Transcript 0:00 [on-hold music] And what I see in the next five to 10 years is environmental data will converge with personal health data to show that, wow, after I installed my air filtration system, my blood pressure levels got better by 15%. 0:20 Right now everything is separate, like we take to 3,000 steps a day, which is recommended. You look at that every day, okay, this is great. I'm living a healthy lifestyle. 0:30 But then how does water quality, air quality, lighting affect our sleep? [upbeat music] Welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show, the podcasting voice of IoT and digital transformation. 0:44 Hello, listeners, and welcome back to The Peggy Smedley Show. I'm your host, Peggy Smedley. My next guest has always had a passion for healthy living. 0:52 He has a deep background in regenerative organic agriculture, indoor air quality, water quality, and other important aspects of wellness technology for the home. 1:02 He co-founded his company, which has become the leading supplier of best-in-class health and wellness solutions for residential applications available through professional installers. 1:14 These professional installers offer monitoring and filtration technologies for indoor air and water, including the hardware, software, and support services required to make a smart home healthier home. 1:27 Please welcome Michael Hamm, president and co-founder of Repure. Uh, thanks so much, Peggy. It's great to be with you, Peggy. So Michael, we have a lot to talk about today, and it's really important. 1:39 I think that most of us don't realize just the importance of really having a healthier home. And, and I really want you to kind of help everyone who's listening today, why is a healthier home so important? 1:53 So this is something that escapes a lot of people's minds because air and water, uh, two of the most important aspects of a healthy home are invisible. So Peggy, you know the saying, out of sight, out of mind, right? 2:06 [laughs] Yeah. So if you, if you don't really know what's going on, you have other things to think about. 2:12 So what we're trying to do is we're trying to make that invis- those invisible attributes visible because when they become visible, then people understand, wow, there's something going on here, and it's affecting my family. 2:24 And just to give you one example or several, more than 40% of Americans live in places with unhealthy levels of air pollution. 2:35 Uh, ozone levels, particulate levels are very high outside, and what happens is those things come into the home. 2:42 So if you think about 40%, 4 in 10 people live in unhealthy homes, that's the exact reason why healthy home environments are important. 2:52 You know, it doesn't surprise me when you say that because I think sometimes we just don't recognize... 2:56 I mean, maybe COVID has opened our eyes to understand the unhealthiness and, and we spend most of our time indoors, e- especially now in the past couple of years, where evidence kind of shows the air is up to five times more polluted than the air outside. 3:13 And, and what can be done about this? I mean- Yeah... what are you suggesting right now? 3:18 So Peggy, this is something also most people are shocked at hearing, but on average, the, the indoor air in a home is worse than outdoors. 3:27 And when you cook, clean, and s- other, uh, lifestyle behaviors in the home happen, it can even be 100 times worse than outdoor air. So what can be done about this? 3:38 Number one thing is you can only manage what you measure. It's the reason why we go to the doctor's, like, every year or a couple times a year. We get a checkup. They do a blood test. Same thing with a car. 3:51 You have your engine light on. You have your gas light on when you need it. Unless you're able to monitor if your home is really healthy or not, it's very difficult to manage it. 4:02 So the best way, as we're moving into s- uh, you know, the modern living time period with, uh, connected devices, is to utilize the latest technology to show exactly how your environment i- is affecting your health. 4:18 That's, that's the number one way to do it, and we can go into more detail, uh, as we go along. I love that you talk about managing what y- you know, managing what you measure because I'm always big believer on data. 4:29 Data is the key to everything. Yeah. And, and you know, we used to say location, location, location. Now I always say- [laughs]... data, data, data. 4:35 So I love that you say that because you're, you're interested in all of that. You know, your company- Yeah... 4:41 has a really big culture on, you know, uh, the data is, is, uh, I think is at the center of everything you're saying. But talk about the technology in itself, you know, uh, you know, being health-conscious. 4:53 I think that's so critical for what you do. Help me understand how you do that when applying- Sure... 4:59 technology to that and, and what that exactly looks like so the average listener right now says, "How do I apply that together?" Yeah. Sure. 5:10 So you mentioned earlier how COVID has accelerated people's, uh, consciousness about how important air quality and healthy home environments are. 5:18 You're absolutely correct because now we know that something called COVID-19 is airborne, and to protect against that, we need to wear a mask, we need to ventilate, we need to filter the air. 5:29 Those have all been great things for people to understand, uh, how to improve air quality. But, uh, to put it very specifically on indoor air quality, there are three pillars. There are... 5:41 There is filtration, which is reducing dangerous particulate levels, uh, VOCs, gases. 