The Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast

Episode 154 - Wane Baker - Indoor Air Quality Hazards and Deferred Maintenance

In today’s episode, Dr. Ayers discusses indoor air quality issue with Wane Baker. In particular, we speak about deferring maintenance is contributing to poor indoor air quality. Please contact Wane for further discussions at wanebaker@centurytel.net 608.792.1528

Duration:: 25m
Broadcast on:: 24 Jun 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

In today's episode, Dr. Ayers discusses indoor air quality issue with Wane Baker. In particular, we speak about deferring maintenance is contributing to poor indoor air quality. Please contact Wane for further discussions at wanebaker@centurytel.net 608.792.1528

- Okay. - Welcome to the Occupational Safety Leadership Podcast, episode number 154 with Wayne Baker. Today we're gonna sit down and continue our journey on indoor air quality issues here. Wayne was nice enough to step up and help out. I have a lot of very basic questions that could even border on kind of being stupid. So Wayne has been nice enough. You know, to help out to kind of really get us going on this whole journey and really understand that we can't have hazards inside our office and everyday air and other things too, whereas a lot of times we're thinking about the general factory floor, the chemical lab and all that kind of stuff then. So let's go ahead there and get started. Wayne, could you tell the audience a little bit about yourself, please? - Sure, I'll try and keep it short. I'm a graduate of the University of Minnesota, grew up in the Twin Cities, ended up pursuing an undergrad in mechanical engineering, was a ammo license professional engineer in a couple of states, Minnesota and Wisconsin. And then I got into the indoor air quality business in the early '90s, 1991. And it was some few years after that that I realized certain potential clients or customers wouldn't give me the time of day, wouldn't really speak to me because I wasn't an industrial hygienist. And so I studied my butt off and spent the four and a half days for a CIH refresher type of a course in Ann Arbor, Michigan and earned my CIH back. I think it was 2002 or 2003. So I actually recently retired back in February. So it's just me and my lovely wife and the dog here. And if you're interested at all, you can take a peek at my profile on LinkedIn. That's probably the most complete listing of how wonderful I am that I know of. (laughing) - Thank you, Wade, thank you, thank you. So when we spoke on the phone a little bit, just kind of sitting down and prepping for this whole thing. We were kicking around the idea of a lot of indoor air issues are really caused by the lack of maintenance or as some people will call it deferred. So maintenance. - It's just deferred. - Yeah, yeah. So how would you really define that? Because I've seen it in all kind of ways and shapes where somebody says, well, I didn't swap out the filters. I saved some money. And I've also seen where folks said, well, I haven't checked that motor in five years. I just assume it runs. - Now you're exactly right. It's kind of funny. And in preparation for having this conversation, I pulled up a couple of files. In fact, one of these PowerPoint presentations or slide decks is actually, pardon me, posted on LinkedIn on my profile. I think there's five or six slide decks there. And one of them is from an Indoor Air Quality Association meeting in Fort Worth, Texas in 2009. And it's titled Indoor Air Quality and Ventilating Systems. And I had at this point put together some what I called common findings. And I did a little ripoff of, gosh, who was it that did the top 10? I think it was David Letterman. And I ended up with a list of 10 and then I couldn't help it. I had to put a couple more on there and then I realized I had a dozen. And then I realized I could be somewhat humorous and clever and call it a baker's dozen if I put 13 of them out there. So there's this list of common findings that are problematic in having done Indoor Air Quality Investigations for years. The reason I'm mentioning this is that within that slide deck, there is a proposed definition for deferred maintenance. And it goes something like this. A deferred maintenance is a premeditated plan that assures the controlled self-destruction of your facility. (laughing) And that sounds kind of highbrow, but it's just true, right? If you don't take care of your stuff, if you don't change the oil in your car, you're deliberately ruining the darn thing. And if you don't change the oil ever, you're gonna, it's gonna die. It's gonna fail. You're gonna spend whatever, $40,000 on a nice new vehicle and it's gonna last you a year or something like that before it just blows up. - Yeah, I've seen a lot of folks. I believe they had very good intentions, but if it's running, it's running. I mean, I'm gonna go up there and maybe spray the fins and get the pollen off, kind of do like enough to make it look like I'm doing stuff and all that. What would you say is probably one of the most common things that lead to failure? - Yeah, it's crazy, but I guess this list of common