ASHRAE Journal:
ASHRAE Journal presents.
Daniel Bourque:
All right everyone, welcome to the ASHRAE Journal podcast. My name is Dan Bourque and I'm a professional engineer in Halifax, Canada. I have served my local chapter as chapter president, I'm on a few committees, the Communications Committee at Society. Today with me, I have some excellent guests. Greg and Rebecca, why don't you introduce yourselves?
Greg Nilsson:
My name is Greg Nilsson. I am a Technical Officer with the National Research Council of Canada. I actively research different ways to evaluate technologies that improve indoor air quality, and I've been working on the topic of wildfire smoke and protecting critical infrastructure since mid-2017.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I'm Rebecca Schmidt. I'm Professor and Molecular Epidemiologist in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California, Davis. I have studies where I study the health effects of different exposures during pregnancy primarily, and that includes things like wildfire smoke and other air quality issues.
Daniel Bourque:
Great, so you both have mentioned wildfires and that's kind of the reason that we're all getting together is to talk about wildfires. In my neck of the woods, in Halifax, we do not have a wildfire season, we have hurricane season, and that happens every couple of years, we get hurricanes. But this summer or this end of spring, we had our first wildfire event that I can think of and it was all the news. We had a large one down at the tip of the province and also one that was quite close to Halifax. At the time, being president of the local chapter, I said, "My goodness, I need to reach out and put out a newsletter and see what kind of guidance ASHRAE has." I was digging, digging and then found a proposed Guideline 44, which deals with wildfires. I got put in touch with you two folks and said, "I need to know more," and so here we are.
Rebecca, maybe I'll ask my first question to you. As the fires were getting closer to our house, there's always the concern of loss of property, you can lose your house and stuff like that, but there was also a concern that we're being exposed to all the smoke. Yes, the fire is going to hurt you, but the smoke can also hurt you as well. Based on your background and research, how bad is wildfire smoke or smoke in general?
Rebecca Schmidt:
Yeah, so we're still learning more about wildfire smoke in particular, but air pollution in general we know has a lot of health impacts. During a wildfire event, those air pollution levels tend to be very much higher than our everyday kind of background air pollution levels, and so there's a lot of acute short-term health effects that can happen. Then, in addition, we're learning more and more about more long-term health impacts of wildfire smoke. There's concerns about both. Even if the wildfire is not very close to where your house is or where you are, you still can get exposed to the smoke at long distances and it can hover for periods of time where that exposure, it can be just as harmful as brief exposure up close.
Daniel Bourque:
Oh, that's a good point. I mean, we all see these dramatic videos of people driving through these walls of flame and stuff like that and you're saying, "Oh my gosh, those people, they're goners for sure," but no, they make it out the other end. Is there a consensus among health professionals that an acute exposure like that, somebody driving their car through a wall of flame, as opposed to being miles and miles off and kind of getting a low dose, is there a difference there?
Rebecca Schmidt:
Yeah, so the components of the smoke, whether you're really close to where the fire is happening or farther away is different, but the important health effects can happen with either type of all the different types of components. The really small particles that tend to travel really far are the ones that get deep into the lungs and can cause inflammation and other things that cause down road health impacts that are concerning at both levels.
Daniel Bourque:
All right, so if the main concern is smoke, I usually look to ASHRAE on guidance on how to improve indoor air quality and fresh air rates, but now the fresh air has smoke in it or the outdoor air has smoke in it. I understand that ASHRAE has gotten together and this Guideline 44P now addresses it. Talk a little bit about the proposed guideline, maybe Greg.
Greg Nilsson:
Sure. The guideline is a collection of best practices. Our committee is very diverse. We have people like myself who's a researcher on methodology of how to evaluate. We've got people like Rebecca who understand the health impacts. We have a lot of mechanical engineers and designers and some building operators, filter manufacturers as well to try to, I guess, collect as much information as we can. The guideline has gone through a couple different revisions. There was an earlier framework which was published I believe in early 2022 that focused on commercial buildings where the guideline we have now does actually cover pretty much all occupancy types, but it still speaks to a fairly general methodology or a set of strategies. If we look at it, the idea of, as you said, your outdoor air, which is generally considered clean, if I can go quote unquote, and you would add to the indoor environment, maybe filtering it to reduce the say CO2 levels in an indoor environment, which is kind of the typical design idea, now you have this really contaminated source of air. The question is, well, how do you deal with that?
