Improving Indoor Air Quality - PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

The following is the transcript of a live interview with Ryan Gottermeier and Frank Santini from Weatherproofing Technologies Incorporated. You can read the interview below,  listen to the podcast. 

Intro: Welcome to the AskARoofer Podcast, where all your roofing questions find their answers. Your hosts, Megan Ellsworth and Lauren White, peel back the layers of the roofing world to reveal the knowledge, tips and FAQs you've been curious about. From shingles to skylights, metal to asphalt, we're here to demystify the system above your head. So get ready to ask, learn and explore the fascinating world of roofing, one question at a time, on the AskARoofer Podcast.

Lauren White: Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the AskARoofer Podcast. I'm Lauren White, and I am here today with two people from WTI and the Pure Air Division. And Ryan and Frank, why don't I have you two introduce yourselves, please?

Ryan Gottermeier: Awesome. Thanks, Lauren. Well, I'm Ryan Gottermeier. I'm the director of field operations here at Pure Air, which is a subsidiary of Weatherproofing Technologies, who is an affiliate of Tremco Roofing. So I'm responsible for the execution day to day of any of the projects that our Tremco Roofing reps sell, from an HVAC and mechanicals perspective across the nation.

Frank Santini: And I'm Frank Santini, director of sales here at Pure Air and I'm responsible for getting our large sales force of several hundred representatives to get out there and educate the commercial property managers and commercial facility directors on Pure Air services.

Lauren White: Great. Well, thank you both for being here. We're excited to talk more about HVAC and air handlers for our property owners on AskARoofer. So just to get started, how did you get involved in indoor air quality and air handler restoration?

Ryan Gottermeier: So for me, I'm a fourth generation mechanical contractor. My family's owned a company in upstate New York, a mechanical contracting business, since 1903. So I kind of grew up in and around the industry, and so it's always been a part of my life. And then Tremco found me, Pure Air found me and a couple years ago I moved down here with my wife, who's originally from Clearwater, Florida. So that's kind of how our paths merged.

Frank Santini: Yeah, and for me, it was just more of passion for environmental causes. My previous career, there's a lot of work being done and not much to show for it. So I got to be able to see actual improvement into air quality, improvement in the way the HVC works, from the work that we were doing. I really felt good about that, and also learning about all the science behind indoor quality as well.

Lauren White: Yeah, that's great. It's always so interesting to hear how people get into such niche areas, and especially in roofing. People are just kind of, "I fell into it," or, "I had a passion and it brought me here," so very cool. For those who aren't as familiar with indoor air quality, can you explain what that is and why it's so important for building occupants?

Frank Santini: So I mean, you can really divide indoor quality into two big categories. One is the quality of the air, in the sense of having less contaminants in the air, ideally, obviously if you're inside of the building. Whether it's a hospital, school, commercial property, you want to be breathing less contaminants and contaminants can mean lots of things. It can be mold spores, it could be bacterial contaminants, could be what we call VOCs, which are volatile organic compounds or chemicals in the air. Could be human skin cells that are often great nutrients for bacteria and mold, so you don't like to have them around, but they're always going to be around, because we're always shedding human skin cells every time we're talking. Right now, we're shedding human skin cells.

So the quality of the air in the sense of reducing the amount of contaminants in a given small space is a big deal. And then, the other piece to air quality is reducing carbon dioxide, having fresh air inside the building, so that we have obviously less CO2, which there's been plenty of studies out there from Harvard and many others showing that obviously high CO2 will make you tired. We all kind of know that, but they did a bunch of studies on that in 2016 and beyond.

So we want to make sure that we have fresh air, we also want to make sure the contaminants in the air are as small as possible. We always have some contaminants, because it's just the nature of things. There's mold everywhere, but we try to reduce that through filtration and through providing fresh air and some of the other things we're going to be talking about today.

Lauren White: Great, and I'm in central Oregon right now, so we've got a lot of smoke coming in from wildfires and so this is very interesting to talk about and very important, because I feel like smoke and like you're saying, those contaminants are everywhere, even just in your day-to-day life. So can you explain some common issues that affect air handlers and HVAC assets in commercial buildings, and kind of explain what those are, what those might look like to people who are unfamiliar?

Ryan Gottermeier: Sure. So an air handler's kind of the lungs of the building. It breathes in and out, it pushes new air in and it returns or cycles and exhausts old air out. So right off the bat, proper filtration, it's part of a robust maintenance program.

A lot of facilities do maintain proper filtration, but sometimes, over time, those deteriorate and cause a problem, where they're not properly filtering the air. Another issue is for roof-mounted air handling systems, the water intrusion in the cabinet itself, if water gets into the air handler, the water goes through that air handler into the building, it causes humidity or water, which leads to mold. So waterproofing and preventing those humidity issues internal to the building are a huge focus for indoor air quality.

