Modern Building Services

FEATURE INDOOR AIR QUALITY Over the past year, Ambisense has been involved in a number of large projects across the UK where customers installed air quality monitors around their office and campus to understand and improve ventilation levels. For the most part, particularly in large open plan areas, the data has shown that ventilation levels were often reasonable and this has helped enormously in returning staff and students to work and universities. Meeting rooms - the final frontier? However, our data also highlighted something else. When we look across customers, deployments, projects & locations - over 80% of the spaces we monitor where there is a ventilation issue are meeting rooms, staff rooms & conference rooms. These small spaces often have lots of people in them and in many cases, building HVAC systems were designed and commissioned before the rooms were constructed, that’s if they have HVAC systems at all. So effective airflows can be much lower than the rest of the building. As a result, most buildings have pockets of localised air quality issues posing a risk to staff, customers, and visitors. We all know those spaces, and have all spent time with two unsatisfactory choices. Either sit there falling asleep or deal with traffic noise, heat or cold, when you open the windows. I call thesemeeting rooms the final frontier, for the following reasons: 1. They are the hardest locations to solve. It is generally either obscenely expensive or technically non-viable to deliver more fresh air to these locations and there are often too many of them to manage to implement localised filtration/ purification solutions in the short term. ‘Hard’ engineering solutions are, for the most part, ruled out. Using natural ventilation is really the only viable way - that is, managing occupancy and creating airflow by leaving doors and windows open to allow Co2 levels to dissipate. 2. The ventilation requirements of these locations are hugely variable based on the number of people in these spaces, how heavily utilised they are, and how often the external weather plays a role too. Some spaces have a 2-person one to one, for an hour, then followed by a 3-hour, 10-person sales meeting, and finally a 2-hour, 6-person training session. In certain meetings, people talk a lot (sales meetings) while in other meetings only one person does the majority of the talking (training session). 3. Meeting rooms are where companies conduct their most important tasks. Sales and customer meetings, board meetings, investment committees, and training sessions. These are locations where companies need people to be together. The virtual version of all of these types of meetings is objectively worse. The return to the office nut is not cracked until people feel comfortable using these spaces. Understanding the spaces we occupy: Managing and predicting ventilation risks Managing and predicting ventilation risks is a function of knowing how many people are and will be using a space, the actual ventilation levels, and the impact of outside factors like weather. Under the hierarchy of controls, when it comes to air quality, our ability to remove or substitute an air quality hazard is often very limited. It falls to engineering and administrative controls to do the heavy lifting, especially if we want to avoid PPE. However, in order to define the engineering and administrative controls required a number of missing jigsaw pieces from an environmental risk management perspective need to be understood: 1. Real-world ACHs 2. Real-time and predicted AQ issues 3. Intelligence to optimise how a space should be used. For example, if a meeting room is heavily utilised, what should the ‘break’ time be between meetings - or could alternative spaces be used? Whatever the future holds for this new hybrid work environment we all now face, understanding the spaces we occupy will have to be addressed if the workforce is going to be comfortable using them. And meeting rooms and board rooms will most certainly be on the frontline of this pursuit. Understanding the quality of the air we are breathing and managing environmental risk with a good dose of transparency and intelligence will be critical. Also, the movement for sustainable architecture has moved away from just concentrating on energy efficiency and water usage. Already, green buildings are rapidly incorporating holistic approaches that look at the human element in built environments. Building owners and developers are realising they don’t have to choose between efficiency and health factors when considering structural designs; in fact, the smart technologies used to enhance efficiency are the very same as those used to improve air quality. In commercial buildings, this can mean not only reduced costs and a smaller carbon footprint, but reduced employee absenteeism and illness, better productivity, and improved workplace satisfaction. MODERN BUILDING SERVICES AUGUST 2022 21 More information can be found at www.ambisense.net