A lot of ideas would be like, "Well, we'll just throw in a much higher level MERV-rated filters," and in reality that doesn't really meet performance expectations. I guess if I were to answer your question in a very high level is that we talk not only about just adding MERV-rated filters, but a lot about planning about how to approach from a design perspective, if you're designing and building a new building, how you can make some adaptations to a lot of focus on how to work within an existing building, whether it's maybe small retrofits or smaller actions that you can take where your system's not designed to suddenly add... If your system's designed for a MERV eight or 10 type filter and you throw in a 14 or a 16, try to reduce the PM 2.5 or PM 1 actually, which is the majority of what smoke is, your system likely won't handle that. You're going to reduce the amount of indoor air and potentially actually create a negative impact where the inside of the building goes negative in terms of its pressure to the outside, and you end up pulling smoke into the building.
I think I've over-answered the question. I have a tendency to do that. It's all good.
Daniel Bourque:
No, that's great.
Greg Nilsson:
But yeah, from a general perspective, the guideline is a set of best practices.
Daniel Bourque:
Okay, so there seem to be quite a few new publications out from ASHRAE recently such as Standard 241, which seem to be related in some sense to this in that we're looking at the outside air and we're trying to protect the occupants from particles. Or if I look at across the globe when we have bad smog days and stuff like that, isn't smog just the small particles? Is this guideline applicable to more than just for wildfires?
Rebecca Schmidt:
It was meant to be kind of focused on wildfire events, but also when there are these burns that occur in order to prevent wildfires, those are also included in the guidance.
Daniel Bourque:
Is there a large difference between wildfire smoke and the type of smog that you would see in a city? Because when the wildfire was happening around Halifax, we tried to find IAQ guidance so we go online and we see these various sensors and we're not as bad as New Delhi in India and we're not as bad as this city, but those are continual problems, right? Before we just talked about driving through the wildfire or a continuous background, what's the difference between the air profile outside of a building during a wildfire from maybe a smog event?
Rebecca Schmidt:
Yeah, so there are some differences again in the components of smoke and whether that's smoke that's burning in an urban area with things like cars and refrigerators and all kinds of other things mixed in, or if it's just a vegetation fire. A lot of times the controlled burns are simply vegetation fires, and that's different again than the air pollution you get from traffic and other sources. But in all cases there are... Particulate matter is a key component, and that's kind of what our guideline focuses on, filtering that out because we know that there are these health consequences associated with particulate matter. In all cases, any kind of particulate matter being breathed in isn't very healthy and we want to reduce our exposure.
Daniel Bourque:
Absolutely, absolutely. If the particulates are the problem then and that we're trying to deal with them, again, looking online during our wildfire, there seemed to be a number of new weather stations or new IAQ stations that happened to pop up from one day to the next, there was two or three in Halifax, the next day there were seven, and the next day there was 15, so are they good enough? Is it people like myself, engineers who say, "Oh, I need to provide everybody with some data, so let me share my data and share my data?" Is this just noise because of the quality of the sensors? Is this helpful at all?
Greg Nilsson:
Well, I would say that there's a large range of low cost sensors that have reached the market that most of them, if not all, use some sort of an online dashboard. Some of them, the dashboard is public. They're all based on a basic type of sensor, they actually all use very similar components. In terms of the low cost sensor, so we're talking a sensor that is probably less than $1000, and some people are going to look at me thinking that I'm crazy saying that that's a low cost sensor, but some of the sensors...
Daniel Bourque:
Only less than 1000? Oh, come on.
Greg Nilsson:
Well, I know CO2 sensors can be quite, I don't want to use the word cheap, they're low cost, but you can get most sensors in that range from say $250 Canadian up to about $800 Canadian, I'm not sure on the US conversion rate off the top of my head.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I think you can get some low cost sensors around $100 US.
Greg Nilsson:
In terms of are they good? When you look at the type of data that the AQHI in Canada or the AQI in the US is using, these are traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, if I'm using that, NIST, correctly. They're very high grade instruments and we're talking more than 1000, we'll just say that. These instruments have a very well established quality control system. Those would be much better to use, especially if you're thinking about any kind of a health-based decision. Now in terms of these lower cost sensors, they can give you an idea.
