"From Spaceballs to Wildfires: Navigating the Chaos of HVAC Design"

In the quest for good air quality, we faced the harsh reality this year that the great outdoors wasn’t always a breath of fresh air—especially when smoke from Canadian wildfires reached the Northeast. Buildings smelled like smoke as it infiltrated through the gaps in facades while air in the buildings turned toxic. Just as we did during the Covid pandemic, the HVAC community started brainstorming solutions for this situation. Should we be positively pressurizing buildings so infiltration from dirty air is not an issue?

A lot of people said, “No worries – Lets send everybody home, i.e., Covid Round 2, and come back in a few days when the air is clean.” An optimistic, but not very effective, strategy: The air quality index for about two months after the initial smoke screen never really cleared fully, just like the airborne Covid virus didn’t go away either.

From Covid we learned about the importance of high levels of filtration, but as luck would have it these high levels of filtration are not always compliant with energy codes.

Oh, and while you’re at it, become carbon neutral says your client. And now here comes Local Law 97 in New York City. If you’re not meeting the standards of the energy code then you’re not very carbon neutral. So say goodbye to fossil fuels and hello to the love-hate relationship with heat pumps. And if you cant meet Local Law 97 your clients get fined.

Yeesh! Embracing a healthy building philosophy has always been a goal for me personally. I believe that increasing outdoor air or decreasing CO2 concentration improves cognitive function and reduces sickness. But, wait, what if that air is dirty? Certainly that will have the opposite effect.

So we polled our healthcare engineers and asked what they are doing in hospitals to combat all this. Healthcare has this figured out already as their designs remained fundamentally the same. Does this mean commercial and industrial settings should stick to the status quo as well? Not so fast.

As an HVAC designer, cutting through the noise is becoming an art. It’s abundantly clear that designing a commercial or industrial facility with the utmost amount of flexibility in the most energy-efficient, decarbonized manner is the goal, but what do I do about all these new wildcards? This question brought to mind a favorite movie of mine – Spaceballs. Aha! Perri-Air – aluminum soda cans filled with fresh air.

But seriously, as innovators, we must challenge ourselves to create designs that truly address these challenges. Our solution revolves around creating multiple modes of operation for a building – more than just occupied and unoccupied.

For example, we can use an air-handling system that can, when needed, positively pressurize appropriate spaces to keep out unwanted smoke. Because embracing the healthy building philosophy of increasing outdoor air for cognitive enhancement only works when the AQI is good.

We could install Smart Air valves by HVAC Manufacturing and Technology on the VAV system to enable us to provide drastically more air when needed because there is no efficiency penalty for oversizing these boxes even by 300%.

We can also install CO2 scrubbers – like enVerid Systems, Inc. HLR sorbent ventilation technology – which allows you to minimize the operation of your building’s outdoor air dampers.

We can place extended filter banks for additional high-level filtration for when the next virus or bacterial airborne infection comes knocking, but only running the enhanced filtration when needed, thus complying with energy codes.

The more we give flexibility to our HVAC systems, the more we can overcome all these challenges. Whether it’s filtering out Covid or dealing with wildfires, it’s time to laugh in the face of HVAC chaos.

To read more about Syska's thought leadership check our 2023 Corporate Sustainability Report https://lnkd.in/ecQ8Ahzh or our other Syska Innovations blog posts Syska Innovations: Fostering Innovation