Maintaining high standards of indoor air quality for your office building makes for more comfortable, more productive, and healthier workers. With the right technology, everyone at your workplace can breathe easy—even during wildfire season, or if you work in an old-fashioned building.
Our experts here at Chiller have talked a lot about how to improve the air quality in your office, but before you know whether your air quality is in need of improvement, you need to measure it. This is where commercial air quality testing services come in. Having your building’s air quality regularly tested helps you catch air quality issues before they start giving you and your office workers figurative and literal headaches.
Whether you’re worried about your building’s air quality and need to know what to do to improve it or want to make sure your HVAC system is doing its job, leave it to professionals to find out. In this blog, we’ll take a look at why IAQ testing services are so important for office buildings and how they work.
The Real Costs of Poor Indoor Air Quality—and How to Cut Them
When it’s wildfire season or allergy season, if your office’s HVAC systems aren’t up to snuff, you’ll notice plenty of sniffling around the office. If you’ve ever had to work through an allergic reaction, you know it’s not easy to stay as productive as you want.
On top of that, if your office’s air isn’t as clean as it should be, it’s easier for disease to spread. When someone in your office gets sick and has to take a day or more to recover, your business loses their productivity while they sit at home on the mend. And if a sick worker comes to work anyway to avoid falling behind or overburdening their coworkers, they can get their coworkers sick instead, which costs the entire US economy over $150 billion in lost productivity every year!
Keeping up your office’s indoor air quality makes it harder for allergens and pathogens to spread through your office. In short, keeping your office’s air clean and fresh with regular and professional air quality testing saves money.
Regular IAQ testing:
- Detects the presence of pollutants like mold, carbon monoxide, radon, or volatile organic compounds that can make people feel unwell
- Reduces sick days and improves worker concentration
- Gauges your HVAC system’s ability to cut down on the spread of pathogens
- Identifies potential problems or shortcomings with your HVAC systems
- Identifies opportunities to improve your HVAC system’s performance, energy efficiency, and operational costs
How Air Quality Testing for Commercial Buildings Works
Having clean air in your office building is important, so you don’t want to take half-measures with it. Professionals with experience performing indoor air quality testing for office buildings know how to use the right technology, tools, and methodologies to tell how clean your air really is and figure out what problems could be keeping it as clean as it should be.
Here’s how professionals test your building’s air quality:
Start With a Visual Assessment
A professional will always start simply by taking a look with their eyes. They’ll look for signs of water damage, visible mold growth, poor ventilation, or other issues that can cause poor air quality. However, a professional air quality tester isn’t restricted to just eyes—a walk through your building can also uncover chemical odors and other red flags lurking in your building.
Choose Where to Test
After the visual inspection, it’s time to start testing. But before the scientific instruments can come out to get objective facts about your building’s air quality, you have to first choose where to test. Professional air quality testing can’t cover every square inch of your property, but it can focus on problematic areas such as:
- Parts of your office with high foot traffic
- Spaces near pollutant sources
- Areas where people have complained about air quality, such as offensive odors, allergic reactions, or headaches
- Areas around your air handling units
Start Measuring Air Quality
Now the scientific instruments can come out. Measuring air quality focuses on comfort and pollutant factors such as:
- Temperature
- Relative humidity
- Carbon dioxide levels
- Carbon monoxide
- Volatile organic compounds
- Particulate matter
Many of these factors can be measured in real time with handheld assessment equipment, but if more rigorous testing is needed, professional air sampling services can use state-of-the-art equipment and laboratory analysis to get more thorough results.
Compare Air Quality
After collecting enough data, the next step is to compare that data to relevant air quality standards for office buildings, such as the standards set by ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers. ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 62.1-2022 is the most recent collection of standards for acceptable indoor air quality.
IAQ testing professionals will test outdoor air as needed to see how much of a difference there is in quality between outdoor and indoor air. If outdoor air quality is especially bad, such as during wildfire season, poor air quality in your building can be a sign that your HVAC systems aren’t up to the task of filtering the air and need an upgrade or retrofit.
Make Recommendations for Improvement
Once the air quality has been measured, professionals deliver a report with their findings and any action items they might have for you.
The best results to get from professional air quality testing is that everything is fine and that your HVAC systems are working as intended to keep your building’s air healthy. Think of it as regular maintenance for your air quality. Not every seasonal maintenance check will turn up a problem, and that’s a good thing.
However, if the tests show that the air quality in your office is falling, that means there’s work to do. Reports on your building’s air quality will include professional recommendations for what you can do to improve air quality, such as changing filters, increasing ventilation, or installing or rearranging air purification systems.
Chiller Systems Service: Providing Air Quality Solutions for Denver Businesses
The safety, health, and comfort of your office’s workforce is your top priority. It’s ours, too. Since 1997, we’ve helped businesses throughout the metro Denver region and the Colorado Front Range keep their air quality high.
Our indoor air quality services include installing, repairing, maintaining, and upgrading all brands of air purification equipment. If a commercial air quality testing expert has found your building’s air quality lacking, we can help you put their recommendations into action with full support for turnkey, best-value solutions that won’t overextend your budget.
Contact us today for support and recommendations on indoor air quality.