The best way that we've proposed it in the guideline and when I'm talking with others about this, is you can use it to baseline your building. Particles come and go, you talked about air pollution, you have traffic events that can peak your particles, and you get an idea of what's your building like normally, and then you see a smoke event or a smoke forecast come in and you get much higher peaks. Now, those may be overestimating, based on my experience they do tend to overestimate. Then you say, "Well, I need to do something. Maybe I need to change how my building's set up. Maybe I need to swap out my filters." Or maybe I've realized that these changes I'm trying to do aren't really doing what I thought, because when I'm comparing my readings today to the readings of my baseline, they're like say four times higher, five times, 10 times, 12 times.
Daniel Bourque:
It's an order of magnitude. It's not a question, are they good, it's are they useful. The quality of the measurement that it's giving you may be highly suspect, but if all of a sudden you're 10 times larger than yesterday, chances are things aren't great outside or inside.
Rebecca Schmidt:
So they provide a good relative measure of the same space.
Daniel Bourque:
Do you see in your research or in your field that these types of sensors are becoming more commonplace inside buildings? We have CO2 sensors that are now built into thermostats, they have occupancy sensors, and I've seen VOCs, volatile organic compounds, that are now built into some of these sensors. I haven't personally seen any with particulates, but maybe I'm not keeping my eyes open enough. Are these, again, order of magnitude useful or, "Hey, listen, your HVAC system should be doing the job and you shouldn't be noticing any order of magnitude differences sitting at your desk, it's too late?"
Greg Nilsson:
There's a lot in that question, Dan. I'll take a swing at it and then maybe I'll let Rebecca, she can ponder on it and fix the stuff that I didn't cover. The particle sensors are getting a lot of attention, especially from building researchers, my colleagues, colleagues in Health Canada and EPA and other groups, because field studies are super valuable for understanding how buildings perform, what's going on. However, for example, I'm studying some different particle movement in indoor spaces, I'm using instruments that are $20,000 each, that's Canadian. Those instruments, you cannot deploy that in a multi-story apartment building. That's, I'll use the word impossible rather than impractical, because nobody's going to pay that much money for a research project. You're starting to see these sensors being utilized by the research community and then they back-trace them and do cross comparisons to higher grade instruments. That's a lot what they're being used to.
In terms of particles, a lot of these sensor kits will come with occupancy or light sensors, even sound. The VOC sensors, when we do VOC measurements, we're measuring parts per billion to parts per trillion with very high grade instruments. The VOCs type, even more expensive ones that use generic VOC monitoring, again, they give you an idea. As Rebecca had mentioned earlier, relative, are you seeing big differences, something has changed in the environment, your filters are getting saturated? Whichever, these can help inform you, but again, it comes back to that... Did you do the due diligence, did you get your baseline? These are the things you'd have to look back and say, "Oh wow, my daily routine is this and I'm seeing something very different. How can I make that better?"
Daniel Bourque:
Right, and we say VOCs, but I think the proper term is more TVOCs or total volatile organic compounds, because I asked earlier, are there particular components of wildfire smoke that are more harmful than the smoke that would come from smog? Is it just the particles or is it some of the VOCs that are in there? I'm not imagining a time in my lifetime where you'll be able to analyze like on all the science fiction movies where you just wave a little sensor around that says, "Oh, too much benzene in this air. Let's get out of here, put on our benzene masks, or something like that." No, you're looking at total. Yeah, it must be how far you compare to baseline or something.
Greg Nilsson:
I feel like Rebecca really wants to say something.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I was just thinking... I don't know. I guess a lot of times the particulate matter is kind of a surrogate for all the other things that are riding along with it. There are these other components that may be more harmful, but they tend to be correlated in their presence, and so that's why we use particulate matter is a little easier to measure and is a good kind of standard as a surrogate for the whole mix.
