Hey thanks for watching in this quick video from the second annual hvecr symposium, my very good friend joe medosh comes on to talk about some healthy home principles, healthy housing principles that hvac contractors can take to heart as we go into this world that care. So much about indoor air quality, we need to start paying attention to the entire structure and joe really is one of the foremost experts on healthy homes and how that integrates with being an hvac contractor a technician. So, thank you to joe thank you to everybody who spoke and sponsored the hvacr symposium. Thank you to emerson for making these live streams possible.

I hope you enjoy this video and i hope you learn more about how to improve your customers. Health through paying attention to the entire home - this is a topic that is a challenge for this industry, and hopefully i will remind you as to why you are the main source for bringing healthy homes, to uh your own homes and to every everybody else's. So my name is joe madosh. I work for hayward score.

I'm a healthy building. Scientist! That's a term! I made it myself because, if you're building a regular building science uh scientist, it's not enough because you're not addressing ventilation, you're, not addressing the chemicals or the other issues that are in those actual materials that are people building. So they're, like oh yeah, air and moisture flow, and i'm like what about all the chemicals that are off-gassing from those issues that you actually ignored. So my goal was to talk about some of the opportunities that are there.

So this is a brand new opportunity. So i'm going to say that i concluded my requirements because i completely changed my focus over the last couple of days so bpi for not from the bpi building performance institute. They have a variety of training and self-certifications as well as train certifications. You may be familiar with them: they have a building science principles.

You can just pay for the the guide and take the test, there's no requirement or training, and this has been around for a long time. There's a fundamental training, it's out there and they just recently released this healthy housing principles. Reference guide: this is going to change the industry, so it's one of the most fundamental things that's out there. I did bring mine with me, so this is it if you want to know anything about healthy homes.

It is in this book right. The book is probably around 129 130 in that range, but it's a phenomenal resource. It's a reference guide. You can take the exam for another 100 bucks or something, and you can just open book test.

The hhp will be some of the one of the newest challenges or requirements that i think was going to happen in the industry all right. So it's built upon the hud principles they also now uh for a variety of other programs use this right. So there are eight fundamentals: they're designed to be key terms or key words that you can actually use to communicate it yourself or to your clients or anybody. So they're built on clean dry pest, free, contaminant-free, safe um, ventilated maintained, ventilated, is a crucial one and um making sure people are comfortable.

You can see that the last several of them are all fit into things. You do normally okay, and i tried not to look at the screen to remember what they were all right, so these uh also fit into a variety of stuff that does fit into building science, all right in terms of air sealing or exhaust fans ventilation. Clearly, straight up with the kind of things you're doing regularly all right, homeowner repair is the reason you're going out there, so they don't maintain their system, but these also fit into a variety of things that are healthy outcomes, reducing plan contaminants and pathways where people are Breathing stuff that they shouldn't be. How well is the garage seal from where their unit is and where they're living all those things come into play, and many of these things might focus that you're actually doing these things regularly or you're at least be able to be aware of what these things are And i don't read my slides just so you kind of picked up on that and i only talk faster and faster as we go.

So if you hear slowly i i will try to help you accommodate that. But maybe you can read quicker than i can talk right. Joseph allen works for the harvard t.h chain, school of uh health and business opportunities. Okay, he's got a book out.

These are his nine foundations, notice, they're very similar to the foundations. I just showed you a few minutes ago, which had been around for probably 30 years right, so here's the whole purpose of why i changed my entire premise to you. Okay, he's been on the news. I don't know how you could have missed him.

Anybody, if you do twitter, you had to come across this guy facebook. Whatever he's on all the talk shows, he says that building engineers and facility managers are probably the one person or people that are actually able to manage your building, have greater impact on your health and your doctor. It's a fundamental premise: that person who keeps track of the building actually determines whether or not people may be sick or healthy or missing days of work, all right, huge uh statement that he kind of said: oh yeah, it's a pretty valid statement. Those who control mostly the heating and cooling system, are probably the person who determines maybe sick days or other things that are happening with the environment.

You're in let's convert that joe medosh says. That's me all right says that hey, it's actually hvac systems that are actually of a greater impact on health and your doctor, and you right here know how to work on a system like that. You have the ability to work with your clients to determine whether or not they are healthy or or have those kind of challenges you think of it as they're comfortable. But comfort is only a side effect or an indirect condition.

That actually happens with trying to make sure that the system's working well, we'll talk about filtration and some other stuff. You can do and i'll try to avoid the shiny object, stuff we're doing a session tomorrow on sensors and devices that measure that kind of stuff and some of the other shiny object, stuff, ionizers and things that glow glow green okay. So this is a common thing here, i'm sure you're all getting your waters in your meals right who can go the rest of the session without eating anybody? Can you do that hold on no eating until i'm done until lunch, fair enough who can go without water until we have lunch, no water? I see you got some waters out there. You cannot drink water.

Okay. How long can you go without breathing? Can anybody go to the end of my session without breathing? How much do you breathe an hour, so we've got 20 breaths an hour all day. You got about 20 000. I kind of reduce that for a simple number: 20.

