David Simkins has spent more than three decades engineering the climate control and moisture management systems that protect construction sites, food processing plants, hospitals, and managed properties. Today, he leads Engineering and Technology at Polygon as its Director. We sat down with him to talk about why water risk builds gradually instead of striking as a single event, what keeps monitoring technology from getting deployed once it’s on site, and how tighter schedules and materials like mass timber are raising the stakes on the job site.
Career Journey
You’ve spent nearly 35 years in climate control and environmental monitoring, moving from application engineering and regional sales into leading technology and product development at Polygon. Looking back, was there a project or moment early in your career that cemented your move towards technology?
Early in my career, I was working on a project where we had all the right equipment in place, but the outcome still depended heavily on manual checks and direct user involvement. The project required precise control of temperatures while a special coating cured at fairly high temperatures.
While we could measure the space temperatures and the surface temperatures our equipment lacked the control logic simply because we didn’t see the trend forming in real time. That stuck with me. It wasn’t a failure of effort—it was a failure of insight.
That’s what pushed me toward technology. I realized that if we could consistently measure and make control decisions on what matters, we could move from reacting to problems to actively controlling outcomes. That shift—from periodic observation to continuous visibility—has shaped pretty much everything I’ve focused on since.
You’ve earned two patents for products designed to protect people in construction, food processing, and healthcare environments. Walk us through what it takes to go from a problem you’re observing in the field to a patented solution. What does that process look like?
It always starts the same way: you see a pattern in the field that people have learned to live with, but shouldn’t have to.
The process is less about a single “aha” moment and more about disciplined iteration:
- First, you define the problem in operational terms—what’s actually happening, when, and why it matters.
- Then you pressure-test it with the people closest to it—superintendents, operators, technicians—because they understand the constraints better than anyone.
- From there, you prototype something that can function in the real environment, not just in theory.
That last part is where a lot of ideas fall down. Field conditions are unforgiving—power, connectivity, durability—so the solution has to work there first. My team has heard me say this many times, but it is worth repeating: ‘it works!” There is a lot of technology being developed out there and very little of it gets pressure tested in the field.
Patents tend to come out of solutions that are both practical and repeatable. If you’ve solved a problem in a way that can be applied consistently across industries—construction, healthcare, food processing—that’s when it becomes something worth protecting.
Perspective on Water Risk
You’ve worked across construction sites, production facilities, data centers, hospitals, and managed properties. Across all of those environments, what do most teams still consistently underestimate about water risk?
Most teams still think of water risk as an “event”—a leak, a break, a failure.
In reality, it’s much more often a process. A small crack slowly leaks or moisture accumulates gradually. Conditions drift. Materials absorb, release, and rebalance over time. By the time you see visible damage, you’re usually well past the point of intervention.
What’s underestimated is how much of that risk is measurable early and controllable, if you’re actually looking for it. Here’s an example: we have a client in the UK that monitors piping failures in building risers. Leak sensors or flow monitoring alone would pick up an event, but sensors that track temperature and humidity give insights into the larger environmental performance of the riser. We can detect condensation risks, catch pin hole leaks that would have gone undetected, and direct the facilities team to the areas with the greatest risk.
Water damage tends to be slow and invisible until it isn’t. From your vantage point, what does it tell us about how buildings are managed that so many water events go undetected for as long as they do?
It tells us that most environments are still managed on a snapshot basis, not a continuous one
Teams are doing walkthroughs, spot checks, and periodic inspections—which are all necessary—but they leave large gaps in time where conditions can change without anyone knowing.
Water doesn’t operate on a schedule that aligns with human inspection cycles. So if you don’t have a way to continuously monitor critical conditions, you’re effectively blind between visits.
That’s why so many issues go undetected—they’re not dramatic at first. They evolve quietly until they reach a tipping point.
The profile of construction has changed significantly in recent years, with mass timber, fast-tracked data center builds, and tighter schedules putting more pressure on the building envelope. How has that changed the nature of the risk you’re managing on job sites?
The pace and materials have fundamentally changed the risk profile.
