Ashrae Journal - October 2008 - 83

Joe’s Hard Lessons Learned If it smells bad, it is probably bad. If it smells at all, it is probably bad. Not everything that is bad smells. Not everything smells when you decide to smell it. Vent combustion sources. Don’t suck on the ground, especially if you poison the ground. Don’t do stupid things in your building. Construct a tight enclosure to keep bad things out and good things in. Keep things from getting wet, hot or exposed to UV—isolate those that do from the occupants. Control indoor humidity. Don’t build your building out of stinky things. Don’t put stinky things in your building. If you have to have stinky things or stinky places in your building, suck on them (maintain them at a negative pressure). Bathrooms and kitchens are stinky, so are elevator shafts and trash chutes. Keep things clean. A messy space is an unhealthy space. Bugs and critters like food and water. Deny them the food and water. Be cruel. Filter for people not just for equipment. Ventilate for people, not for the building—source control will handle the building. Think about this for a minute. You sample for about a minute. Is it a representative minute? Where do you sample for this minute? Let’s say you are okay with the minute method, or you feel you can make something up that sounds semibelievable to get others to ignore the issues with this minute method. Now what? Here is where it gets out of control. What is in the “library?” It depends on the lab. Folks tend to look at the “most common 40 spectra,” which typically means the most common 40 in the lab library.§ So, the typical VOC test looks to see if those specific 40 things are in the air. If your “stuff’s” spectra are not in the lab’s top 40, too bad, you are out of luck. Maybe it’s close to one of the top 40? Does the lab say that it is close? Ah, it depends. If it is not close to your top 40 do you look further? How do you look? Do you even know you should look? Sorry, looking further is not going to happen unless you pay, and pay and pay. You can ask NASA.|| But, why look even in the first place? Or why look this way? More about that later. So let’s say that some of your “stuff ” matches some of the “top 40.” What are the odds? High. Why? Well, if you selected the EPA’s BASE list as your comparison “stuff ” you are going to find stuff because the whole point of that study was to look for stuff that you are likely to find. Now, you get to ask the question civilians ask all the time: “Are the levels too high or too low?” You pretty much have nothing to go on. We don’t have acceptable or unacceptable levels for most of the stuff. Can BASE help us out? Nope, the study just said what the levels were, not whether they were too high or too low. Is BASE even representative? Sure, ask an easy question. Some folks say that it is, some folks say that it is not. What do I say? It was probably representative then, it is probably not representative now. ||NASA Oh, we have some threshold limit values (TLVs) for some occupational stuff. But that is occupational stuff. If you are factory worker working with a particular chemical that we know a great deal about, NIOSH probably has an exposure limit for that particular chemical. But, TLVs were pretty much intended to apply to factories (i.e., occupational exposure); they were not intended to apply to office buildings and houses. I am an order of magnitude kind of a guy, so I sometimes divide the occupational numbers by “10” when pressed for an opinion for office and residential exposure. But this is an arbitrary guess on my part. There is no health data that I have to go on. Why not divide by 100? Some folks do. Are they more right than me? They seem to think so. The point is that we are “making this stuff up.” All of us. So let’s say you test for some VOCs and you get a “hit.” Let’s even say that it is a pretty well-known VOC that has a TLV associated with it. And let’s say you divide the TLV by 10 or 100 or whatever strikes your fancy, and your top-40 hit is above your own particular arbitrary action level. Now what? Where did it come from? Isn’t that the fundamental question? The VOC test report from the expensive lab has big words that mean absolutely nothing. That is because you don’t know where the stuff is coming from. How helpful is that? So what is the typical recommendation from one of these reports? Increase the ventilation rate. That will reduce the concentration. Dilution is not the only solution to indoor pollution. We can’t ignore the effect of ventilation rates on energy and part-load humidity. We can’t just turn up the crank and ventilate like crazy. Whatever happened to source control? Here is the rub: source control only works if you know the source. I have a completely different approach to this problem. Now, there’s a surprise. In my experience contaminants are usually has the most comprehensive spectra data set of anyone. When they first started sealing folks in aluminum capsules on the top of rockets, NASA found that stuff off-gassed from the stuff inside the space capsules and affected the ability of the astronauts to function. The astronauts got “stoned” on the VOCs. NASA tested everything that went into a space capsule for off gassing and over time developed an impressive database of “stuff.” NASA discovered “source control” before anyone else. Dilution was not the solution to indoor pollution in the vacuum of outer space. Standard 62 committees take note—sometimes it is rocket science. October 2008 ASHRAE Journal 83

Ashrae Journal - October 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Ashrae Journal - October 2008

Ashrae Journal - October 2008

Contents

Commentary
Industry News
Letters
ASHRAE HQ Dedication Booklet
ASHRAE Rebuilds HQ to Reflect Mission
Feature Articles
ASHRAE's Living Lab
Meetings and Shows
Sizing Pipe Using Life-Cycle Costs
Feature Articles
Energy-Efficient Data Centers: A Close-Coupled Row Solution
The Future of 90.1
Ventilation Standard for Health Care Facilities
Grosvenor Humidity Chart
ASHRAE Research Report
ASHRAE Honor Roll
Building Sciences
Special Products
Emerging Technologies
Product Showplace
Classified Advertisting
Advertising Index
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Contents