Greg Nilsson:
Yeah, and you'd actually asked about wildfire smoke compared to smog compared to other types of pollution. Taking into consideration that smoke is 5,000 different components, when we think particles, we tend to think like sand, maybe really small sand, but we think of something hard that's floating in the air. We're talking particles that could be a glob of SVOCs, semi volatile organic compounds that are actually in a semi droplet form, just really small. Again, when we're measuring it, we're measuring it with a laser that it basically sees something that comes across its path and it measures its size. That's a really, really generic sense. If the temperature changes, that particle can change. If it's exposed to sunlight, it can change. Smoke is photochemical, it has components very similar to smog in that way. We call the term aging as smoke leaves from its source and its traveling, it can change. You see peaks in ozone, for example.
We often talk about formaldehyde as well, which is actually classified as a VVOC, if you want to get really geeky about it. Yeah, it is different but yet similar except what you see is when it's a problem, it's a very big problem and it can be persistent for several days to even weeks depending on the type of event.
Rebecca Schmidt:
There have been toxicology studies kind of comparing the components of wildfire smoke and, again, where then from wildfires that hit urban areas versus wildfires that are more vegetation fires. They do show greater toxicity in the smoke that's from urban wildfires, and so there might be even more of a concern about filtering out those types of particles.
Daniel Bourque:
Then, here may be a less technical question to mix that up a bit. If you guys are going camping and the smoke from the campfire is coming, does it always go in your direction because you guys are researching smoke and stuff like that? It's like how come no matter where I put my chair, it comes towards me?
Greg Nilsson:
No, I use the force. It never comes towards me, it's always everyone sitting.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I use the pink bunnies don't like smoke and it goes away.
Daniel Bourque:
Oh.
Greg Nilsson:
Pink bunnies.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I learned that at camp. It seems to work
Daniel Bourque:
Well, I learned something else in our meeting today. I didn't know about the pink bunnies.
Greg Nilsson:
For us, it's white rabbits. I don't want white rabbits, I don't want white rabbits.
Daniel Bourque:
I guess based on that last answer, we talked quickly about prescribed burns when they're trying to burn some of the organic materials. There's no better smoke, one from the other like, "Oh, my wildfire was all trees and grasses so it's more organic than yours. Oh, your city burned. Oh, sorry about that." In all cases, we're looking at different compounds, they may have different effects on the body, but in all cases we don't want the smoke around, correct?
Rebecca Schmidt:
That's right. There are some types of smoke that might have some more harmful particles or contaminants than other types, but in all cases there's no healthy smoke that you want to be breathing in.
Daniel Bourque:
Okay, so maybe another follow-up question to that, Rebecca, would be, if I can't smell the smoke, is it still a problem for me? I mean, it's far away, I know that there's a smoke event in my province, state, county, whatever, but if the wind was blowing in my direction, I'd smell it and so then I know that I'd have to do something. Is that accurate or...?
Rebecca Schmidt:
Yeah, so you can't really use smell as an indicator of how clean the air is. If you do smell smoke, that's an indicator that you might need to protect yourself from it. But if you don't smell smoke, it doesn't mean that there aren't particles there getting into your lungs when you're breathing it in. That's when sensors or using websites that tell you what the air quality is is really useful.
Daniel Bourque:
Because those websites are looking at more than just stuff that you can detect with your nose, they're looking at a variety of factors or at least the better sites in larger cities, I guess?
Rebecca Schmidt:
Right. Yeah, your nose can't always tell you how clean the air is so it is good to use other measures that are actually measuring the quality of the air.
Daniel Bourque:
Right. As anybody who has ever looked in a vent for a plumbing system can attest, "Hey, listen, you can't smell anything, it's not that bad." Or washroom exhaust, right? But it's not indicative of the air quality. All right, so another question maybe for you, Greg. At the beginning of COVID, I remember seeing people with full on glass face masks that were covering eyes, nose, a full on face mask because we didn't know what it was and how deadly it could be or not, and then we learned more and then the guidelines and the guidance seemed to go towards N95 masks for people in healthcare, et cetera. Then, despite that guidance, the best that I ever got was a little disposable thing as I walk into the hospital saying, "If you're coughing and sneeze, sneeze into your mask and at least your sneeze particles won't go in and infect everybody." For wildfires, is there a level of personal filtration that is useful or beneficial?
