Problem: Ventilating buildings is costly and inefficient
Commercial buildings use a lot of outside air. A building’s entire volume of air is replaced 10-20 times a day.
Ventilation is essential to ensuring that indoor air quality is healthy, mainly because it offsets the build-up of gas contaminants like CO2, formaldehyde, and VOCs. Still, high ventilation rates require a tremendous amount of energy, driving up peak demand costs, when energy is most expensive, and introducing outdoor pollutants into the building.
But what if ventilation didn’t have to be both costly and inefficient?
The reason current ventilation practices are so inefficient—and therefore costly—is because we make decisions to control Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) parameters that we don’t then adequately monitor or measure.
If we’re concerned about CO2, formaldehyde, and other VOCs, we may need more ventilation. We may need BPI, UV, or some other device/technology that cleans the air, but:
- How do we know what we need if we’re not monitoring the exact things we’re trying to control?
- If we increase ventilation or add an air cleaning technology to our system, how do we know it’s working?
Until now monitoring meant you needed at least one sensor in every single room. For a small commercial office building this may not be that big of an issue, but for large commercial buildings like hospitals, schools, and universities, this could mean thousands to tens of thousands of devices across buildings and campuses.
Meanwhile, we use vast amounts of energy to move air to each of these rooms, trying to hit setpoints we’re not actually monitoring.
What if, with no additional energy input, you could use the air you’re already moving to create another airstream? An air sample?
With AntrumX’s patented centralized sensing technology you have the ability to use 6% of the sensors of a traditional system—1 sensor for every 16 monitored spaces—and you can access these sensors from 3% of the maintenance points when you monitor 32 spaces from a single location (the nearest mechanical room).
Beyond the drastic reduction in number of devices, which leads to an equal reduction in maintenance, you now have the foundation to KNOW YOUR AIR by continuously monitoring the parameters you want to control. Your BMS is equipped with the information it needs to optimize the ventilation for your building. Today it’s CO2, VOCs, and RH. Tomorrow it could be Formaldehyde, PM2.5, PM10. With AntrumX you have the platform to scale your monitoring technology as your building scales, and/or as your understanding of how your building is used scales and changes.
Contact your local Antrum rep by visiting https://www.antrum.com/contact and take control of your building.
Antrum
Healthy Buildings, Healthy People