findings and my focus on deferred maintenance, all those many years, beginning, all those many years ago, was a result of just having served our customers, our clients when we got inquiries or calls or complaints about people being uncomfortable, thermally, uncomfortable, or just concerns about indoor air quality in general, people just getting sick and the bulk of my customers over these many years have been public schools. Did an awful lot of work in the public school systems up in the Twin Cities, moved here to La Crosse, Wisconsin about 25 years ago and again, most of my customers were public schools around the state of Wisconsin. And I just began to see these crazy things in our school buildings again and again and again. My gosh, when was the last time someone changed this filter? When was the last time someone got in here and checked the condition of this coil? 'Cause it's filthy or looked inside the ductwork to find out if the duct liner, if the interior insulation is falling apart and shedding glass fibers, bits of fiberglass into the air stream. I'll never forget a call I got from a middle school over in Southern Minnesota. And the director of buildings and grounds rang us up and said, you know, we got people in this particular wing of the building and they're complaining about itching around places where their clothing comes into contact perhaps around their necks or around the collar. And oddly enough around the waistband perhaps of your pants and down around the tops of your socks where the elastic holds your socks up. And I thought, gee, that sounds an awful lot like, that sounds familiar. That kind of sounds like fiberglass. We bits of fiberglass getting in there and irritating the skin. And sure enough, we started looking around, initially we just did some surface samples and submitted them to optical microscopy for particle ID and there were an unusual number of glass fibers found in that report. So we started looking on the ductwork and the air handling units. And again, if you go look at that particular slide deck on my LinkedIn profile, again, I'm not trying to sell anything, I'm retired here. I'm just trying to help people out. But you'll see some pictures in that slide deck of the condition of this interior duct liner, this interior insulation. Now, at the same time, I would be remiss if I didn't mention David, that there's nothing wrong with that product today. People still use insulation on the inside of the ductwork. It has improved tremendously in terms of its ability to resist scrubbing and to resist the release of fibers into the air stream. That product is, there's nothing wrong with that product. Years and years and years ago, it wasn't nearly as good as it is today. So I don't want to scare people off using duct liner just for that. You just got to be careful, it's like anything else. You've got to look at it once in a while and make sure it's not falling apart. - Right, right, right. So is that liner placed inside or is it more of like a spray in? I'm having trouble picturing it in my head. - Yeah, it literally comes as a blanket. - Okay. - And look, you know, typically an inch thick and it's just, typically it's black in color just due to the resin that they use to hold the glass fibers together. And again, the thing that they've done that those manufacturers have improved upon is the treatment of that air stream surface, the surface of the insulation that's exposed to the moving air stream. That's where they've really made some remarkable strides in ensuring the integrity of that insulation product. - Right, right, right. Was probably really smooth. So something just really has a hard time getting a grip in there too. - Yeah, it's much smoother than it used to be. (laughing) - Yeah, yes, yes. So I have just a little tiny bit of exposure. We'll call it, you know, with indoor air things. I have done a couple of things where people had the typical scratchy eyes and scratchy throat, kind of like I have today in my basement, you know, and we were able to go back and sample the HVAC. And to me, it was really obvious that had mold, but like all things, I'm like, well, my eyeball can't really say it's mold. You know, I really have to have a scientific basis, you know, on and on. So, and we were able to go back and mediate all that stuff then. So I have just a tiny, tiny bit of knowledge. And that seemed to be really easy because it was easy to get to. We do, when you have things like ductwork that has a lot of bends that you can't really get to, you just kind of almost like abandon it in place and run new ductwork or. - Oh, if the ductwork is right above a hard ceiling or something like that. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, mm-hmm. - You know, the duct cleaning in this tree, I kind of gave them a hard time years and years and years ago and poo-pooed the idea that it needed to be done until I got to know these people better. And they do some remarkable work. And they have devices that allow us, specifically what I was impressed by was a remote controlled little robot that you could send down the ductwork and it would turn corners and go down near anywhere. