How IoT Solutions are Changing Indoor Air Quality for the Better

simPRO IoT (Internet of things), alongside specialist partner services, can offer a solution to help combat indoor air pollutants and reduce transmission risks.

How simPRO Helps Combat Indoor Air Pollutants and Reduces Transmission Risks

As an early adopter of IoT solutions, UK-based Envirotech Facilities Management has worked in partnership with its client Tandem Property Asset Management to roll out wellSPACE. The offering combines affordable, flexible and portable environmental quality measurement and analytics tools, together with professional insights, strategies and solutions to overcome IAQ abnormalities within clients' managed properties. The backbone of wellSPACE is simPRO IoT technology.

“Demand to determine the environmental quality and risks to building residents who have experienced exposure to poor quality air is omnipresent and exponentially increasing, however the historical means to supply this demand has been expensive and inflexible,” said Jeff Smith, director of Digital Technology at Envirotech. “With the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this has accelerated the demand for ways of measuring the effectiveness of the indoor air quality, and with the recent publication of the UK government IAQ thresholds, the demand will continue to meet these requirements.”

Smith leads the partnership initiative and helps building owners and managers provide a COVID-free indoor environment. He knows the importance of IoT as the best solution for IAQ management, but that it requires a specific software solution that has low power consumption sensors, isopen-source and can integrate with other systems via an open API.

“We were trying to not tell the customer what we could give them but actually adapt our business to give the customer what they wanted, and we chose simPRO because it enables us to give flexibility to our customers,” Smith said.

Smith also chose simPRO because of its openness. “simPRO is open to development, open to feedback, open to criticism and open to the user community,” Smith said. “And that’s very important to us because, in the end, we could give customers exactly what they want with simPRO IoT.”

simPRO IoT Helps with Air Pollutant Detection and Indoor Air Management

simPRO IoT combines hardware, software and data within one single, seamlessly integrated platform, providing automated sensor solutions ordinarily requiring extensive manual effort and significant cost. The solution is ideally suited for enabling low-cost, low-power, plug-and-play sensors.

simPRO uses a Low Powered Wide Area Network (LPWAN) standard called Lora WAN. This uses sub-GHz radio frequency for communication between sensors and gateways on a site and is very robust and can penetrate plant room walls and reach long distances. Sensors are low-powered and have been known to communicate with gateways kilometers away.

With simPRO IoT, Envirotech was able to deploy live monitoring to clients' sites in London, UK. The comprehensive live dashboard demonstrated the urgent need for additional air purification and an increase in fresh air operating strategy.

“As part of our managed solution, we provide customers with a live dashboard of all readings displayed in a user-friendly manner, but the dashboards aren’t just graphs, we worked with simPRO to implement an executive dashboard which shows whether our customers are compliant or non-compliant at a glance,” Smith said. “This makes it really easy for property and building owners to use the solution and get the information they need.”

More Than an IAQ Monitoring

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