indoor air quality. So if we look at the hardware and the software involved in making that happen, like what's going on in terms of you bringing pieces of kit into the building or is it a completely software-based solution? Like how do you integrate into the building management system, into the BMS
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, and there's different ways to do that, of course, and we do a lot of different types of integration and implementations. But Saliorian is a software company, so we don't have our own hardware concerning this particular service. Rather, we would prefer to collaborate with a partner.
00:10:22
Speaker
Primarily, that would be the BMS company and the BMS provider, but it can also obviously be an IoT platform for instance, or it can be a sensor company providing sensors.
00:10:37
Speaker
But for, and we have also done integrations and implementations where we made use of a kind of a simple kind of edge unit, edge gateway. But that is simply just because we want to cut corners. And this is primarily, we do that primarily for older systems, older babies, where they sometimes they don't even have an internet, it's not connected to the internet either. So we have to really start from scratch. But yeah, there are different ways
00:11:08
Speaker
So it strikes me as an example of smart building systems, right? We're trying to connect the building via your software with the daily realities of what's happening inside the building. So it's reactive rather than being passive. Now, do you just make a distinction between the air purification that's going on
00:11:29
Speaker
in the building and the air quality. So is the software looking at purification rates that are happening? Do we need to consider that there's not enough purification beyond just the ventilation rates in the building? Do you normally recommend that there is a complementary strategy in terms of improving the indoor air quality beyond just ventilation? Or is that typically enough to remove the VOCs, remove the CO2?
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah, and obviously like again, definitely depends on where in the world you are and what kind of building you're in. But we obviously like we see a lot of data, we can see and we can analyze that for the customer, but then it's obviously up to the customer to take actions based on that data.
00:12:18
Speaker
But it's not that uncommon, obviously, that we get the questions like, how can we improve this further? What measures do we need to take apart from the software and stuff like that? And then we'd like to be really, how you say, be really frank about that. We're not a consultancy in that way. There are others who are way much better than us, providing advice on that.
00:12:48
Speaker
any way we can to help is obviously we can do it. And from our perspective, we are not in this to save energy. It might sound strange, but our standpoint is that we want to improve, we want to secure indoor air quality. That's why we actually do it. The energy savings is just a benefit that comes with it.
00:13:11
Speaker
So as long as as long as the building has healthy IIT, then we're happy and energy savings, they will come as something extra. So then you'd imagine there being, say, a network of, say, head height, I think the regulation or recommendations are around one meter to 1.5 meter high from the ceiling, air quality monitors throughout the buildings.
00:13:39
Speaker
building management team are getting one source of data coming in. You've then got what Saliara producing in terms of data and you can start to see how the management team is building up a picture, right, of exactly what's going on. So you're part of that solution and then you connect to
00:13:56
Speaker
the ventilation rates that are going on in the HVAC. So if you don't mind me asking, what is that connection point between the software and the reality of ventilation rates changing? How does that take place for someone who's not familiar with that process?
00:14:14
Speaker
Yeah, so you're creating the data and is the software making decisions on behalf of the building management team or the building management team having to take to sort of interpret the data that you're creating and then manually create, implement changes or is it automatically linked?
00:14:38
Speaker
Now it's totally automatic. It's automated to 100%. Based on whatever parameters you as a building owner or as a facility manager,
00:14:51
Speaker
what you want to achieve in the building in terms of indoor air quality. So you set the thresholds that the software needs to take into consideration. And usually there is a minimum value and a maximum value and never to exceed the maximum value of course. And then
00:15:08
Speaker
the system, the software would optimize within that kind of range. And it would do that automatically. But it would also obviously pick up on any like discrepancies in that performance as well. And for instance, we can easily analyze a abnormal high energy consumption within any kind of like fans or anything like that that we can track back to, for instance, a filtrate change being
00:15:37
Speaker
and need it. So we can optimize that and we can optimize for other types of services as well. So you can introduce more filtration, for instance, considering now like WHO are starting to talk more and more about PM1, for instance. So you can definitely, there's definitely room to improve more on the filtration side with an optimization service like ours.
00:16:06
Speaker
So PM1 typically talk about PM10, which would be kind of like dust level particles. PM2.5, which is the sort of much smaller things like mold and like tiny little things, but PM1, so that's even further. Would that be sort of airborne disease level?
