 cord button real quick via the chat, or you can access us via the Q&A button. The Q&A is really there for question and answer. So if you have a question for our speaker at any point, I encourage you to use that Q&A box. If you just want to say hello, say where you're at or any other general information, I encourage you to use that chat box. So those are the two big differences with the Zoom webinar. A couple of quick upcoming webinars that we have coming for 2023, on February 16th, we have a discussion of cold storage theory and practice for photographic and paper-based records. That one should be a really fun webinar. We're going to talk to a person who deals a lot with cold storage with some practical tips on how small and mid-size institutions can actually deal with cold storage within their institution for photographic and paper-based items. And then on March 21st, we have an exhibiting photographs webinar that we're pretty excited about, that we're going to be talking about kind of how people deal with collections, care issues and exhibiting photographs. So those are our next two webinars for the actual program itself. So I'm going to go ahead and hand this over to our presenter today. His name is Christopher Cameron. He's a sustainability consultant. He's going to be presenting on our topic today. Just as a reminder, we've shortened our program for 2023. We're going to be running from one to 2 p.m. Eastern. So after we hear our presentation, we will do a brief Q&A period as well. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and I'm going to hand this over to Chris. And I will see you during the Q&A period. Thanks again. And then go for it, Chris. Well, thank you very much. Again, just waiting for my slideshow to pick up. I want to thank everyone for coming today. Again, we're doing Sustainable and Passive Ways to Improve Your Collection Environment. My name is Christopher Cameron. I worked as a Sustainable Preservation Specialist at the Image Permanence Institute for nine years previously. I currently work as an assistant director for facilities for our major real estate corporation. We're managing over 500 doctors' offices or medical buildings in Western New York. So it's kind of got our hands full, if you will. And I also offer some consulting services on the side. I am a certified project manager, trained in HVAC refrigeration, and a certified energy manager. So as we discussed earlier, you know, we'll send your questions in as they come on, but we'll hold them until the end and address all questions at the end. So our agenda for today. We're going to be going over three kind of main topics as I go through this. I'm going to start with understanding set points and capabilities, really kind of what you're aiming for and what you can do. Then I'm going to cover some passive means for improving the environment, whether or not you have a mechanical system, or even a historic building, some ways you can implement to improve that collection environment, and some methods for improving the environment that involve HVAC system. So then if you do have a mechanical system, what are some other options that you have? So why would anyone want to improve their collection environment? It's a silly question. There are dozens of answers, but some of the reasons that we'll cover here, we want a better environment will increase the longevity of the collections and reduce potential for damage. So the better, you know, the better we can make that, the more we can increase the preservation index for that space, the longer we can improve the life of that collection of materials and reduce any damage that could occur. We want to improve our sustainability, improve sustainability is going to reduce our carbon footprint. And with global warming being the concern that it is, we all want that as a goal, but not just for ourselves, but even in our workplace. And also lastly, informing capital investments and strategic planning. So when you go and you begin to understand ways that you could improve your collection space better, or that you're possibly deficient in running your collection space, then you can begin to make a plan going forward of we need to improve X, Y or Z. And as you make that list, you can start to say, okay, well, I can work with my admin, my facility staff, and we can start to understand things that we need to do to make our space better, which would be, you know, a year or so now maybe buying a new mechanical system, insulating a space, things to that nature. So I'm going to get into the first section, the understanding set points and capabilities. So really what we're going to go over here is just some general housekeeping and some basic understanding of your buildings and what you're looking for. The goal is to really get an understanding of what set points are we aiming for? Are set points realistic? Are we asking for things that are within the capabilities of our mechanical system or our building envelope? And just just kind of opening your eyes to what are we looking for when we think about our collection spaces, our set points and things of that nature. So first things first, when you look at that, we always address temperature. So temperature is measured in cell C as Fahrenheit. It's very easy to control or influence. Simple heating, cooling, basic mechanical system functions of a space. You can heat it with a space heater. You can cool with a mini air conditioner. Some terminology not very important for this, but just for everyone's knowledge. When you talk mechanical systems, when they talk about heating or cooling a space, you either add heat or remove heat. You don't add coal. So that's just my own HVAC coming in there just passing along a fun fact for everyone. Temperature will also greatly influence the chemical reaction or the rate of decay within collection materials. So the higher that temperature, the greater that temperature, the faster the chemical decay will occur within collection material, within organic collection materials. And temperature is also one of the factors that the materials will experience quickly. So if you have quick, sharp changes in temperature, the collections are most likely going to feel that quicker. Even if they're, you know, in a buffered case, they may be delay of a few hours or so, but the temperature changes, collection chairs will generally feel those much quicker. Our other element is relative humidity. So relative humidity is a measure of water vapor content of the air. It's going to, relative humidity is going to influence the amount of water contained within collection materials. And it's much harder to control than temperature. You may have a mechanical system. And if you have a mechanical system, you may not have humidity control. You may not have the ability to dehumidify or humidify that air. Many times it would be an addition or an extra function of a mechanical system. So just because you have a mechanical system doesn't mean you'd have the ability to dehumidify that air or humidify it. It is also more energy intensive to raise or lower that relative humidity. When you think to dehumidify the air, you have to drive the temperature down, cross dew point. And once you cross dew point, then you have to heat the air back up. Or you have to have some form of mechanical system that's actively desiccating the air as it goes through the space. Conversely, also raising it, we have to have some humidification, whether it's coils or tubes that are going to atomize the air or boil it and blow it out of steam. So there is a lot of energy involved if we're in raising the humidity levels as well. And moisture equilibration we know unlike temperature can take time, especially for buffered materials in boxes packed tightly on shelves. We know from when I was working at IPI there was some studies being done in the lab that would show this. And just my own experience in the field that moisture equilibration, unlike temperature can take for well buffered materials weeks, if not months, depending on how well buffered those materials