Greg Nilsson:
Yeah, so the masks that are used for COVID protection, like the surgical masks that you were just talking about, the material that those are made from and that N95s are made from are both tested in a very similar manner, they're very similar materials. Let's talk a little bit about the particles. The particles in wildfire smoke or wildland fire smoke are what we call PM1, so these are particles that are smaller than one micron, so really, really small. The performance testing for the masks, they're tested using particles that are roughly 80 nanometers, so 0.08 of a micron, so much smaller than smoke particles. They are different types of particles, so that can impact the filtration efficiency, but the material itself should be effective against wildfire smoke. Although there were questions even in the committee about how filter material or media performs against wildfire smoke particles because they're not tested against particles of that nature, they're tested using salt particles.
But more than the filtration media, let's connect this a little bit with HVAC systems. You have this really high MERV-rated filter, that's good, it will remove particles, but if it's not fitted well in the system, you can have bypass so particles can actually get through, and as filters load, that bypass can increase. Going back to your question about the masks, when we think about a mask, putting it on your face, especially those disposable surgical type masks, they're not fitted well to your face. The material may reduce the amount of particles getting to a person, but there's still going to be a lot of bypass.
The same is even true for N95, like in an occupational health and safety setting, if you're required to use an N95, you have to get fit tested, the mask has to be fit to your face so that it performs the way you're expecting it to, that it's actually removing the particles and they're not just leaking through, say, the gaps between the mask and your nose or the portions of your face. Or if you're like me, well, I have a very full beard right now, no mask is going to seal to my face, the particles are going to go right into my mouth, my nose as I'm breathing in, so the mask really isn't going to do much. In terms of using that to reduce exposure to wildfire smoke, I would caution. I know in some extreme settings where people are, say, evacuating an area and they're being exposed to high levels of smoke and they need to drive through it or whichever, then of course anything's going to help in that setting.
But in terms of say you have higher levels in a building, I don't know if using a surgical mask or even a poorly fitted N95 is going to provide a lot of benefit, but it will potentially make the wearer uncomfortable throughout the day. Yeah, when it comes to personal protective equipment, I would say use with caution, and certainly I wouldn't want to say use a surgical mask so that I can go outside and do heavy labor or laborious type activities when there's high concentrations of wildfire smoke.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I'll just add that from a public health standpoint, if people do have to go outside during a smoke event, it's still recommended that they wear an N95 mask fit as tight to the face as possible, especially for those who have more susceptibility to the impacts of smoke, so those that are pregnant or have respiratory conditions or other underlying chronic conditions that they should still wear an N95 mask, so not those surgical masks that became acceptable during COVID, but the N95 masks that make it a little harder to breathe, those are the ones that are a little more effective at filtering out some of those small wildfire particles that can get deep into the lungs. That will provide a layer of protection, not complete protection from the smoke, and so they should also not use that as an excuse to stay outdoors any longer than they need to. It's still important to stay indoors with clean air as much as possible, and that's why it's important to give guidance on how to keep that indoor air quality high and keep that air clean.
Daniel Bourque:
That's a great answer. My understanding of these very, very fine particles is that they're not dropping out of the air, they're going to stay aloft for a much longer period of time. I'm guessing the guideline must address that to say, "Hey, just because the smoke is gone or you think the smoke is gone or the fire is passed, there's still these really, really, really small particles that are bad for you that are still in the air." Is there a way to test for that or the measures that are outlined in the guideline, are they for a given period of time, "Hey, do this for one day after, for a week after, a month after because there's likely tiny particles in the air?"
Greg Nilsson:
That's a great question. The answer is yes and no. How's that for being a politician? I'm not practicing, I'm not about to run for public office anytime soon. But it does talk about putting measures in place when to start the event, and to be honest, we haven't talked as much about when to stop the measures. Sensors and these kinds of things when we're looking at your baseline, that could be part of your informative process for discontinuing your actions. Although what we're seeing now, it seems like you're going to have a smoke season and winter. Those are going to be your two seasons.
Daniel Bourque:
In Canada anyways. Maybe not in Texas, but up here, yes.
Greg Nilsson:
Well, yeah.
Daniel Bourque:
We only get two weeks of summer anyways, so I mean, come on. That's not fair.
Greg Nilsson:
I would say that once you've started measures, you're probably going to be keeping them up for until you're switching more to your seasonal variation, whatever that might be. There are some places where this might be a new norm, you might be looking at a building that has to operate under these conditions almost year round in certain areas.