000 breaths a day from here on you'll kind of get freaked out as to what's going down your uh, your lungs and into your your body right. So this is your concept here: 10 by 10, a small swimming pool, 30, 000 gallons every day in and out constant. We think so much about the food and our water. What's in our contaminated water, what's in we're eating, is it organic? We don't think about organic air.

We don't think about any of that kind of stuff. It's all like we just accept, because we have so few choices and we're constantly doing it that we can't be like. Oh wait, i'm not going to breathe. So i get home because this is a really bad place to be in right.

There's a prop over at bergman's uh booth over there with truetek tool stuff. I made that probably six or seven years ago, it's about most homes have infiltration they're leaking. That means the air that you're breathing is actually coming through the walls themselves, all right so you're, breathing whatever's inside those walls as nasty as they may be. That's actually where your air comes from.

I try and ask people where do you think the air comes from like yeah, it's gon na come down, you know just from wherever i'm like yeah. It comes through your walls from your attic. Give you a crawl space, not common here, but maybe those in our listening world out. There have crawl spaces, but all those places are where the air comes from, and this is some nasty places where you actually get the air that you're breathing.

So it's an exposure pathway is what you're trying to work on we'll talk about exposure pathways are in terms of an energy penalty which also may actually impact the heating and cooling system. You install all right, so here's a nasty one, okay. So, every day we shed this seven million flakes per minute. Those of you that have been home for a while.

This is a lot of stuff to fathom. Okay. Is that the? When you look at some of the dust that we have in our house, 70 to 90 percent is composed of skin flakes. That's right! Those of you at home are probably now tuned out like what else have they got over there, because this is getting kind of gross, so it's just part of life, so we're actually breathing this kind of stuff, but most of the dust is probably in your house.

If it doesn't come off of you many times, we bring it in it's on our shoes on your clothing, it's on your animals, it's on whatever it's coming into the house, all right, so uh, then it also has all kinds of metals and other nasty chemicals that Are in that dust and we're breathing it all the time? Okay, this is about what we're breathing for the most part and how you can actually kind of help prevent what we're breathing you may have seen this. This is from the epa they made this a nice slide probably decades ago. It shows a human hair all right and they talk about pm10, which is actually the size of particles. That's a micron size right and then they talk about pm 2.5, which gets much further in so they kind of okay, here's a human hair and we can get five of those across a hair and we get five acros of that.

So 25 of them will fit across the human hair of these pm 2.5. You may be familiar with pm 2.5. It's a common phrase. It's been around for a while: okay there's a bunch of particulates in the air, but how small are they and how far do they go and here's a little uh uh a little fine beach sand, uh beach and probably pretty common out here somewhere? So, let's talk about the sizes, though let me sort this stuff out and see what we can't do about making this makes more sense.

So here's my pm10 right and what i do is i have here is i have a prop: that's going to simulate what goes through our body and where it goes okay, so we got the human hair, all right, blood cells. I don't really deal with the blood cells people going to get freaked out by that, but i do have a 5.0 micron size. I got 2.5. I got a 1..

Things are bacteria in this range and i got a 0.3 okay. So i got this little breath of air that we have here is full of all of our little stuff right and i have a human hair. This is based upon scaling things up 15 000 times. Let's see what my next slide is there we go okay.

So here's my little uh the things i got that are actually pretty close to the same scale. We needed all right. Quantity matters, okay, so this is my human hair that we're going to come back to right. So in this one breath you take a particle counter and it beams up, and it says: okay, i'm counting all the particles in different sizes, so in general, in an average breath, there's 20 000 pm10s right down here, we're in seven million and seven and a half Million of super small particles and most needs are way beyond what you can see anyway.

These are the kind of things you're experiencing when you're on the sitting in traffic. That's from exhaust from cars wildfire smoke. All those kind of things are just super fine, you think of them as a miss, because they're just that fine, so you can see how much are we actually breathing in one breath so in a day, 20, 000 breaths a day. This is the trillions of numbers that you're actually getting of these kind of particles that we're breathing our body does a great job of actually saying hey.

I can. I can do something with that stuff, even though it's very nasty and has significant health impacts. We usually overcome it, so in general i had to make these things bigger, so i made them fifteen thousand times larger, so here's my human hair, fifteen thousand one of my hairs. I have thin hair right, so it's kind of this is only uh thin, hair.

There's thicker hair, which even larger thin hair we've got our pm10s. We got our uh 0.5, all those things we're going to put in here and i'm going to mix them and see what happens just so. You get the visual my goal. Is you get a visual as to how stuff moves through your lungs and your body and by the way this is merv right, he's birth? 13? All right! If he was an average person, we would be 14 and a half miles tall.

So this kind of puts you in perspective as to how big we are and how large we've gone to right. So i adjusted this number, so we actually end up with one of these pm10s and you can see 3. 12. 30.

50. All the way down all right all right, so i'm going to put here here's our loud moment for the mic thing. So if i dump all this stuff in right, here's our normal breath we're like okay. What do you got? I got all this stuff.

