Air Quality Matters

This week, we step outside the usual world of homes, schools, and offices to ask a question that might reshape how we think about the hospitality industry: What if the physical performance of a hotel room matters just as much as the quality of service—and what if guests are already telling us this in their online reviews?

The paper is titled The Impact of Indoor Environmental Quality on Tourist Accommodation Ratings Using Guest Reviews, published in the Journal of Building and Environment. It's authored by Fan Zhang and colleagues from Griffith University, the University of New South Wales, and several other international institutions. Using web mining and artificial intelligence, they analyzed over half a million Booking.com reviews from Australian hotels and serviced apartments to understand how indoor environmental quality—air quality, acoustics, thermal comfort, lighting—actually drives guest satisfaction and ratings.

Traditionally, measuring occupant satisfaction in hotels has been nearly impossible. Post-occupancy evaluations require structured surveys, but try getting a business traveler rushing to the airport at 6am to fill in a 20-page questionnaire about ventilation rates. It's just not going to happen. So instead, these researchers used natural language processing to extract the actual, unprompted words from guests who stayed in these places—to see exactly what they care about.

Key Topics Discussed:

Three Factor Theory: A framework that categorizes any product or service feature into three buckets: basic factors (dissatisfiers), performance factors (the better it is, the happier you are), and excitement factors (unexpected bonuses). Almost all indoor environmental quality factors function as basic factors—guests expect them to be good, and if they're not, ratings plummet.

The Big Three Failures: Poor cleanliness, poor indoor air quality, and bad acoustics were the specific failures that dragged accommodation ratings down the most. Stuffy rooms, musty smells, and hearing the elevator rattling through the walls all night are directly torching hotel revenues by driving down public ratings.

Indoor Environmental Quality Accounts for 33% of Guest Ratings: In budget hotels, nearly a third of a customer's overall rating is driven by indoor environmental quality. In luxury accommodation, it's still about 24%. You can have the best marketing team and the friendliest staff, but if your building is fundamentally underventilated, your business will suffer.

The COVID Effect: The pandemic drastically amplified our sensitivity to poor indoor environments. During COVID, the negative impact of poor indoor air quality and cleanliness on guest ratings got significantly stronger. People suddenly equated visible cleanliness and fresh air with their own personal safety and survival.

The View Exception: In budget accommodation, a nice view was an excitement factor—people didn't expect it, so when they got one, they were thrilled. But in luxury hotels, the view reverted to being a basic factor. If you're paying 5-star prices, you expect 5-star views.

The Case for IEQ Benchmarking: The researchers suggest that policymakers and industry leaders should implement formal indoor environmental quality benchmarking for hotels—similar to Australia's NABERS rating for office buildings. Imagine being able to check a hotel's certified ventilation and air quality rating before you even book a room.

The Impact of Indoor Environmental Quality on Tourist Accommodation Ratings Using Guest Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2025.113135

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Overlooked Environment of Hotels
00:01:21 The Hospitality Blind Spot: Service vs Environment
00:01:52 The POE Problem: Why Traditional Surveys Fail in Hotels
00:02:24 The AI Solution: Mining Half a Million Guest Reviews
00:02:56 Three Factor Theory: The Framework for Understanding Buildings
00:04:06 The Eye-Opening Results: IEQ as a Basic Factor
00:05:03 The Triple Threat: Cleanliness, Air Quality, and Acoustics
00:05:44 The View Exception: Budget Thrills vs Luxury Expectations
00:06:30 The COVID Effect: When Air Quality Became Survival
00:07:53 The Bottom Line: IEQ Accounts for 33 Percent of Hotel Ratings
00:08:37 The Future: IEQ Benchmarking and Certification for Hotels
00:09:18 Study Limitations and the Reality of Guest Perception
00:09:55 The Main Takeaway: Engineering as Front-Line Business Survival

This week, we sit down with Adam Muggleton, Chief Technical Officer at AESG and host of the Edifice Complex Podcast.

Adam's career spans project management, property development, and commissioning across 21 countries—from the UK to the Middle East and North America. He views buildings not as architectural statements, but as complex machines that are likely underperforming. With decades of experience and zero patience for performative sustainability, he has developed a reputation for dismantling corporate jargon and shining a light on poor engineering and mediocre outcomes in the construction industry.

His relentless focus is on commissioning and building performance. He doesn't just want to know if a building looks good at sunset—he wants to know if the HVAC actually works, if the air is healthy, and why the industry persists in delivering glorified caves with modern price tags. Beneath his sceptical, no-nonsense exterior lies a deep advocacy for human-centric design, driven by the belief that the only way to fix the construction industrial complex is through radical transparency, rigorous testing, and a refusal to accept average as the industry standard.