5:49 There's ventilation, bringing outdoor air into the home, filtering it to ensure that oxygen levels are always optimal for human health. And then the third pillar of indoor air quality is humidity control. 6:03 You wanna have between, if possible, between 40 and 60 relative humidity. That is known to be optimal for human health. 6:13 So every metric that I'm referring to as it tends, uh, as it, um, uh-It relates to the three pillars of indoor air quality. 6:22 It's the number one goal, or the North Star, is making your environment optimized for human health. That's what it is. So it's got to address all three of those pillars for a holistic solution. 6:37 Is your integrated system that you talk about for, you know, in software, hardware- Yeah... is, is tho- is that pillars, are those pillars helping kinda remove those harmful contaminants, you know- Yeah... 6:51 in our water, in our air? Is that what we're talking about? Because it's not one or the other, it has to be everything- Right... that is what you're saying, right? It's just like a system. 7:00 Um, even with green building, we're constantly taught the best way to build to be sustainable, energy saving, everything works as a system. It's the same thing with the healthy home. 7:12 So we need sensors in place to see where the vent- where the, uh, numbers are. Where's your humidity? Where are your particulate levels? Where are your carbon dioxide levels? 7:23 Then you have your hardware solutions so that when it goes above a certain... 7:28 Let's say your humidity goes a- above 60, which is out of the optimal zone for health, then a trigger will be sent to the control to activate the whole house dehumidifier. 7:39 So if it goes to 70, automatically it starts bringing it back to under 60 and optimal zones. It's just, it's like how the body works as a whole system. 7:48 Uh, you have all your nerves and sensors, and then when they send out an alert, your body compensates and brings everything back to normal as best as possible. 7:58 That's c- that's what this new healthy home connected system, uh, uh, strives to mimic as well. So you're talking about a healthy home. 8:07 You're talking about air quality and water quality and, and specific types of metrics. Do people really wanna measure these, or do we talk about it and yet they're like, "Ah, it's a lot of work. 8:19 I don't wanna have to do it." Yeah. "I want something that just is there and makes me healthy." [laughs] The, the on- the only ones who wanna know all the details are the diehards, and- [laughs]... 8:29 I guess you could say the nerds, right? [laughs] Like me. Like me. So the majority of people, they don't know what these numbers mean. They don't know what these things are. 8:40 So it's very important for any type of ecosystem to optimize indoor air quality, just to simply run on a green, yellow, red metric so people can say, "Oh, everything's green, everything's good. 8:52 That's all I need to know" But for those people who really wanna dive in, they should also have access to what their weekly averages are for particulate carbon dioxide so they can get a sense of what, what's going on in their environment. 9:06 But in the end, yeah, uh, the answer to your question is the majority of people, they don't wanna get into the weeds. They just want a system to say, "Oh, uh, everything's working behind the scenes. Everything's good." 9:18 If something happens that, uh, constitutes a pollution event when you're cooking, then they want the system to just activate and work in the background, and that's kinda what, where the industry is moving towards, which is great. 9:31 But we're getting to a society that wants to know that they're safe. They want better quality. Yeah. They just don't wanna have to do... They, they wanna know that it's working, as you just said, behind the scenes. Yes. 9:42 But they wanna know the air quality is better, the water quality is better. Oh. But they want that information, is what you're saying. 9:49 For sure, they want the data and the insights into what is happening, and, um, uh, that's the most important thing, to, to make sure that they're... That's what provides peace of mind, right? 10:01 So to know that the sensors are reading good levels of all of these different metrics is really what the consumer wants to know at the end. 10:11 In order to achieve your goals that you're talking about here, to get to this m- the, this, the best metrics, you, you have to have good- Yeah... collaborative partners. 10:20 Talk to me about the partners you're w- working with to make this happen. 10:25 So, um, with all of these different aspects of indoor air quality and water quality, it's really important, especially when you're putting sensors in place, that the hardware partners are the best performing in the market, right? 10:41 Best in class. Unless you have best in class partners, you're not gonna achieve the goals that you want, and you don't, you can't keep everything in green for 90% of the time plus. 10:53 So when we talk about humidity, uh, our partner, very well-known, Santa Fe dehumidif-ification hardware manufacturers, they're one of the best on the market. 11:04 When we talk about filtration, we have, uh, Intellipure, Healthway. We have, um, for, for, uh, ventilation and radon for monitoring, we have Airthings. 11:16 We typically choose the best in class category leading for each of these elements. Uh, for on the water side, we have Elite Water Systems. Uh, very, very high performing water filtration products. 11:31 So in the end, in a holistic ecosystem that's all working together, they open up our, their APIs to us, allowing us to integrate each of these components onto our ecosystem. So that makes it very easy for the end user. 11:45 They don't have to open up 10 different apps, right? Everything is just on one ecosystem working together as a system. 