can be. So our current understanding of collection needs. In the past, everyone, we all looked at 70-50. We now know 70-50 for long-term storage of collection materials, not gallery spaces. This is for long-term collection materials. We know cooler temperatures are better. They're going to slow the degradation of materials. And also that 70 degrees, 50% relative humidity can be quite costly to achieve and hold for a long term. Trying to hold that steady line is very energy intensive. So we want to start thinking about backing away from that if we can. The same with maintaining on RH in an appropriate range. So generally, instead of holding that 50% salt line, can we keep the collection fluctuating between roughly say 30 to 55% relative humidity? The general safe range for many collection materials, but also go judge by what's safe for your collection. And we want to avoid extreme highs on those. We want to avoid extended periods of say 20% relative humidity, 70%. We obviously want to avoid those, prevent any mold or any other damage to collections. And we do want to also think about seasonal fluctuations. And I'll cover those a little later, allowing the temperature to temperature relative humidity to fluctuate as the seasons occur outside. So first and foremost, when we look at our buildings, once you all, when you look at your data, always look at DuPont. Because DuPont is critical when you're looking at a collection space. So DuPont is that temperature at which water vapor from the air becomes saturated and droplets begin to form. That's our condensation. DuPont is one of the best ways to understand the moisture content of the air that's in your space. There's different ways to really assess it. But when you're thinking about DuPont, if you're trying to just assess your collection, the things that DuPont alone can tell you when you look at that, there's some few things there. Does my building envelope hold up? You know, comparing your outside DuPont to your interior DuPont. If, you know, they're tracking very closely that your building envelope may not be buffering much at all. Does my mechanical system have moisture control? Does my building or my storage space offer any moisture buffering? Basically, if you have a storm going on outside, a hurricane comes through. What does your collection space look like? A few years ago, I evaluated some collection spaces from both New York City when the hurricane went through and from Houston when the hurricane went through. And a couple of the museums, one thing we noticed is despite the fact that they had some flooding in the basement, many of their collection spaces were still within a safe range for materials because the building still had buffering even though water was in the building. It didn't affect that collection space as much as there was concern for. You can also assess similar DuPonts across the space. We look for things like DuPont signatures, trying to identify common DuPont across collection spaces. So one way to determine your DuPont that there is the free program, dpcalc.org. Using software like that, if you understand the DuPont that you do experience within your collection space, you can plot that in dpcalc and then go and kind of adjust the temperature and relative humidity to see what ranges you can expect within your collection space. It also will give you the preservation index as well as the equilibrium moisture content to give you a rationale for how safe and how stable that your collection space would be. So I'll have to look at your, think about your building there. But again, before we go into some passive measures, one of the questions we want to ask, when you're thinking about any measures or anything you want to implement your spaces, what's the history of my building? The past history of your building is going to impact your current capabilities. Many different features are going to play a factor in that. This is just one example here. We had a restaurant in our city that is, a restaurant city that was once the original train station further. So there's tunnels running underneath it. What kind of issues do they have? They have airflow issues because it was a train station that didn't have originally air flow to begin, original air handling units to begin with because the tunnels they had to account for potential pests or other issues. And this comes to a factor when you have museums as well. When you think about these spaces, we have seen museums that were once, we've seen car dealerships, janitor's closets, apple storage, rifle ranges, the whole like gambit of things. And when you think take two of those, the janitor's closet for one, they never removed the plumbing features from the janitor's closet. So in that janitor's closet, what used to be a janitor's closet, they started to distor silver items. So they have silver items, but they now have a source of moisture because they never sealed up the drains, they never stopped the water. So they had a higher moisture content in that room just by the fact that it was still a janitor's closet. The same with car dealership. They took over a car dealership, they made a collection storage space, but to save money, they never replaced the mechanical systems. And in never replacing those mechanical systems, they had the same mechanical system meant for human comfort that was conditioning a car dealership. And they could never get collections, quality space, because of that. A few years ago, I did a presentation with NEDCC. This is one of the slides that we use in there. I really, really appreciate it because it's a good idea of like questions you should ask for your facility staff when you're evaluating your building. I thought it was great. I wanted to make sure I include that. How old is this building? Have there been renovations? What are some issues? There's some great series of questions to post to your facility staff, just to get a better understanding of, you know, together what kind of issues has that building occurred in the past and what can you potentially expect to experience in there in the future. So layout of space is going to be a huge factor for your building as well. The layout of space is going to influence the environmental conditions and potentially your sustainability. Distribution of rooms, huge factor. If we're looking at this facility and we have collection spaces on the right side and that one collection space is connected to offices and restrooms, and then there's also collection spaces on the other side of the building. And those collection spaces are connected to, say, a loading dock and a director's office. There's a lot of factors that play into that. And when we deal with different conditions, we're going to have, you know, say 50 degrees for storage, collection storage space. Great. You know, it's a perfect storage space. But then we're adding, you know, 70 degrees for the offices. Then all that air has to go back to the mechanical system and be cooled to 50 degrees and then be reheated back to 70 going out. So it's a very energy intensive. So can we start looking at, you know, combining spaces? Something I'll cover in a little bit. Adding walls is another factor and it's something I'll cover in air flow a little bit. But anytime you start redesigning rooms or changing walls, you create a major issue within a collection space. And one thing to keep in mind, your rooms on your southern side are going to be potentially warmer than the rooms on the northern side. So if you do have mechanical systems, one of some of the things you want to be aware of is what the system is capable of. I've been on grants before where we have, you know, the grant project said, hey, we can achieve the desired conditions within our collection space. We've asked for, you know, this temperature, this relative humidity and it just, we've asked and asked and asked and facilities won't do it. And then when we show up on the grant, we start, you know, looking at the mechanical system talking to facilities. Facilities, the system just was never designed to do