That happens. We breathe we're moving around 20 000 breaths a day right. This is the kind of stuff that's moving through some of it kind of gets, caught higher in your respiratory system, lower and lower and lower and my goal. Was you get this concept of how much of it gets further and further into your bloodstream? Okay, even the 2.5, these yellow or these pink balls here they can actually get into your bloodstream, but you can see how much more there is of the other ones.

All right, how far they're getting into them right, significant health impacts, are coming from these types of particulates right. So we're going to talk about that and talk about what can be done to reduce this all right. So here's our number. So i try to keep a color coding system that went through right, so the blue, when i ordered it from amazon, i turned up green, but it's close enough.

The concept here is that when we actually have these particles, you can see how deep they are in the lungs. Our goal is to kind of connect these two, but there's even a blood brain barrier when you're breathing there's actually parts of your nose that are connected. Your olfa factory that go right into your blood, so you can actually sniff stuff and it goes right. It doesn't even need to go through your lungs to actually go straight directly into your brain all right.

So here's a video i'm going to play um we'll check the sound real, quick as it plays, but uh it's a great uh uh thing i found that shows how these things move a little more realistic graphic and what they actually do to your blood. The small smoke particles from air pollution or pm 2.5 are more than 25 times smaller than the width of a human hair as air is inhaled. Particles enter the body through the nose and mouth air passes through the respiratory airway and finally reaches the alveoli tiny air sacs in the deepest part of the lung. The smallest of the particles that enter the lungs diffuse through the walls of the alveoli into the bloodstream.

But they are transported to all organs of the body where they can affect normal function. Critical organs affected include the lungs, the immune system, part and developing brain, so yeah. Clearly, there's a longer video. I decided to cut it short because there's only so much time i can actually get to that, but there are direct impacts where it's something clearly, when we know stuff's in our blood, it's going to impact our brain, the immune system, the heart all those but we're Learning a lot about maybe we're having heart conditions, and one of these are attributed to is actually having particulate matter that they're exposed to and high of it we're kind of lucky that in america it's not a major significant impact right, but there's other parts of the World, india, china, uh other, you know developing countries where this is something that is serious and something that people don't wear masks all the time, not because of any kind of a reaction to a pandemic, but because they have so much particulate dust.

And it actually is something you you can actually see it in the road it's so challenging. So i found this recently. This is actually called see the air we're showing you from pm10 how much, how far the stuff gets into your body all right versus 2.5. All the way down to one which is the most significant that smaller stuff point one is, you would actually think of this as almost a gas, because it's so small, so if you're stuck in traffic and you've got your windows down, that's the kind of stuff.

That's getting into your blood system and going all the way through your body as you're, breathing those kind of chemicals. If you can smell the car in front of you, it's actually you're smelling it you're, actually breathing it's going into your blood system, so in 2005, maybe hard to read there by 2005 they attributed 130 000 deaths to particulate matter right. So what they're saying is they say they understand deaths, conditions, how many people are dying from certain things? They do some extrapolation same with the radon. They don't really know exactly.

If you die from radon, they do a variety of health attributes to determine. Oh based on these conditions, we think this is actually the significant amount, so it's no small number by any means. Oh, i do have a section later we'll come to, but i just want to make sure we got to this in terms of our time frame. This comes from linda wigginton, she's in pittsburgh area, where they actually have high particulates they're one of the few places in the country where opening your windows is not a good thing for part of the year, because they actually have more particulates and more issues.

If you really want to learn more about particulate studies or you should be considered something sheba, does she actually has this whole series of diagnostic tools that they give to a bunch of people, usually it's locally, but she also does reach out across the country and they Send you all these and you have them for a month and they actually keep track of. What's going on in your house what you could do, so they learned that by uh. Maybe you guys are familiar with these kind of units. You guys remember this.

Some look familiar right, so the concept here is that clearly, this filter is only working down here, right kind of a real challenge. Uh here we actually have a beautiful flow, low, static, super low static pressure and now my filter's going straight across, and i can now use that entire area to catch all that right. They were able to change the motors out and they run those 24 7. All the time cost around 11 12 a month and here's the stats that come from that, so what they did was they showed.

This is a the roamer was in the bedroom, so they have outdoor indoor indoor orange is bad. Red is very bad. Okay, so before they had this, they put these systems in and then they end up realizing that remote's giving you problems here. So afterwards you can see everything's turning green, but outdoors is still bad.

Significant reduction in particle matter particle matter all the stuff, we're breathing all the stuff, that's causing health issues. I have a bunch of stuff that reminds us that this is bad stuff for you, okay, oh, i did my prop okay, we did that early. Okay, great! We did the problem uh, you guys met merv. Merv 13 was earlier.

You guys uh, who here is actually installing and checking static, it's okay to say, with your systems, you're saying: okay, i'm going to put a higher static, higher merv rating in, and i confirm that this system was designed for that, because you know your clients are out There buying these things and they're only like stressing out their system in general. They think it's a good thing to do and they don't really know that so, as my son says, something's going to kill your dad, why are you keep going on and on about this stuff when it goes, it pays the bills dude. So you know you need to just roll with it and uh. You know it's it's how it goes.

