June 17, 2020
COVID-19 Successful Infection = Exposure to Virus x Time
Professor Erin Bromage's,
a Comparative Immunologist and Professor of Biology (specializing in Immunology) at the
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth,
blog
post starting at “where people are getting sick”
is helpful in understanding how and where people are getting sick (
Erin's Blog).
After consulting this and the CDC's "Take
steps to improve ventilation in the building" section under
CDC Engineering Controls
, UHL Company made a few changes to the HVAC systems in our own facility.
We doubled our minimum fresh air positions on our 3 Air Handling Units' economizers. We added an hour of fresh air runtime on our 3 AHUs after closing time. We increased the minimum Variable Air Volume Box airflows up to 3 times. In order to increase the VAV minimums, we needed to keep the boilers running at low HWS temperature most of the summer to prevent the rooms from sub-cooling.
While these, or any changes, will not make our indoor environment virus free, it will help in reducing the time of exposure to a virus.
Want to see how we are helping to drive building automation? Read more
here
.
