ASHRAE Journal:
ASHRAE Journal presents:
Emily Toto:
Hello, and welcome to the ASHRAE Journal Podcast, episode 26. I'm Emily Toto, ASHRAE Manager of Codes. Today's podcast is about the newly-published Standard 241, Control of Infectious Aerosols. Joining our discussion today are two special guests. Dr. Bill Bahnfleth, Chair of the Environmental Health Committee and presidential member of ASHRAE, is a professor at the Pennsylvania State University. He's currently serving as chair of the Standard 241 Project Committee. Welcome, Bill.
William Bahnfleth:
Thank you, Emily, glad to be here.
Emily Toto:
And Dr. Max Sherman is an expert researcher in building science. For several decades, Max was a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and is currently an honorary professor at the University of Nottingham. He lends his talents to ASHRAE as the vice chair of SSPC 241. Hi, Max.
Max Sherman:
Hi, Emily.
Emily Toto:
Both Bill and Max are ASHRAE distinguished lecturers and recipients of the Donald Bahnfleth Environmental Health Award, named in memory of Bill's father. They're also Holladay distinguished fellows. Well, let's get started. Can you tell us a little bit about the purpose of Standard 241 and what users are going to be able to glean from this standard?
William Bahnfleth:
Certainly, I'll take that one. I think the standard itself says it really very clearly and succinctly. The purpose of this standard is to establish minimum requirements for control of infectious aerosols to reduce risk of disease transmission in the occupiable space of new buildings, existing buildings and major renovations to existing buildings, including requirements for both outdoor air system and air cleaning system design, installation, commissioning, operation and maintenance. So it's really a comprehensive standard intended to address an area that really isn't covered in existing IAQ standards or codes for buildings. So from that point of view, it's something very new and there are a number of new concepts in it that I'm sure we'll talk about later, like the standard being based on something called equivalent clean air and applying to something called infection risk management mode.
Emily Toto:
Talking about some of those new concepts, Standard 241 has information that we could call groundbreaking information that hasn't appeared in a standard before of this kind. Max, could you walk us through some of the features that are new to the ASHRAE world of guidance that has been provided by Standard 241?
Max Sherman:
Sure, that's easy to do because there's only a few of them. After all, what 241 is, is something that answers the question, how do I make my building better if I want to get ready for the next epidemic? And that's what Bill just described. The groundbreaking features involve, as Bill said, the equivalent clean air concept of deciding how much you need and quantifying how much air you need in infection risk management mode is really what the standard does to begin with. And in order to do that, you have to come up with all the ways to find equivalent clean air. Obviously clean outside air is one way, clean filtered air is another, clean disinfected air is another. And so we have a groundbreaking way of determining how to qualify air as being equivalent or effective clean air. The two biggest things are that, and then there's a whole bunch of smaller ones, which we can get into as we go along.
Emily Toto:
Thanks, Max. So users of our existing ventilation air quality standards, how are they going to go about applying Standard 241 to what they're already doing and related to that we can discuss the clean air flow in more detail?
William Bahnfleth:
Well, the user of the standard is going to look at it and determine from the tables for equivalent clean air per person how much they need, and they'll assess the building as it exists and determine how much equivalent clean air is provided. And then knowing what the difference is, the next task is to determine the best ways to provide it. This idea of equivalent clean air, it really is something that brings together concepts of dilution ventilation with outdoor air, which is what our ventilation standards typically deal with, and also the impact of different kinds of air cleaners, filters and germicidal ultraviolet and other technologies as well into a single quantity, which I think is a really powerful concept.
So instead of needing to increase outdoor air above minimum requirements to meet the standard, you can go beyond the minimum outdoor air that might be required by Standard 62.1, let's say, by putting in filter units. A unit of air that's cleaned by taking air from a space and putting it through a high-efficiency filter and then back into the room can be equated to an amount of outdoor air. So all of these things are interchangeable and it really creates a lot of flexibility for the user. Now how we get those numbers that are in the standard is another story in itself, and Max can say a few words about that.