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So you can still visually inspect the stuff or you can use, you know, it doesn't take much of a hole to insert a borescope and you can have a look around in that way. And even if the ductwork doesn't need to be repaired, the duct liner, and again, I don't wanna just spend our entire time together complaining about duct liner, but if it does need to be repaired, there are repair products out, there are repair coatings that again can be applied in clever ways using the robotic devices like that or other methods that get into the ductwork. It's pretty rare that you've actually got to rip it out or abandon it in place and install it. Pretty darn rare. - Oh, okay, neat, neat. That is a fantastic idea to go take some kind of little robot and it can just fix it right in place and inspected. It could do all that stuff then, you know? Very good. Very good. - It's remarkable. - Let's talk about a couple of other ones and the one that I know that's really common that I know almost nothing about is the common Legionnaires, I think it's called Legionella. I'm not sure that I'm using either term correctly. - Yeah, it's a very common bacterium, Legionella pneumophila. It is ubiquitous, you know, natural waters. And I'm not an expert in particular on Legionellosis, so I'm gonna limit my comment somewhat. I always tended to turn those types of inquiries over to colleagues that I knew that specialized and stuff like that. But yeah, it is typically associated with cooling towers. In fact, the name Legionnaires disease is associated with an outbreak. Gosh, I'm gonna forget the year right off hand, 1978 or something like that. And at a conference of folks from the American Legion, this was the Legionnaires Conference or something like that. And unfortunately, a number of people got very sick and a few actually perished as a result of this dangerous form of pneumonia that's caused by this particular bacterium. As an aside, during the pandemic, when we stayed home and we didn't go into our office buildings and our schools so much, those building water systems, the water supply to a drinking fountain or a sink, those became very stagnant and a lot of time, not a lot of time, unfortunately, an unfortunate number of cases of a buildup of that bacterium occurred in our water systems, in our schools and office buildings. So it can happen in both both cooling towers and water systems and fountains and decorative water displays and that type of thing. So, but I really would. I would turn that over to someone who's truly a specialist in that area because it is so important. - Okay, so you brought up a little fun fact about cooling towers there, you know? Is there anything that you would recommend that folks put into the cooling towers to help with this problem, to also help with things like scaling and all the other things that people go back and tackle? - Yeah, the last decade of my career, I was teaching fundamentals of heating, ventilating, air conditioning systems. And one of the things that I wanted to make sure the folks at this company, I worked for locally, the new engineers there knew about was the importance of water treatment. So water treatment in boilers and chillers in any kind of heat exchange equipment, including cooling towers. So I actually brought in a wonderful gentleman who spent hour and a half, maybe a couple hours with the young men and women in my class. To talk about the importance of water treatment. And everyone who has a cooling tower, everyone who has a commercial building, a public school has to have, I can't stress this enough, has to have a water treatment specialist under contract to take care of those systems. That's, there's no magic bullet, there's no single solution. But those folks know all about water chemistry and how to keep those biologics under control. - Yeah, I've seen a number of different products used, but I've never heard anybody say, "Oh, you should do this." So I think that it could also be very system dependent where you are in the country. Just a lot of different factors that make it really hard to have a precise answer out there. - Oh yeah, and especially when it comes to scale and corrosion, it's remarkable how the properties of the water we get from wherever we get it from, like up in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis gets their water out of the Mississippi River and St. Paul, the sister company, they get it from aquifers and pump it into reservoirs. But you go out west, the water is very different than it is here in the upper Midwest and so on and so forth. So again, that's why you need those folks with the specialized training and analytical tools that they can turn to and say, "Here's what I need to do specifically for the type of water you've got coming into this building in this location." - Right, right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Is there anything that you'd like to tell the folks before that we call it a day? - I guess when it comes to maintenance, I would just like to point out one, pardon me, one resource that I've found particularly helpful. It was published by the, let me pull it up