Tag: building pressure

Prevent Sick Buildings: Why Positive Building Pressure Matters

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Can a building get sick? I’ll give you the answer up front: Yes, sure, most definitely — a building can get “sick.” You may ponder… “But how can a building become sick? It is an inanimate object. It doesn’t live and breathe like humans!” On the contrary, your building is a living object. The main factor making your building come alive is its people: your customers, employees, and outside partners (think mail delivery or an overnight cleaning crew). Let’s dive into what factors can make a building sick and why maintaining positive building pressure is so important in prevention.

What Makes a Building Come Alive?

First, consider what may make your building come alive (or ultimately “infect” it):

  • Supplies
    The products you bring in (from any point of origin) may have outside contaminants or be perishable. As you know, perishables may emanate odors or fumes.
  • Chemicals
    You must account for chemicals or cleaning supplies in their controlled rooms (where exhaust is extremely important). 
  • Restrooms
    Consider the restroom facilities. Restrooms, especially those open to the general public (i.e. in a lobby area) can encounter high volumes of traffic and behaviors that may not meet sanitary standards. 
  • HVAC System(s)
    Your HVAC system is a key element bringing your building to life. With proper cleaning and maintenance, they are designed to provide comfort on demand. Heating and cooling are crucial amenities that have grown to be a must-have and are mandated by federal and local guidelines. 

When you take all these factors into account, it’s easier to understand how a building can become “sick.”

Sick Building Syndrome symptoms

Facility Managers: How to Prevent Sick Buildings

So how can a facility manager or building owner help to prevent sickness in a facility? As a professional in the HVAC industry, my primary goal is to earn your trust to maintain the wellness of your building’s HVAC system. Think about it — you can’t control others’ actions. There is no way to determine someone’s state of health as they are in your establishment. But you can control the HVAC system and make sure it is properly maintained to be a healthy system!

A little-known fact about HVAC systems that I will stress the importance: FRESH OUTSIDE AIR IS NEEDED TO MAINTAIN A POSITIVE BUILDING PRESSURE AT ALL TIMES. What does this mean, and why is it important?

  1.  Your restaurant, retail store or office building, has many moving parts to bring it alive, has to breathe. Like any living thing, it requires oxygen to replace the carbon dioxide. The equation should result in bringing in a greater amount of fresh air than the carbon dioxide, chemicals, fumes/odors, and cooking effluents that the building creates. When this happens, there should be a slight positive pressure from the inside of your establishment that pushes outward at your doors and drive-thru windows.  A proper HVAC test and balance (TAB) by an NEBB-Certified firm like Melink can help you achieve this goal.  

  2. A common oversight that people make is assuming, “My building is positive. We’re in good shape.” But how sure are they that the lungs of the HVAC system are clean and free of operational damages? Many times, I have encountered damaged and clogged filtration components within an HVAC system that may lead to costly repairs to your equipment and structural damages:
  • Clogged or missing outside air intake filters
  • Clogged, missing or inadequate air filters
  • Clogged evaporator and condenser coils
  • Clogged and inadequate fan blower wheels
  • Mold and mildew
  • Trapped small animals that lead to contaminations
  • Contaminated duct work that eventually shows up on the supply, return and exhaust grilles throughout the establishment 
Checking HVAC ductwork for positive building pressure

All these issues work together to create a sick building.  The opposite of positive pressure is that dreaded negative pressure. Every time your facility’s doors open, all of the outside air conditions are sucked into the building.  These elements can be hot or cold air, humidity, airborne pathogens, and odors. The humidity attaches to the chilled supply diffusers and grilles, creating moisture buildup that drips onto your floors, tables, customers, and clients.

Checking HVAC filters for positive building pressure

Of course, it’s not feasible for a facility manager to know the ins and outs of every HVAC system of every facility he/she manages. So let us do the work for you! Melink Corporation’s T&B technicians can be your eyes and ears to help your facilities maintain positive building pressure. We are an army of application engineers with skilled LEED and NEBB certifications. Our company is nationwide and has more than 30 years of experience. Along with services that will help you on your way to a healthy building, we offer a monitoring system and demand ventilation systems that will alert you when problems or concerns arise.  These services, along with reliable routine maintenance will minimize uninterrupted service to your most important people. We can help you protect your customers, employees, and outside partners from sick buildings.