Max Sherman:
Sure. The hardest thing we had to do perhaps was exactly that, and that was coming up with a way of figuring out what's the number. A lot of what we've done here is based on what the Epidemic Task Force did last year and the year before in order to handle COVID. The question we got asked all the time was, "Oh, yes, that's well and good, but what is the number?" And we never came up with a number because we didn't know how.
For Standard 241, we spent a lot of time to come up with the number and the way we came up with the number is very complicated. In Appendix D, we have a very short description of how we did that and there will be scientific papers published on that. But what we did was combine absolute risk and relative risk and theoretical risk and probabilistic risk in a way that met certain criteria. For example, we wanted the risk in every space to be more or less the same so that when you went from space to space, you had the same risk no matter where you were per hour that you were there.
We also didn't know what the community spread would be, what the community infection rate would be. So that was an unknown that we had to treat, but we had to make some assumptions about when the trigger would be, and we don't decide what the trigger's going to be, the public health people decide when the trigger's going to be, but then when it is, we improve the situation from long-range transmission and there's a lot of variation. That is the amount that somebody emits in terms of quanta, which is a magic word that's used in this business, is very variable. It depends on the individual, it depends on the strength of their infection, it depends on their immune system.
So there's a huge spread. So we had to use probabilistic approaches in order to figure out what was going to work for the population as a whole. And that's really one of the other criteria is that this is not an individual risk, it's not your personal risk, it's the average risk or the risk for the population as a whole. So when you put all that together, it came out to be a very complicated risk assessment problem that our risk assessment team spent a lot of time doing and came up with a model, and that's what generated the numbers that are in the table.
Emily Toto:
I know users will appreciate that you've been able to simplify all of that complex data into a user-friendly lookup table, and I think I speak for the community in saying that we look forward to seeing that research paper when it's published down the road.
William Bahnfleth:
Well, this is one of the difficult things about risk assessment and maybe why we didn't get there during the Epidemic Task Force is when you really start digging into it, there are so many choices to be made starting with what risk do I think is acceptable, that it's really hard to come up with a defensible model. And I think this is the best that I've seen and this idea of the risk being the same per hour no matter which covered space type you're in, is really, I think, powerful because everybody is somewhere 24 hours a day. So as you move from space to space, essentially it's saying that your aggregate risk over the whole day would be the same whether you spent all of it at school or all of it at the office or if you were at home all day.
Emily Toto:
Thanks for giving us a little bit more background information on the values that are used in the standard. I want to see if we could get some more background information on how the committee came to be formed and why this standard originated, how that all happened and the reason why we went through this accelerated process in order to get the standard published.
William Bahnfleth:
Sure. Well, it's a long story, but I'll give a short answer to it, of course. When the Epidemic Task Force was formed in 2020 one of the first things we did was go to the government and say, "We don't see building scientists on your response teams that are responding. Buildings are important, and that expertise ought to be there." It was really not until the second year of the current administration that that message really seemed to take hold. And the White House COVID-19 Response Team started doing some really good things with respect to promoting better indoor air quality and talking about the value of ventilation and air cleaning for reducing risk.
So we were having discussions back and forth about the need for national standards, and it all culminated in November of last year when Ashish Jha, who was given an award at the ASHRAE annual meeting in Tampa, got in touch with ASHRAE leadership and said that the White House really wanted to strongly encourage ASHRAE to develop a national pathogen control standard. And so the board of directors agreed to do that in the beginning of December. And because the White House really wanted to have a standard done as close to the end of the COVID restrictions as possible so that we could say that we really know how to deal with these situations, the board agreed to try to do it in six months, then Max and I wound up being chair and vice chair of the committee that was supposed to do it. So that's how the project got started, and we were given a lot of latitude to pick the right people and to modify a few of our standard ANSI procedures to develop the standard so that we could get it done within that six months’ timeframe.