- Mass timber is more sensitive to environmental exposure during construction.
- Fast-tracked builds, especially data centers, compress timelines and reduce recovery windows.
- Complex building envelopes introduce more potential points of failure earlier in the lifecycle.
All the while, the building assets are growing in value, so there is more to protect.
What that means is there’s less tolerance for drift. You don’t have the luxury of discovering an issue late and correcting it without impact.
Risk today is more about precision and timing—knowing what’s happening in the moment and acting before it becomes a problem.
Technology in the Field
There’s often a gap between a project team purchasing monitoring technology and actually deploying it. What gets in the way, and what does it take to move from a box sitting in a trailer to a system that’s genuinely embedded in how a site operates?
The gap is rarely about intent—it’s about integration into the way work actually happens.
A system can be purchased with the right objectives, but if deployment isn’t simple, clearly owned, and directly tied to decisions, it becomes something that sits on the sidelines.
To move from a box in a trailer to something embedded, it needs to:
- Deliver immediate, visible value to the people on site
- Require minimal friction to operate
- Connect directly to actions, not just a mountain of data and annoying alerts
If it doesn’t influence decisions day-to-day, it won’t stick.
What makes mass timber particularly demanding from an environmental monitoring standpoint, and what are you actually measuring and managing to protect it through the construction process?
Mass timber is highly responsive to its environment, particularly moisture content and temperature.
What makes it demanding is:
- Exposure during construction,
- Variability in site conditions,
- And the consequences of getting it wrong—structural performance, mold, aesthetics, and long-term durability.
You’re not just measuring ambient conditions—you’re tracking how those conditions are affecting the material itself: moisture migration, drying curves, and equilibrium conditions.
Protecting mass timber isn’t about hitting a fixed number—it’s about managing a controlled drying and exposure trajectory from installation through close-in.
What’s encouraging is how much progress the industry has made. Through better monitoring, tighter process control, and more disciplined management, we’re demonstrating that materials like CLT can perform extremely well even under demanding construction conditions when risk is actively managed rather than passively observed.
Construction environments are unpredictable in ways that put real demands on sensor technology: signal coverage, power access, site conditions that change week to week. What does it actually take to make a monitoring solution reliable across those conditions?
Reliability in construction environments has many inputs. What are the critical areas of the project? What are the materials that need to be stored and then installed with specific limits for environmental conditions like temperature, humidity, and moisture content? Do we have Owner Furnished Contractor Installed (OFCI) materials coming to site?
Considering the answers to these questions and viewing the site as a holistic system helps define the approach to a system.
A viable system has to be self-sufficient where possible, redundant where necessary, and adaptive as the site evolves.
There isn’t one sensor, one probe or one gateway that does all things or be all things when it comes to monitoring and reporting conditions of a site. A system approach considers site specific restrictions and the environment and aligns that with available technology.
Sustainability
LEED 5 is requiring recertification of buildings on a three-year cycle, which changes the monitoring calculus for building owners significantly. How do you see that kind of regulatory shift affecting how technology gets specified and budgeted from the design phase?
A three-year recertification cycle shifts sustainability from a one-time design goal to an ongoing operational requirement. That changes the way technology is specified. It needs to support continuous verification, not just commissioning. It has to produce defensible, consistent data over time. And monitoring becomes part of the building’s long-term operating strategy.
From a budgeting standpoint, it moves investment and decisions earlier into the design phase, because retrofitting a building later is always more complex and less effective.
Smart control systems have shown dramatic reductions in energy consumption on some projects. For an owner or contractor thinking about this for the first time, what’s actually happening operationally to produce those results?
The biggest difference is that systems stop operating on fixed assumptions – which humans inevitable get wrong – and start responding to real conditions.
Instead of running continuously or on static schedules, they adjust based on actual environmental needs and performance targets.
Operationally, that means less over-conditioning, fewer unnecessary runtime hours, and more precise control of outcomes. Project teams spend less time managing equipment and devices.
The result isn’t just lower energy use—it’s more efficient alignment between what the system is doing and what the environment actually requires without burdening the field.