Key Topics Discussed:

The Commissioning Accident: How Adam fell into commissioning engineering by accident—and why commissioning is always an accident. No one wakes up at 16 and says they want to be a commissioning engineer. Yet it's one of the most critical roles in delivering functional buildings.

The Consequences Problem: Why the construction industry is the only industry in the world where you can send out a set of documents riddled with errors and omissions—and not pay for those mistakes. Why there are no real consequences for poor delivery, and how that shapes everything from design to handover.

Humans at the Centre of Buildings—A Waste of Time? A brutally honest discussion about whether the rhetoric of "humans at the center" actually matters when residential developers are at the bottom of the care chain, and the only real feedback that matters is whether people stop buying.

The Elon Musk Question: Who is the Elon Musk of the built environment? Who is innovating, crushing it, doing the impossible? And why Adam's daughter and her engineering friends would rather flip burgers than work in the built environment.

The Platinum Building Paradox: Why even high-performance buildings with all the badges can fail spectacularly—like a healthy buildings conference held in a room where everyone is sitting in a fog of their own breath because the ventilation can't handle 80 people.

GUEST:

Adam Muggleton - Chief Technical Officer, AESG | Host, Edifice Complex Podcast

https://www.linkedin.com/in/buildingwhisperer/

https://aesg.com/uk/

https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/edifice-complex-podcast2

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/

Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Ultra Protect (https://www.ultra-protect.co.uk/air-quality-matters)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Accidental Commissioning Engineer
00:03:18 The Property Development Perspective: When Commissioning Becomes an Afterthought
00:04:50 The Consequence Problem: Why Construction Keeps Making the Same Mistakes
00:06:27 The Complexity Trap: Why Buildings Are So Difficult to Get Right
00:09:47 The Defects Dilemma: Cars vs Buildings and the Zero Defects Dream
00:10:51 The R&D Desert: Why Construction Firms Don't Invest in Innovation
00:15:49 The Building Hierarchy: Who Gets Good Air and Who Doesn't
00:19:09 The Human-Centric Building Myth: Why Residential Is at the Bottom
00:32:24 Breaking the Cycle: Commissioning as a Compliance Tool
00:51:19 The Supply Chain Reality: Who Really Designs Your Building
01:05:05 The Elon Musk Question: Where's the Innovation in Construction?
01:13:44 The Platinum Plaque Problem: High-Performance Buildings That Don't Perform
01:17:34 The Visibility Solution: Open Source Performance Data and Property Tax Penalties
01:20:41 The Housing Crisis: Why Government Must Get Back in the Game
01:37:35 The Optimistic Conclusion: Why Construction Is Still a Great Career

This week, we tackle a question that goes to the heart of the performance gap in buildings: What if the problem isn't just poor construction or shoddy installation—but the data we're feeding into our models in the first place?

There's an old saying in computer science: garbage in, garbage out. If you feed a perfect model with bad assumptions, you get a perfect calculation of a fantasy. And that's exactly what's been happening in indoor air quality modeling for decades. We've been relying on scattered, outdated, inconsistent emission rate data—pulled from 1990s conference papers, paywalled journals, and PDF reports buried in the internet—and wondering why our buildings don't perform as predicted.

The paper is titled Pandora: An Open Access Database of Indoor Pollutant Emission Rates for Indoor Air Quality Modeling, published in the Journal of Building Engineering. It's the work of a huge international team, including Mark Adobati and colleagues from Annex 86, and it represents a massive effort to clean up the mess of data that indoor air quality modelers have been struggling with for years.

Key Topics Discussed:

The Data Problem: Why finding reliable emission rates for indoor pollutants has been a nightmare—scattered across thousands of sources, often in the wrong units, measured under weird conditions, and completely inconsistent.

What Pandora Is: An open access, web-based database systematically compiling nearly 10,000 specific emission rates from the scientific literature, categorizing 740 different pollution sources—from paints and carpets to cleaning products, furniture, and even human beings.

The Shocking Case Study: A simple child's bedroom modeled three different ways using data from Pandora. The total formaldehyde emission rate ranged from 342 micrograms per hour to over 6,000 micrograms per hour—a factor of 20 difference. If you designed ventilation based on the lower number, a trickle vent might be fine. Based on the higher number, you'd be installing industrial extraction.

Why the Huge Discrepancy: The database contains data going back to the 1980s, when building materials were dirty—paints full of solvents, glues full of formaldehyde. Regulations like the French VOC label and German AGBB standard have forced manufacturers to clean up their act. If you use a statistical average of all data ever published, you're skewing your model with dirty data from 1995, predicting a problem that might not exist anymore.