Max Sherman:
And the approach we took was in some ways similar to what NASA calls tiger teams. That is we picked people who were competent and knowledgeable and had a broad range of knowledge in the whole area. We put them together in such a way that we could get stuff done. We created working groups, each of which had critical responsibilities, and we gave them a fair amount of latitude in getting those responsibilities done. And we couldn't fail. Any one of them failed and we all failed. So everybody was pulling together and we got a lot of work done from a lot of people, a lot of volunteers who put in huge, huge amounts of time and staff, too, for that matter, put in huge, huge amounts of time to get this done. And everybody really worked hard.
William Bahnfleth:
And we benefited a lot from the Epidemic Task Force experience. First of all, we'd been through an exercise like this where we were trying to get guidance out quickly, so we had learned some lessons there and also a lot of the same people who were involved became key personnel on SSPC 241P that developed this standard. So a lot of things helped us to get this done in that short timeframe.
Emily Toto:
I think you even did the bulk of the work within five months, right?
William Bahnfleth:
Well, we had our first PC meeting on February 28th, and we recommended the publication draft on June 15th that went to Standards Committee, and I believe that was 116 days start to finish.
Max Sherman:
Which is roughly 10 times faster than a typical ASHRAE Standard.
Emily Toto:
Yeah, I think people who are familiar with ASHRAE as we normally operate would be surprised by this new process and the team of individuals you had working on the standard, which was a very global effort. Is that right?
William Bahnfleth:
Sure. We had had members from US and Canada and UK and Denmark and Lebanon and India and Singapore and Australia.
Emily Toto:
I think that would be a great trend to carry forward into other standards. And along those same lines, the standard is a little different in that it expands on what we normally do with regard to post-design activities like commissioning, operations and maintenance. You have a large portion of the standard dedicated to assessment planning and implementation as you call it. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Max Sherman:
Sure. In the other standards, like 62.1 and 62.2, there's some inclusion of operations and maintenance, but here we wanted to be more specific about what you had to do for the infection control part. So there's a lot more detail here, and there are things like the kind of extra maintenance you have to do when you are in IRMM, you need to maintain things a little bit more carefully than you do when you're not in IRMM. So there's a lot of detail, and this was key from the Epidemic Task Force. We couldn't have done all of that without what had been already done in the Epidemic Task Force.
Emily Toto:
And just to clarify for everyone listening who hasn't picked up a copy of the standard yet, IRMM?
William Bahnfleth:
Infection Risk Management Mode. So that's the time when you have these special controls in place, which, as Max has already suggested, needs to be determined by some decision maker, which could be an authority having jurisdiction, could be a public health official, but it could be a building owner or it could be the occupant of a building.
Max Sherman:
Right. It's important to say that all of the things that we require that happen only have to happen when somebody has determined IRMM is appropriate, when it's time to turn this on. Otherwise, the standard is just waiting for that time and doesn't affect how the normal operation of the building works, at least not directly, which is why we don't talk about indoor air quality in this standard. It's not about indoor air quality. You're supposed to have that already. You're supposed to be doing Standard 62.1, 62.2 or 170 all the time anyway. It's only when there's an epidemic or somebody tells you you have to be in this mode that you include these extra air flows and the extra ECA.
William Bahnfleth:
And to me, this is bringing the idea of resilience into air quality standards for the first time, things that you ought to do at certain times, but don't need to do it all the time. Another example of that would be responding to wildfire smoke events such as we've had to do in recent times. I have to say that the filters I put in my house for COVID did a pretty good job on the wildfire smoke when it came to Pennsylvania a few weeks ago.
Max Sherman:
Yeah. Some of the questions we already have had are, "Can I use this when I have a wildfire mode?" And the short answer is not all of it because, for example, UV disinfection doesn't help during wildfires and nor does adding more outside air, but the filtration part certainly does. So one could imagine having a similar sort of thing for wildfire resilience, and in fact there's a guideline that's already out there to help you do that.
Emily Toto:
How will the standard help ensure that when we're ready to switch from normal to IRMM, that we'll be able to do so effectively?