Innovations in CO2 Capture Technology for Sustainability
00:16:22
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Or I mean, not according to me, according to the WHO. Okay.
00:16:31
Speaker
And so you then have this other piece, right? You have this other element, which I think is a really interesting complement to what we've just been talking about around the HVAC building management and this carbon capture and indoor farm. So where did that come from? What's that product about? Give us give us a quick intro to that. Yeah, absolutely. So we will need to go back five or six years, basically, because Sally or
00:16:59
Speaker
Our name, to begin with, is attributed to Sally Wright, the first female astronaut, US astronaut. So we basically turned to space in the beginning to find solutions to how our buildings can rely less on the outside air, because we see problems with the outside air being more and more polluted, and a lot of energy consumption comes from the air exchange from buildings and to the outside, from the deeded, cooler, whatever.
00:17:29
Speaker
So when starting to look at ISS and how they're solving the indoor air quality on the space station, we came across some very crucial things that we need to solve. And one of them obviously being the optimization of the whole service. And that's our software today. Another part of it is being able to capture CO2 from an HVAC system or from an indoor environment. So for the last
00:17:58
Speaker
three or four years we've basically been digging into that and and evaluating different technologies out there and then coming up with our own technology in order to capture carbon efficiently from indoor environments and then obviously like looking looking for different solutions in how to offset that carbon but once you once you capture it what would you do with this year too and we saw this this
00:18:27
Speaker
kind of new industry. It's not new, but it's definitely on most people's radar these times. And it's concerning vertical farming and locally grown herbs and urban farming and container farming. There's a lot of buzz going on there. And one crucial part of sustainable indoor farming is being able to enrich the farming area with CO2. And the
00:18:56
Speaker
The only solution that we've seen so far is to bring in like tubes and tanks with CO2 that quite often come from natural gas. And that's not very sustainable. So we see a possibility here to kind of make one industry more sustainable by giving them the CO2 and one industry, the real estate industry safer and more energy efficient by capturing the CO2.
00:19:24
Speaker
Um, so yeah, it was a long explanation of monologue. It's fascinating. So if that was say, just to understand, because I know some of the images on your website, they depict maybe like a rooftop indoor farm that could be on a, could be on a, um, an office building, for example, where they decided to go into that with the kind of, um, like a bubble, right? So you create this, this glass house area where it's a protected environment.
00:19:51
Speaker
And would it have to work, would it only work in those, that context, or could it be say a vertical farm set up in the reception of a big building, for example, or do you need an enclosed space? How is it, what are the applications like? What do you need from your side? Yeah, we need an enclosed space in some way, in order to really have an effect on the CO2 levels, so that you actually get an increase in the yield on the crops.
00:20:18
Speaker
but they grow more, the more CFP you have, so it makes sense of course. So that is what you need, but we're also looking into different applications concerning more like traditional indoor farming, like traditional greenhouses, and particularly in commercial greenhouses. And then we would actually capture the carbon from ambient air instead. So that would be more like direct air capture, but for a specific purpose. That's another kind of application on that.
00:20:48
Speaker
So you sort of have this circular economy concept, right, where we're trying to keep everything in the loop rather than, and in this case, the CO2 is kind of like the waste product that we want to keep in the loop to reuse to get more value from it. Is that fair to describe it that way?
00:21:05
Speaker
No, absolutely. That is what we really want to achieve and we also want to kind of like waste a kind of the general awareness that you can actually do good things with CO2. CO2 is natural, it's in our air. It's just that we have a bit too much of it these days. So we need to make something useful with it and why not actually do or try to increase the production of healthy food and especially locally grown healthy food.
Commercialization and Market Impact of CO2 Technology
00:21:35
Speaker
Because there's loads and loads of benefits with vertical farming, indoor farming, urban farming. And if we can help, we want to help in that. And so where do you go from here in terms of building the business, bringing in new clients, developing new products and services? How do you see this evolving over the next three to five years?
00:21:59
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's very exciting times here at SIR. What is the plan for this year is concerning the optimization where we are scaling that business at this stage. We're getting into new markets. We obviously started out in Sweden in Scandinavia, but we're looking to plan into the UK and further into Canada as well this year.
