All outside air isn’t created equal, neither is the available engineering guidance, and there isn’t enough preliminary owner/consultant discussion about the pros and cons. Welcome to the air filtration design process.
Most of us in the developed world spend the majority of our time indoors, breathing clean-smelling air that is mechanically warmed or cooled and then perhaps filtered and recirculated.
The Forest Hills Public Schools Community and Aquatic Center in Forest Hills, MI, needed to replace two aging 24-ton dehumidifiers for its 12,000-sq-ft natatorium.
While in Las Vegas at the ASHRAE conference and AHR Expo, I visited the colossal Hoover Dam built over a remarkably short time of five years (1931 to 1936).
A Tennessee district faced an old school HVAC challenge: aging ventilators and space constraints. So this team tried a new-school variation on common VRF retrofits to deliver improved efficiency and critical IAQ: they decentralized the outdoor air, combining enthalpy wheel and VRF components within a single classroom enclosure.
Engineers retrofitting non-air conditioned schools to variable refrigerant flow (VRF) the last few years have relied on centralized packaged DOAS to comply with ASHRAE 62.1 outdoor air standards.
St. Luke's Cataract & Laser Institute continues to pioneer the use of ultraviolet (UV) germicidal irradiation light systems for disinfecting surgery rooms and promoting clean HVAC system coils.
Revitalizing turn-of-the-century infrastructure means finding a way to dehumidify interiors successfully. Before you move on to weighing DOAS and other techniques, understand the built-in relationship between these structures and water.