Preventing Indoor Air Quality Issues after New Construction or Renovations

As a forensic facility manager you may have run into this scenario. After returning from lunch you find your desk littered with phone messages and your e-mail inbox brimming with terse, distressed pleas for help. Quickly reading through them you notice one recurring theme: indoor air quality complaints. You begin wondering what is going on. Didn’t we completely renovate that work area? Or perhaps the complaints are originating from a newly constructed and freshly occupied forensic laboratory. Shouldn’t they be ecstatic with their new surroundings? Well, welcome to the world of indoor air quality or IAQ.

Indoor air quality, and in a broader sense and perhaps more accurately, indoor environmental quality, IEQ, has risen to the top of the list of worker complaints over the last decade. IEQ encompasses many different parameters from temperature to odors, lighting, and even ergonomics in addition to potential contaminates. IEQ has received the most attention stemming from mold concerns—the media baby of the twenty first century. Nonetheless, research and, unfortunately, major health disasters during the last few decades have increased our knowledge and understanding of the indoor environment. From the infamous outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease during that ill-fated conference in Philadelphia in 1980 to the multitude of Sick Building Syndrome cases during the 1990s and dozens of major mold infestations discovered during the beginning of this century, our awareness and perspective of indoor air quality for building occupants has grown tremendously.

The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now estimate that Americans spend an average of 90%of our time indoors where potential contaminates and pollutants may be two to five times higher than outdoor levels.¹ Add to this fact that an estimated 17 million Americans suffer from asthma and 40 million have allergies and you can see indoor air quality is nothing to sneeze at. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist.)

We do have some good news though, and that is the focus of this article. The USGBC in developing their Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program have come up with a comprehensive strategy for optimizing indoor environmental quality and minimizing potential problems from poor indoor air quality. The LEED IEQ strategy addresses many areas. These include meeting minimum indoor air quality performance standards, controlling environmental tobacco smoke, use of low emitting materials, increasing ventilation effectiveness, controlling chemical and pollutant sources, addressing thermal comfort, and optimizing use of daylight, among others.We highly recommend using the LEED strategy for all your construction or renovation projects. But, whether you are going for LEED certification or not, use of one particular strategy can go a long way in ensuring good indoor air quality following construction and that is implementing a construction IAQ management plan. Let us take a deeper look into what this plan does and how it can prevent your building occupants from flooding your desk and inbox with those angry complaints.

The LEED Construction IAQ Management Plan
The construction IAQ management plan (LEED EQ Credit 3.2) is basically a simple protocol for ensuring the indoor air quality is acceptable following construction and prior to occupancy. We all know how dusty construction can be. In addition to the heavy particulate loads from all the normal construction activity other potential contaminates can accumulate during the project. These include chemical pollutants or volatile organic compounds (VOC) given off by building materials and biologicals such as mold spores, pollens, etc. that enter from outside. The goal of the construction IAQ management plan is to reduce potential indoor air quality problems resulting from the construction or renovation process. Under the LEED rating system this is achieved by one of two methods—a building flush out or air testing.²

Building Flush Out
The building flush out is achieved by running the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems until a large amount of outside air has been delivered to the space. In following the LEED for new construction or major renovations, the HVAC system is operated continuously until 14,000 cubic feet of outside air is delivered for each square foot of new floor space. This can take a period of weeks, depending on HVAC system design, even running 24/7. During flush out the temperature must remain at least 60°F and the relative humidity cannot exceed 60%.