Is Your Building Ventilated Like It's 1978? -- Spaces4Learning

Is Your Building Ventilated Like It's 1978?

Ensuring healthy air in your campus facilities contributes to the well being of your students and staff. Here’s how to breathe easy.

By Tom Kolsun
05/02/19

Did you know that humans breathe more than 11,000 liters of air a day? Your staff and students will likely spend around 2,000 hours per year breathing the air in campus buildings. Would you drink 900,000 liters of water if I said, “I actually have no idea what’s in it or how long it has been sitting in this room… but it’s fairly clear and doesn’t really smell too bad.”

Here are some interesting facts to consider about indoor air quality:

Indoor air often contains 4X to 10X the amount of pollutants of outdoor air.
Many studies have linked exposure to small particles (PM2.5—defined as airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns) with heart attacks, cardiac arrhythmias, strokes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, worsened symptoms of asthma, and an increased risk of respiratory illness.
The World Health Organization says that particulate matter contributes to about 800,000 premature deaths each year, making it the 13th leading cause of death worldwide.

Your Bottom Line and Student Performance
Employee wellness programs are great for employees and the university. The ability to reduce absenteeism and pre-absenteeism (working while sick) is the right thing to do and it goes directly to your bottom line. A study by Dominion Systems concluded that unscheduled absenteeism cost roughly $3,600 annually for an hourly worker and $2,650 for a salaried worker. Seems like a very compelling case for incorporating ventilation performance into your employee wellness program.

How about requiring proof that the small particle levels in that shiny new building are measured and controlled? Have it defined in your project; require Verified Ventilation Performance—VVP.

Now consider how verified ventilation performance (VVP) will increase productivity with your healthy employees and the positives effects it could have on student learning. United Technologies and The Harvard School of Public Health conducted a study on the effects of indoor air quality on productivity. It demonstrated that:

Lowering the levels of CO₂ and VOCs resulted in their participants scoring 61 percent higher on cognitive function tests compared with those in conventional offices.
There was a 101 percent improvement on their cognitive function tests when the ventilation levels were doubled above the standard ASHRAE prescribed levels.
Information usage scores were 299 percent higher than conventional offices when the ventilation rates were doubled.

The conclusion of this study couldn’t be clearer: verified ventilation performance will increase employee and student performance.

Consider VVP in lectures halls, libraries, and classrooms across campus. Better cognitive function means improving information retention, critical thinking, and recall during exams.

How about attracting/retaining top talent—students, researchers, professors, and staff—and how that affects you bottom line?

It is a fact that employees are paying more attention to the healthy conditions of their work environment. This is especially the case for researchers and their lab environments. We see surging growth in universities adopting lab design programs such as Smart Labs which places an emphasis in the indoor environment quality of the lab and through certification programs as:

If your building design mandates verified ventilation performance, you are already contributing significantly to points required to attain these programs certifications. Use the VVP as a recruiting tool!

What Should You Include?
Bottom line…make your inside air like outside air.

Let’s look back a few decades and see how we got to where we are with building ventilation. Most buildings design the core and shell with a set-it-and-forget-it strategy, which has been completed long before occupants ever arrive. I call this the 1970s Standard. Typically, this means that 80 percent of the indoor air is recycled. The percentage of ventilation air allowed in the facility is usually designed when the building is built and based on standard ASHRAE formulas. The amount of ventilation air that comes in is frequently dependent on the position of a damper on the air handler. Ask anyone you know in the building automation business how often they have experienced the actuators which control these dampers being broken. Oftentimes a building engineer has clamped the damper at a set position because the building was unable to maintain heating or cooling loads.

Imagine it is a very hot and humid day. By reducing the ventilation air, the system isn’t trying to cool 95°F air (and dehumidify it). It only needs to cool air being returned from inside the building which has only gone up a few degrees above the building’s set point. The same thing happens on cold days, with these values reversed. Do you know where your buildings outside air damper is set? Do you know how much ventilation you are getting right now?

