Entopia: A breath of fresh air – Incube Space and Cambridge Institute of Sustainability Leadership team up on healthy building
20 March 2024 - Rishi Chowdhury, Co-Founder of Incube Space, discusses the opportunities presented in teaming up with CISL’s Entopia Building to accelerate innovation in the built environment.
The Entopia Building in the heart of Cambridge is home to Canopy: a community for entrepreneurs, startups, innovators, and small businesses pioneering sustainability.
Incube Space and the University of Cambridge's Cambridge Institute of Sustainable Leadership (CISL) team came together in early 2023 to ensure Entopia was also one of the healthiest spaces in the country.
The mission? Achieve a prestigious WELL Gold certification, ensuring optimal indoor air quality (IAQ) for everyone who sets foot inside.
To make this vision a reality, Incube Space deployed a cutting-edge sensor network that measures CO2, VOCs, Particulate Matter 2.5, temperature, and humidity. The sensors were battery-powered, meaning they could be set up and installed in minutes. The whole building was monitoring the indoor air quality within hours.
In addition to the comprehensive indoor air quality sensors, Incube Space incorporated a range of cost-effective CO2 sensors to give an in-depth view of indoor air quality across the whole building in the most cost-effective fashion. These sensors have a smaller profile, but that also means they lack space for batteries and need to be plugged in.
CubeOS is a building intelligence platform by Incube Space and this was used to aggregate real-time data from all the sensors into one simple dashboard.
The result? An intricate, interactive map of indoor air quality, superimposed onto floor plans of the Entopia Building. Not only does this mean a simple and easy to read view of the building's air quality for the facilities team but also the opportunity to make it visible to occupiers and guests, giving transparency and helping educate on the impact of the air they breathe.
Thankfully the Entopia Building has excellent indoor air quality. As temperature or CO2 levels rise during busy periods such as events or when meeting rooms are full, CubeOS will be able to provide prompts and eventually automate changes to the HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) to counter any negative IAQ changes before they happen.
The real power of this technology lies in its ability to discern trends and anomalies in air quality across the building. CubeOS will be able to provide prompts and eventually automate changes to the HVAC to counter any negative IAQ changes before they happen, which also lowers power consumption required by the HVAC.
It's a pivotal tool for the CISL team, enabling them to spot areas with elevated CO2 or temperature levels promptly. The Entopia Building was meticulously designed with low energy usage and optimal airflow in mind, and the data from these sensors has confirmed that, since March 2023, all areas fall consistently within recommended thresholds.
The outcome of this transformative project is an indoor environment at the Entopia Building that consistently maintains excellent air quality for all its occupants. The dedication to this initiative will also go towards supporting a WELL Gold certification, an achievement eagerly anticipated by the Estates team in the months ahead.
This project exemplifies the correlation between technology and sustainability, bringing together innovation and environmental consciousness for the benefit of all. The Entopia Building stands as a beacon of how technology and responsible design can create healthier, more sustainable spaces.
The next step is to integrate with the HVAC and enable automation that can support Facilities in making tweaks pro-actively based on real-time space utilisation. The opportunity to scale this up across buildings in Cambridge starts with the availability of data. Low-cost, low-maintenance and fast install solutions help make this more achievable. Not only can the data support in ensuring optimal indoor air quality and reduced energy consumption, but the same data can also help influence cleaning and maintenance schedules, space design or more.
Incube Space forms part of the Entopia Living Lab, which is designed to be a sandbox for new processes or technologies, enabling their pilot and testing within a real-world environment, such that the data collected is an accurate reflection of its use, and can be deployed for further development work. It is an ecosystem in itself – with significant value to the different stakeholders involved – and will bring measurable growth to the innovation ecosystem already based in Cambridge.