Air Quality Sensors to Meet ARC Requirements – Greenbuild 2019

ARC is the U.S. Greenbuilding Council’s carbon footprint monitoring online program. For about $360 dollars a year any building can subscribe and start tracking their carbon footprint. Once a year’s worth of data is recorded the project can consider getting Certified a LEED building with the Operations and Maintenance requirements. If the building is achieving 40 points for LEED Silver all they need to do is perform the prerequisites such as commissioning the building’s water, heat and lighting systems.

Green Cincinnati Education Advocacy is volunteering to implement the U.S. Green Building Council’s ARC Carbon Footprint Measurement System, https://arcskoru.com, at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati. To do that we need to install air monitoring systems like these. We are currently using Foobots, https://foobot.io/sensors/. Here are three interviews we did at Greenbuild 2019 of similar systems.

“My name’s Liam from Kaiterra, and we focus on air quality monitoring. So, this is one of the devices that we make. It measures pretty much everything that you need to be concerned about in an indoor environment. Such as particulates, M2.5, CO2, VOCs, temperature and humidity. So, as you can see, the air in here is actually pretty good today. The device connects to wifi, connects via ethernet, so that all the data that you collect on the indoor space you can export. You can calculate the 95th percentile as you need to for ARC reporting, and then directly upload those readings to ARC.” Learn more about Kaiterra at their web site https://www.kaiterra.com.

“I’m Daniel King, I’m business development manager here at Airthinx. Here is our Airthinx IAQ monitor, which is really part of a greater indoor air quality solution. So we monitor for 10 different parameters actively and continuously, which is PM 1, 2.5, and 10, TVOCs in three different calibrations with zero gas isobutylene and ethanol, CO2 formaldehyde as well as temperature, pressure, humidity and dewpoint.
We are able to be integrated with any HVHC or open API compatible system, including business management systems, to effect the indoor environment and qualify the quantitative data. So we’re backed by Netronix IoT platform, which enables AI to monitor for sensor drift, allows for organization, partner and user management system. We’re also able to monitor the data from any point in time that the device has been activated, generating reports, Excel spreadsheets, PDF reports that you can share with clients and colleagues, as well as configure and set very specific complex or even simplistic alerts that buzz your phone, or the phone of your loved ones or partners or colleagues.
Calibration and IoT is what sets us apart. We’re very consistent. And we are here to bridge the gap between high-end, high cost instrument and a consumer instrument to democratize the air quality for everybody.” airthinx.io

Chuck Lohre, “Here we are at Greenbuild Atlanta 2019 with Brian Van Buskirk with arbnco, and their product, arbnwell, can help buildings like the Contemporary Arts Center meet their ARC requirements. Tell us about that, Brian.”

“Thanks, Chuck. Basically, the arbnwell product deploys high resolution wireless sensors within a building to capture the ARC requirements for human experience. Now, the nice thing about that is once those sensors are deployed, the information is continually updated into ARC and gives you a dynamic scoring with basically one-click integration. So it eliminates the need to do the manual surveys on an ongoing basis.” https://us.arbnco.com/

All of these sensor systems will meet the ARC reporting requirements with one sensor per 25,000 square feet. We are especially interested in similar applications in public spaces like the Contemporary Arts Center which includes offices, art studio warehouse areas, children’s education areas and gallery spaces. We would like to compare our ARC results with similar buildings in similar climate regions around the world.