Tech Talks With Jeff: NEW Fellowes Air Solutions
Welcome to Tech Talks with Jeff! A blog where our Business Development Manager, Jeff Barret, sits down with our Marketing Coordinator, Aly, to discuss his latest findings and his opinions on recent news and developments. Like what you see? Want to know Jeff's opinion on something specific? Let us know!
We've recently brought on a new brand in a new category for Aartech: Fellowes Air Purifying Solutions. This exciting new opportunity for us has felt like a breath of fresh air...literally! We've been testing the line out and we're happy to share our findings. Jeff has been a huge fan. See what he has to say:
A: So we're bringing in a new Product line, Air purification. Can you tell me a bit about how this came into being?
J: Fellows Air purification is the brand we have chosen to bring in. It's aimed at commercial and industrial applications, although some of the high-end residential customers are also installing them.
Essentially, I went down to the Toronto home show a month or so ago. I ultimatly went down looking for new insights as to how we could help support the HVAC industry in particular. I didn't go there looking for new projects, but I had a great conversation with Martin from Fellows. He showed me a few different things that caught my attention- The information captured by these air purifiers, not just what they removed from the air, but what they identified for us about the environment. The second piece was integration. This system is already integratable but is also on the BACnet roadmap. Early summer will provide too many integrations to think of - it's incredible.
My head was immediately spinning with applications for our customers, such as:
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Server Rooms (more to come on this one!)
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Dentist or Docotor's Offices
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Break, Lunch Rooms, Employee Spaces - Cut Down on Sick days
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Multi-Res/Condominium Common Areas
Not only did we learn something new, but we brought the solutions back to you.
It's so interesting that this came about from the Home Show - You didn't mention this in your last Tech Talk.
To be honest, it moved pretty quickly—I spoke to Rob, and we had a good conversation with Martin [from Fellowes]. Fellowes came down and met with us a week later, and now here we are. I didn't want to touch on it until we knew this was the path that we were going to take. I'm very excited about this line. And based on my preliminary customer conversations, they are excited too.
Air cleaning in of itself is a normal part of our lives at this point, but what is the big deal with this line specifically?
I think that depends, and I'm still learning how to talk about this myself, but I think it ultimately depends on the end user. Look at our own office - they [Fellowes] came in, and did a little presentation for Rob and I. They put a device down about the size of a big pack of cigarettes on the table to measure the quality of our air. Not only was the sensor able to depict a steady baseline and anything that dropped below it, but it even detected Rob and his coffee when he walked into the room- The presence of Rob, and the coffee were identifiable in the results. It was eye-opening.
From a purification perspective, here's an example: Let's say I had a bit of a cough that I didn't realize, and I'm in the room eating lunch, and you join me. I didn't notice I'm coming down with something, and you and I are talking exposing you to my "germs". When mounted in/at the ceiling, the air purification device pulls the viruses up away from the occupants while cleaning the air. The device also adds to the current HVAC system to increase the number of cycles per room or how often the air is actually cleaned and cycled per hour.
Another application is an urgent care office, or retirement community. Here, you potentially have somebody in a situation where you need to be preventative because of a hypersensitivity or a chronic illness. I'm asthmatic. I live in a condominium, but even here, there's only so much control I have over air filtration as a public space. I already touched on Server/IT rooms, this equipment needs a clean environment too! Add the temp, humidity and Occupancy sensor and it's an all-in-one Server solution.
In conclusion, what really blew me away was what the system depicted in terms of the negatives—we're going to talk more about this in the future. I mentioned that the system shows a baseline of what good quality air should be. Just like a heart rate monitor shows the blips up and down, anything negative drops down from that baseline, and then that creates an event, essentially, in the software.
Now, to me, this sounds like it would have been really good to have several years ago when we were dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
100 percent. I'm not going to speak too much about this because I'm still learning and I'm obviously not an expert on this subject. That said...
In the next pandemic situation - hopefully, no time soon - but it is inevitable. Not only will air purification be essential for services to remain open, but from what I'm understanding, there's a policy or law from the World Health Organization which apparently put out certain expectations that if you're to remain open in the next pandemic, you have to follow specific criteria's. Not just qualify as an essential service. I can't speak to it heavily, but it involves recycled air per location per hour, those kinds of things. The bottom line seems to be if you don't have these checkpoints In place, you cannot remain open the next time a pandemic happens. Pure and simple protection, today and tomorrow.
Is there anything else you think that installers should know about Fellowes Array?
Definitely BACnet. I've heard of it, I know of it, but I'm not an expert on it.
Essentially, BACnet is an open-ended developer platform that allows integration between different devices and manufacturers. The integrators of the world love it. It is very open-ended, and it gives you the ability to take simple, basic alerts from one system and tie them into something else.
So, with this system, BACnet compliance is on the roadmap for this summer - let's say mid to late summer to be safe. That's going to give the ability to actually take some of these dips that would send just a simple text to somebody or an email that says, "Hey, there's a problem," to be able to actually trigger an automation system (one example) that could set off strobe lights, maybe activate a camera, close a door - all depends. The point is you can now take these readings and implement them into some kind of action to fit your world, and that's key.
Let's touch on vaping, a huge problem in today's world. If somebody were to walk into the room and vape, it would show this activity with dips in the air quality readings, TVOC, etc. If you could predict/identify that pattern, you'd be able to go into the BACnet platform world and have that pattern trigger an alert or action. It is very open-ended—it's mind-blowing to think what we could tie in with the air systems readings.
The air purifiers not only have a filter but also a humidity, temperature, and occupancy sensor, so there's a ton of information that can go back into this BACnet platform and be pushed out into some kind of automation or alert system.
Have you heard any stories or examples of how this data has been used?
A funny little story—I won't disclose which company, but they [Fellowes] gave me a case study. They [Fellowes] came to Oshawa, Canada, and they did an air analysis, essentially for a corporate customer in an office setting. The company was convinced people were vaping in back halls and corners.
The air quality was so bad that the employees noticed and escalated their concerns. They contacted Fellowes to come in—they wanted to talk about the need for a solution. They [Fellowes] set the system up and, within minutes, had alerts for bad air quality.
They walked around the corner, expecting to see someone vaping but instead just an open window in an empty office. Confused the staff asked around and got their answer. Every day an empolyee would go into this office as the afternoon sun heated up to open a window for fresh air. The problem was not vaping, but the pollution coming off the main street outside - it was all the diesel exhaust etc. from the vehicles coming in from outside. It wasn't an inside problem at all.
I thought this was an interesting story because we always think the air outside could potentially cleanse the air inside. We need to really focus on making the area inside better quality.
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