Frank Santini: Yeah, and we can go on further, Lauren. I know we have a lot to cover in this podcast, but just another for instance is some air handlers are what we call single-walled, meaning the air handler itself has to be insulated to prevent condensation from forming. And oftentimes, particularly in the case of older air handlers, you'll have a situation where the fiberglass exposed insulation can become moist and dirty from lack of maintenance.

And that can be an excellent substrate for mold growth, because its porous nature and as I mentioned before, all the millions of different contaminants, including human skin cells, that can get in there and become a great breathing ground for mold growth. So that's another example there of how indoor air quality can be affected by the air handler itself and because of the old insulations become deteriorated, moldy.

Lauren White: Yeah, absolutely. That kind of leads us into our next point to talk about, is how those issues, either through the roof or through the air handlers themselves affect the IAQ, that indoor air quality of a building and therefore the occupants. Is there any more to add to that?

Ryan Gottermeier: Yeah, I mean, so for most of the listeners of this podcast, roofers in particular, they fight water intrusion all the time. And so probably, there isn't a roofer listening to this podcast that hasn't been on a job site where they touched a roof and there's an allegation that there's water intrusion into the building and they come and they investigate and they find out that it's the air handling unit themselves.

So all of these issues in and around the HVAC that sits on a roof leads to water intrusion inside of a building, which is something that a roofer will find himself, maybe I won't say in an argument with a building owner, but maybe at the other side of the table, where they're dealing with an issue that may not be their fault, it may not be a true story of what's going on. They may be replacing a roof in and around a piece of HVAC equipment, and they're being blamed for water that is getting in.

And when water gets into the building and the HVAC equipment isn't sized properly to handle that excess water and get that moisture out, there could be a dampness or a claminess inside. I'm sure you've been in a building before where you just kind of walk in and you can feel it. You just feel that the humidity is off, it's far too high and it's just generally uncomfortable to be in. So in a situation where you're the roofer and you're touching the roof, you're the first person that anyone points at and we're kind of here to say, "Maybe not always, maybe it isn't fault." So that's kind of the broader message that we want to bring today to this audience.

Frank Santini: We can get into a whole other subject with respect to the actual operational efficiency of the unit itself. Ryan covered making sure that unit's not having the intrusion that we talked about, and oftentimes how the roofer is the first person the client looks to. But then, the actual operation of the unit itself is important, because we want to make sure that the unit's producing enough air flow to actually condition the space correctly, dehumidify the space, as Ryan just mentioned.

And that might be an issue, depending on the condition of the major component parts inside that unit, which is typically a coil and what's called a blower or fan. Those pieces of equipment are not working properly or not sized properly. That can lead to a lot of issues, not only just the issues of how much air is getting downstream, but also, if these components aren't cleaned properly, again, becoming that substrate or that place for mold and bacteria to grow and obviously hinder air quality, even despite filtration, because you'll have a lot of what called filter bypass. So there's dirt, debris and all these bad things, if you will, will get past the filters if they're not properly maintained and fitted correctly.

And then, you'll have situations where you have some concern about the amount of contaminants in the unit and as you pass the certain part of the unit and the humidity rises, that also lends itself to more mold growth, because mold needs obviously moisture, humidity to proliferate.

Lauren White: Yeah, absolutely. And so kind of on the flip side of the building owners going to the roof or first of, "What's wrong with my HVAC unit?" do you have advice besides regular maintenance for those building owners of what to look for or what to consider before, if there should be something wrong with their HVAC or they feel like it's humid in their building?

Ryan Gottermeier: Yeah, I mean, as I alluded before, a preventative maintenance program is obviously the first line of defense, a doctor would tell a patient to eat healthy. Have a maintenance program on your air handling equipment and make sure that they're operating efficiently. And that way, you kind of have a baseline of how your business is performing or your HVAC assets are performing. So making sure that you can benchmark how it's performing over time, and then allocating your dollars appropriately to know that these units do have a shelf life.

Here at Pure Air, we believe in the idea of air handler restoration. If you listen to ASHRAE or some of the industry leaders, will say 12 to 15 years is about all you'll get out of an air handler. And that may be true in some cases, but our entire business is around stretching that CapEx dollar further and actually restoring the unit, bringing it back to the way that it was when it was originally installed and saving the business owner money by not having to go and not having to replace it. But that requires getting ahead of it, thinking about it and making it a priority inside your budgeting and capital spend.

Frank Santini: And then, when you do that, Lauren, you avoid issues, as Ryan just alluded to, avoiding potentially having to replace a unit that you otherwise may not have to replace if you catch it early enough in its lifespan. But also, avoid issues with respect to efficiency problems. One of the things that we do oftentimes is retrofit what's called a fan array in the place of the existing fan inside these units. And the fan array provides multiple fans, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 fans that go in the cabinet, as opposed to just a single fan that most of these old units have.

