Pete Armstrong on healthy homes, smart ventilation, and why air quality can't be an afterthought
Mixergy CEO and Co-Founder Pete Armstrong joined the Healthy Homes Hub podcast to discuss one of the most underexplored problems in the built environment: the link between indoor air quality, energy performance, and resident health.
The episode, ‘Are Healthy Homes Being Suffocated by Dumb Air?’, tackles the gap between homes that look good on paper and homes that are genuinely healthy to live in. It’s a distinction Pete has been thinking about for some time, and one that sits at the heart of Mixergy’s approach to whole-home energy management.
Beyond the EPC
An EPC rating tells you about a building’s energy efficiency, but it says very little about the air inside it. As homes become better insulated, the tension between thermal performance and ventilation quality becomes harder to ignore. Tighter buildings retain heat more effectively, but without adequate airflow they can accumulate moisture, CO2, and pollutants at levels that affect occupant wellbeing.
Pete’s argument is straightforward: you can’t separate energy performance from healthy homes and expect good outcomes. The two have to be designed together, and that means thinking beyond the metrics that currently drive specification decisions.
What Mixergy is learning from St Basils
The practical dimension of that argument is visible in Mixergy’s ongoing Smart Home Energy Management (SHEM) beta programme, which includes a pilot with St Basils at a scheme of 32 self-contained apartments in the West Midlands. St Basils provides supported housing for young people, a group with specific wellbeing needs and typically little control over the energy systems around them.
The SHEM pilot combines smart hot water control with indoor air quality monitoring and adaptive ventilation, giving both residents and housing staff visibility over conditions that would otherwise go unmeasured. Early results point to around £200 per year in resident energy bill savings, average electricity tariff savings of around 20% through optimised scheduling, and a reduction of more than 50% in compliance administration time for the housing team.
Those figures matter, but what the St Basils work has also demonstrated is that monitoring air quality and responding to it in real time is achievable at the kind of scale social housing providers actually operate at. That’s the point Pete makes on the podcast: the technology to do this properly exists, and what’s needed now is the confidence to specify it.
Healthy homes as a system, not a feature
The Healthy Homes Hub exists to move conversations like this out of research papers and into practice, and Mixergy’s involvement reflects where the company’s thinking has been heading. Hot water, ventilation, air quality, and tariff optimisation aren’t separate problems to be solved by separate products. Addressing them together is how you actually improve outcomes for residents, and the SHEM programme is building the evidence base to show that. As the beta progresses, Mixergy will be sharing more about what it’s learning, including what it means for specification, for compliance, and for the homes themselves.
Listen to the full episode: Are Healthy Homes Being Suffocated by Dumb Air?
Find out more about SHEM and the St Basils pilot.