Get A Pulse On Your Building

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In today’s world, we are surrounded by smart phones, watches, cars, and other devices that are becoming further integrated into our lives. These smart sensors and technologies are helping day-to-day tasks become more efficient. To improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings and restaurants, these smart sensors and technologies can be applied in a similar manner.

Like a Fitbit that monitors and trends personal health metrics, sensors within a building can monitor and trend overall building health. With these smart sensors, important building health metrics, like relative humidity, CO2 levels, temperature, and pressure, can be measured to paint a picture of building health and HVAC performance. With data from the sensors, facility managers can identify improvements regarding building health, energy efficiency, and occupant safety and wellness within their building. PositiV, Melink’s exciting innovation in the world of building health, equips facility managers and building owners with a tool they need to verify building health and HVAC performance.

There are a variety of tell-tale signs of an unhealthy building like wet, dripping diffusers from high humidity, lower occupant cognitive ability from excessive CO2 levels, or a strong incoming draft at an open door caused by improper pressure or HVAC balance. These problematic unhealthy building signs can be addressed before becoming a costly, major issue. With building performance data, a facility manager or building owner will easier understand when building health begins to decline and identify corrective actions for the issues before they cause further problems.

A Fitbit won’t directly prevent a heart attack or make someone healthy, but it does arm its wearers with knowledge that is needed to live a healthier lifestyle. Similarly, building sensors won’t make a healthy building space, but they will equip its users with the information needed to create and sustain a healthy building space. It’s up to the manager or owner to take necessary corrective actions, but providing the data to help them make the proper decisions is the first step to improving overall building health.

Using Data to Evaluate Building Health

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What is the most valuable resource in the world? If you said time, I can’t argue with that… However, if you said a commodity like gold, coal, or even oil, you may be shocked to learn that not even these precious natural resources compare to the inherent value of a certain intangible object. I’m talking about data — more specifically, the data that allows us to make mission-critical decisions about building health.

We live in a period known as “The Digital Revolution,” where the once groundbreaking mechanical inventions of the 20th century have been enhanced by the digitization of computer software and automated control systems. Bookkeeping now consists of populating Microsoft Excel worksheets, medical records are now analyzed by computers, and checks can now be deposited with a smartphone camera. These advances in technology have, without a doubt, made our lives easier. However, many of us are overlooking the most valuable byproduct of using these machines, which is the collected data itself.

The practice of interrelating computing devices for the sake of transferring data over a digital network is known as the Internet of Things (IoT). This shared system of information allows us to collect data using multiple machines to ultimately assist humans in making better decisions.

Melink Corporation has always strived to be ahead of the curve when it comes to modernizing its products for better data acquisition.

For instance, our Intelli-Hood® kitchen ventilation system was the first of its kind back in the early 1990s. Our engineers have since continued to evolve its firmware to better integrate with building automation systems so that building owners can more closely monitor energy consumption. Users can log in to a cloud-based portal to extract real-time data to better manage their utilities. Thirty years after its inception, Melink continues to lead the industry by advancing green energy building solutions.   

In February 2019, Melink Corporation pushed the envelope for how building owners keep their workspaces healthy by launching a new product that is the first of its kind. Much like how a smartwatch can closely monitor your physical health, PositiV™ is a device that monitors your building’s health.

Components of building health
Melink Corporation’s PositiV™ system helps monitor building health.

About the size of a thermostat, PositiV ™ houses a variety of sensors to detect temperature, relative humidity, CO2 levels, and building pressure. This data is collected and transferred to our online portal where users can view the live data and trend it over time. For facilities managers who operate a network of buildings across multiple cities and states, PositiV™ allows them access critical data that can both justify costly HVAC improvements and warn against sick building syndrome. How is this possible? Melink’s software developers have implemented machine-learning algorithms and data visualization tools to harness the full potential of this invaluable building health data. After all, data means almost nothing if it’s not thoroughly analyzed and effectively interpreted.