All of these things that we referred to in terms of particulate matter are from outside. You saw that saying earlier about 130 000 desks, that's from uh. They say outdoors but you're, inhaling it or you're, interacting with it indoors. We spent 90 percent of our time, even with or without covet inside.

For the most part, that's either your car, your work or your home you're, probably at home, around 80 percent of the time and half of that you're in your bedroom. So the focus here was that okay, we can establish epa says i can tell you how your air outside should or shouldn't be. I can regulate that and i can tell you if it's good bad there's, so many apps out there that do this. You can go to so many sites and tell us - and this is a blue air.

This is actually something you can actually get in your own house or it's a free source to say, hey. I want to find out what's going on near me, you go to blueair.com and it'll find these particular matter maps near you. You say: okay, what's happening, especially there's some kind of wildfire conditions right. So now we take this outside rating and we have to figure out how do we interpret it with inside? So people do it? They kind of do a little strange, i'm doing a session tomorrow with caleb about indoor, air quality, monitors and sensors and they say: okay, let's help you figure this out, but it's a little challenging.

So here's one standard that does a pretty good job of trying to tell us what our pm 2.5 is kind of a standard number. We talked about 0.5 and 0.3, it's hard to measure those things or measure them consistently. So but these are some of the standards that actually are working for commercial buildings and commercial properties to determine if they are actually having good health outcomes. I mentioned joseph allen earlier his book actually does a great job of saying.

You know what, if you own your building, and you have a business in this building, mostly dealing with commercial kind of high-rise or business opportunities, and you control the environment. You make these optimum numbers towards the bottom. There are documented health benefits for your employees reduce missed days. There is an increase in efficiency.

Cognitive abilities go up, there's a variety of win-win, including energy, goes down. So for those who really want to invest in their employees, they should be investing in the facilities that they're in all those are a great turnaround in terms and he actually documents it in the book. Here's the real numbers so temperature and humidity uh carbon monoxide. Clearly, we understand that as an issue, but you can see where some of these are.

Carbon dioxide is a great thing for ventilation, mostly we're focusing around particulates, because this can make you dizzy, can make you not feel so well of tvocs. They are a challenge because i don't know what the heck it is. It could be that guy in the middle of the back is cologne. It could be these tablecloths, it could be.

Who knows what all these other chemicals are in this room? It's hard to figure out what it is this i can actually measure, but you know what these are particulates. This is carbon dioxide. I can focus on those and actually try and reduce those this i can dilute it, but it's hard to know what exactly caused those issues. Okay, so we have some air leakage all right.

We have all this stuff around us. Remember we talked about, we we're regulating and keeping track of what's happening outside epa says these numbers are what you should strive for, and your community should be activating those and let you know if they actually get high. Those indoor days where you should stay home high ozone high particulates all right, but these things are all coming inside. These are the contaminant pathways.

These same pathways are the same ones that are impacting your systems working well and operating well at their efficient manner. So all these things are coming inside and we're like, oh yeah inside, is five to seven times worse, two to five times worse, it's way worse than that, we just don't regulate it or we actually keep track of it, but not only are they keeping track of What goes in, but what are you doing inside inside you're, showering, you're, cooking, you're, bathing cooking is just one one nasty condition in your house. If you solve the things that show up on your charts when cooking you'd be like, you probably would be depressed about the numbers that are happening when you cook so your meal, oh yeah, i love that meal. You find out.

No, all the particulates come from all that bacon and all this stuff we love to cook. So all these things are impacting the people as well as remember we talked about earlier. How much are you shedding? Really anybody? Remember: seven million yeah right yeah right a whole lot of stuff. Are you oh they're, all shed, not just one of you and all these things are actually happening when this stuff gets inside.

It doesn't just kind of roam around or fall the floor. It sticks to whatever it can right. It sticks to the walls, the ceiling, the carpets, your clothing, your furniture, then it kind of hangs out there until something triggers it to release itself right vacuuming with a really good vacuum. Is it very beneficial vacuuming with a bad vacuum, only takes all that stuff.

That kind of settled your carpet works, kind of as a filter and says: okay, thanks for stirring it up boom, it can stay in the air for sometimes two to three days. Sometimes a week these small little red particles they can be suspended for days. Okay, yes, so yeah all the stuff you're like i'm not going home anymore. We should all move back outside and live outside, no issues with that.

So i am covid. Maybe you guys have heard of me this year, i i'm the guy who's been causing all the problems. I try not to make it public because i want to like live in peace, but i have been covered right. I just was kind of looking for a popularity issue.

I didn't realize how popular it would be, but in the the the upside of the down is that everybody you're talking to is hyper aware of their home you're, probably more hyper aware of your home than you've ever been. If you have kids you're very aware of how small your house suddenly became right, your clients are now hyper aware of their home. They understand what it means to have not so good, fresh air when they understand what it means to not be comfortable or to have nowhere to go anymore or wish that their living room was more comfortable or their whole home just felt better. These are the things that would turn your uh.

