Page 24 - School Planning & Management, April 2017

FACILITIES CLEANER AIR, BETTER STUDENTS
Such ventilation can also help to deal with potential carbon dioxide monitor- ing. At the Wentworth school, Harriman installed a carbon dioxide monitoring system the constantly checks carbon diox- ide levels inside and outside the school’s buildings.
Get Down on the Floor
Generally speaking, most ventila-
tion systems distribute air through vents placed high on the walls or in the ceiling. Harriman systems, however, go against the traditional grain.
“Typically a classroom or office build- ing ventilates with an overhead distribu- tion system,” says Harriman’s Story. “We ventilate at the floor — from zero to four feet, and we provide room neutral air, close to the temperature users want.
“Systems with floor displacement dif- fusers have been our standard practice for about five years now — so this is relatively
new in the industry.”
The story goes on to say that floor dif-
fusion systems can ventilate with lower airflow, which in turn requires less energy to heat and cool. “We’re not mixing air,”
he says. “We’re just delivering air to the occupied zone, and so we’re only heating or cooling air at the desired room temperature.
This is how the Harriman approach to improving IAQ in a room — by providing fresh air at the breathing zone and not mix- ing it. It is a displacement system that does not require as much heating or cooling of the air as a traditional system.
“We also use radiant flooring, which provides even heat across a room,” Story continues. “A traditional system uses thin tubing around the bottom perimeter of a wall. The tubing carries water heated to 180 degrees. It takes a fair amount of energy to heat water to that temperature.
Harriman’s radiant flooring system places tubes beneath the flooring and uses
water heated only to 80 degrees. The water passes heat to the flooring surface, which, in turn, radiates into the room — there is no need to use energy to blow hot air into a room.
Story goes on to point out the even more savings can come from generating hot water. “Because this system uses hot water at lower temperatures than tradi- tional systems,” he says, “it is possible to replace a traditional hot water heater with a condensing boiler.”
A condensing boiler, says Story, oper- ates at an efficiency rate of 95 percent, compared to an 83-percent efficiency rate for a traditional boiler.
All told, then, healthy indoor air quality enables the occupants of a school building to function at peak efficiency. In addition, maintaining healthy IAQ will make it possible to manage a building’s operating costs more effectively and, in some cases, actually reduce those costs. SPM
24 SCHOOL PLANNING & MANAGEMENT / APRIL 2017
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