Beam Me Up Scotty!
Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of…….lost in space. Walk into room and can’t remember why you went there? Have that fuzzy kind of brain doesn’t seem to be working day? Maybe a senior moment…but you are only 35? Feel lethargic? Can’t concentrate? What the heck is going on?
Interesting thing about Oxygen..too much or too little can be lethal. The right balance of 21% Oxygen and 79% Nitrogen keeps us humans happy and healthy. The right balance of CO2 in the atmosphere is also critical to our happiness and well being.
Spatial Disorientation….a new frontier. This is the more common syndrome caused by a lack of fresh air or oxygen and too much CO2, or stale air. Most people experience this in schools, offices or homes where there is little or no fresh air exchange taking place. When you have room that is full of people the amount of CO2 goes up and the amount of O2 or oxygen tends to go down if there is no method of introducing outside fresh air.
The typical symptoms of this problem include, lethargy, headaches, inability to concentrate, foggy/groggy feeling and total lack of focus. This is why many of the older schools in the US that had through the wall heating/cooling units and no central systems to introduce fresh air had so many students falling asleep or having significant problems concentrating in class by the middle of the afternoon.
The majority of the homes that have been built in the last 10 to 15 years in the US have incorporated new energy conserving building technology and materials to keep the house warmer or cooler using less energy. These “tight” homes also have little or no natural ventilation which means no way to introduce any fresh air into the living space.
While the ability to introduce outside air through “economizers” incorporated in many of the commercial HVAC systems used in commercial building is fairly common, this is not the case for the residential market. Unless requested by the home owner, fresh air dampers or mechanisms designed to introduce outside air through the HVAC unit are never installed in homes. And for good reason.
When the outside air temperature is higher or lower than the inside ambient temperature it makes little sense to introduce cold or hot humid outside air into the house since you will now have to expend more energy to heat or cool that additional outside air. Yet, with the tightness of the homes, some effort should be made to introduce small amounts of outside, fresh conditioned air into the home.
Pure Air Systems has been making HEPA based, fan powered air filtration systems since 1985. These units are designed to either attach to an existing heating/cooling unit or as stand-alone systems. PAS HEPA units are attached to the heating/cooling units using the partial by-pass concept. In this way they pull a small portion of the total return air flow and filter it before putting it back into the supply side. These units can be used to introduce small amounts of outside air, filter it and mix it with the return air from the HVAC unit and then introduce it back into the house…..without using more energy to heat or cool.
For more information on the complete PAS product line and their capabilities please go to our website at: www.pureairsystems.com