ACHR News featured enVerid CEO Christian Weeks in a story about addressing the poor indoor air quality caused by wildfire smoke. Here’s an excerpt:
“Commercial building managers should also consider reducing outside air ventilation to bring in less polluted outside air,” said Weeks. “We recommend sorbent filters for gaseous contaminants that are generated indoors — VOCs from paints, furniture, cleaning supplies, etc. — to ensure these contaminants do not reach unhealthy levels when they are not diluted with outside air ventilation.”
Another key IAQ consideration in such circumstances is to reduce reliance on outside air ventilation to maintain good IAQ through dilution ventilation and instead control indoor generated gaseous contaminants directly using sorbent media-based filtration technologies on recirculated indoor air.
According to Weeks, this can be done using ASHRAE’s IAQ Procedure (IAQP) in Standard 62.1, which may be used to permanently set a lower outside air requirement when accounting for the air-cleaning efficiency of a technology like enVerid’s Sorbent Ventilation Technology.
“This approach is in line with the recommendations of the ASHRAE 62.1-2019 user’s manual, which says, ‘If outdoor air is deemed to be unacceptable for general ventilation, consider using air cleaning and the IAQP in lieu of the VRP [ventilation rate procedure] for the ventilation system design,’” said Weeks. “In addition to making buildings more resilient to polluted outside air, this approach has the added benefit of permanently saving energy associated with conditioning outside air without compromising indoor air quality.”