Indoor Air Quality is best known as IAQ. These three small letters can strike fear into the hearts of building operators.
Why?
Often, when IAQ is mentioned, it’s because of a real or assumed problem that now demands attention. In many cases, it turns out to be something that could have been avoided or addressed much sooner with far less disruption.
Managing and monitoring IAQ has grown significantly in recent years through better understanding, advanced technology, and updated industry standards, which help to clear the fog around what to do about IAQ. With a better understanding, building operators are learning they can provide optimal IAQ for their occupants, and, at the same time, run the building more efficiently to promote a more sustainable property.
For many years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated three important factors to improving IAQ are source control, ventilation, and air cleaning. We can see in the modern built environment that these three factors are considered much more than in years past.
We have learned to control sources of pollutants—using fewer chemicals and materials that off-gas fewer Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC). We also pay more attention to people and activities which would produce indoor pollutants. It wasn’t that long ago when smoking was still allowed in offices!
Lessons learned from the COVID pandemic made ventilation and air cleaning critical considerations. Buildings increased their air exchange rates, improved filtration, and incorporated advanced air purification technologies like bi-polar air ionization and UV technologies to address bacteria, viruses, and molds, and provide a healthier indoor environment.
To this end, most buildings do provide particularly good indoor air quality. Many building operators are understanding this, and are monitoring and displaying their indoor air quality.
More advanced platforms can show a comparison of indoor to outdoor air quality and communicate that the air is better in the building than outside. This is a strong message in our age of transparency, where knowledge of IAQ for any building occupant is just a click away.
Following this movement, standards and guidelines have been adopted so buildings have the guidance they need to operate healthier and more efficiently.
In 2023, ASHRAE (American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) published Standard 241: Control of Infectious Aerosols, which was developed to help protect building occupants from the airborne transmission of illness.