that. They can ask for it. There's no way we can ever produce that. But you want to understand that before we ask. So, you know, working with facilities, what are the cooling capabilities of that unit? What are the heating capabilities? What kind of relative humidity control do we have? And work with facilities. Ask, are you achieving, are you asking for achievable set points? For yourself to look at, what can you achieve? Start looking at some outdoor air data versus indoor air data. If you're data logging, get some outdoor air data. Bring it up. I think most programs will have an option for looking at outdoor air. If not, then try getting a data logger outside the building and evaluate that data. Make sure you cover it because the water will kill it. But really, getting an assessment of what is the dew point outside? What's the interior dew point? And, you know, do they track, as I said earlier? And if so, you're building maybe leaky. How well does temperature impact your space? You know, if you start to see these collect, these conditions agreeing on the data, then you likely have some leakage or some carryover from outside to inside. And the same with the mirror mechanical system, you know, getting some data logs in the mechanical system will give you an idea of what you can achieve that way. So occupancy is a huge factor as well. Occupancy plays a major role in conditioning of a building. You're going to heat a building to make your occupants happy. And this goes for collection spaces as well. Typically, as I said earlier, we like to see collection spaces nice and cool, cooler the better. However, we've seen specifically designed collection spaces, almost a vault style space that was designed to be capable of producing 55 degree temperatures. So great. We designed this great space. We designed, you know, a wonderful mechanical system. But the addition of one staff member into that space means it doesn't matter what you designed it for, we're conditioning for human occupancy. And remember, people add heat to space as well. So just in your presence of a staff member or people with tours, open building, people are not only going to add heat, they're going to breathe, and they'll add moisture to a space. And your staffing schedule and operation, your staffing operation schedule is going to influence what you may be able to implement for energy saving. So if you're thinking I want to do, you know, mechanical co-shot downs, which I do have, we'll talk about a little bit. If you don't, you know, the museum closes at five, wonderful. However, you may close at five, but your cleaning staff are still in the building until say 10, then you have to take that into account, you know, what's going to happen if we start adjusting mechanical system cleaning staff still here. So establishing the baseline as well. Installing some data loggers before you really do anything, set up a monitoring program. Get data loggers into your space, you can understand what the current baseline is for your collection. What types of temperatures do you see? What types of relative humidity? Do you, what's their average relative humidity? What do you see any trends occurring? Like do you see things happening Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday? Do you see things happening seasonally? Start to get an idea for what's occurring in your space. So you begin to know if, if I make changes, what does that mean? You know, if I adjust the temperature, how does that impact space? If I turn this system off, what does that mean? So I started, started mentioning this earlier. So we want to start thinking about separating your spaces. This is the last one before you went to some of these passive measures. But when you look at your collection space, think about environmental conditions and consider that there are basically about three types of spaces and museums. I know this is up for debate because there's, within collection storage, there's probably about 20 itself. But when you think about there's collection storage spaces, human-occupied spaces and no condition whatsoever. So long-term collection storage, you know, the collection's going to live there and exist there. We have a human-occupied space. We have no condition loading dock. Each one of those required different temperatures relative humidity. If we're looking at a mechanical system, if we're looking at conditioning them, we want to try and keep those spaces as separate as possible and keep dedicated systems to those as much as we can. And remember, mixing your spaces, I described, you're going to use more energy to heat the air up and then cool it back down and heat the air up and cool it back down. So I'm going to go into some passive methods for improving your environment. Again, this is, it applies to, should many of these things should apply to everybody, whether you have a mechanical system or you're just a historic house with no mechanical system or you just have some, there's some methods in here that should be should be implemented or could be implemented by just about anybody. So look at the first one, utilizing some microclimates, furniture, like cabinets, vitrines, they can help create helpful microclimates for my coworker, Kelly Christ was working on a project previously where she had to working with a historic house with no conditioning whatsoever. They had taken an old safe, I believe it was, and they had put a gasket on the safe. And they were testing, you know, how does the safe look, historic house, no conditioning, they had outside temperature, we had the safe, or we had the outside temperature, we had the room and they had the safe, and they were evaluating and they actually found that even though that that cabinet was old, that was providing a good, a great buffer for the environment. So it was an old cabinet, new gasket, great buffering conditions for relative humidity. It's obviously less effective against temperature swings, you're going to get some swings in temperature, as I said earlier, that the collection may still feel those, you know, within a few hours, depending on how well packed that that is, but it was buffering pretty significantly for relative humidity swings and adding desiccant can definitely help, you know, buffer that even more. Looking at addressing your building envelope is important for any building, whether you're have conditioning or not, building envelope is huge. Holes in your building envelope can have a major influence on energy use, ability to control the room, even pests getting in, look for holes within your facade. If you look at this image, there's a couple issues, this was a historic building, there's holes in the brick right here, there's what they, we call great stuff, it's an expanding foam in a can that they blew in here, so you want to avoid things like that, we want to make sure that, you know, you doesn't have to look, you know, the solid more than anything outside, but at least filling in those joints with actual mortars, we don't have penetrations in, make sure the doors are tightly sealed, they have the sweeps on the bottom, and try not to leave doors open. The story I love to tell is we worked with a archive collection in the library, archive was in the general library space, and they wanted people to feel welcome, so they would open the doors in the morning, so that people would see they're open and come on in. The downside was the archive space was conditioned to specific cool levels for the archive, and the general library stacks were human comfort. The very second they opened those doors to look inviting, they were wasting all that condition out of the space. Well, you know, make sure you try and you want to keep your, everything is contained in your space as much as possible and have this little influence. We, a few years ago, I was able to take an architecture class, and day one of the architecture class, they said if you took a brand new building built this year, and added up every hole and puncture and gap and everything going through that building, it would equal a three