Why Your Building's Best Friend Should Be Wireless Technology

Using wireless technology to monitor conditions in your building is the gold standard of catching leaks and other dangers. In this episode Jerry Kestenbaum, founder of Aware Buildings, explains how it can be successfully done at a price point that makes sense. The side benefit to these systems is its significant impact on your building’s insurance loss record – catch a leak before it does damage and you can avoid filing insurance claims for the repairs. Habitat’s Carol Ott conducts the interview.

Thanks for listening. Subscribe to this podcast for more stories on how New York co-ops and condos have solved a myriad of problems. Brought to you by Habitat Magazine, the "bible" that hundreds of board directors turn to every day!

Transcript

Carol Ott: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York's co-op and condo board directors. I'm Carol Ott of Habitat Magazine and with me today is Jerry Kestenbaum, founder of Aware Buildings. 

There are many things in a building that need monitoring. Without technology to help, some of these things are just too expensive or too labor intensive.

Jerry, you're in the monitoring industry, so can you tell us what is the technology today that has made monitoring all sorts of things more affordable? 

Jerry Kestenbaum: We are actually at the cusp of a new ability for people who traditionally had to go to the large wired sensor companies, names like Johnson Controls, Honeywell, Siemens.

If you went to your building engineer and you said, we are having leaks from the roof, we'd like to be able to monitor the humidity in the the gap between them or we're having this problem, we are having that problem. There wouldn't be any route that they could take that wouldn't end up with one of these big controls companies.

And frankly, for most residential co-ops and condos, they're not affordable. They're not affordable. And that's because you've got expensive proprietary sensors. You've got wiring, running through buildings, sometimes, pre-war, very old buildings, proprietary controls and stuff. And I know that the synagogue which I'm a member of, had a fire and then they had a flood after the fire and there was only one insurance company that would insure them.

They insisted that they put in 70 leak sensors and they paid $470,000 and it took three months to get it done. So now there's new technology though, which is starting to become available and we did a similar job on Fifth Avenue, 80 sensors, and it cost $7,000. And it took three hours. 

Carol Ott: What is this new technology?

Jerry Kestenbaum: The new technology, the overall category is wireless technology. However, we all know that the promise of wireless has been around for a long time, and even today, if I have 10 smart light bulbs connected on wireless, every month, I've gotta reset to two of them. So wireless has not been reliable; certainly nothing that you would run a building on. But there is new technology in a lower radio spectrum; I don't wanna get too geeky, but basically in the 900 megahertz spectrum, away from wifi, Bluetooth, and all those things, which can actually penetrate walls and produce long range reliable signals.

And the technology that we are using in that bandwidth is called LoRaWAN. Six years ago when we started, if you had Googled LoRaWAN, you would find a company in Amsterdam, a city in France that are doing a little bit of experimenting with this technology. Now you will find hundreds of products and hundreds of companies that are building for this particular wireless technology. It's not good for streaming videos. It's not good for emails. It's good for sending short 11 byte packages, messages, the kind of notes you pass from friend to friend in a classroom. It's good for that, really short and to the point. 

Carol Ott: Give me some examples of how this could be used in buildings and what are the problems that it can solve? 

Jerry Kestenbaum: So the biggest problem and the reason we went with this technology was because of leak detection. When you get to the point where you want to put, let's say, leak sensors inside fan coil or PTAC units, two or three units in every apartment in a 150 unit building that could be 450 different locations that are behind walls and living rooms and bathrooms and every place else.

You can't do that with any other wireless technology. You would need hundreds, dozens, or hundreds of little gateways to support them. LoRaWAN, you can cover a whole building sometimes with as few as five to 10 of these little hubs and they can hear hundreds of sensors all throughout a building. So leak detection has been our biggest demand.

Now in New York, you have buildings that really want protection from condensation riser, clogs from PTAC units. March, April, May, we have a rush of buildings that say, how quickly can you put sensors under each of our units? But for the rest of the year, there are many leaks that cause significant damages, and the insurance companies are making it very expensive to insure leak damages. The last couple of years, they've decided this is an unquantifiable risk and they have raised the deductibles and stuff. So of course when you think about leaks, you think about overflows in user spaces such as bathtubs, toilets and stuff, sinks, even washing machines, but there are also lots of other things that cause damage. One of the areas that people don't realize is a major source of water damage in the building is the ice making circuit in refrigerators. Refrigerators these days all have a little pipe that feeds the ice maker and refrigerator gets serviced. It gets moved in, moved out, vacuum, fixed, and it vibrates.

And those pipes crack. Thin little pipe, and when it cracks, it's usually right along the wall and it runs down multiple floors. So there's lots of interesting use cases for leak detection that's within the apartment. There's also building leak detection. You can have a roof leaking, you have mechanical rooms, have pipes and hoses, and there's always one hose, it's cracking, that's bursting and that's spreading water all over the place. We have very unusual requests. We have requests for water level detection: a building that has a bunch of terraces, and when it rains very hard, the water collects it so fast on the terrace and the pipe basically fills up and the water overflows to the apartments below it.

We had one interesting building that asked us for a sensor to put, this in California where they're having heavy drains to put in the vault outside their building where the rainwater collects so they can see if the city water level is rising to the point where they're gonna start getting their basement flooded.

So this is interesting. This is a building that's actually monitoring the level of the water in the rain sewer right outside their building. 

Carol Ott: Lemme just ask you, I, I understand sort of the concept of detecting a leak. But there, there's gotta be a loop. So the leak is detected. Then how does that, who knows that? 

