Simon Jones looks at the impact that energy prices could have on the often fine balance between adequate ventilation and heating our schools, colleges and universities.
I regularly meet those responsible for managing school buildings, whether it’s CFOs of academy trusts or estate mangers of universities, and without exception, the topic on everyone’s mind is costs. Costs of services, costs of wage increases this summer and now, costs of energy.
Depending on how you negotiate energy prices for your school and a bit of pot luck on when contracts start and end, the increases are anything from twice to five or six times what they where this time last year. This kind of increase looks like a train coming at you down the track with little room to move out of its way. One very experienced estates manager I spoke to last week was talking in terms of closing entire buildings down.
It’s worth noting the social impact this fuel crisis is going to have on schools as well. Depending on where you live in the UK and Ireland, it’s estimated that anywhere between and half and three quarters of households could be in fuel poverty by January 2023. This will impact staff, students and teachers, as well as food programmes, absenteeism, health and wellbeing and, not least, mental health.
Managing air quality in the classroom
So, my fear for ventilation and air quality is that, understandably, people are likely to have other concerns on their mind. And with two winters of sitting in often cold classrooms will people simply be too fatigued to focus on doing the right things again when it comes to maintaining ventilation and managing air quality?
It’s not just schools of course, the temptation to close things down, hunker down and seal things up is going to be enormous, regardless of the sector or situation. And of course, in that environment air quality is going to suffer.
COVID, flu, colds, asthma, chest infections, concentration and performance, chronic exposure to VOCs, radon, mould and damp conditions – the list is long and the impacts of this winter and perhaps the next could be felt for years to come.
So, have we learned anything from the pandemic and what are the short- and long-term solutions?
Well to answer the first, time will tell. The difference is of course we are monitoring more spaces than we ever have, and I know in Ambisense we are keeping a close eye on the trends and will help our customers to find the right balance through the winter. But if the data is not online and being kept an eye on, people could start ignoring it.
The long-term fix in my opinion is moving classrooms towards a fully mechanically ventilated state where we control how much air people get and when. And in addition, heat recovery to minimise heat loss – the kind of volumes of air movement required in these spaces are too high not to. Of course, the cost of doing this is high, it’s complex and will take time.
Short-term air quality solutions
So, in the short term how do we provide adequate air quality to schools at the volumes they need and not blow heating budgets through the roof in the process? Well It will probably need to be a mix of considered and planned out supplementary solutions like air cleaners or UVC , while using the ventilation schools already have. My hope is that we move on from the panic buying scenario we had last winter to a considered, specified, risk assessed approach that looks at the deployment of these technologies and solutions in a longer term.
This all starts with a considered and well thought out risk assessment of the assets, and the development of a plan to reduce the risk in a meaningful way. Like any other risk, you can’t manage what you don’t measure, and this is where monitoring of our indoor environment becomes so important.
Schools are incredibly complex environments with a huge range of building types, age and infrastructure. Most are naturally ventilated and the use of the ventilation is down to human behaviour. Depending on the size of the school or institution you could have many hundreds or thousands of spaces to be considered at any one time.
So how can you develop a plan for these spaces without data that looks at the performance of the assets and unpacks it in a meaningful way? I don’t think you can, and I think you will continue to play a guessing game that in the context of the fuel crisis will leave air quality and ventilation in crisis.
Simon Jones is Head of Air Quality at Ambisense.
