The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA) has completed its trilogy of free guides designed to help building owners and managers turn their buildings into safe havens that protect occupants from health risks linked to airborne contaminants and viruses.
The third guide called Buildings as Safe Havens – a practical guide explains how to measure Indoor Air Quality and what questions to ask ventilation experts.
The foreword is written by Professor Cath Noakes OBE, who is Professor of Environmental Engineering for Buildings at the University of Leeds and a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE).
She states that poor ventilation is the most overlooked building safety issue and can be directly linked to high levels of Covid-19 transmission.
“Covid-19 has been shown to be transmitted through the air,” she writes. “Despite regulatory requirements that have been in place for a number of years. This guide will be an invaluable tool in raising awareness of the importance of good IAQ and making our buildings more infection resilient.”
The new BESA guide provides a step-by-step strategy for monitoring and maintaining good IAQ in offices, schools, and public buildings and provides advice and strategies for dealing with ventilation problems.
It outlines the questions building managers should ask their ventilation and air quality specialists so they can properly address their IAQ problems, and provides recommendations for conducting a building review, planning for improvements, and selecting the right technology.
The contents of the guide were steered by a technical committee led by Nathan Wood, chair of BESA’s Health and Wellbeing in Buildings group, and the Association’s head of technical Graeme Fox.
The guide contains a building review spreadsheet to help building managers identify areas that require improvement. This is designed on a traffic light system, with actions categorised as red, amber, and green, and works in tandem with an IAQ monitoring spreadsheet.
All three BESA guides addressing indoor air quality (IAQ) can be downloaded for free from: www.theBESA.com/iaq