William Bahnfleth:
I think because those technologies and control sequences have all been thought through and put in place and tested and because commissioning of buildings is important, then we should know that they're working. If you roll back to where we were at the beginning of the pandemic, everyone suddenly had to go out and find out whether their outdoor air dampers were actually open or whether they were delivering the right amount of outdoor air, whether their filters were installed correctly. Now we should have buildings that are ready to respond rather quickly because all those decisions have been made. They're not being made in a panic situation as was the case three years ago.
Emily Toto:
And we're able to do so by making sure that people have developed this Building Readiness Plan, which may be a new term of art.
Max Sherman:
That's right. The Building Readiness Plan contains all those things and the commissioning makes sure that everything that was supposed to be installed is installed and ready to work. So if you have all those things, if you've done all those things, then you're ready to just push a button or whatever it is that initiates the IRMM and not go out and buy anything new, not install anything new. It should all be in sort of ready reserve to go into IRMM when the trigger is pulled.
Emily Toto:
Max, I know before you've said that this actually goes back in time a little bit to a way of thinking that existed long before we had the pandemic. So we don't necessarily want to scare people that we have to do this because the world is having more disasters and health crises, but that actually, this goes back, you said to Florence Nightingale's time.
Max Sherman:
That's right. Back when ASHRAE was a pup at the turn of the 20th century, the big issue was in fact contagion not odors and all these things we know about now that we didn't know about then. And so Florence Nightingale was a big proponent, and if you're an HVAC geek you may know the name James Billings, who was at the same time also looking at ventilation rates for contagion control. The rates that those people had were not dissimilar from the rates that we came up with for different occupancies in 241. So sometimes things are circular and what goes around comes around.
William Bahnfleth:
I think that kind of speaks to the cycles of how we feel about what's important in indoor air quality. There were 22 states that had those 30 CFM per person rates in them in 1922, and then we became persuaded that odor was maybe the most important thing to control. And that's where we were sitting until the present when we wrote this standard almost a century later.
Emily Toto:
Of course, nowadays, we have a lot of new technology to account for. During the height of the pandemic, there was a lot of discussion about which air cleaners to use and what's the most effective, safest. How does Standard 241 address that question?
Max Sherman:
So that's really one of the breakthroughs that I mentioned before is we didn't want to pick winners and losers. We wanted any technology that could demonstrate that it was safe enough and effective enough to be used, and that would encourage innovation rather than retard it. If there are standards that exist that tell you the safety and effectiveness of a particular technology, we let you use them. But we also wrote a standard in Appendix A, which allows any new technology to be evaluated to determine what its safety and performance is, and you can use that technology to meet ECA requirements if you pass Appendix A, which is the performance test methods.
William Bahnfleth:
Of course, you hear people say sometimes, "Well, you're promoting air cleaners, aren't you?" No, we want to enable technologies that work and really there are burdens on both sides. So we've written a standard that will allow you to use some of these emerging air cleaners, but on the side of industry, they're going to have to test equipment for effectiveness and safety in a way that's credible and it will be a win-win if that happens. And I think we've started down that path with this standard.
Emily Toto:
So looking more at the idea of appendices to Standard 241, there are several. Max mentioned Appendix A, which provides flexibility to the standard on choosing different air cleaning technologies. We also have Appendix C, and so I'm interested in hearing if that was developed under a similar rationale to provide flexibility to the user of the standard.
Max Sherman:
Appendix C is sort of an interesting story. It is a test method that can be used to commission a process to show what its ECA is. And initially when we were in development, it was on the list of things that we were going to do in version two. We have a list of things that we just couldn't get done or that didn't have to be done in this version that we said should be done. Those kinds of commissioning tests were one of it, but we had a committed subgroup who said, "We want to make this happen." So they worked extra hard during a crisis period to turn what they had into essentially a test method. And so that's what Appendix C is. It's a test method for verifying in the field of what you really have in terms of ECA under certain limited conditions, and that can be used as a test method. And so it was really knife edged whether it was going to make it in or not, but they pulled it through and it's in.