You know box change out into a twelve thousand thirty thousand dollar upgrade of making their home much more comfortable. There's a lot of studies that happened before covet about this. This is actually another study. That was a joint study with harvard and a variety of other folks, and they were showing the amount of people that are very in tune with making sure their health has healthier components right.

These people wanted to make sure that if they had children and they had younger people want to know, i want to make upgrades to my home that are healthier. You can see here younger folks who really want to make these kind of investments and indoor air quality was one of the top factors that are evaluating pests and water quality. Again, all these things are about being not just comfortable but actually living in healthier environments. There's a variety of chemicals that are out there, i'm going to just remind you that i'm not going to just focus on pm 2.5, but i will give you seven seconds on some other stuff.

That's out there from household pollutants, the things we're using. So, if you're using this stuff, they also give off pm 2.5 and vocs and a variety of other conditions out there - the amount of chemicals one of my props is over on uh. I have a couple props here today. The other one is over on bergman's table off to the left side.

It's a little tiny container full of all the stuff, that's in our house little pieces and see if you can't identify some of them because they all have all these kind of things that are just so hard to actually pronounce or know what they do. But they're all giving off vocs and toxic gases again all this over breathing. It wouldn't be that much of an issue if you lived in a home from 1945 or something with ventilated. Well, just naturally it was leaky as heck.

All those things were actually kind of a good thing, because all the stuff that we now live with actually we're able to ventilate itself and instead we're making home super super tighter, we're making them tighter and yet we're not doing a very good job. No we're doing an awful job of ventilation. I'm not going to be i'm not one to be like oh yeah, we're doing. We put an exhaust fan in the middle of the house.

That's ventilation! That's a fart fan in the middle of the house. That's all! It's! Not ventilation, it's not so don't be confused by the code or all the people. Talking about like oh yeah, you got a whole house ventilation system. No, you have an extra fan that may run 24 7 or run 20 minutes out of the hour.

That's not ventilation! That's an exhaust fan in the middle of the house, again, here's some of our stuff that we have we're not getting rid of this stuff and uh. It's all taken into effect. So let's talk about you, the ac contractor. This is something we've actually worked on at the hayward score me and my boss.

Bill come up with this concept that there's a triangle of things here, there's an assembly, it needs to be maintained, and then people live in it. These are probably the people that can destroy an entire triangle all by themselves. They're like. Ah i didn't do anything in my house.

I don't i don't turn on the exhaust fans. I don't use anything in the house. Well, i got a kitchen range hood. I never use it right, but you're showing up because they didn't do a good job of maintaining it or it wasn't built well.

In the first place, all right, i'm sure, you've been in many calls you're like who the heck installed this man. This was crazy, so you're, you have two parts of this triangle and your goal is to convince them or work with them to figure out how their habits can actually be adjusted to to put them forward. Uh anybody here, familiar with the duck test. I actually came down and trained hundreds and hundreds of contractors uh down here, just as you guys switched over your code a couple of years ago about the blower to our test.

We went through the whole concept, but the reality is there's not much difference. This is just a shell. This is just a shell, a fan with a motor and a gauge fan with a motor and a gauge. These are all the same kind of concepts.

I still have a hard time convincing people that, if you're an hvs contractor this will help you as much to figure out your systems working. Well then this will. This is a great job of determining direct linkage. This is actually way larger.

The largest duct in the house is what what's the largest duct. You guys work with the house. That's right, so the most forgotten and largest duck system in the house is the the actual house itself. So if you're learning those infiltrations, we you think of as an energy penalty, what have you figured out so far? They're, not an energy penalty, they are a contaminant pathway.

They are a way for all this other stuff to get into the house right, which you also need to address. You want to address the the energy penalty, and now you want to also address the the contaminant pathway penalty, so i'm going to go through our some images now in terms of how they move through the house. So let's talk about outside air coming in so we take our normal house all right. Uh most addicts are vented.

So now we've got green yucky stuff coming through the attic and uh it's gon na get in the attic very common setup here, except that we have a lot of penetrations that are going down to the other floors right. So it's not uncommon to have uh attics that actually have these kind of issues, a bunch of holes where probably had wiring plumbing and even the gaps around all of the drywall. Where they're connecting you don't think it adds up to a lot. But you can actually have anywhere from uh one to three square feet of openings from your attic down to below, but you're like air doesn't go down right.

So there's your contaminated pathways. Air does go down, we'll talk about how that can happen. So it's a variety of issues from either temperature differences or those dang fans that we're trying to use to get eliminate stuff, they're, good and bad at the same time. So here that air that came in from the attic is now coming down from inside my walls inside the drywall inside the openings works its way down all the way from the attic to the second floor, like how does that happen? Coming down right, we can see the path now.

It shows up across the ceiling on the first floor and shows up in the electrical boxes or anywhere else it can leak, because i got an exhaust van here. That's actually pulling a lot of cfm throughout the house. Air in equals air out, where's it coming from. So that's our goal is to figure out.

What's happened here so now we've got air moving through. Maybe just went backwards. There we go so i got moving through now we have other exhaust fans. All this stuff is leading to wherever it can leak path.

