Mold Detection

The importance of assessing Mold risk in Buildings

Mold detection system integrated with Building Management Systems (BMS) offer significant benefits in terms of enhancing the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of building operations.

Mold is a type of fungus that develops in damp, humid environments and can grow in pretty much any surface, like walls, floors, ceilings, or even furniture. While some mold is harmless to most people, it can still produce allergens, irritants, and potentially toxic substances that can negative impact one's health (especially dangerous for people with respiratory problems and/or weakened immune system).

A health building environment is one devoid of mold, this minimizing the risk of it developing is crucial for keeping the indoor air quality good. An IoT system that has mold detection, or mold development risk capabilities can be a powerful tool for whether you are a building manager or a single home owner.

Such a system would eliminate the need of employing inefficient methods like visual inspections or costly professional employment. These hands on methods often work at a stage where significant damage (to either the building itself or the people occupying in it) has been suffered and they do not provide a comprehensive, building-wide picture of the state of things.

Thus, systems like Enterprise can be used to a great effect in combination with traditional or moder BMS systems to more efficiently deal with unwanted mold development.

Mold Detection Metrics in the Enterprise platform

MClimate Enterprise is more than just a platform to gather metric from your devices. It comes with built-in features that provide advanced functionalities and allow you to better observe, manage and automate your building in order to keep living conditions and comfort at the highest level possible.

The Mold index metric is a good example of a feature that is adding value to the platform, giving insights into the likelihood of mold developing.

In order for MClimate Enterprise to provide Mold Risk detection insights it needs data from devices that have both a temperature and humidity sensor.

For example a Vicki would be able to provide mold risk data, a Multipurpose button would not.

Additionally, a minimum period of 12 hours is required to gather the data, so the devices must have been operation and registered in Enterprise for at least that long.

There are 3 levels of mold risk, which are color coded:

• Low risk

• Medium risk

• High risk

Index Levels

Mold detection summary

In the main building view there is a separate section that shows the building's Mold detection summary. It is a collection oh 3 main components:

• Mold index

• Mold risk graph

• Devices with high risk

Mold detection summary

Mold index

This components stands at the top of the section and shows the overall Mold index together with a graph with the last 12 values (they are calculated every hour). This is a good indicator of how likely it is at the time for mold to start developing in general.

We consider that there is risk of mold developing if the overall Mold index is 40%+

Overall Mold index

Mold risk graph

This graphs is a composite of several parameters:

1. Temperature (measured)

2. Humidity (measured)

3. Dew point (calculated from 1 and 2)

4. Mold index (calculated from 1, 2 and 3)

Let us break down why these 4 are represented, so we can understand the graph better.

The Temperature and Humidity are obviously correlated, as you can see in the image below. In most cases an increase of temperature leads to increase in humidity as this increases the capabilities of the air to hold water

The Dew point is important as this is a measure of the temperature at which the vapor from the air starts to turn to dew (what actually creates the mold). Thus, it is an important metric to obtain. For your reference we use the Tatens equation (details in the link) to calculate the Dew point using the measured Temperature and Humidity data.

Based on the aforementioned 3 metrics we compute the actual risk of Mold and represent it by the Mold index.

The graph is very useful to keep track of what the conditions are and how the air composition affects the Mold index. You can change the period to gain a better overall feel of how things are over a day, week or more. The graph below is an example of a week in a relatively moist building and as you can see there is a good change of mold developing.

As a rule of thumb the closer the Dew point curve is to the Temperature and Humidity ones the higher the Mold index. Ideally you want the curves to be separated.

Mold risk graph

Devices with high risk

This area is especially important if you are facing Mold issues, as it is a list of all the devices that have 40%+ Mold index. It is likely that they are positioned in spaces where an improvement is needed in order to mitigate the risk, decrease humidity, adjust temperature, etc.

Devices with high Mold index

Last but not least, you can expand this section via the button in the lower right "Check all devices" in order to see a full list of the devices that have mold detection capabilities (measure both temperature and humidity).

Navigating to the high risk device section

High risk of mold

If you have a lot of devices perhaps over a very large building/space you would need to look at this section in order to get a full list.

At the top are the devices with the Highest Mold index, below is a full list of the devices. This gives good insights into which area/space in the Building needs improvement in the air conditions in order to mitigate the risk of mold developing (assuming you have at least 1 device per area/space).