William Bahnfleth:
I think that the relationship between the two is that in both areas, both in laboratory testing of air cleaners for effectiveness and safety and in field testing, we had a standards landscape that was a little underdeveloped. And that's really one of the reasons we have Appendix A is because some of the standards we'd hoped would be published by now aren't quite done. So it fulfills that role to some extent. And Appendix C is starting to describe procedures that could be used to determine how your technologies are actually working once they're installed, which can be a quite different thing.
Emily Toto:
And just in case this part is necessary in order to clarify to listeners, we have Appendix C allows for field commissioning to occur instead of offsite testing. Is that correct?
Max Sherman:
That's right. Appendix A is about testing equipment so that you take it to a laboratory, you test it, you get a performance rating. Appendix C says, well, it doesn't matter whether you think you know what the hell this equipment performs in the field. This is going to tell you how it really does perform in the field. So if you put a bunch of equipment together and you think it's going to perform in some way, you can verify that, in fact, it does perform in that way.
William Bahnfleth:
Now there's some types of equipment where there's an interaction with air distribution, for example. So you could do a standard test on a portable air cleaner in a chamber and get a clean air delivery rate for it, but when you take it to a different room and put it there, it may not have the same effect you'd predict on the concentration. And some things like germicidal ultraviolet, there is no really good laboratory test at this point for determining their clean air delivery rate. It really is how it performs in the space where it's installed.
Max Sherman:
And it's important to mention that air distribution was a tough nut to crack and we didn't completely fill it. That is we have something there, but we're not happy with it. That's one of the things that we'll continue to work on in version two is to improve the air distribution part. How do things interact? What kind of mixing is good? What kind of mixing is bad? These are things that we talked a lot about but couldn't come to a good consensus on and will be improved in future versions.
Emily Toto:
And you mentioned how this appendix serves as a method of test, but ultimately we're looking to have a method of test developed and also outside of the standard, and we're also looking forward to the publication of related standards to Appendix A, which are in the 185 family.
Max Sherman:
That's right. There's a bunch of 185s that aren't quite passed yet that will be passed. But I think it's fair to say that Appendix A will stick around a long time because every time there's an emerging technology, there isn't going to be a standard for it for quite some time, or there may not be a standard for quite some time. So until everybody's convinced that everything is covered and there are no technologies that aren't covered by existing standards, Appendix A will hang around.
William Bahnfleth:
They're not only ASHRAE standards, certainly 185.3 is one that we're eagerly awaiting. There's also an ASTM standard I understand is under development to test for byproduct production. So the more of those that we can reference, I think the stronger the standard will be.
Emily Toto:
Who do we expect to adopt and/or, separate question, to use the standard if not adopt it into a code?
Max Sherman:
Right. Well, if adopt it means code, I'm not sure that that's going to happen real quickly. It could happen down the line because this is something above the minimum, and codes are usually defined as the worst thing allowed by law and this may not make a minimum code, but that doesn't mean that it won't be adopted voluntarily by all sorts of people. For example, if you were a building owner, whether that be a commercial building or an apartment building and you wanted to attract people to say, "Look, we are more protected against the next epidemic because we have 241 compliance," then you might be able to charge more rent for the space that you have.
If you are a large building owner, like perhaps the GSA, you might want to spec that all of your new buildings have to be built 241 compliant. Now, that's not a code, but it's still requiring compliance. If you're a homeowner, you might want to just make your house 241 compliant because no one told you to, just because you want to do it. So there's all sorts of ways that people would use it. Minimum code may take a while before it's adopted that way.
William Bahnfleth:
Yeah, I think adoption by government agencies could be a really good way of pulling it into use. I do think it's going to be a long time before it was code, and even if it was building code, building codes don't really deal with operation. I think that's an area we're going to have to work on. Standards like this aren't going to be fully effective unless the operational requirements, the maintenance requirements are somehow enforced. And I think there's a good analogy in the energy efficiency carbon arena to what could help achieve better impact from this standard, as now we've gone from just having design standards to also having operational requirements. So that analogy should hold here as well.