foot by three foot hole on the side of the space, so it does add up when you really stop and look at everything. Some things to assess when you look into building exterior, your landscaping, you have vegetation too close to your building, the brick pointing. I've been in circumstances where brick pointing has failed, it's just missing and brick pointing would be the joints of the brick where they meet, and it's letting air and cold air and moisture into the building, and that condenses inside and they have a head mold occur inside the walls because the brick point wasn't there. Valuate your roof, make sure you don't have leaks. I mentioned earlier, addressing those door sweeps, make sure you, you know, they have those holes in the gutter and even gutter drainage. This is an issue of gutter drainage. If you look at this picture, that gutter is not matching up, we're getting the moss growing on there, the mulch is washing away inside of this structure actually has a huge mold bloom on the wall from this occurring. In your building interior, there's a number of things to look at building interior. Lights can add heat to a collection space, and I'll discuss lights in a minute or so, but it's important to think when you light a collection space, you pay twice for that once for the electric to run the lights and the lights do add heat, so you then also pay to remove they. You want to also address water sources, whether they're purposeful or accidental, you want to make sure you address any leaks or leaky pipes or even understanding where the water flows through the building. So if there's a problem, you know how to address it quickly. Make sure your windows don't leak that, you know, going with the building envelope earlier about the three foot by three foot hole, no gaps around windows can add up. Keep the doors to zone spaces closed. A number of collection spaces do break up their spaces individually and keep collection spaces and offices and these all, but then they'll open the doors between spaces when staff are in there. So kind of defeats that purpose, make sure you're keeping those doors closed, make sure events in HVAC equipment are not blocked and operating freely. One thing to be sure of when you look at your building envelope is, remember, you want to watch for compounding issues. You may have just a simple gutter leak and it might be no big deal. You know, a gutter leak is, it's just leaking outside. Unfortunately, this is an example of one of the buildings we've been managing. This here, what you see is the new gutter. The old gutter is this line that ran right here at the building. The gutter had failed, it had broken off. And what issues it was causing was it was pouring off the roof and causing a major patch of ice here on the sidewalk. That ice staff couldn't get in. They actually had to walk through the mulch to get in because of the major patch of ice. As the water, you know, it began to rain more and melt more, what was a patch of ice became a blockage causing water to not move. So the water actually started to pull here in front of the door. It ate a lot of this brick away causing fist-sized holes that allowed pests to now enter the building and the standing water to not get in. And the standing water caused, you know, significant damage to the carpets to the walls. So what may be a simple roof leak could really escalate quickly. And you want to make sure you're on top of these things and just keeping eyes on them and addressing them as needed. So light, we talked, I mentioned light earlier and I started bringing it up. And, you know, we want to look at reducing our light. And this is achieving energy savings by altering duration, quantity, and the type of light we use. So we're all used to, we all know the type of light. That's what we're trying to do in our house. That's our bottom here, this type. Replacing our LED, replacing, you know, fluorescence, incandescent falls with LEDs. But there's other ways, other things we can do. And again, these apply whether you have mechanical systems or not. The duration is so we want to reduce the time of light that is used in the space. So timers, motion sensors, if staff aren't in a room, can we get them, can we wire them up to turn off? We also want to think about curtains on the windows. So if, you know, we have a historic house and we're going home for the evening, do we need to, you know, leave the windows, the curtains open? No, we can pull them, at least reduce some of the light damage and the light load on that space. Also exposure. So we want to think about reducing the amount of light that is used in a collection space. I've been in some collection spaces that are lit for surgery. Is it necessary? Most likely not. There's a high volume of light. So maybe just can I think every other light in the space or reducing some bulbs within that space. Or even adding tint to windows. One thing I want to make sure I bring up is tint is not long-term solution. Window tint has a lifespan. I believe the average is five years depending on the amount of sunlight hitting it. But average is about five years. So just remember window tint though it's a great solution is not a long-term solution. So a couple additional solutions for your facility. You know, again, whether you have a mechanical system or not. We'll start with the bottom of the office equipment. Office equipment of any kind can add heat. Possibly moisture if you think about coffee pot to a space. And I have seen coffee pots in collection spaces. We want to turn any of this off when it's not in use or not necessary. We don't want to run it at heat and moisture to a space that doesn't need to be there. So you know, just thank you. If no one's coming in or no one's using the copier for the day, can we turn it off and just not run the copier? Heating is a whole another monster. We want to avoid heating a facility if we don't need to. And I know it goes without saying, but we have worked with an institution. The institution was only open November, made in November. So you know, good, what six months of the year it was closed. And they were heating the building 270 degrees year round, even though the building was close, there was no visitors or staff in that building. So we asked them, can we reduce that heat? Do we need to heat it to 70? There was some water sources. We had to take that into account. We were able to back that temperature down to about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 10 degrees Celsius, which still worked. It didn't cause any freezing damage and was significant energy savings for the buildings in the months that they weren't being used. And they just planned accordingly. If they had anyone working in those buildings that day, they would just think ahead and either go ahead and turn them on early or show up that day and just stay until it got warm. Of course, let the shimming run until it got warm. So I'll be jumping into some methods for improving your environment that do involve HVAC equipment. Some of these can be energy or mechanical system induced as in shutdowns. It'll save you both energy and potentially improve your collection environment. And shutdown is the complete shutdown of all components of your HVAC system. First select period of time. So imagine we have an eight hour system, an eight hour shutdown, I mean, that's a third of the time that that machine would have run during the day that it's now removed. So a third of its energy is gone. With shutdowns, potentially, I'll go to some pros and cons, you can get slight improvements in preservation. So if we think of mechanical system shutdown, we can shut a system down. And at times we've done it and gained a few degrees, the temperature will drop, maybe three degrees during a shutdown. And it's some slight preservation improvements, not great, it's not major, but it is definitely some improvement. So we're getting some gains of preservation as well as some energy or savings. Some risks to this, of course, there is the risk of the system not returning back online. But it's true