here on the screen. So I can see it, this is from the U.S. Department of Energy. It was published, gosh, 15, almost 15 years ago now. And it's actually, it's actually our federal energy management program under the DOE. So FEMP, if F-E-M-P, federal energy management program, and it's called their Operations and Maintenance Best Practices Guide. And it's wonderful. It describes in very, in tremendous detail how to take care of your building, the different types of maintenance, like what they call reactive maintenance, right? You will, you don't do anything until it breaks and then you go fix it. - Right, right. - Or there's preventive maintenance, where you try and stay a step ahead of those failures by keeping an eye on things, having a qualified individual checkover, your mechanical systems on a monthly or quarterly basis. Or in certain critical applications like healthcare, you've got people on site that are watching this stuff continuously. So reactive maintenance, preventive maintenance, a step beyond that is predictive maintenance, where you can actually use clever devices like vibration analysis to head off failures or identify the likelihood of failures well in advance. And each of these steps, believe it or not, costs something, of course it does. - Yes. - But what the F-E-M-P guide shows is that an investment of $1 today is gonna save you $2 or $3 tomorrow if you just let it break and then fix it. It is invariably less expensive, more efficient. It improves operational efficiencies. It protects and improves the quality of the air that the occupants of those buildings are exposed to. It's a win-win all around. So look up that FEMP operation and maintenance. Yeah, operations and maintenance best practices guide and there's a wonderful resource. One of the things that I did right after that, we found the mold a long, long time ago. Now this was with a totally, totally separate company is that we were able to go back, get all the specs to make in the models and go get all of that maintenance stuff and really sit down and say, "Ah, so here's our checklist for the monthly." I know, I think we even had a very small weekly one, but monthly, quarterly and just really make sure that it just never happened again out there. And that was really good, but the one thing that we missed in this whole thing is that if we had a person who cared but everything was installed, we would have started it as opposed to, "Well, we got it here. "We'll figure out how to use it. "We'll bring in a vendor if we need help." So I really think that if we sat down like proactively and said, "All right, it's here. "We're gonna grab the manuals. "We're gonna do the training. "Anything the vendor can offer." And that would really get you going on the right foot, right from the get-go too, I think. - Oh yeah, so much of this routine maintenance of HVAC systems is straightforward. It doesn't take super fancy equipment. You get into high tech chiller plants and the like, and yeah, you gotta know what the heck you're doing, but my gosh, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to clean a coil. - Right. (laughs) - Right, exactly. - It's just, and cleaning out a cooling tower is something that probably needs to be done on an annual basis, and that job really stinks. That's messy and dirty, and you're gonna get all wet and full of goop, so I can't, but it's gotta be done. It just has to be done. - Right, right, right, right, right, right, right. Well, Wayne, we are bumping up on time. If you could take just a couple of seconds, let folks know where they can find you, where they can reach out, if they have any other questions or concerns, or just those types of things. - Yeah, and again, I retired, well, I guess it's getting to be four or five months ago. And so, here's the thing, I'm more than happy to answer questions to the best of my ability if someone wants to reach out. I'm not gonna charge anybody anything that I'm done with the consulting business. And, but I think all of my contact info, including a telephone number and an email address are right there in LinkedIn. I know I keep mentioning LinkedIn, but I think most of us have a profile there. And if someone wants to reach out and become a connection on LinkedIn, I think that actually opens up some other stuff that they withhold from, otherwise, like maybe those slide decks. But no, I'm more than happy to help in any way I can. I just, I passionately care about indoor air quality and people's health. And especially when we're talking about our public schools, Senate, Senate, our kids, because they have to, right? It's the law, you have to go to the school. - Exactly. - Let's make sure it's a safe place for them every hour of every day that they're there. - Uh-huh, yes, yes, exactly. Well, Wayne, thank you, thank you so much. I had a whole list of questions out there. I hardly asked any of them. So maybe I can talk you in the coming back for part two and part three here in the future. So episode 154 is complete. I wanna thank Wayne today for taking time out of his busy day to help us out with indoor air quality issues. Thank you, Wayne. - You're entirely welcome. [BLANK_AUDIO]