Page 20 - Climate Control News May 2022

Indoor Air Quality
How to turn buildings into safe havens
It outlines the questions building managers should ask their ventilation and air quality spe- cialists so they can properly address their IAQ problems, and provides recommendations for conducting a building review, planning for im- provements, and selecting the right technology.
The contents of the guide were steered by a technical committee led by Nathan Wood, chair of BESA’s Health and Wellbeing in Buildings group, and the Association’s head of technical Graeme Fox.
The guide contains a building review spread- sheet to help building managers identify areas that require improvement. This is designed on a traffic light system, with actions categorised as red, amber, and green, and works in tandem with an IAQ monitoring spreadsheet.
Wood said that at the top end of the market, ventilation management is well understood, and expertise is on hand to implement best practice.
“BUILDINGS NEED TO BE MORE INFECTION RESILIENT BEFORE THE NEXT HEALTH EMERGENCY.”
“Our priority now is to find ways of helping the thousands of buildings that have no ventilation strategy and lack the information and expertise to prepare for the next health emergency,” he said.
“That is why BESA is working hard to raise awareness and provide free guidance that can improve competence and compliance across the ventilation industry.”
All three BESA guides addressing indoor air quality (IAQ) can be downloaded for free from: www.theBESA.com/iaq
THE BUILDING ENGINEERING Services As- sociation (BESA) has completed its trilogy of free guides designed to help building managers cre- ate safe havens.
The goal is to protect occupants from health risks linked to airborne contaminants and viruses. The third guide called Buildings as Safe Ha- vens – a practical guide explains how to measure Indoor Air Quality and what questions to ask
ventilation experts.
The foreword is written by Professor Cath
Noakes OBE, who is Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings at the University of Leeds and a member of the government’s Scien- tific Advisory Group for Emergen-
cies (SAGE).
She states that poor ventilation is
the most overlooked building safety issue and can be directly linked to high levels of Covid-19 transmission.
“Covid-19 has been shown to be transmitted through the air,” she
writes. “Even if only 10 per cent of all Covid-19 related deaths in the UK could be directly attrib- uted to the failure to adequately ventilate indoor spaces, that would be more than 15,000 since the start of the pandemic – a shocking statistic that should make everyone sit up and take notice.
“The pandemic has demonstrated that far too many of our buildings are under-ventilated, de- spite regulatory requirements that have been in place for a number of years. This guide will be an invaluable tool in raising awareness of the im- portance of good IAQ and making our buildings more infection resilient.”
The new BESA guide provides a step-by-step strategy for monitoring and main- taining good IAQ in offices, schools, and public buildings and provides advice and strategies for dealing with ventilation problems.
LEFT: BESA’s technical head, Graeme Fox.
The pandemic has proven too many buildings are not properly ventilated.
Gambling on indoor pollutants
A NEW STUDY found significant differences in indoor air quality among 28 hotels on the Las Ve- gas strip, with the worst air quality hotel 80 times more polluted than the best.
The study was conducted by Wynd Technolo- gies, a maker of AI-powered indoor air monitor- ing and purification technologies.
Wynd’s study found that the Aria Resort, Park MGM and Wynn Las Vegas are the top three ho- tels in terms of cleanest air. Their average air quality is just as good as, if not better than, out- side air on a non-polluted day.
Meanwhile, the worst air quality hotel has a concentration of ~300 micrograms / cubic meter
of PM2.5 (worse than the average air quality day in Beijing or New Delhi), which is more than 80 times worse than the best hotel.
Wynd CEO, Raymond Wu, said air is invisible, and the subtleties of air quality between differ- ent spaces or buildings can be hard to discern with human senses, and difficult to keep track of or to compare.
Wynd’s proprietary sensors measured a wide range of indoor pollutants, with a focus on PM2.5 or Particulate Matter.
RIGHT: The proprietary sensors measured a wide range of pollutants.
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