ASHRAE Journal - December 2022 - 20

IEQ APPLICATIONS
Column
Brendon Burley
Developing Indoor Air Quality Standards:
Reflecting on a White
House Summit
BY BRENDON J. BURLEY, PH.D., P.E., MEMBER ASHRAE
In October, the White House convened an indoor air quality summit of government
agencies and experts from public and private organizations to discuss public policy
that could be adopted in response to lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.1
In his opening remarks, White House Coronavirus
Response Coordinator Ashish Jha framed the policy
choices as an option between building more hospitals
and training more health-care workers to deal with a
larger sick population, or developing indoor air quality
policies that reduce the fraction of the population that
becomes ill. This framing makes it difficult to argue for
the former choice. But the feasibility of the latter turns
on whether there are engineering solutions available
today to implement them.
Following Jha's remarks, the keynote speaker, Joseph
G. Allen, an associate professor at Harvard University,
recommended four actions. Three come from a report
by the Lancet COVID-19 Commission Task Force on Safe
Work, Safe School, and Safe Travel2 and were described
as giving every building a " tune-up, " maximizing outdoor
air ventilation, and upgrading filtration by making
MERV 13 the new minimum standard. (A fourth Lancet
recommendation, to use portable air cleaners where
needed, was not addressed.) Allen's fourth recommended
action was to make ventilation metrics healthbased.
This column presents ASHRAE's current positions
and activities related to these topics.
Giving Every Building a Tune-Up
Commissioning of a building's heating, ventilation
and air-conditioning (HVAC) system includes ensuring
the initial operation is as designed, and retro-commissioning
ensures continued operation of the HVAC
system to meet occupant needs. Multiple panelists in
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ASHRAE JOURNAL ashrae.o rg D ECEM BER 2 0 2 2
the public schools and private sector panels noted that
most of their buildings were not operating as expected.
A recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO)
report found that more than 40% of school districts
required replacement or upgrade of their heating, ventilation
and air conditioning systems.3 Many of the summit
panelists reported conducting retro-commissioning
of their buildings to optimize their operation. A panelist
with the GSA noted the cost saving potential of commissioning,
since properly operating buildings use less
energy.
Commissioning has long been recognized by ASHRAE
as critical to achieving intended HVAC system performance.
ASHRAE Guideline 0, The Commissioning Process,
was first published in 1989 and is updated under continuous
maintenance, most recently in 2019. ASHRAE
has also developed: ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 202,
Commissioning Process for Buildings and Systems, first published
in 2013 and under continuous maintenance; The
Strategic Guide to Commissioning, published in 2014 and
available as a free download; and the Commissioning
Stakeholders Guide, published in 2018. Commissioning is
also one of the main subjects of the Indoor Air Quality Guide:
Best Practices for Design, Construction, and Commissioning,4
which is also a free download. Unsurprisingly, commissioning
is one of the core recommendations of ASHRAE's
Epidemic Task Force.5
Brendon J. Burley, Ph.D., P.E., is the healthcare practice leader for Burdette, Koehler,
Murphy & Associates, Inc., in Baltimore. He is the chair of ASHRAE SSPC 62.1 and a
member of ASHRAE's Environmental Health Committee.
http://ashrae.org
ASHRAE Journal - December 2022

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