What do you do if you feel that your home or office is stuffy? There are some obvious benefits to opening a window. An open window helps provide a room with air changes, which means the air within a space is exchanged. Air from an open window can replace the stagnant room air, which may be contaminated with mold, bacteria or viruses that could cause illness. The increased ventilation can help decrease carbon-dioxide levels that build over time due to room occupants’ breathing. High levels of carbon dioxide can cause fatigue and headaches. Harmful chemicals that have off-gassed from paints, furniture, or cooking can also be removed with adequate air changes from an open window.
But there can also be negative consequences for having a window open. If you live in a city, traffic related air pollution can be introduced to your home or office causing exposure to carcinogens and other toxic fumes. Pollens and other allergens can infiltrate the indoor space, leading to irritation for suffers of hay fever and other allergies. Unpleasant odours can blow into your living space. If you live in a noisy neighbourhood you might want to keep your window closed because it’s too loud outside. Or it might be too cold to have a window open.
An ideal solution would be to bring fresh air in from the outside, but remove the outside contaminants, and try to mitigate some of the other issues associated with open windows such as noise and temperature. This “ideal solution” is what fresh air purification systems aim to do.
Traditional air purifiers work on the premise of a motorised fan forcing air through a purification system. This system may rely on air purification technologies such as filtration, electrostatic attraction, ozone, or UV to remove particles or gases that may be contaminating the air. Much like the recirculation function of a car’s air conditioning system, typical air purifiers only recirculate and filter the air that is already present in the space, they do not aid in the ventilation of the indoor space.
Fresh air purification systems facilitate the ventilation of an indoor environment by drawing outside air through an air purification system, removing the outdoor contaminants, and introducing this air into the indoor space. Meanwhile, the purifier also draws the stagnant contaminated air from indoors, blowing it outside. Therefore, the indoor space is continuously being provided with air changes using fresh clean air from outside without opening a window. Most fresh air purification systems use a heat exchanger where the fresh air introduced to the indoor space is preconditioned to the same temperature as the room it is entering.
Fresh air purification systems are often installed into a building’s HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) system, but more recently air purification manufacturers are attempting to provide the same level of air quality to consumers where HVAC systems aren’t available. By designing and building compact, cost-effective fresh air purification units that are designed to be installed onto the walls or the floor of the indoor space, with exterior piping for inlet and outlet airflow, or units that are to be installed into window frames, more customers are now being provided with the option of far superior air quality control in their homes and offices. As a result, these systems are becoming increasingly popular in areas of the world that suffer from poor air quality, such as China
Here at airmid healthgroup, our goal is to provide both manufacturers and their consumers with independent scientific data on the performance and effectiveness of fresh air purification systems. We are uniquely placed to test these systems, based on our ability to link one or more of our multiple environmental test chambers via connecting air ducts and introduce contaminated indoor and outdoor air simultaneously into the test chambers to create a realistic representation of “in-field” installation. Using state of the art environmental monitoring equipment and sampling techniques we can measure the real time performance of fresh air purification systems when challenged with a wide range of biological and non-biological contaminants, such as VOCs, allergens, viruses, mould, and bacteria. The proximity of our laboratories to our chambers allow for rapid analysis of biological samples ensuring highly accurate data outlining the performance of these devices.
As fresh air purification systems become more commonplace, airmid healthgroup looks forward to doing its part to help keep manufacturers and consumers informed with independent scientific data, and to help ensure we all breathe healthier cleaner air in the future.