Similar to how doctors check blood pressure, cholesterol levels and body temperature to diagnose a patient, PositiV™ can connect seemingly unrelated data sets to draw conclusions about building health.

Building owners, feel more empowered to make the critical decisions you need to keep your occupants comfortable.  Calculate how PositiV™ can help you save money and improve building health.



PositiV and Test and Balance: A one-two punch to sick building syndrome

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Sick building syndrome is a condition that affects a building’s occupant due to unhealthy factors in the work environment primarily associated with poor ventilation and airflow in the facility. Per the EPA, symptoms of Sick Building syndrome include acute discomfort such as headaches, dry skin, coughing, dizziness, and nausea. Despite all these symptoms Sick Building syndrome can go undetected for years as the symptoms are all relatively minor and occur over multiple years.

With the release of Melink PositiV™ earlier this year, facility managers can now remotely diagnose and asses 4 of the key building metrics that contribute to building health. These include CO2, relative humidity, building pressure, and temperature. By ensuring these 4-building metrics are within acceptable ranges facility managers can sleep well knowing that they will be able to monitor and track if their facility is showing early signs of sick building syndrome. This can empower the end user to act and stop the early patterns that can lead to numerous issues down the road.

You know it is time to act when one of the 4 measurements are outside of the recommended limits. A primary way of attempting to correct any of these issues in a facility is to have a test and balance to reset airflow to the engineered design plans. During a test and balance, existing issues are identified and corrected to allow for proper airflow into the space. Through this process the technician should be examining and resetting the outside air dampers at the facility to allow the building to receive the correct amount of fresh air. The combination of monitoring and acting on the data allows end-users to ensure comfortable, healthy and energy efficient facilities.

Healthy Buildings by Staying PositiV

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This week my team and I had the unique pleasure of attending the Restaurant Facility Management Association’s annual conference, RFMA, in Austin, Texas. Having a chance to reconnect with our customers and focusing on helping them solve problems is always an incredibly rewarding and satisfying experience.

In talking with so many of the customers with whom we work on a regular basis, we noticed some consistencies regarding their challenges. First, many of these Facility Managers are managing an incredibly large portfolio of stores; most folks citing somewhere between 50 and 100 under their management, offering precious little time on a per site basis. Additionally, operating budgets are incredibly thin, leaving marginal room to proactively manage facilities, and often only being able to respond to urgent matters re-actively.

As the industry leader in HVAC Testing, Balancing, and Commissioning, Melink is uniquely positioned to help Facility Managers ensure comfortable, healthy and efficient buildings. And for years we’ve been taking note of the challenges this industry faces. So, we are incredibly excited to be launching our new product, PositiV!

PositiV is a standalone, self-powered, system that monitor’s building pressure and remotely tracks building health. Think of it like a fitness tracker for commercial buildings. We believe this proprietary technology will revolutionize the commercial building industry; it’s unlike anything else you’ll find in the market.  

So what makes this tech so revolutionary? First and foremost it was designed with Facility Managers in mind, empowering them to monitor the health of their portfolio with meaningful information… not just more data and alerts. It’s entirely stand-alone; meaning there are no wires or difficult connections with your local network. Our technology is powered by solar energy (yes, even the indoor unit!) and connected to the cloud wireless via 4G. And installation can be done in less than 15 minutes. One unit is installed on the roof and another unit is installed inside. From here, PositiV tracks four key building health indicators: building pressure, relative humidity, temperature, and CO2. But we want do more than just empower Facility Managers with information – we want to help them work smarter! For example, this technology enables our users to proactively manage problems by customizing intelligent alerts and trending this information over time, which provides valuable context, as opposed to a limited snapshot in time. 

This week we heard countless real-world problems cause by sick buildings. Here are a few examples, and where we believe PositiV can help.

