I heard a comment last week that said “if we did not have tenants in buildings, we would not have IAQ problems!” I had to laugh.
But since that’s unlikely to occur anytime in the future, I choose to see it from a different perspective.
In the “early days of IAQ,” seventy-percent of the problems we investigated were due to property management failures, while 30% were related to tenants. That’s because in the early days of IAQ, property managers and engineers didn’t understand how important the simple things like air filters, HVAC maintenance, good custodial attention, outside air, or other maintenance and operations issues were to IAQ.
Now, after having done this for 28 years, I have actually seen the numbers almost reversed. It’s still the same 70% vs. 30%, but this time it appears that 70% of the problems are related to occupant issues while 30% are related to building management.
I attribute this to the fact that building owners and managers have been “beat over the head” with indoor air quality issues a lot over recent years. As a result, maintenance and operations has improved, building custodial attention has improved, air filtration has improved, and the response when somebody does complain is taken more seriously.
On the other hand, building occupants seem to expect more, spaces are more densely occupied, and there are more and more sources of contaminants present in tenant spaces than ever before.
While I don’t think that we will ever have a building without occupants (and if we did we would all be out of a job) I think this next phase requires educating building occupants on the impact that they can have on indoor air quality.
Good indoor air quality in buildings is a shared responsibility! And just as the building owner and manager hold certain responsibilities, so do the occupants of the building. The sooner they recognize that, the more likely they will be to have consistently good indoor air quality.
More soon.