If you have redundancy, multiple fans, then you have lesser risk of having that unit go down and lesser risk of having no air flow through a certain area. And when you have no airflow, that's when you risk all the things I talked about earlier, not getting rid of that CO2, not removing those contaminants and bringing fresh air and diluting the contaminants in the air. So that helps in the sense of removing that concern, but also, there's also efficiency issues and those kind of things that we can get into a little bit later here.

Lauren White: Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, all the things that you necessarily don't think about all the time until there's an issue, but it's so important, like a roof, like the HVAC to have those plans in place and have reminders to maintenance and check them out. So with that, what systems and services does Tremco offer to address the IAQ and HVAC issues in buildings or the Pure Air?

Ryan Gottermeier: Yeah, I won't speak for all of Tremco. Tremco is a very, very large organization and we represent a very small piece of it. So I will not speak to Tremco at large, but I will say for us at Pure Air, that we are a mechanical restoration business. I mean, we've been doing it for 40 years. Tremco acquired us a few years ago, but for 40 years, we've been focused on indoor air quality and air handler restoration.
And we do this, it's sort of a three-pronged approach. We start with an assessment, we'll assess the piece of equipment for you and benchmark its performance against where it should be. That assessment will generate a report and a set of engineering documents, as to how we would go about restoring this particular unit. And then, we have a self-perform restoration crew. We have 40 field guys dedicated all year round to restoring air handlers across the country. So that's what Pure Air brings to the table. And Frank can probably expand on that a little bit more.

Frank Santini: Yeah, I mean, just to piggyback what Ryan's saying, when you execute this kind of work, first of all, the one thing you think about is, "What's the value of this?" Well, if you can restore or refurbish a unit and you're spending a lot less to do that, and you're getting essentially the same product, a unit that works and provides the airflow you need and is clean and it costs 20% or a third of what they're going to spend to replace, that can be very attractive to building owners. But then, we look at what are the other ancillary benefits? Well, if you're improving the efficiency of that unit through the work that we do to the major component parts, that could also result in energy savings.

And then, we look at the indoor air quality piece to this. Again, you're having better airflow or at least the less risk of losing the airflow by virtue of the redundant fan system. And then, you have a clean system after we get done. So you're removing the potential risk of agitating contaminants that were in the system before, either that were stuck in the insulation I referred to earlier or just embedded in the coil and there's all kinds of what's called biofilm, which is if you think about the Swamp Thing, what that looks like on the microscopic level, the nastiness of mold and bacteria growth and even viruses and so forth.

So when you do this kind of work, you clean the unit up, you make it more efficient, I'm talking 30,000-foot view here and then you seal the unit, as Ryan alluded to earlier, because you're trying to prevent the intrusion, especially for these rooftop units. And you get a piece of equipment then that is warrantied and you have more of a peace of mind that your asset's going to last a lot longer for you and not fail suddenly, which can be a very big deal.

A variety of different types of verticals, from healthcare to municipalities, colleges and so forth and manufacturing, where the unit goes down because of its age, lack of maintenance, it can be a very big deal and cost the customer a lot of money. Imagine a situation where an operating room can't be used because the air conditioning's not working that day. So completely not going to fly with the needs for the environment of care in that situation. So that's the idea here, is to try to avoid those issues and then save money in the process.

Lauren White: Definitely. I'm sure a lot of people are thrilled with that, to save money and keep their equipment running longer and not have to replace it after those 12-to-15 year potential shelf life. Do you have any success stories or projects that maybe stand out where Pure Air's solutions significantly improved a building's IAQ?

Frank Santini: There's so many. I mean, I can talk about the project we had recently in Texas, Ryan, where we had two units that the client is healthcare, client hospital, the client wanted to replace these two units. But the way they wanted to replace the units was going to involve a whole re-engineering of that part of the hospital and actually move the location of the units from a spot inside of what's called a mechanical room to a rooftop. And so it was going to be like $1.8 million to do these replacements.

We were able to do the restoration for about $400,000, so you had $400,000 to restore versus $1.8 million to replace. Now, that's the easiest example of a low-hanging fruit, because you not only have the value of restoring a unit in place, but you have the value of avoiding a whole bunch of logistics that would've been involved in the replacement. And so that's what we try to do. Even when logistical issues aren't as big a concern, it's still a great value, but when they are a concern, it's a no-brainer.