Of least resistance is where your air is going to come from. So these uh all these connectivity areas around different floors or near the crawl space. All these are causing the issues to happen in terms of. What's in the wall, go back to the section we talked about where you can see what's in the walls of where air is coming from in your environment and the dryer, the dryer takes out all of this air in this entire house in 20 minutes all right.

So it doesn't take long, actually it's an hour. So when one hour all the air in your house is exhausted in exchange with one dryer, so um, one of my goals was to convince hvc contractors that you are the reason the house failed when it comes to air leaking. So somebody comes out and does a blower door test. They're like it failed and everybody says: oh, it's you, the plumber, it's like! No, no! I sealed all my spots.

Electrician says no. My holes are small. I got those sealed easily. Everybody says no, no! It's you! Hvc contractor this is where your leaks are.

Your leaks are in all of your joints that weren't sealed correctly all the little boots. You didn't seal all the big pathways, where you're running ducks all the way down to another floor. That is why these homes are failing with their blower door test. So i say: hey you guys need to go, get something like the guy says: hey we failed.

You need to run over there while the blower door. Guy is still there and say: hey just a second. I want to see. What's going on, you get out your pressure pan, while the blower door is going sorry, one by the way you could have a pressure pan, which means it could measure the pressure through these openings while the blower door is on.

So it says: okay, blower doors on pressure comes through goes out here. If all these are well sealed, you're, not the problem. Go back to the plumber, go back to the poor construction. That's your goal is to be like it.

Wasn't me or they're going to prove that it was you and then you're in trouble, because you've got to go back and find it all these leaks and there's simple ways. You can actually do to measure this in terms of a simple gauge, while the blower door is going to find out where those leaks actually are one time rookie on time, uh. What time we end? Okay, let me know when i ten minutes give me ten minutes. Okay, so one of the things i also focus on is that you have duct leakage.

It is a driver for infiltration right. So one of these that can happen is if i have supply leakage, i started returning liquid. Let me go back there. We go supply leakage.

Maybe we're missing something all right there. It is okay, so i got supply or positive yeah. That's a return! Sorry, it's skipped through one. Maybe it's on the next slide.

So what happens when i return leakage, so it's grabbing all extra air right, we're like oh yeah. That's a penalty you're losing energy, no you're grabbing whatever it is from the attic or the crawl space and pulling it into the house right and many times it may be. It should be where there's a filter, but if they have a filter down here, i'm pulling it in over here and i'm bypassing the filter. So it depends on where it is.

This can actually impact it. But it's also saying you know what i'm going to pressurize the house. If i had to choose, i would rather pressurize and depressurize, but now i'm actually pushing stuff out, which is actually the better thing than the opposite uh. Here we go so we have supply all right so supply.

So i'm saying i'm losing air you're losing energy, but you're actually grabbing stuff through the envelope again back to what am i breathing where's it coming from when you have significant supply leakage, all right, i'm losing air there. Each of the arrows is equivalent to say a thousand cfm air has to come back in from some other place right, so i mean i'm pulling air in from the envelope the crawl space or the attic has to come in to make sure that motor meets its Demands one of the challenges is that you know this supply if there was a hot water tank sitting here in the middle that had a direct draft, that draft is probably the least restricted pathway. That's the most fastest place where air can come in is right down. The uh the vent for a hot water tank, so you go out there you're, like oh, my god.

I found this huge return leak and i sealed up all your returns. Your returns are super tight now, but that means now the dominant leakage is now their supply. So you could actually alter back drafting in a house if you're, not careful with finding that big large return said. Oh, i fixed your return was completely separated.

I fixed that now it's super tight, but yet your supply leakage wasn't addressed because you really didn't see that be that significant okay, so the big big ass fan all right. That's actually a company. We had a i worked at retrotech and they made us change our our we weren't allowed to call things big ass fans because we owned that term. You can't use that term.

Okay, i'll move this kind of quickly, so there's a variety of ventilation, air conditioning stuff. I found this company down in uh when i was in uh atlanta right. They took a letter out like we don't do ventilation, so they just thought that it would just be. You know you call them a hack but really you're focused on what you do.

If you don't do ventilation, take it out your name. In fact, i tried to convince people in my industry. Don't call you guys hvac contractors, because most people don't do the v just call them heating and air conditioned contractors or brian refers you guys as air conditioning contractors. That's okay! It's not a knock! It's the fact.

Most people show up and they're like uh yeah. We don't do that so or we don't address those kind of challenges which is uh one of the places where you actually can increase the amount of money you're making there. So it isn't fresh air, it's actually outside here. When people say it's fresh air, it's just so you can make your clients feel better, but if your neighbor's burning leaves or lord knows what they're doing - and that is not fresh air, but that's where you're getting your air from and your neighbor it's just outside air.

It's a better term in the industry. It's called outside air oops, so ventilation is headed towards a really advanced stage right now, it's very kind of exciting, so you can get balanced ventilation and erv right or you can actually get now. An exhaust fan and supply fan that actually talk to each other can work together directly, okay, they're like okay. I don't need to do this entire duct system or integrate with my other duct system.