Max Sherman:
Yeah, I think that's a good segue actually, because people ask, "Well, isn't this going to be a hideous energy sink if people do this?" There are sort of two answers. First of all, you're only doing this when there's an epidemic around. So even if it used a lot of energy, that might be deemed worth it. But more importantly, we allow so many different ways to comply. It isn't all just outdoor air. You could come comply with without any additional outdoor air using filtration recirculation or ultraviolet or a host of other means, and the energy cost would be quite small. So it's up to the designer to look at his climate and his conditions to decide what makes the most sense for the building that he's working on. And energy may not be an issue at all.
William Bahnfleth:
I think this is hopefully a place where we'll see the law of unintended consequences in a positive way. I think if we start getting everyone focused on the energy cost of providing better IAQ, they'll find out that it's actually a problem that can be solved. We just haven't really engaged with it yet.
Max Sherman:
And then the other unintended consequence is that if you're putting in better filters in your air handler so that you can comply with 241, everybody's getting the benefit of that in normal mode so that you're getting better indoor air quality for free, so to speak.
Emily Toto:
Sounds like we could kill two birds with one stone and have IAQ and energy efficiency all at the same time. I know haven't seen a lot of examples of implementation just yet with this being a new standard. And I'm sure this group is interested in collecting case studies from people who have them in the future, but theoretically this could be used in any number of designs. It could even work in a passive house, is that right?
William Bahnfleth:
Really any building, it's a question of how you interpret the requirements and how strictly you follow them. So for a residential, which Max knows very well, I think maybe he could talk about how would a homeowner or the owner of a multi-unit residential building apply this.
Max Sherman:
Right. Well, there's a unique thing about residential and that is that when there's an epidemic, public health people send people home. So the office buildings clear out, those sorts of places get lower density and protect people, but people spend more time at home. Therefore, you really want to consider what are the special things you should do at home. So in 241, one of the things we do is we specify that to comply in a home, you need a separation area so that when you have somebody you know is infected, as opposed to somebody who just might be at risk the same way the rest of the community is, you can separate them from the rest of the household and then there are requirements on what you do. We also have requirements for what you do if you have a vulnerable individual in the household, somebody that's at extra risk. So these are all things that I don't ever expect to be in a code, but you might want to do as a homeowner.
Emily Toto:
So for people who are interested in that, they'll want to check out Section 10 of the standard, right? Unfortunately, I don't think the memory of COVID is going to be receding from our minds anytime soon, and we're going to see a lot of use out of this standard. And with that in mind, the standard is going to continue to grow and improve. Would you say that there are big plans on the horizon for enhancing Standard 241?
William Bahnfleth:
Certainly. We have a list of items that we couldn't get to in our very short development time, and I think there will be some significant expansions of the standard over time. We didn't do as much with air distribution as we would've liked to, as Max noted. We were very interested in the interactions between in-room air cleaners and the existing air distribution, and found that that was not an easy thing to deal with. Another example is the risk assessment. We right now have one set of numbers based on one set of choices about all the parameters that go into the model. I think there's room to generalize that and develop some kind of a performance path, which was something we've talked about but didn't implement there. We can see more development in the air cleaner section as some of these other test procedures become available. So I see a lot of things that we could do. And perhaps another one is energy, looking at that more closely, the impact of the implementation of the standard on energy use. What else, Max?
Max Sherman:
Well, I think some of the things that we want to do in the near term are to provide more guidance for the users on what we do have as we're doing these other things. We want to produce a user's guide so that you can figure out how to do all the things that we say you do. We have some informative appendices which help you do that a little bit, but we really need to do that in a much better way, so we're going to focus on that. The other thing is that we took a lot of shortcuts to generate the standard in such a short time. The ASHRAE way is to make standards be ANSI standards. So one of the things we have to do is spend some time turning this into an ANSI standard at some point so that it has the full amount of rigor that all of our other standards do. That's going to be a lot of work for the committee over the next couple of years.