00:22:24
Speaker
Concerning the carbon capture, we're in a way more like a premature stage, but we're commercializing that technology right now. We're getting our first couple of clients, and we will continue to evaluate the performance on that technology. And so, yeah, we'll be a little bit divided, and we're in little different cases considering the technologies, but yeah, we've got our hands full.
00:22:54
Speaker
So let's take a potential building in, let's say, central London. Are there certain parameters within which you can work? Are there certain requirements in terms of going in? Does it need to be a certain genre or type of building or something that's built after a certain year in terms of its HVAC? Are there areas where you can't help? Or are there areas where you can have more impact and more positive results? Yeah, essentially, we don't
00:23:24
Speaker
Our software works for any kind of building anywhere, basically. As long as you have mechanical ventilation, we can optimize that. But it's more of a matter of where we put our focus as of today. So we focused deliberately on offices and retail primarily.
00:23:44
Speaker
but also on more sensitive buildings like schools and hospitals or the health sector. But we make the most difference in obviously large buildings, obviously less complex buildings, so open spaces, large open spaces.
00:24:05
Speaker
And we can really make a difference where you have a lot of people coming in and changing in the occupancy.
Cost Benefits and Savings with Sally R's Solutions
00:24:15
Speaker
Because then we can react really fast and we get a huge difference on the energy. So it's a question that I'm nearly always asked when I'm proposing these kind of concepts and services to clients that I work with. Oh, Matt, okay, but what are the cost implications?
00:24:35
Speaker
how much more is this going to cost me and often my responses will look there might be a little bit more upfront in terms of your capex but then how long will it take you to pay that off in terms of your operating costs once you open the building and actually it can often be within a space of two to three years.
00:24:52
Speaker
I think the owner if they holding the property for that long if they're developing or constructing building and then selling and slightly different story i find when the holding the building for at least a few years is often a discussion around what what are your management and operational costs of the next three years and how much can we save you on those is it a similar argument in terms of. Selling in a cellular service to a developer or landlord.
00:25:17
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. And obviously with the twist, we sell our service as a service. So you would basically pay a monthly fee that is way lower than your energy savings. So I mean, from our perspective, there's actually no investment. You're basically like, yeah, you're saving money, you're making money from day one, basically.
00:25:38
Speaker
But obviously like in this sort of place, there can be certain investments that you need to do and that could be relating like investing in more sensors, for instance. But the way that we figure is that, well, you want sensors anyway, even if you're not going, those are not cellular-specific sensors. So whether or not, whether you like it or not, you would need the sensors.
00:26:02
Speaker
and then you can subscribe to our service and start saving energy as well as be comfortable with that it's actually locked in and you secure the indoor air quality no matter what happens in the building or outside the building. So sensors you mean ventilation rates as in inside the HVAC system or in terms of the air circulating in the occupied spaces?
00:26:26
Speaker
Yeah, to a 90% extent I would say that the sensors inside the HVAC system that is already in place, it is very rarely that we need to complement those sensors.
00:26:37
Speaker
But what we want, it all depends on what type of building, obviously, but in an office building, in a sense, where there are more traditional office buildings with a lot of different rooms and stuff like that, we would need some more reference measurements in the different rooms so that we can securely control the interior quality.
Connecting with Sally R: Contact Information
00:27:01
Speaker
But as sensor cost, as the cost
00:27:03
Speaker
or sensors comes down even more, it's not a huge investment in any kind of way, I would say. So yeah, it's minimal compared to what other types of investment you can do. It's not like solar. That's a much easier sell than solar panels on a roof. I can tell you from experience. Very good. So how can people learn more? How can they connect? How can they reach out and follow what you're doing?
00:27:31
Speaker
Yeah, we obviously have a website, which is fairly good. It's getting more and more content on it. But we're also trying to stay as active as we possibly can on primarily LinkedIn. That's our channel of choice. And you're always happy to schedule a meeting with me or one of my colleagues to learn more as well. So we're always eager to speak to people out there. Awesome. We'll put all the contact details in the show notes.
00:28:00
Speaker
That was great. Thank you so much for your time Frederick. Thank you very much.