The IEQ Proving Grounds
Creating healthy indoor environments is a universal priority in 2021, but optimizing buildings in the real world is incredibly difficult.
The IEQ Proving Grounds is a practical effort to determine if the indoor environment monitoring technology available today is able to meet the challenge of providing useful and actionable information to our members in commercial real estate, going forward.
Ember Strategies, LLC has partnered with MCI HVAC, Gamut Systems & Solutions, and Hygieia Sciences to create the IEQ Proving Grounds. Together the partners bring decades of real estate, HVAC, and industrial hygiene expertise to this effort.
Our Real-World Approach
Our intent is to assess the “state of the market” offerings ability to monitor the indoor environment, in real-world conditions and true commercial office use cases. Think “consumer reports” for IEQ monitoring technology in commercial buildings.
We’re pursuing a simple question - can commercially available IEQ monitors provide useful information to commercial building owners and operators? Are they fit for purpose, today?
This question is easy to answer, on paper or in the laboratory, but in real buildings filled with people the answer is not so clear.
​
In existing buildings, long runs of straight duct are rare, and you cannot place IEQ monitors in the middle of a room, 4 to 6 feet above the floor. To succeed, you must collect the best information you can and maintain the discretion to act when it has meaning and discard it when it does not.
​
To definitively answer our questions about the ability of these IEQ monitors to perform in our members’ use cases, we developed multiple testing environments and evaluation criteria to inform our members.
About The Partners
Ember Strategies is a boutique strategy consulting firm located in San Francisco, specializing in buildings and real estate. Ember has been supporting leading companies, cities, NGOs and philanthropies thinking long term about real estate and the built environment since 2013. The IEQ Proving Grounds was created by Lane Wesley Burt, P.E.