I can actually just use two fans or multiple fans to say: exhaust out supply and exhaust out supply, very simple concept. That's headed for the industry. The next one is smart ventilation. Where you don't need to realize it's happening in your home.

It's able to just able to work by itself. It knows the occupancy, because it's able to do carbon dioxide. It understands your rhythms, your patterns, if you've got pets, they may want to ventilate more because they give off a lot of carbon dioxide, but ultimately we're going to be headed here. This is probably i'd, say five years away before this is super common.

In most new homes that it's just a ventilation strategy, it isn't like one big system, it's multiple little systems that are able to work well with each other. When your exhaust fan goes on in your kitchen, there's a supply vent, that's working on and providing fresh air someplace else. So why is this such an obstacle? I'm still confused as to why the balance part is still a challenge again. We're still doing fart fans and calling it ventilation.

Here's why it's so complicated is. I actually did a. I did a whole thing about, like here's all the different strategies you could do for uh ventilation simplifies. It went from a fan to adding a variety of stuff to a switch to ambient sensors and outdoor sensors and people and whether it comes on or not and add, uh fans in the window and then just as you got your system all set up.

You're, like you know what i missed a homeowner, i'm so glad you went out and spent 12 grand. We put another three in there where 15 000 your system is phenomenal. This is the best area you could probably have in any house. You go on vacation and the system has a glitch, and this other guy shows up and be like what the hell is going on here.

Man, your guy, was an idiot i'm going to redo this whole thing, for you, no i'll fix it, yeah yeah right. So it is one without question. By far the most complicated thing in a home is what you guys do. It is seriously close to the complicated as what a car does.

I don't know how many you guys still work on your own cars. If you are i'm impressed because that's a lost art anymore, you know get something from the 80s or before you probably could do something open in the engine. Be like here's all the parts. Now, that's that's gone.

You need a computer and a whole bunch of other stuff to do that. This is where you're headed the the guy with you know, a truck and whatever this is way beyond their ability to figure this stuff out. It is there and it is uh achievable. There is a variety of resources out there that help you get through how simple ventilation can be or your systems.

That's why uh bergman is what you know, one of my good friends in a god, because he tries to simplify the challenges to go along with trying to know everything i'll go through uh, real, quick on uh, some of the uh studies that are out there trying To put this at the end in case we ran out of time. I've lost track of time. If i know what we're doing or when should we be ending all right, so oh here's one of the stats i found so uh. This is um.

Most of the i i'm not the only one trying to convince you that particulates are the issue and that you are the only contractor that can actually resolve particulates in somebody's home that come from outside inside whatever they are. They are a major health risk and they are the one thing that are a bonus for you to upgrade. Remember i showed you that one where they fixed the duck system for the company that does it out there. It's a five to seven hundred dollar upgrade.

They show up, they talk about what's going on and they go. We can do this today before they leave they're swapping out that return. The only challenge is sometimes the whole water tank is too dang close you're like. Ah, this is going to be a challenge, but, and they can't do it, but otherwise that's a that's, a in and out same day service that they actually do for somebody.

So clearly you can see that particular pollution is even worse than smoking or alcohol and uh. Clearly, whenever you're doing any of these, you still got this. It's not like. You can eliminate this exactly so you're, always like oh yeah right i'm.

I have some problems. I'm smoking, i'm drinking, oh, and i got ridiculous. Damn ridiculous they're killing me there's a lot of great studies out there, i'm going to give you the next slide is a summary it's one of my favorite slides. This is from weatherization folks.

These are a bunch of studies that talked about what are we doing in homes, and this is actually just fundamentals: air sealing thermal upgrades, usually just adding insulation in the attic all right, sometimes in the wall, if they're missing a lot of wall, insulation and the heating Tune up, this isn't even like revamping or upgrading their system, all right, so i'll read off some of these. So, on this side we are reducing through these we're reducing through what they did: air sealing thermal upgrades and heating to them. They're reducing gases and particulates, particulates right, uh, they're, using less medications, dampness is reduced, mold is reduced. Risk of cancer is reduced, arthritis, depression, energy bills, pollutants days off, work and school have been reduced, cardiovascular issues.

All these have been reduced. These are all documented conditions that have been reduced from these simple measures that happen, improvements, they're, actually saving money. They have extra money in their pockets, general health, mental health, lower respiratory upper respiratory blood pressure, a variety of medical conditions have all been approved by usually spending less than 10 grand in a house, because this is weatherization. They have a lot of money, but they're able to do some basic stuff with what they have the funds for a lot of great studies out there.

This is indoor kim if you're looking for something interesting, you'll be like well. That would be great if somebody took a house and measured every freaking thing in the house and then decided to use it as a normal house. So what they did was the sloan foundation says here: here's a couple million dollars. We want to find out what does bleach do when you also do something else or when you're, cooking and then after you've cooked with the particulates are still in the air.

You decided to clean the kitchen. What does that do? How do those things get combined? So they spent the money on that cooking is clearly is off the chart numbers when you cook all right. Clearly, you cook anything you're frying the gases from the actual combustion combined with the particulates. This is how much is getting into your head airways, the you can see the tracheal stuff gets kind of caught quickly.