  1. High Humidity. A negative building pressure draws in unwanted moisture from the outside causing costly damage and potentially even organic growth (i.e., mold).  Two Facility Managers I spoke with talked about having to replace tens of thousands of dollars of woodwork as a result of high humidity warping and destroying it. Having the ability to remotely monitor building pressure will enable the industry to eliminate costly issues such as this. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
  2. Pest Control. One facility manager spoke of a facility whose operations were being threatened by an insect infestation brought on by negative air pressure. Again, having meaningful data enabling operators to respond in real-time will eradicate issues such as this. Restaurant operators have far more important things to worry about.
  3. Increased Store Comfort, Customer and Employee Satisfaction. Keeping buildings healthy will prevent air from feeling stuffy & stale, eliminate offensive odors from grease & sewage, prevent hot & cold spots in the dining room, keep smoke out of the kitchen and dining room through ensuring adequate hood capture, and will prevent the cook line from getting too hot. Any one of these issues could become a big problem. A sick building will often yield many, if not all, of these symptoms. Make operations thepriority through preventing the building from getting sick.
  4. Increasing Safety and Reducing Risk. Nobody wants to deal with the liability from a harmful “slip & fall” brought on by moisture pooling on a floor from dripping condensation. Again, the meaningful and real-time information PositiV provides will help make facilities safer and reduce these very costly risks. 
  5. Reduced Energy Costs. A sick building often has unnecessarily high energy costs due to equipment running inefficient. Frequently, this may have a chain effect causing other equipment to work harder or improperly as a result. Keeping a building healthy will keep the overall cost of energy low, thus improving store profitability.

These issues can be mitigated with the use of PositiV. By consolidating multiple buildings’ health in a single, easy-to-use dashboard, users can triage problem sites and get ahead of issues caused by negative pressure. Ultimately, PositiV will give Facility Managers peace of mind in knowing their buildings are healthy and performing effectively.

If you’re interested in getting a unit for your facilities, let us know. We’re currently finalizing our Beta testing and will be going into full production in Q2. At Melink, It’s our mission to change the world, one building at a time. I hope we can do so, together.

by Craig Davis, President and Alex Falck, Product Engineer

Healthy Buildings & Employee Performance: The Next Revolution ?

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Do you want to optimize your employees performance by 299%?  Increase cognitive ability in strategy development by 288%?

Yes! Of course, we all would love to fully optimize ourselves and those around us to maximize our potential and impact on the world.  What if the answer was all around us, literally allowing us to live, and also invisible.  According to new research focused on indoor air quality in the work place, there is a tremendous opportunity to move beyond “green” buildings and ensure we work in “healthy” buildings. 

Source: Natural Leader: The Cogfx Study

The COGfx Study, while limited to 24 participants, demonstrated that improved indoor environmental quality doubled cognitive testing results in buildings with enhanced ventilation versus conventional buildings.  The study distinguished between three building types; Conventional, Green, and Enhanced Green.  Within these building types the focus benchmarks were Carbon Dioxide levels in parts per million (ppm), ventilation rates expressed in cubic feet per minute (CFM) per person, and Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) in micrograms per cubic meter. It’s also worth noting that building used was already a LEED Platinum certified facility, thus there’s likely more room for increased scores when comparing older existing buildings.

Source: Natural Leader: The Cogfx Study

The study explores the decrease in energy efficiency, which could be viewed as a negative, however relative to the increase in employee productivity and lost time due to sickness the savings can be dwarfed.  The noted increased cost per occupant in energy consumption is $400/year, however the study suggest a 6 x return in sick leave reductions alone relative to the increased energy cost.  Factor in the potential for increased productivity for one of the biggest operational cost for any company, the people, and the energy penalty is worth the investment.

While Melink is focused on energy efficiency, we’re also not blind to the impacts of IAQ and built our corporate HQ as a LEED Gold facility, later upgraded to Platinum.  In addition to the LEED standards, we also monitor in door CO2 levels via sensors and increase ventilation rates via a HVAC purge sequence once the room exceeds 800 ppm in CO2.  On average, the general office area CO2 levels hover around 600 ppm and are aided by the addition of live plants which produced an average drop of 100 ppm in CO2.