The Challenge
Maybe you are thinking, “OK, this makes a lot of sense to me. I want fresh air in the place where my staff and students are going to spend 2,000 hours this year, therefore I will demand that the air handling system not recirculate any air. I want 100 percent outside air coming in.”

There are actually buildings that run on 100 percent outside air. Research laboratories are an example. All the air entering the building comes in from the outside, blows through the rooms and is immediately exhausted out. They are designed this way to dilute chemicals which are usually in fume hoods but may occasionally escape into the breathing zone. Why not demand all buildings mandate this type of HVAC system? The air would be fresh and clean all the time. It would be like standing outside on the roof of your building. Health and productivity would abound.

Here is why that won’t work. The fans, cooling, heat, and re-heat in lab buildings typically triple the first cost of the HVAC equipment of an ordinary building. Ongoing, they average 7 to 10 times the operating cost. As you can imagine, this will result in unattainable utility expenses.

Even if money was no object, the environmental impact of this strategy would be grave—which is why most energy codes do not allow for this. Please consider that buildings are the largest contributors to greenhouse gasses. In a 300,000-square-foot non-critical space, running a standard HVAC system with 100 percent outside air would require an additional 27,580 MMBTUs. In layman’s terms, your building would be adding 1686 Metric Tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere every year… which would be the equivalent of:

Burning 239,826 gallons of gas every year, or
adding 479 cars to the roads every year.

Financials and Mother Nature both preclude a standard HVAC system with the dampers set 100 percent open and no recirculated air for noncritical environments.

Stop reading for a minute and look around your office. Do you see people consuming every square foot of space? Normal office occupancy is between 7 and 10 people per 1000 square feet. That leaves significant open spaces. And many times, people are congregated. Rooms and large portions of space are open. What if you have a system that would increase ventilation, but only where/when you need it? The 1970s standard made a run at this. Using the best commercially available technology at that time, buildings were designed with some CO₂ sensors on the walls. The intention of which is to keep ventilation levels low and to increase outside air based on CO₂ levels. But here’s the problem—brace yourself—air can be polluted by things other than CO₂. So, we build these airtight spaces, reduce the outside air as much as possible to save energy (and the environment), and either have a fixed amount of outside air or vary it based only on one potential contaminant. Not a recipe for a healthy and productive 2,000 annual hours.

It’s 2019. You’re not carrying an analog bag-phone anymore. You need to have real-time measurement of the all contaminants in your office air and match that with real time control of the outside air coming into your environment. You need a building that:

Brings in lots of outside air—but only exactly where and when you need it.
Measures and controls more than just temperature and CO₂.
Displays the ventilation performance for you, staff, and students.

The Solution
It’s 2019. This technology exists—just ask for it. You need to demand the new 2020 Ventilation Standard in for your building. Think about it; you have a watch with sensors that tells you how much you slept, walked, and pumped blood. Your car’s sensors prevent lane changes, collisions, and will email you for maintenance needs. Your building—where you breathe thousands of liters of air every day—is ventilating the exact same way it did in the 1970s.

What should you ask for specifically? I highly recommend your project should require measured and verified ventilation that follow the criteria prescribed by the International WELL Building Institute, or some similar organization. They state that for optimal health, comfort, and productivity the air in your space should remain:

Total VOCs—less than 500 ug/cubic meter
Small Particles— (PM 2.5) to be less than 15 ug/cubic meter
Relative Humidity—30 percent and 60 percent
Carbon Monoxide—Below 9 PPM
Carbon Dioxide—Below 750 PPM
And you need to be able to see it validated anytime on your computer or mobile device.

Technology exists that cannot only monitor these parameters but can also actively control the ventilation rates to maintain high production/high health air. Many systems can also display this information with easy-to-understand graphics. You want staff, students, and prospective employees to have full visibility to the great indoor environment you are delivering. This should be a marketing tool for attracting students and great talent.

Require the 2020 Ventilation Standard as a part of your building projects for your staff’s health, your students’ health, recruiting, productivity, and your bottom line.