The Recommendation: Use the 25th percentile of the data for things like formaldehyde. This lower value is likely a much more accurate representation of modern, regulation-compliant materials. We might be systematically overestimating the chemical load from building materials if we rely on older datasets.

Pandora: An Open Access Database of Indoor Pollutant Emission Rates for Indoor Air Quality Modeling

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2025.114216

Pandora Database: https://db-pandora.univ-lr.fr/

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Data We Rely On
00:01:06 Garbage In, Garbage Out: The Input Data Problem
00:01:45 Introducing Pandora: A Massive Data Compilation Effort
00:02:27 The Scattered Data Nightmare: Why We Needed This
00:03:08 What's Inside: Construction Materials Dominate the Database
00:03:43 The Overlooked Sources: Cleaning Products and Human Pollution
00:04:34 The Case Study: A Child's Bedroom Reveals a Shocking Problem
00:05:41 The 20X Problem: Why Data Selection Method Matters Enormously
00:06:06 The Time Trap: Old Dirty Data Versus Modern Clean Materials
00:06:43 The Recommendation: Use the 25th Percentile for Modern Materials
00:07:03 The So What: We Might Be Solving Problems That Don't Exist Anymore
00:07:27 The New Risks: Recreational Chemicals and Activity-Based Pollution
00:08:17 The Living Project: Pandora Needs to Grow and Evolve
00:08:38 The Path Forward: From Guessing to Engineering Precision
00:08:59 Closing: Transparency and Understanding the Invisible Cloud

This week, we step into the world of moisture in buildings—one of the most overlooked yet critical aspects of indoor air quality and building performance. While we talk about humidity constantly, we rarely stop to break down what we actually mean. What is moisture? Is it a pollutant? And why does it matter so much?

We sit down with David Schurk, owner of HVAC Insight Consultants and a dehumidification specialist with over 40 years of experience in the HVAC industry. David has led system design, application engineering, and field implementation efforts across healthcare, aerospace, industrial, and mission-critical environments. He's an ASHRAE life member and distinguished lecturer, and a course developer and instructor for multiple ASHRAE Learning Institute professional development programs.

Key Topics Discussed:

Is Moisture a Pollutant? How humidity impacts human comfort, building integrity, and health. Why 30% of the way we regulate our body temperature relies on evaporative cooling—and what happens when high humidity impedes that process.

The Operating Room Problem: A vivid real-world example of how high humidity in hospital operating rooms causes surgeons to overheat, insist on colder temperatures, which paradoxically increases relative humidity further—creating condensation, discomfort, and potentially dangerous conditions.

Breaking Down the Terminology: Dry bulb temperature, wet bulb temperature, relative humidity, absolute humidity, vapor pressure, dew point temperature—what do these terms actually mean? How do they interact? And why does relative humidity confuse everyone?

The Psychrometric Chart: The beautiful, intimidating, and essential tool that maps the relationship between temperature and moisture. How to read it, why it matters, and why it's still relevant in the age of apps and AI.

Surfaces, Condensation, and Mold: Why moisture risk is one of the few pollutants that can damage the building fabric itself. How dew point, surface temperatures, and adsorptive materials create the conditions for mold growth and structural decay.

The Case for HVAC-D: Why dehumidification deserves its own prominent place in the HVAC world. How traditional air conditioning treats dehumidification as a byproduct of cooling—and why that doesn't always work.

Desiccant Dehumidification: How solid and liquid desiccants can achieve moisture removal at levels traditional cold coil systems simply cannot reach—down to negative 100-degree Fahrenheit dew points. The applications in hospitals, pharmaceuticals, semiconductor manufacturing, lithium battery production, and ice rinks.

GUEST:

David Schurk - Owner, HVAC Insight Consultants

https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidschurk/

The Air Quality Matters Podcast in Partnership with

Particles Plus https://particlesplus.com/

Farmwood (https://farmwood.co.uk/) - Eurovent (https://www.eurovent.eu/) - Aico (https://www.aico.co.uk/) - Ultra Protect (https://www.ultra-protect.co.uk/air-quality-matters)

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website. (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

If you haven't checked out the YouTube channel its here (https://www.youtube.com/@airqualitymatters-SimonJones). Do subscribe if you can, lots more content is coming soon.

