A Breath of Fresh Air for Buildings

People spend from 80% to 90% of their time inside buildings. Staff productivity and efficienty depend directly on the atmosphere within. Scientific experiments have shown that the condition of the ventilation and air-conditioning systems can have both a positive and negative influence on the working process.

The Sick Building Syndrome

    Questions about how air quality affects human helth have only been discussed for a relatively short time. In Finland, among other countries, the problem has interested specialists since the mid 1980s. The concept of the sick building syndrome(SBS) has existed for about 10 years. Experts say that in the United States,20% to 30% of buildings suffer from this syndrome. Sadly, no statistics are available for Russia. The syndrome may appear in the form of breathing difficulties, followed by joint pains and insomnia. Flu-like symptoms may linger for years, slowly eating away at the immune system. The leading cause may well be the poor quality of the air. New technologies have even made the situation worse: new construction materials intended to conserve energy and provide buildings with the most efficient insulation end up making them airtight. Some components of finishing materials such as synthetictiles, linoleum plastics all end up setling in people’s lungs.

      Despite shortcomings on the legislative end, the enviromental equipment market has begun to take shape in Russia. Several companies, including Lifa Air, Danduct and Air Power, provide IAQ (interior air quality) equipment and service. Without waiting for government watchdog organizations to take the initiative, these companies are issuing the following warning: Dirty ventilation systems are hazardous to your health and life.

Infections

The accumulation of dust is normal, and no matter how often a ventilation system is checked and cleaned, dust will always be present.The most important question is how much?It must be remembered that the air circulating in the system is the same air that people are breathing. The combination of elements such as dust, moisture and temperature creates favorable medium for various microbes.

      The primary function of ventilation is to supply a building with air that is within the necessary parameters. This is precisely  why a ventilation sistem must have one fundamentally important quality: it must be clean. If it is not, dirty air will circulate throughout the entire building, spreading bacteria and infection.

IDEALLY, VENTILATION SHAFTS SHOULD LOOK THE WAY THEY DO IN WESTERN SPY FILMS

Fire Safety

      If a vent is clogged with dust and the air in a building is dry, the fire danger increases dramatically. For example, if the ventilation system in a hotel equipped with washing machines and driers is not  serviced  properly, lint can settle on surfaces, and the possibility of a fire breaking out is increased. Such cases have been observed time again in many countries. Take the hotel Moskva, for example. A fire started at one of  the telecommunication points and destroyed some very expensive equipment. The subsequent investigation showed that one of the causes of the fire was dust. The fire invaded a nearby ventilation shaft and spread to the dust inside. Fire sprinkless did not have time to react, as they were also clogged with dust.

Maintenance

      “The fasted and most widely-used methods of cleaning a ventilation system are to surround it with plasterboard or to change an old grille for clean new one. Unfortunately, these solutions are used even in class A business centers. Instead of cleaning the system, they change the unsightly parts of a suspension ceiling or scrub the grilles,” says Andrei Mosenyov, general director of GREEN GROUP. So without the problem being solved, the building’s respiratory illness travels inward. Germs and fungi multiply, mold begins to grow, and they spread into other parts of the building through the ventilation system, and infect the entire body of the structure. As a result, other systems are afflicted by this negative effect . Air ducts may be damaged by increased humidity and metallic parts such as valves and baffles may be corroded. If hygiene norms for ventilation maintenance are not scrupulously observed, the spread of fungi may be substantial, which may cause irreparable damage.

          In practice, as long ago as the Soviet era, Russians devised a widely-used and efficient way of getting rid of garbage: they would tossit into the ventilation shafts of a newly-completed building.Video recording of inspections of several Moscow buildings clearly show that many shafts are full of bricks, waste from plasterboard panels, and other refuse. "Ideally, ventilation shafts should look the way they do in western spy films, when a hero crawls from one building to another through the air-conditioning system. It would be impossible to do this in a Russian ventilation shaft. Even Superman would die of suffocation," Mosenyov smiles.

          GREEN Group rates the quality of maintenance as catastrophically low. "There are no government standarts for the maintenance of ventilation systems in Russia and until some monitoring of their condition is introduced, the situation is not going to change.Perhaps some accident, such as a fire or the spread of a virus, will serve as a catalyst to finding a solutions, but companies, even large international ones, are not paing any attention to the problem." Mosenyov says.

Cleaning technology

      Vizual inspections and microbiological analyses are used to monitor the condition of shafts. The latter is accomplished with the aid of a remote-controlled robot equipped with a video camera. The machine travels through the shafts, recording the level of pollution, the places where most dust is concentrated, and problem points with the highest condensation or where mold and/or corrosion have already attacked the system.

         To get rid of contaminated or moldy areas in the system, special chemical agents are used after cleaning. There is no sense in working on dusty surfaces, so a cleaning machine that incorporates brushes and a vacuum cleaner is used first, followed by a device that sprays an antibacterial solution onto the air duct walls.

         Air can be cleaned with superfine 3G filters capable of neutralizing even Moscow’s smog. They look somewhat like gas masks and are capable of keeping out deadly gases or dangerous disease-carrying spores in case of a chemical or biological attack.In addition to filters, an air-filtration system may employ ultraviolet radiation and ionization.

         Ventilation system  cleaning is a new and promising field that is still in the finetuning stage. And while the companies involved are mostly small domestics firms, the marketplace for this service is already worldwide.In Europe, the total area equipped with ventilation systems, according to Lifa Air, is 1.5 bln sq.meters, about the same as in the United States and in Asia. Using an arbitrary interval of one cleaning every five years at a cost of 6 euros per square meter, the yearly figure comes to approximately 1.8 bln euros fpr each of the three markets.

         The Russian environmental equipment market is minimal. Hopes for this segment of the market depend on, first, the presence of foreign companies with ready requirements for the health and safety of their personnel, and, second, an increase in the overall level of consciousness among Russians, since the ecology in the larger cities is unfortunately not improving.In light of these factors, the future of the environmental equipment market is clearly very bright. 

                                                                    Tatiana Romantzeva