This is the deep part. This is the uh, the alvin air. This is actually going deep into your lungs. We talked about that with the video.

How deep that goes! This is what they got here, so they got this house they've been using for a long time, and each universities get a little shed on the outside to test what's happening on the inside, and they do this like normal living stuff. So they're like let's combine these two cleaners, let's let's vacuum and then clean - and do all this stuff that you would think are normal activities that we've never actually done a great job of studying or what happens when people combine stuff. So there's a lot of great stuff from healthy, indoors iq radio, um corbett lunsford, i know he's a fan of what you guys are doing or you'll be a fan of his he's done a great job of documenting and doing video documentation of everything. They're doing it's all online, here's just something to back it up.

So epa says that particulates are. You know what they are: microns 2.5 they're bad. You know we inhale them, they're bad, some of the health stuff that they say is bad. We've already gone through.

Some of this, but i wanted to back it up with the epa. If you're going to do anything with the homeowner, you want to make sure that you are a trusted. Source means you're using other people's documented information. Not just saying like hey particulars are bad like why you know they just sometimes they make me cough that doesn't go over well to an occupant or a homeowner.

You want to be able to have resources that actually go past that so irregular heartbeats uh non-fatal heart attacks. These are all stuff that we're now just really figuring out why particulates are becoming such an issue in our homes. Here's some other stuff. You know a lot of great evidence showing why these are doing short-term exposure, nitrogen dioxide and ozone.

We kind of mentioned those earlier, but nitrogen dioxide's, usually given off from cooking. In fact, most of the appliances you buy today that have gas they're, like oh carbon monoxide, is kind of an issue. So let's adjust the flame when they adjust the flame to reduce carbon monoxide. They kind of introduced more carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, sorry, so some of the the things you're like oh yeah.

This is not a much better job. Their flames, weren't really retuned, to reduce that and ozone is a combination of variety of stuff and it can actually combine with other stuff to create particles. So it in and of itself is a whole analysis by itself. We could do a whole nother show on that.

So occupants are complicated. We've seen some of the evidence of that. You know between your lungs and the what's going through your blood, how all the kids homes are complicated. I mean we understand.

These are like you know. Home is a system and all the stuff and the most complicated thing in there you own it's what you do, let's put them together, that's a real, complicated situation, even though you may installed a perfect system, you have a duct leakage, it's less than 25 cfm. Your system is running as efficient as possible. You've got the best merv filter inside you've done everything possible low static.

This is a beauty i would give anything to have the system in my own home they're, not happy and comfortable. Everybody has their own extreme sensitivities that you may find out that are really hard people who are have hypersensitivities. They understand more about themselves and their their house than you whatever, and you need to use that as a tool use your occupants who have hyper conditions as how to help them help themselves. What are the things that usually bother? You uh mayhem or sir, usually there's conditions that they are more aware of, so don't try and tell them what they should or shouldn't know.

It'll it'll only snap right back at you. They they will be determining what kind of house they want to live in. What's around them, i've seen people be like, oh, my god, their their lawn is too green and i'm like uh, come again like oh yeah they're, putting fertilizers they're having a truck spray fertilizers in their yard, and they know that they didn't want to live near that So they didn't buy this house, so they are aware of their conditions better than you ever would be. I want to do a special thanks to linda whittington at raucous, if you're looking for some phenomenal information or reach out to us, hey, i caught this class.

That joe did, can i become one of your cohorts and tell them which you live, and what you want to do and learn about their page, because she's had some phenomenal resources. She is the uh, the mother of particulate matter and diagnostics, carbon dioxide and particulates and a variety of stuff in your home. I mentioned this at the very beginning. This is the healthy housing principles, great resources here, not only what's in the book, but they have this whole thing online.

That's free! If you want to learn more about their references and seminars and things that are happening, an entire world is out there right there. This is one of my conclusion slides. So, if you're not familiar with the indoor generation, i got the link here. Vera lux makes this thing about.

Um tight homes are giving us some serious issues and they make big skylights and windows right. Uh uh, maybe you're from the aero barrier area barrier, is a miss similar to the duck seal that you actually put in ducks right, but they actually now do it for the house. This can take any home and make it super tight. I mean any home super tight home.

We already live in an indoor generation, so we have a super tight homes and we're in them all the time with more and more chemicals from our furniture, and you know shedding all that kind of stuff, and what happens now is that we actually have this paranoia About um exposure to stuff, so we're now cleaning like crazy. The amount of people that are calling all of these agencies about being poisoned or poisoning themselves or their kids is out of control. We are still hyper cleaning, there's a variety of normal bacteria that we live with and we are doing everything we can to kill everything in our sight and our touch that will haunt us in four or five years, because when you kill one thing, it says, ah Guess what i can now come over and take over this environment? This is perfect. I'm so glad you did a thorough job of killing this stuff because, what's even worse, will come in um there's a good book on that.

I don't know if i have it in here. Maybe i took it out so it'll come to me in a second special thanks to kalos hvac school hayward score for allowing me to come here.