Abstract: . . .  new filter in place or we put an old one back, in a random sequence, and the subjects, of course, had no idea what we were doing. On Thursday of each week they answered questions on their sick building syndrome symptom and on their self-estimated productivity, and there was a significant relationship. Old filters are not as good as new ones. Perhaps we should be changing filters more often instead of leaving them in place until it’s too expensive to force air through the dust mat. Sick leave reduces productivity, of course. In an interesting study in Holland, occupants who reported that they had some means of individual control were absent 34% less often due to sick building syndrome. So, if you give people a chance to do something about the lighting, noise, air quality, or temperature, they not only feel better, they are less often absent. That must be an increase in productivity. Walter Corona [?] from the Rensaleer Institute carried out a study of a move of an insurance company from an old to a new building. The new building caused a 4.3% increase in the rate at which they processed insurance claims. He simply registered the time it took for a claim to be dealt with once they had settled into the new building, and providing some form of individual control of the temperature gave a further in the performance of this work. This is one of the few studies that have been done in the field with existing measure of productivity. We need to do more of those. Page 24 24 E- Vision 2000 This is bad news, isn’t it, from the point of you of a conference that is intended to lead to energy conservation? Conventional solutions to the IEU problems I have described would increase energy use in buildings. Better thermal control, better air quality by means of simply increasing the ventilation rate, would increase energy use in buildings. So we don’t want to be pulling in two different directions. We must save energy; we must use more energy, because it pays to use more energy. This is what will happen, unless we take a pro-active approach. My view is that DoE should focus on developing new energy conserving solutions and, it’s not enough to develop them, you have to expedite the process that ensures their widespread adoption. I’ve seen it happen all too often that promising solutions are developed by academics—they just gather dust on the library shelf and they aren’t taken up because the risk of introducing them to the market would be too great. The idea to widespread adoption process has three essential parts and I think the DoE should work to expedite all three of them. We need scientific experiments of the kind I’ve been showing you to show causality, to validate the mechanisms, and to quantify the problems. But we also need engineering optimization to develop solutions and bring them to market. Finally, we need field trials to demonstrate the applicability of these solutions and their acceptability. Some of them will involve changes in behavior or even in comfort, . . .
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