COVID-19, despite being one of the worst happenings of the recent decades, has helped shining a light on the importance of indoor air quality. We know air is essential to life, and we know people spend almost 90% of their time indoor, where air is usually 2 to 5 times more polluted than outdoor air. Due to lack of proper air-exchange, enclosed environments can significantly contribute to people’s exposure to air pollutants or contaminants, impacting their well-being, their health, and their ability to focus.
Air-exchange, then, is fundamental to guarantee and maintain high indoor air quality levels, diluting, or bringing down to zero the contaminants concentration in enclosed spaces.
Read more here about the importance of indoor air quality (IAQ)
Mechanical ventilation systems
There are different ways of providing indoor environments with air-exchange. Mechanical ventilation, though, has proven the most effective and efficient.
Mechanical ventilation systems can be centralized or de-centralized systems.
Centralized ventilation usually involves the use of large size air handling units (AHU) located outdoor on the rooftop of the building, or indoor in a technical room. That means there would be a single location accommodating the equipment, which would ventilate the whole building through a network ducts and grills.
De-centralized ventilation systems, instead, use smaller Air Handling Units, placed in specific areas of a building: one AHU per apartment in a multi-family residential project, for instance, or an AHU per office in a multi-level office building.
Read more here about centralized vs de-centralized ventilation systems
Each of the two systems have pro and cons, but de-centralized ventilation solutions have proven to be perfect solutions for existing buildings where a ventilation system was not foreseen at a design stage.
Mechanical ventilation in existing buildings
Mechanical ventilation is almost a standard in Northern Europe but are not present in a still large portion of the European building stock.
In fact, most of the existing buildings in Europe (schools, public offices, light-commercial buildings, or even residential buildings), built decades ago, not only do not have ventilation systems, but cannot accommodate machines’ installation for structural reasons.
Technology is constantly evolving, though, and the air-conditioning sector is now able to offer compact enough solutions to make installation in existing buildings possible and easy.
Daikin has recently launched the Daikin Modular T Series – a unit designed to give customers the possibility to upgrade their building with a modern system, a compact and all-in-one de-centralized solution, able to provide ventilation, cooling, heating and dehumidification. This will help raising indoor air quality levels in existing buildings and make them healthy environments for occupant.
Read here about how Daikin ventilation solutions can contribute to Green Building certification
The Daikin Indoor Environmental Quality Sensor
We all know monitoring and tracking not only helps understanding things, but also helps taking actions to make improvements.
In this day and age when almost anything that surrounds us can be monitored, improving Indoor Air quality and Environmental comfort is the ultimate purpose of the Daikin IEQ sensor.
The IEQ Sensor is an Indoor Environmental Quality sensor, able to monitor and track indoor conditions through a set of indoor air quality parameters, so facility managers can have a clear idea of the Indoor Air Quality status in the building they manage.
Besides measuring Indoor Air Quality, the IEQ Sensor also measures environmental quality and comfort, and electromagnetic pollution, through parameters related to noise and light, which also affect peoples’ well-being.
This sensor ensures stand-alone installation and has 12 embedded different sensor that monitor 15 different parameters. It connects to the WiFi network, can be easily configured through a dedicated configuration App and can be connected to Daikin on Site – Daikin’s remote monitoring and smart maintenance solution.
Once installed, the IEQ Sensor can track values related to Indoor Air and Environmental comfort, transmitting them to Caelum – Daikin’s Indoor Environmental Quality monitoring platform, which allows to easily monitor the status of indoor air quality and environmental comfort in the spaces where the sensors are installed. But it does not stop with that, the web platform Caelum also allows to easily generate report and video wall real time monitoring. Another feature, then, is the possibility to set a notification system when thresholds on specific parameters are exceeded. In this how the system can send an alert message when there is a risk for deterioration of the indoor environmental quality levels set.
Monitoring and tracking indoor environmental parameters, not only helps understanding how the surrounding environment affects our well-being, but also helps taking actions to improve the quality of the environment, wether it is home, the office, a restaurant, schools or even shops.
The new IEQ Sensor is Daikin’s answer to the need of creating awareness around Indoor Air Quality, and the ability of this sensor to perfectly integrate products such as the Daikin Modular T, allows Daikin to provide the perfect combination of technologies to make existing buildings healthier environments despite not having been designed with modern criteria.
Are you interested in Daikin solutions for mechanical ventilation and indoor air quality? Then, get in touch using the form below!