of any mechanical system, even when you stop it for maintenance, there is that risk that you let out the magic smoke and the system just doesn't return. And then there was also the risk that the facility is not capable of holding conditions, you shut off the mechanical system and you lose temperature quickly. But there's definitely things that, you know, something I could even talk you through testing to find that out. But even we worked, I've worked with facilities in Louisiana that were able to shut downs up to four hours in the summertime in the evening. So you'd be surprised if your building is likely capable of holding conditions. Setpoint changes, changing a setpoint of your HVAC system to deliver improvements in preservation, as well as energy reduction. So there's two kinds of setpoint adjustments. There are daily setbacks and seasonal setpoint adjustments. I'll cover each of those individually here. So for daily setbacks, that's going to involve a separate day operation and night or after hour set points. So you're thinking about, you know, when staff are in the building and visitors are in the building, we're going to be aiming for this condition. And then when people leave, we're going to back things down to, you know, we're still in our safe range, but back it down so that we can gain some preservation quality in that air and reduce our energy consumption. Depending on your mechanical system, it could save very large amounts of energy. But the biggest con we get here is you can get people coming in early. Someone comes in an hour earlier than the system turns on and you'll get some complaints that it's too cold and have a very go-getter of a facilities person that'll turn the system back on early and kind of disrupt that whole cycle. An example of some daily setbacks. Gallery here, we're running from seven to five. We take a temperature of 72 degrees. They were running year-round 72 degrees, 41% relative humidity. And then, you know, we ask, can we change that a little bit? You close at five o'clock, you're close till seven, so that's 14 hours. You know, if I evaluate that time, can we make some changes? And we were able to drop it home at nine, I was going to say almost 10 degrees, but nine degrees helped us at their ceiling of 56% for relative humidity. And we gained pretty decent jump in preservation index there. So seasonal set points, similar to daily set points, establishing seasonal set points for relative humidity and temperature in spaces to improve the preservation environment and reduce energy impacts. The pros you're going to get out of this, this is going to save you energy over a season. So instead of just nightly changes, you're going to have big seasonal changes occurring. Once they're implemented, there's less potential for issue. You're not relying on the system to cut back and forth every day. You're really just implementing it and walking away for, you know, till the next season comes. And they can be easily combined. You can combine seasonal set points with daily set points, so you can do both. Get the energy savings for daily set points as well as seasonal. You can combine them with shutdowns and other strategies. So it's a very flexible energy saving strategy. Here's, you know, an example of seasonal set points, a winter condition if, you know, and the summer condition. We'll go back to that summer condition of 72 degrees, 41% relative humidity. So if we're looking at supplying this condition throughout our year round, and then we change and geos backing at the four degrees and reducing the relative humidity, we're going to save on, you know, reheating the four degrees but also humidifying that air in the drier winter season or drier months. And we got a pretty significant gain of preservation index, which is the PI in that space. So getting a little further down some other strategies that we do implement is the reduction of outside air. And the goal of this is to reduce the outside air that's being used by an air handling unit. Every air handling system of some kind uses, every air handling system regardless the kind uses some amount of outside air. We're recommending is not closing off the outside air entirely, do not close it off entirely. You will need some outside air for off gassing removal or conditioning that space or even keeping positive pressure in that space. So it's one of those things we definitely want to reduce our, we don't want to use major amounts of work with some spaces that are using 50% outside air. Any amount of that air that's lost, you have to make up for and then you have to treat so that it's still usable in your space. For an example, in colder winter months, you have to bring it you're going to bring in cold dry air that has to be heated and humidified to make it usable in the space. So the less of that air that we can bring in the less work we could put on the mechanical system. So also looking at the way we employ airflow is important. I mentioned earlier that, you know, moving walls around can be a problem. The proper airflow is key regardless of whether you have an HV system or not. You could in a historic building, if you're in a mechanical system, building a mechanical system, anything you do to interrupt that airflow can cause pretty substantial issues. I've seen some buildings where supply and returns are located right next to each other. So the air is coming right out of supply going right back into the return. It's called short circuiting. It's a big waste of energy because there's no conditioning happening to the collection space. And one of the things we see quite often, and I know a number of you may have done it within your facility itself, remodeling a space. So we're going to remodel a space. We're going to make some changes and we'll take this large room and we will put a wall up in the middle. And when that occurs, you know, well, this large room was hurt was either heated by one mechanical system or they'll be, you know, was designed originally for windows to move air from one side to the other with a wall up in that middle and you stop that airflow. You either stop the air from passively moving via the windows or the supplies on one side of the wall, the returns on the other and the air just can't flow. Or in some scenarios, they block, you know, if thermostats now on one side of the wall and supplies the other and it's not seeing the air that's being delivered. So, you know, understand how the air flows through building. One of the things I like to recommend to people is sitting down with a blueprint for your building, mark supplies, returns, mark where your windows are, which way the wind, you know, comes in typically and get an idea for if the wind is blowing this way. If my air is coming out of the supply, drawing some lines to either the other windows on the opposite side or to the returns, where do you see dead spaces? Where do you see, you know, possible zones of microclimates within your space? Any of the previously mentioned strategies want to make sure, be sure you test and evaluate any of the strategies before permanently implementing them. Definitely, we always have always recommended a two-week testing period for any strategy. Put it in place for about two weeks. Look at your data every two days, every three days. Make sure you're not upsetting the apple cart that everything's working properly and that you're getting good readings and everything stable. And if it does look good, then, you know, carry on. Still, evaluate your data maybe every week and a half, two weeks. But going forward, you know, that initial two-week testing period is important to really see, make sure you're in that safe range still. There's a couple other mechanical system options. Those of you who don't have major mechanical systems, but you have a rooftop unit. So a rooftop unit is, you know, if you walk outside, there's a big mechanical system sitting at a building that's designed to heat or cool. I've worked with a lot of facilities, some were installed in the 70s. They were popular units. They still are