Ryan Gottermeier: Yeah, and in terms of getting mold remediated and/or getting the biological contaminants, the air quality correct, we've got multiple situations, particularly here in Florida. It's a very humid environment, where we've gone in, we've done an assessment, we've determined that the piece of equipment isn't performing to the way it was supposed to. And a lot of times, our healthcare clients find a lot of value in this. They have specific rules with regards to humidity as to what they can do for patient care, but we go in, in our assessment, determine that the piece of equipment isn't performing.

And just the other day, we did one across the coast over in Boca, where we were able to bring an air handler back to the way it was designed to perform, for minimal invasiveness and minimal cost and it allows them to continue on doing the work that they're doing. So yeah, plenty of opportunity, not just here in Florida, in a humid, moist environment. But yeah, we've got countless... There's all kinds of white papers. If anyone's interested, we've got marketing collateral that you could dig through for hours.

Lauren White: That's amazing, significant price difference for that hospital. And so looking forward, are there any technologies and innovations in IAQ and building maintenance and how does Pure Air incorporate those advancements into your services?

Ryan Gottermeier: So in terms of cutting-edge technology, COVID sort of exposed a lot of things. Bipolar ionization is starting to become huge. Now, I've been doing this for almost 20 years now and I believe that probably existed 20 years ago, but no one knew what it was. I certainly didn't. Now, with COVID, ionization is huge in the airstream and even UV bulbs, UV technology, washing the coil with UV lights. Essentially, imagine a tanning bed light that you put across the inside of the unit, so that as the air comes across the unit, it's killing anything organic that may be in the airstream and making it better for the health and comfort of the occupants, wherever that airstream's going.

We're seeing more of that, we're seeing more clients want that. Our engineers are specifying that in the restorations more and more. HVAC, it's really old technology. It started William Carrier back in 1913, so there aren't a lot of new innovations, but using things and adding it to the Airstream, we are starting to see more with UV and bipolar ionization. Those are two that immediately come to mind. I don't know if you've got any others, Frank, because it's [inaudible 00:21:36].

Frank Santini: Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say it's cutting edge, but I mentioned that before the fan array, which is the concept of taking what was typically one big fan that blows the air through the unit and replacing that with a wall of smaller, more efficient fans. And that way, you have redundancy in case one of those fans fails. You have two, three, four, five, six others that will ramp up and make a difference, so that you're not just relying on one single fan. That technology has been around for some time, but we are still not as ingrained as you see it as it should be, because it's exceptionally helpful for a lot of different types of verticals.

Lauren White: Very cool, it's always fun to hear. Maybe it's not a new tool, but how you're innovating, how things are changing and adapting to what people need. And yeah, so any other key takeaways that you'd like listeners to remember or know regarding IAQ and building maintenance, HVAC, kind of anything we've talked about today?

Ryan Gottermeier: Yeah, I just think for the roofers that are listening to this, understanding indoor air quality and what's going on inside the buildings, roofers tend to spend a lot of time outside and on top of buildings, but inside the building, it becomes a differentiator. If you're even to speak about it at any level of intelligence, it shows your customers that it's something that you understand impacts them.

And for any building owners that are listening, I would just make them aware that there are opportunities. As a building owner, you've either got tenants or you're using it for a purpose for your employees, that indoor air quality is something to be focused on. There's a benefit there. And in terms of CapEx savings, the idea of air handler restoration over replacement is definitely something that should be running around in the back of your mind as a building owner. So those are the takeaways I would recommend.

Frank Santini: And for me, holistically, just thinking about the air duct work too, in some circles, a lot of folks are not too keen on cleaning their air duct work, but you do have situations where you're getting [inaudible 00:23:49] 20 years old, 30 years old, 40 years old, et cetera, that they've never had their air ducts cleaned. And in some cases, it's fine. There's been great maintenance, great filtration and there's maybe a thin layer of dust in the duct work. But in other cases that we've seen over the years, this tremendous amounts of buildup of fouling in the duct work, to the point where it's actually obstructing the air flow because of these things inside duct work, VVs, reheat coils, terminal units, et cetera, that collect on these components inside duct work and restrict the air flow.

And that can also not only provide the concern about contaminants getting stirred up by the air, but also from the perspective of actually restricting the air to get from the air handler downstream to the unit. So the takeaway is, despite what you may think, if you've gotten to a point where you've got a building that's a couple decades old, never had the air ducts cleaned, at least check it out, have a professional take a look inside, certified indoor environmentalist, industrial hygienist and take a look at a couple representative areas of that duct work, to make sure you don't have a tremendous amount of fouling buildup in the duct work and along the component parts.

Lauren White: Yeah, maintenance, maintenance, maintenance.

Ryan Gottermeier: Always.

Lauren White: Excellent. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much. Learned so much about indoor air quality and HVAC units that I never knew before, and I'm sure our listeners will have some good takeaways as well. Thank you again, Pure Air, for your time and this is the AskARoofer Podcast. We will see you on the next one.

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