11:52 And that's important because that collaborative ability to share that information you just described, that the average homeowner says, "I wanna be able to see it. I'm living safe. 12:01 My family's safe and healthy," that's important. 12:04 And we just talked about it, you and I talked about in the living lab that we're doing, we wanna be able to show consumers why they can move from a world that we live today to a better world tomorrow. 12:14 Talk about how we're changing and your vision for the future for a healthy home.So we're still in the very early stages of connected healthy home- Mm... connected sustainability in the home. 12:29 We have a lot of great pieces of the puzzle. You have your energy monitors, you have your whole house water, uh, trackers, intelligent water, uh, hardware. You have... We have 80% of what we need. 12:43 It's existing, uh, [laughs] right now. The next 20% is really about, uh, integrating it all together to work as a system that we spoke about earlier. 12:54 Um, and only when we do that can we, for example, like, uh, my wife, we j- we just got an Apple Watch to track her heart and all these different metrics, ECG, blood levels. 13:09 Um, and, and what I see in the next five to 10 years is environmental data will converge with personal health data to show that, wow, after I installed my air filtration system, my blood pressure levels got better by 15%. 13:29 Right now, everything is separate. Like, we take th- 3,000 steps a day, which is recommended. You look at that every day, "Okay, this is great. I'm living a healthy lifestyle." 13:39 But then how does water quality, air quality, lighting affect our sleep? We have our se- separate sleep trackers. 13:45 Everything is kind of separate, but my vision or our vision for the future healthy home, not only the health of the occupant, but environmental health, it's all gonna start to converge together where we're gonna have much greater insights than we do today. 14:02 Do you see more and more companies recognizing the need to start doing this faster, sooner than later? 14:09 That we're getting to that point that more and more companies recognize, and individuals recognize, the importance of having a healthy home, having a healthy business, having a healthy environment? 14:21 Uh, I see it in the market quite a bit, actually. So just a, a clear example of that was at CES a few weeks ago. 14:29 Uh, you could clearly see on the floor there are way more health and wellness companies that are exhibiting. Uh, they've, in terms of the speaker panels, they actually added health and wellness, uh, last year. 14:42 They never... It was very small in previous years. But it's of interest because consumers are demanding it, and so that kind of gets people interested in, okay, what do we do to meet this consumer demand? 14:55 We're seeing it with builders. We're seeing it with, uh, custom integrators. 15:01 They sh- they're seeing that consumers want it, but we're at a stage where it's, where it, the whole solution is not there yet, and that's gonna take a little, little time. 15:09 But that's why the Living Lab, the things that you are doing are so crucial, because it's showing the market what is coming up and why these, uh, things are important for them specifically. 15:21 In your mind then, and that's why we're excited that we're working together in the Living Lab, what do you think comes next? 15:27 How do we get more excitement and get individuals, everyone excited about where they have to see the future? Do we have to push society to wanna encourage this, or will it just gradually get there? 15:38 Well, it really, people like you, people in the building industry, technologists, we need to create a lot of examples, uh, like the Living Lab throughout the country, 15:49 uh, where people can come and access and say, "Wow, this is really interesting. I never realized that a healthy home technology can provide this sort of peace of mind. I want this component in my home." 16:03 So that's the beautiful thing about projects like what you're doing with the Living Lab. 16:08 It actually shows people how it can be relevant in their day-to-day life, and that's kind of what, um, builders need to kinda continue to improve on. 16:19 Um, the top builders in America are actually offering air quality, water quality solutions, but the messaging is not quite there where it's, uh, it- it's extremely appealing for consumers. 16:32 Well, Michael Hamm, co-founder and president of Repure, uh, we're excited to work with you. Thank you so much for your time today. Where can our listeners go? 16:40 What's your URL to get more information so we can all continue this rally ca- cry to have a healthy home? 16:48 Uh, yeah, to, uh, kind of see what we're doing in the market, uh, you can go to www.repure.io, R-E-P-U-R-E dot I-O. Michael, thank you so much. 17:00 I look forward to us talking more and, uh, continuing and everyone to see what you're doing in our Living Lab. Thank you so much. Thanks so, so much for having me, Peggy. Appreciate it. All right, listeners. 17:10 That's all the time we have for today, but share your thoughts with me on Twitter, @connectedworld. We'd love to know what you think. Remember, we broadcast live every Tuesday at 12:00 PM Central. 17:19 Check out our website at connectedworld.com. Our show website is thepeggyסmedley show.com. This is The Peggy Smedley Show, your voice for our connected world. 17:27 And remember, with great technology comes great responsibility. Have an awesome week. [outro music]