This focus on IAQ has led us to the development of a new product, Melink PositiV, to help ensure proper positive building pressure and CO2 levels in commercial buildings. The aim is to provide a simple solution for one of the biggest problems in all buildings, restaurants and retail locations; negative building pressure.  The standalone device will monitor pressure, temperature, relative humidity, and CO2 levels and provide a picture of building health and trends.

Top 5 Negative Building Pressure Problems

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The difference between outside air supplied to a building and air removed from inside a building is the building pressure.  Typically, a slightly positive (or more air being supplied than taken out) building pressure is wanted for most buildings.  Negative building pressure can cause many issues for customers from high energy costs to hot and cold spots in a building.  Here are the top five problems a building with negative pressure can experience:

  1. Difficulty Opening and Closing Doors:

One of the first signs that a building is negatively pressurized, is when the front door is not easily opened.  After finally opening the door to a negatively pressurized building, a large draft will be felt on your back as the door is slammed closed.  Because buildings are typically designed to be positively pressurized, you should feel a soft gust of air blowing outward when this is set properly.

  1. High Humidity:

If your building is negatively pressurized, the building will pull in unconditioned outside air through all openings including doors, windows, and other leaks in the structure. This is very noticeable in the summertime when outside humidity is especially high.  This can cause mold or mildew in the building.

  1. High Energy Costs:

Studies have shown that correcting negative building pressure can save a facility owner as much as 20% on their HVAC energy costs.  By ensuring your facility has a positive building pressure, you are avoiding unnecessary costs and maximizing comfort in the facility.

  1. Outside Debris:

In a facility that is negatively pressurized, owners are more likely to see outside debris being pulled into the facility through various openings. These items include, leaves, flies, dirt, as well as smells brought in from outside.  In many facilities, this could create major issues with production as the outside debris could be contaminating the products.

  1. Hot and Cold Spots:

Another symptom commonly noticed in buildings with negative building pressure is noticeable hot and cold spots that are created by the disrupted airflow.  This could cause the customers to become angry because they can’t reach a comfortable temperature in the building.  In a restaurant, this could also cause food at the counter to become cold.

Talking to Kitchen Staff About Restaurant Air Balance

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Muppet chef

Regarding restaurant air balance, negative building pressure costs restaurant facility managers thousands of dollars every year.  Uncomfortable kitchen staff, as well-intentioned as they may be, are often instigators of a facility’s air circulation becoming off balance.  Hot and bothered, they’ll tinker with the thermostats or other HVAC components in an effort to come into agreement with the air they are working in.  The issue is that most kitchen staff aren’t aware of the sensitivities of a balanced HVAC system and may make an adjustment that throws the system into inefficient operation, causing the entire operation to cost much more than necessary.

During your next site visit or conversation with on-site managers, restaurant facility managers should take a moment to explain the basics of air balance to kitchen staff.

Here are some points to explain:

1. The single most important thing to explain is that HVAC equipment works as “one system.”  What happens in the kitchen can and will affect the comfort in the dining areas, and vice versa.

Kitchen hood air transfer graphic

Graphic provided by Trane

2.  Explain basic building pressure.

  • Building pressure is a large factor of customer comfort, kitchen hood smoke capture, condensation issues, energy savings, door pull issues, insect issues. etc.
  • Kitchen airflow is the largest contributing factor to the overall building pressure.
  • High velocity airflow near kitchen hoods (like from a portable fan) can adversely effect the ability of those hoods to capture and remove heat and smoke.

3.  Emphasize regular cleaning of grease filters.

  • The kitchen staff and/or the building owner should ensure that all kitchen hood grease filters are being periodically cleaned.
  • They are in place to protect the exhaust duct work, exhaust fans, and the discharge area of the exhaust fans, which is typically the rooftop.
  • Grease filters can quickly become clogged if not thoroughly cleaned on a regular basis. Also, these should also be replaced immediately if they are damaged.

HVAC cover

Hiring an experienced and professional TAB firm to perform a test and balance on your HVAC system periodically can provide confidence that your systems are balanced and operating properly.  This will ensure that your kitchen staff is operating under the best conditions and that your customers are comfortable.