popular units, but some of the older ones had no way of being connected to BMS or the system that controls the HVAC. They just kind of run on a thermostat and that's it. They do make smart motors now. The motor that controls the fan can be replaced with a smart motor that acts as its own computer and begins to kind of do evaluation of temperature, space, usage, and does its own calculations to start learning how to optimize the energy use of that system itself. So it could start basically planning its own energy savings for you based on your use. Looking at your start and stop time, that kind of goes, it's kind of a no-brainer, but it's still important. We want to stop any unnecessary equipment at the end of the day when we don't need it. Are your running compressors in space that you don't need? We have seen that in a lab space where they're running a compressor. They just left it on. Can we turn that off when we don't need it? There's an example. Some hotels will turn, if they have four elevators, turn two of them off during slow periods. Can we start equipment only when it's necessary? Do we have vestibule heaters? Can we only run the vestibule heaters when we need to? Some other mechanical system options. Be sure your ductwork is all sealed. Duckwork, holes in ductwork can be a major loss of energy. Make sure that there's no gaps, no loss, because remember all that air that you lose through a hole in the ductwork has to be made up with outside air, which causes more energy to be used in the mechanical system. So can we make sure, walk through with your facility staff, see if there's any holes, address them? They do sell that silver tape, tape up the ductwork, and try and keep it as sealed as possible. Utilizing better dead bands through your HVAC system, so a dead band is the temperature during which you will neither heat nor cool. So if you imagine you're heating to 72 degrees, we have a 72-degree ceiling, you're going to heat to 72, and then maybe 68 is your on point. So it'll heat to 72, and then the mechanical system will let the temperature drift till it hits 68 and then run back on. So that's what a dead band would be, that gap between 72 and 68. Some institutions are tighter than that. They'll use two degrees, so 72 and 70, and there's the tight up and down of that system. You can gain some energy savings by expanding this, maybe going to five or six degrees. Again, gauge your comfort for your collections, for your facility and your space, but there is something to be said about being able to expand that. The Department of Energy does recommend expanding that, I believe the seven or eight degrees, but a little hesitant for museums to go that far just yet. Now, some additional notes in here. Again, I'm going to start at the bottom because I want to make my final point on that last one. Make sure you budget for repairs. If you know something needs to be repaired, work with your facilities, make sure you're in touch with them, make sure you're working with admin, that you know something needs to be updated or changed, and that's like on their list of things to get done. Analyze your data routinely, as I discussed earlier, make sure you're looking at that. I'll walk through your collection spaces regularly. Make sure you have eyes on it. I have seen in the past collection spaces a very large collection space that had six data loggers in it. It was probably data logged to the best of their abilities and to the best that I would even be able to recommend, and they still had a major mold outbreak occur. Things can still slip by it regardless. Make sure you're getting some data logs in there. Regular preventive maintenance is important regardless of what your facility is. One of the things that always gets cut first is maintenance. It's generally seen maintenance isn't a money maker. It actually costs more money. We could save some money by reducing this, reducing that. It basically leads to your facility stepping reactive and not proactive. They're no longer preventing the fires. They're putting them out and fixing the damage from the fires after they occur. Make sure if it ever comes down to it, you would all have my email address or a way to contact me. I am happy to weigh in, fight for you, to make sure your maintenance doesn't get cut because when it gets cut, usually that's when some of the worst effects start to occur. Some grant funding that's available that's out there for everyone. There's NEH, sustaining cultural heritage collections, and preservation assistance grants for smaller institutions. The IMLS Museums for America grant and IMLS Inspire grants are available. The AIC cap grants are open right now. There's a February 28th deadline. I have worked with many institutions that had great experience both in applying for that and with the grant itself. So definitely recommend looking into that grant. And the database for state incentive renewable energy, it's run by the Department of Energy. It's called Desire. We really wish they had a different name, but it basically is a program through the U.S. Department of Energy and you look up by state and then by your city and it'll tell you different incentives that you can apply for things like funding for insulation, funding for components like drives for a mechanical system that you can apply for that you can either be reimbursed or grant type deals. Some services that we do offer if any of you are interested in reaching out to me. If you want to establish a data monitoring program, we help institutions do that. Optimization of mechanical systems, custom environmental and now assessment can perform those services if you like. Just give you an idea of how well you're doing. Are you doing the best you can do with the system you have or does you need it something to be replaced? Mechanical system design or representation, if you're building a new space, we can weigh in for the collection you have, what might you need. And even preservation commissioning. Sometimes as buildings age, their abilities fade. What a building was designed to do, it might not be doing five, 10, 20 years, 60 years down the road. So we do offer some preservation commissioning to commit and evaluate to try and get the system back to what it should be. I know you all were given some resources. Can't stress this enough, some excellent resources on the PIPI's environmental publication page. The methodology book and sustainability preservation practices manual, excellent books to look through. Couldn't stress them enough. They're both, I believe, free downloads on that site as well as the role of two points. So if you have a question about, you know, some what want to learn more about two point, you want to try and understand it better. There's a role of two point in there as well. So I'm going to hand it over to questions now. I'll leave this up. If anyone wants to reach out, my phone number, if you want to ask me a question on the side that you don't feel like asking publicly, there's my email address and my website as well. So I will stop talking for a minute and open it up to questions. Thanks, Chris. That was great. The Q&A and chat have been chattering away about, and this is interesting because I was just at an in-person workshop last week where we were talking a lot about kind of these newest standards for temperature and humidity that have come out recently because I know when I was coming up in the museum world, it was very much like, no, you have to be within, you know, 70, 50 plus or minus two. Like it was like tight, right, to do this. And it was kind of scary. Like even I worked at a newer facility and we were like, we can't really make those standards. So a lot of people in the chat and in the Q&A are just kind of asking about those standards and kind of how do you best determine the set points for different seasons, just kind of that whole world. So I didn't know if you wanted to comment on that or we could dig into some more specific questions if you'd like to. Yeah, and the standards, it's, I'm going to kind of put my foot in my