William Bahnfleth:
Well, and a big change, too, is ANSI or not, we've already agreed with the Standards Committee that going forward, we're going to follow ASHRAE standards and procedures, which are based on meeting the ANSI requirements. So we'll be having more open meetings, and the standard will be under continuous maintenance. So continuous maintenance proposals and comments can be submitted and they'll have to be responded to. So all of those procedures that those who are familiar with ANSI know and love will be coming to 241 in the future.
Emily Toto:
In five months' time you've done a lot and there's already some great tools that are available at the present time. If people get a copy of this standard right now, they'll get immediate access to a nice tool for doing that equivalent airflow calculation. And so it's great that you've been able to provide so much in this little time you had available.
William Bahnfleth:
Well, again, that's the ETF carryover. The equivalent clean air calculator in 241 is the progeny of the equivalent outdoor air calculator that the ETF produced. And there are a couple of other things as well for ERV assessment and for reentry assessment, and there may be more in the future.
Emily Toto:
Well, I just wanted to invite both of you to share any final thoughts that we may not have covered in the previous questions. Max?
Max Sherman:
Sure. I think that it's important for everybody to understand that this was done in record time and probably has some issues in it. And we are looking forward to hearing people try to make proposals through the continuous maintenance process to help us find those. And we're going to continue to extend it in the ways we've talked about from air distribution to developing standards. We'd like perhaps to develop some of the things that are in the appendices to be standalone standards as well. So we've got a lot of things to do. We're going to be very busy, as I said over the next couple of years, turning this from a tiger team-written standard into a normal ASHRAE-written standard. So there's a lot to do and we're kind of looking forward to do it under Bill's leadership.
William Bahnfleth:
Well, I echo everything that Max said there. There's still a lot to do, and I think a lot of it is what happens around the standard as he suggested. I think making sure that it's comprehensible and accessible and as easy to apply as possible is one important task. And I really think we need to not just leave it here and say, well, we've developed a nice standard. How are we going to use it is our next question. So we need to work to get it adopted and also to try to follow up on what the board charged us with doing, which is considering how some of the provisions of 241 could be incorporated perhaps into 62.1 and 62.2. And eventually, I'd like to personally see a national model IAQ standard, and I think perhaps this would move us in the direction of having standards that could get that status.
Max Sherman:
We're doing a few things to help communicate. You will see in upcoming ASHRAE Journals, articles by Bill and I and the other members of 241 trying to explain different pieces and parts. There should be some program items at the Chicago winter meeting that are there to help people learn about 241. So there are going to be a continuous stream of communication type activities that are happening to try to get the word out and to try to answer any questions.
Emily Toto:
Well, we really appreciate your efforts and your perseverance working on this standard. I know there's some committee members and staff alike after this publication that need to catch up on some sleep.
William Bahnfleth:
Well, it's been a great privilege to work on this. And yes, it was a tremendous amount of work, and I had other plans like spending more time on my bicycle, but I wouldn't have missed it for the world to be able to work with these experts to really take on a big challenge like this and to have it turn out as well as it did.
Max Sherman:
I, on the other hand, was glad not to have to be on my bicycle.
Emily Toto:
So part two, you're going to be riding on the Peloton.
Max Sherman:
A little more than I have been. Yes.
Emily Toto:
Well, thank you, Bill and Max, both for joining us on today's podcast. Thanks everyone for listening in. I'm Emily Toto, and this is the ASHRAE Journal Podcast.
ASHRAE Journal:
The ASHRAE Journal Podcast team is editor, Drew Champlin; managing editor, Kelly Barraza; producer and associate editor, Chadd Jones; assistant editor, Kaitlyn Baich; associate editor, Tani Palefski; creative designer, Teresa Carboni; and technical editor, Rebecca Matyasovski. Copyright ASHRAE. The views expressed in this podcast are those of individuals only and not of ASHRAE, its sponsors, or advertisers. Please refer to ashrae.org/podcast for the full disclaimer.