Over the years, tons of research demonstrates the benefits of increasing the ventilation volume above the minimum US standard (20CFM/Person), including productivity, cognition, body health and sleep quality. However, higher ventilation standard is only adopted in small part of the new and existing buildings. In this text, we will talk about the two main barriers to promoting higher ventilation standard, which are economic and environmental.
Let’s dig deeper together!
The first one, we can translate it into the cost of adopting higher IAQ standard. Higher standard will mean more or bigger ventilation fans, so normally we tend to believe that it will consume much more energy. But, it’s not. See below table:
From “Economic, Environmental and Health Implications of Enhanced Ventilation in Office Buildings, by Piers MacNaughton, James Pegues, Usha Satish, Suresh Santanam, John Spengler and Joseph Allen”
20CFM/person will be our based line; then annual cost of energy consumption for increased ventilation rate is calculated according to local rate and compared to our based line data. As you can see, increasing the ventilation rate by 30% or doubling, the energy cost will only increase a little per year, which is not thousands of dollars that we tend to believe. Moreover, if we introduce ERV into the building, the cost will be lower or even less than the original cost!
Secondly, environmental, it means the environmental impact of increasing the ventilation rate. Let’s see below table for emission comparison:
From “Economic, Environmental and Health Implications of Enhanced Ventilation in Office Buildings, by Piers MacNaughton, James Pegues, Usha Satish, Suresh Santanam, John Spengler and Joseph Allen”
Same as cost, data for 20CFM/person will be our based line; then compare their emission. Yes, no doubts that increasing the ventilation rate will also increasing energy consumption in normal case, so to increase the emission of CO2, SO2 and NOx. However, if we introduce ERV into the experiment, the environment will be neutralized!
From the above information, you can see that the cost and impact of increasing ventilation standard to a building is very acceptable, especially when an ERV is introduced into the system. Actually, the two factors are too weak to stop us. What really seems to be a barrier is that we don’t have a clear idea of what higher IAQ can contribute! These benefits far exceed the per occupant economic costs. Hence, I will talk about these benefits one by one in my following articles.
May you have fresh and healthy air everyday!