mouth. Standards can be tricky to achieve. Even the 70, 50 standard, I've seen mechanical systems designed for 70, 50 that, you know, it was designed in the 80s and 30 years down the road, 40 years down the road, it's struggling to even produce that 70, 50 anymore. It's really just, it just can't get to what it used to do. For determining the mechanical system set points, one of the best ways to do that, when if you, it involves some data logging, getting some data loggers in your mechanical system, or even in your collection space, start to understand, and it all goes back to dew point, that dew point that you typically experience in the hotter humid months that you see, start to understand that dew point you're experiencing, and that'll tell you how much dehumidification that your mechanical system is performing. And then going back to, as I said, that DP calc program. So, you know, you know, the dew point that you can, that you expect to experience in the summer, you can plug that into DP calc and then adjust the temperature slides on the side and say, okay, you know, at this temperature, what's my relative humidity? If I lower it, what's my relative humidity? And keeping 55% as your ceiling, you know, where do you see yourself crossing that 55? And in some instances, I unfortunately worked with a few museums, and instead of lowering the temperature, we actually had to look at raising it because the dehumidification was just not there anymore. But that also being said, if you're looking at winter conditions, one of the things we recommend is typically looking at the average dew point that occurs in your locale, not your facility, but outside, the average dew point in the wintertime and placing that into the mechanical system, or looking at if you're humidifying to even reach 35, setting 35 as a base in DP calc, and then adjusting that temperature, you know, slowly to see, okay, at this condition, where am I at this condition? Where am I at? And then just evaluate because, you know, if you started that base, then you can set your, build your condition from there. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And I think a lot of this is because some of the other stuff I'm reading in the chat, and the questions are people kind of saying, you know, like we, the environment changes so drastically between just every part of, and I'm just talking United States, like landlocked United States, like I was in Florida, right, up until the summer, where you just got extremes, now where I'm at in the mid-Atlantic, different areas, right? So I think you're kind of also working within the environment you're into, and kind of really comparing what the objects are used to is something I think about a lot, and then also just what our environment can handle, and our facilities, and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's a tough process because the conditions I would give you say, we're in Rochester, New York. So the conditions I would give you for Rochester are not even going to be the same for New York City, and might not even be the same for Pittsburgh, even though Pittsburgh's like three hours away. Yeah. So, you know, we got to look at your locality, but it's not just your locality, it's what your building and mechanical system are going to give you, are going to buffer for you as well, because all of that comes into play. You know, I mentioned the shutdowns, and we worked with the Museum in Louisiana that, or an institute in Louisiana that could shut down for four hours in the evening, which we never thought would be possible, because it was an old and leaky building. Right. But by the same respect, I've worked with institutes in the northeast that couldn't shut down at all because the envelope wasn't there, and if they shut down, they just would take off with the environment. Yeah, exactly. It all comes down to really what, you've got to evaluate your building, your collection, and your mechanical system. Take all it into account and see what you're capable of. Yeah, I like that idea too of like really looking at the whole thing. You know, I mean, like you said, it's like three pieces. It's not just looking at your HVAC or your system and being like, well, this is what we have, you have to kind of take all these bits and pieces together to really provide the best environment for your collection to kind of be preserved for as long as it can be. Another question we have is we have a couple of people dealing with the issue of older houses. One person says, we are in a decades old home with only window AC units. I have been there. I feel you're paid. Is this really bad? No money to fix things. Also mouse and bug problems as we are in a camp. Any suggestions? Okay. Typically, my knee-jerk reaction is I've always been averse to window AC units. Typically, if you were to look at, or even I'll use DpCalc again, if you go in and put a solid line, just plot a solid dew point on DpCalc and then drop the temperature, you'll see the relative humidity shoot straight up. And that's one of our concerns with those window units is they generally in most circumstances are only sensible control, this temperature control. They're not moisture control. So in reducing that temperature, you can potentially raise that relative humidity into a dangerous level. Put yourself at a mold risk. In historic houses, you've got a little bit more to leave me because the air is going to mingle. You've got some play, but I have seen some issues in historic houses when they've installed those units and there have been problems. But the reason I'm couching my words very carefully is I have actually worked in a historic house where they installed an air conditioner and somehow it dehumidified the space. So there is some potential and again, that comes down to a case-by-case, but it was a rare circumstances. And my typical response when they told me an air conditioner, I've been like, no, let's stay away from that. But they installed that. They were using it when we were getting data loggers in there. It was the first historic building I had seen that actually the window unit dehumidified the space as a byproduct of its operation. He's meant to start coughing. That's fascinating. Someone's in the chat said maybe if it had a heat pump, maybe that would have something to do with that. Do you have any thoughts on that? If that unit had a heat pump or just the it was a basic window unit that was bought from I think Home Depot. It was not, there wasn't connected to anything. It was just a simple slide-in window unit that you'd use in an apartment or somewhere at your house, which is why I was surprised by that. I do agree with people. It has had me and I believe Kelly was on that with me that completely stumped as to how what happened there. It's a magical AC unit. So a lot of people also are going back to the idea of the fluctuations over 24 hours because that's something that I came up learning is that what you wanted to avoid were these big fluctuations over a certain amount of time. Excuse me. Do you have anything more to talk about that just fluctuations and ways to avoid that? Yes and no depending on the types of fluctuations. When I had left IPI some of the research they were doing was into some of those fluctuations and looking at temperature or not relative humidity fluctuations and they were I don't think they've published anything on it yet. I think they're still, so I don't want to spoil it, but I know one of the things I can say is that relative humidity equilibration can take weeks if not months for even more packed collection materials. An example I can give to that. I worked with a library that had a massive mold outbreak in their building. They had torn the roof off to install an elevator so they had basically their collection was open to the environment for the better part of the summer. When they sealed the building back up they started to notice they had mold occurring in the books and this was after they had you know building sealed the mechanical system running and they were also noticing that as