Fresh air ventilation in Multi-family buildings
Small sightlines and all-glass facades are beautiful, but could they be contributing to the health problems?
If a building is ventilated poorly, then yes, it could be affecting the occupant's health negatively. Known indoor air pollutants could include mold, mildew, cockroaches, dust mites, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, radon, secondhand smoke, and many more. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) believes some indoor air could be worse on your health than some outdoor air and could have long term effects. "These effects, which include some respiratory diseases, heart disease, and cancer, can be severely debilitating or fatal." For years as the industry has moved to more fixed windows and curtainwall systems, builders have relied on generators that claim to clean that air but have never been backed up by the EPA. Other options include fresh air returns that use mechanical devices that pump air into each unit, which are beneficial for extreme weather days when users will not open windows.
Due to the current stay-at-home and quarantine orders, many people have found themselves inside all but maybe an hour a day for their daily walk outside. This has lead to talk within the design community that we need to start thinking about not only what will make a building look good, but how the design could benefit the occupants inside the building.
So what is going to the best windows for the occupant of a building?
Inswing casement windows with a 4" defeatable limit for safety and egress paired with fresh air returns will give occupants the option to open windows on good days and the ability to get fresh air from returns on miserable weather days. We choose inswing casement windows particularly because they have the best benefits such as 5 lb ADA operating force on handles, high performing air, water, and thermal tests, and they provide the most square footage for ventilation with a 4" limit when compared to projected windows. Below you can see the calculation using standard sizes of a project in and a casement window.
As you can see our G200 casement inswing window with a sash size of 36" x 48" has an estimated airflow of 1.85 sq ft while our G200 project-in window with a sash size of 36" x 22.125 has an estimated airflow of 1.30 sq ft. As mentioned previously, casement inswing windows also give the option to have a 4" defeatable limit which also has some other added benefits:
• Meets Fair Housing codes
• Emergency egress to escape
• Release arm to clean from the interior of a building
• Arm can be mounted at the head for increased fall protection
In the event of a storm...
• Power can go out
• Generators run out of fuel
• Plumbing can burst
In any of these instances having only fixed windows could keep you from preserving human life or vastly diminish the quality of life of the building occupant.
For more information on our defeatable limit or casement inswing windows, contact your area Business Development Owner.
Sources:
https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/introduction-indoor-air-quality
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=2163