Jerry Kestenbaum: The leak is detected with a LoRaWAN sensor, these sensors that go long distance and that last for 10 years. They send a message up, which is heard by one of these, usually five to 10 boxes in a building that listens to this sensors. Comes back to the internet, into our servers, and then we implement a whole bunch of rules. In most cases, it's an alert rule.

It says notify these people by email, by text, by automated call. We have an annunciator that can play an announcement. The front desk attention, the leak has occurred. We have the ability to shut off valves. Now in New York City where we don't have a one pipe system; every apartment is serviced by 15 pipes, so valve shutoff isn't necessarily that effective 'cause you don't know which pipe to shut off. But in many other areas that works. And it escalates and we have a button we can click to confirm that you've responded to the leak. Basically we've built an entire system that lets buildings know someone has responded to a situation. And it's very interesting because sometimes somebody will get a few leak alerts and they'll say, the equipment's very sensitive. We don't have any water there. And then the sensors also have a humidity sensor. So you can look at the humidity sensor, excuse me, your humidity has risen from 40% to 70%.

You have a leak there. Go find it. We had one building that called us twice about a defective sensor on the 14th floor, and we said, it's not defective. And then in the middle of the night, they got an alert from the eighth, the seventh, and the sixth floor on the same line, and they realized it was not, defective.

But the beauty of this solution is, there have been like leak systems for like private homes where you don't have to cover any distances. The beauty of the system is it the technology allows you to deploy sensors across a building without any wires, without any proprietary boards, without any of the infrastructure costs that has made smart sensing be too expensive for normal residential co-ops and condos. So it, it opens up the control world that usually only commercial or even industrial plants used to have at their fingertips. 

Carol Ott: So I need you ' cause I am a newbie to leaks. I need you to describe for me so I can actually see what you are putting in my building? I have a 14 story building. I have a stairwell. 

Let's start with, are you coming into my apartment to put something? 

Jerry Kestenbaum: We usually rely upon the building to do it. Before that, somebody is putting these little hubs -- five inch by five inch square boxes in your hallway or in your compactor room, mid hallway, or in your electrical closet, someplace in the middle of a floor. And they're putting one in every, let's say three floors, and they're plugging it into an outlet. And if they don't have internet there, these boxes have cellular, special cellular, and we also have two other technologies for connecting these boxes up to the internet. When these boxes are in place, they create a huge catchers mitt. Imagine that you're having batting practice in Yankee Stadium or Shea Stadium. These boxes create a huge catchers mitt around your whole building.

They all listen together for every one of these LoRaWAN sensors. It's a big radar system, okay? And as soon as any sensor, any place in your building chirps out data, they pick it up. The next piece is you take these small little sensors about the size of a small bar of soap. And you turn it on and either the building names it, this is apartment 7C, going onto the refrigerator, or we name it and it's pre-labeled and it says 7C refrigerator.

You turn it on. Right away it talks to the network and the communication, and it starts sending data. Here's my battery, here's my temperature, here's my humidity. I'm dry. Here's my signal strength. A whole nice conversation unseen and unheard by us, but the devices and the gateways talk to each other and the instant some condition comes up that you want to be alerted to, the gateway says, Hey, I need to tell somebody what I just was told, what I just heard. The sensor is wet or the temperature is below 45 degrees. Somebody has opened up their window, in the middle of the winter and the pipe is about to freeze or, got it. You can have a temperature sensor in a, in electrical box and say, this electrical box just hit 120 degrees. Something's wrong there. There's maybe there's a short, maybe something is overheated. You can do many things. One of the buildings, interestingly, in New York, because of the laws of converting from heating to cooling and cooling to heating, requested from us eight sensors.

They put four of them in the middle of the room, in the four supposedly coldest apartments. The people that complain the most that it's cold and they put four more in the warmest apartments. The apartments, when people complain the most that it's warm and they monitor temperature 24 hours during that critical cut-over season in September, October, November, and they were able to decide exactly when the law says they have to convert over the heat. And they said to their residents, I'm sorry, but this is the data and this is when we're doing it. So you can stop your calling and your whining.

Carol Ott: I have one more question and that is about insurance. So I know the insurance, everybody's insurance rates have been going up and leaks are the most common types of insurance claims. Are there any insurance companies who will say to a client, if you put in some kind of leak technology, we will reduce the rates?

Jerry Kestenbaum: So there are. They ask us not to represent that because we're not an agent. We can say, call this company and talk to them, but we can't say this company will give you a discount. But if you think about it, the ship has sailed on that logic already because if a company gives me a 3% discount, but then raises my rates 50%.

What does the 3% do me? The insurance companies have really raised deductibles and raised premiums and have been dropping clients. The best way to maintain low insurance rates is to have a competitive building that you can shop where more than one insurance company wants you as a client. That's where you make your money, not by going to your favorite vendor and begging them for a couple of percent off. And managing your loss record is critical. A leak detection system, yes, it's very nice. But from an actuarial point of view, insurance companies look at your loss record. A year or two after you put a leak detection system in, you will have a greatly improved loss record, which your insurance company will give you lower rates, but even if they don't, you can shop it to other insurance companies. It's like they say, when you grow up and you come up from the bottom in a company, you're never gonna get credit for what you're really capable of.

You have to switch to another company. Sometimes it's the same thing. You want low rates, you have to be prepared. And making sure that your building is the kind of building that people want to have as a client is based on keeping your loss record down. 

On the East coast, we're a little bit new to this, but the West coast has buildings that have been doing this for six years already. And they talk about how their insurance problem has basically been solved. 

Carol Ott: There you go. Alright, Jerry, thank you very much for sharing all of this with us.

It's really been informative. Thanks a lot. 

Jerry Kestenbaum: My pleasure.