they were they were red tagging everywhere in the books that they saw mold or in the shelves that they saw mold. When you walk through we're four or five months from the roof being sealed but they're still seeing mold only in the middle books so you know as the books in the end had reached the equilibration the tightly packed books in the middle were still trying to equilibrate with that moisture so they still had high moisture content so I guess where I was going was we know moisture equilibration could take time so if your collection is really buffered if you have spikes that occur over a day it's less of a concern to me than a spike that occurs you know a large climb in relative humidity that's going to last for two or three weeks that's a concern but if it jumps up for one day and then jumps back down say they're doing maintenance on the system they turn it off or they're doing some work and you get that spike as long as they get it under control and back on it's less of a concern because the collection if it's packed tightly if it's buffered if it's in cabinets if it's on shelves most likely wouldn't feel that but if it's an you know say a piece of artworking on the walls by itself then it wouldn't feel it quicker. I know I just kind of ran around in circles on you. No that's okay. No I think that answers it and like I said I think it's hard it's just it is I'm going to go back to that idea like you're just trying to find the balance between everything right like I would also knee jerk to be like oh these these fluctuations are freaking me out a little bit but I think also just kind of seeing how often they happen and the the length of the fluctuations should be really the thing to focus on just generally. Yeah this and the when they happen is important to look at as well if you have again I apologize for keeping giving the examples like but worked with an institution that was doing nightly shutdowns and they you know nightly shutdowns look great but every now and then there would be a huge spike in relative humidity and no one really could understand why and then you know we started to see that that spike was tied to when they had windy days outside and what was happening was the outside air damper wasn't closing during the shutdowns so that spike was tied to the wind blowing the hot moisture outside into the building even though it was sealed up so really you know it gives you points to look at when you start seeing things like that okay what was occurring why did it occur it helps you track things down and almost prevent that from happening in the future. That's really interesting and you know actually this makes me think of like how I think it's so important that one of the first steps people are kind of saying like where do I begin with a couple of the questions and I think one of the first steps with any of these things is just getting collecting data like it feels like you almost have to collect data for like a year to just kind of get a feel for like what what the heck is happening within your facilities which is a touch frustrating but I feel without that basic data set like it's really hard to sit there and figure out where the trends are happening. Yeah and collecting data is probably the most important thing you could do getting starting to build that and I see one of the things I mentioned earlier build that base what's happening in your space start to understand you'll see daily fluctuations what we call a finger to graph you'll see Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and if you're closing the weekend it'll flatline you'll start to see things like that you'll start to understand different dew points in your collection space and what happens seasonally. I'm always available throw that out there I'm happy if someone I'm happy to take 10 minutes of my time and look at a graph with anybody if there's something they don't understand or can't figure out or what's going on in my space it I'd rather you know help you get an answer to your question then leave you in the dark I'm like figure it out in your own so I'm always available for somebody if they've if they've got a question that they can't answer or a head scratcher I actually like to try and figure out those things as to what's happening so. Yeah I think that's greatly appreciated we shared your email earlier on in this webinar in the zoom chat and we'll share it again too as we go out. One other thing is that someone which is talking about monitoring someone this is the last question we'll probably hit today is they work at a historic house museum with the typical residential four-stair system and they're asking if adding smart thermostats would be as beneficial as data loggers and I wanted to get your feelings on that because I have an answer in my head but I'm curious to see if it matches. If you I want to say if you can trend the data off of it and the data is reliable meaning um compare the sampling uh the the uh I can't compare how the plus and minus of that I forgot what it's called the calibration sorry compare the calibration of that thermostat to a calibration of a standard data logger like a conserved data logger or a hobo data logger um compare that that calibration yes thank you Melissa um compare that compare that to you know what you see if it's similar um I know many of the software programs can take a csv and if you can export that data you're getting from a smart uh sensor as a csv you can upload it as a data logger even in um buildings that have mechanical systems you can if you can trend the data from a sensor from a temperature relative to me a temperature relative to midi or wall sensor of any kind if you can trend it as a csv you can in most software upload it and look at it as you would a data logger yeah I mean I would say probably especially if you're working with a budget and if someone's offering to get you a smart thermostat like that then I would say go for it because you're probably going to have better control over your system at the same time if you can manage to find a little extra money to get an independent data logger of some kind it would also be interesting to compare the two and kind of see like what's going are they reading the same thing and that's one of the things I always recommend to everyone you get data loggers one of the first things to do is compared to what your sensors see in space do um is your sensor doing what you think it's doing yeah exactly there are still a ton of questions and I wish we had time to go through them all but what I'm going to do is I'm going to give them to Chris um everyone's name is connected to him so we'll be able to do some follow up there if you have a distinct question for Chris again email it to him uh we shared your email earlier and we will do it again in the second if I can grab that link as I can um one quick thing too is that I put we put together a resource sheet which is on the website so I encourage you guys to go see that we also have this survey for today's webinar so I would encourage you to fill that out as well um we take those surveys very seriously when it comes to future programming so please please please do fill them out um Chris thank you a million times over this was a huge amount of information but as you can see from the chat and the questions like people were very engaged so I think this is something that we have to revisit again in the future for sure well I'm happy to do it do you have any final thoughts you'd like to pass on out to the audience today uh none uh if anyone like I said if anyone has questions or problems I'm happy to look at and try and help you figure out what's going on excellent I'm going to see if I can grab your email address one more time so I can put it in the chat so people have it yep there it is okay everyone thank you again uh Chris thank you a million times over thank you to IMLS and FAIC and we will put this recording up as quickly as we can and we will see you all in February for our next free webinar so have a great day and thanks again stay safe everyone thanks