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Forgotten Child of Indoor Air Quality
00:02:27 Is Moisture a Pollutant? Defining the Problem
00:04:11 The Human Impact: Perspiration and Core Temperature
00:07:57 The Operating Room Problem: When Humidity Becomes Critical
00:14:30 Adding the D to HVAC: Why Dehumidification Deserves Recognition
00:28:59 Temperature Fundamentals: Dry Bulb, Sensible Heat, and Radiant Energy
00:36:05 Relative Humidity Explained: The Fish Tank Analogy
00:42:05 The Relative Humidity Trap: Why It Misleads Us
00:53:14 Absolute Humidity and Dew Point: The Real Measures That Matter
01:06:32 Wet Bulb Temperature: The Sling Psychrometer Explained
01:12:13 The Psychrometric Chart: Your Moisture Roadmap
01:18:21 Surfaces and Condensation: When Air Meets Materials
01:23:58 The Cold Spot Mold Spot Phenomenon
01:26:42 Controlling Moisture: The Thermostat Problem
01:30:59 The Efficiency Paradox: High SEER and High Humidity
01:32:55 Desiccant Dehumidification: Beyond the 32-Degree Limit
01:38:44 Real-World Applications: From Lithium Batteries to Pharmaceuticals
01:41:16 The Journey of a Dehumidification Jedi

This week, we dive into a question that goes beyond sensors and science: What actually motivates people to invest in clean air for their homes—and does culture change everything?

The paper is titled Indoor Air Quality: Predicting and Comparing Protective Behaviours in Germany and Portugal, published in Indoor Air, and it's based on survey data from 800 participants split evenly between the two nations. This research uses Protection Motivation Theory to unpack the psychological and cultural drivers behind adopting indoor air quality technologies—things like sensors, air purifiers, and ventilation systems.

Key Insights:

Germany: Autonomy and Family Duty: For German participants, the biggest driver was self-efficacy—the feeling of "I can do this." They need to feel capable, empowered, and in control. There's also a strong link to benevolence caring—particularly protecting close family, especially children. In Germany, you're not buying an air purifier for yourself. You're buying it because you feel a personal responsibility to safeguard your immediate circle.

Portugal: Prove It Works: For Portuguese participants, self-efficacy didn't move the needle. Instead, it was all about response efficacy—does this thing actually work? They're pragmatic consumers. If you tell them it works, you better be able to prove it. Also, people who already had respiratory conditions were much more likely to adopt the tech—health status mattered in Portugal, but not in Germany.

Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: You can't use the same messaging in Berlin as you do in Lisbon. In Berlin, you say: "Take control of your home and protect your children." In Lisbon, you say: "This device is proven to reduce particulate matter by 99%."

Fear Doesn't Work: Perceived vulnerability—the feeling that "I am personally at risk of getting sick"—had almost no impact on whether people adopted the technology. None. But perceived severity did. People are motivated when they acknowledge that poor air quality is a serious global or environmental problem—but they aren't motivated by feeling personally weak or susceptible.

The COVID Hangover: The authors suggest this might be a legacy of the pandemic. We became accustomed to taking protective measures—masks, sanitisers, ventilation—not because we were terrified for our own safety every day, but because we recognised the severity of the threat in a broader, almost civic sense.

This is Part Five of a five-part series exploring the psychology and perception of risk around air quality and ventilation.

Indoor Air Quality: Predicting and Comparing Protective Behaviours in Germany and Portugal

https://doi.org/10.1155/2024/3006342

The One Take Podcast in Partnership with

SafeTraces (https://www.safetraces.com/) and Inbiot (https://www.inbiot.es/?utm_campaign=simon&utm_source=airqualitymatters&utm_medium=podcast)

Do check them out in the links and on the Air Quality Matters Website (https://www.airqualitymatters.net/podcast)

Chapters

00:00:00 Introduction: The Psychology of Air Quality Behavior
00:00:55 The Missing Episode: Germany and Portugal Study Context
00:02:12 The Research Framework: Protection Motivation Theory
00:03:07 Threat and Coping: The Two Mental Processes
00:03:59 The German Mindset: Self-Efficacy and Family Protection
00:04:59 The Portuguese Perspective: Prove It Works
00:06:10 One Size Doesn't Fit All: Cultural Messaging Matters
00:06:31 The Vulnerability Paradox: Fear Doesn't Drive Action
00:07:29 The COVID Legacy: Civic Responsibility Over Personal Fear
00:08:15 The Performance Gap Problem: Why Efficacy Matters
00:08:53 Demographics and Early Adopters: The Youth Factor
00:09:26 Study Limitations and Economic Context
00:09:52 The Key Takeaway: From Education to Empowerment
00:10:46 The Path Forward: Respect, Severity, and Solutions
00:11:17 Closing Thoughts: Understanding the Human Element