Daniel Bourque:
All right. In the guideline that you guys are both working on, maybe you guys can talk about how the guideline is structured, maybe introduction, does it have various sections? Are they all written with the same intent? Are they aimed at different groups of people? How is ASHRAE addressing this issue of wildfires and the smoke that's bad for people?
Rebecca Schmidt:
I can start by saying that the guideline starts with an introduction on why the guideline was written, and especially in times where we see more and more wildfires occurring and they tend to be larger and impacting more people. That was kind of the reasoning for the guideline is at the beginning and the introduction. Then, Greg can tell you more about the rest of the structure.
Greg Nilsson:
After the introduction, which also talks about the health relevance and some historical data from other past events in terms of say concentrations and timeframes, for example, how fast concentrations can change. That's meant to give the reader context as they start to develop their plan. The middle section is more focused on new design and/or if you were looking at retrofitting or redesigning an existing building. Some approaches, we've made some attempts to look at how you can pre-calculate loading factors on your filters to try to make decisions on filtration rates. Again, we actually helped the EPA and BCCDC both gave us some great data sets from their archives that give a designer an idea, "Okay, so this fire produced this level and these other fires produced that level and it lasted for X amount of days." You can start to kind of think about what do I want this building to do, how do I want it to perform? What kind of indoor/ outdoor ratio do I want to try to protect to?
Then the last, and it is the biggest section and has a slightly different, we use the term voice, and it speaks more to the operator, the people that are reacting in real time and flipping the switches, adding filters, and doing the work hands-on in the building, what do they need to do? We do speak a lot to maintenance and planning and trying to really, kind of a few overarching themes, plan ahead of time, don't try to react in the middle of event because it's not going to work, and learn from what you've done in the past. You can purchase filters ahead of time. Well, that's great. Does your building have storage for that? How many times have you been in a building that walk through it and you see in the mechanical room they've got boxes and boxes of filters? Well...
Daniel Bourque:
Every one.
Greg Nilsson:
Every one of them. Exactly. Well, hey, it's easy to swap them out that way, right?
Daniel Bourque:
Right.
Greg Nilsson:
But we've even talked about the use of portable air cleaners and a little bit of an introduction to DIY approaches as well. It really is a collection of the best practices that we have available to us today. The goal is that people will start to apply these and hopefully share some of their lessons and the document can grow and improve. It's not a standing committee yet, could be, who knows? But it is... At this stage, our goal is to collect the best practices and get them in the hands of those who need it.
Daniel Bourque:
When you say plan for the event, I remember when I lived in Montreal, we didn't have a wildfire season, but we had shad fly season and shad flies are something that will clog up your pool filter in hours. Some of the buildings that we worked on, the new construction, they actually put extensible mesh over the cooling tower louvres and they were changing out pre-filters on an almost hourly basis. When those bugs are up in the air, they get everywhere. You're saying there's a similar mentality for wildfires where I change my filters every so often and now wildfire season is upon us, and so now we are, I guess taking those high MERV, the ultra-efficient filters, and we're just changing them out to take all those tiny, tiny particles out of it?
Greg Nilsson:
Yeah, I would say that there are certain regions that we know are going to experience smoke in Canada, that's going to be BC and Alberta. There, it's an annual thing now. We don't really have a traditional wildfire season anymore. I'd say the east coast of the US probably didn't consider this until this year. I would say that even in Ottawa, they understood that this might be an issue for Western Canada, but this year... There's a lot of building operators that were kind of scrambling to try to react to a very unique situation. There does have to be some risk analysis and thought because unfortunately filters are not free, it's a very considerable cost. Also, I'll just add since you mentioned it, it's not just about sticking MERV-rated filters. You can stack filters to protect your... If you are going to go say to a 14 or 16, you would definitely want to protect that with a lower, say, a 13 or something in front of it.
We've also talked about different ways of, say, using pressure zones in a building to help keep smoke out of sensitive areas. Something else that we haven't really touched on is who is in your building? There are those that are more vulnerable to this type of pollutant, say the elderly or those that have different types of chronic illnesses or very young. You may need to think, "Okay, this building is intended to be a retirement home. I'm probably going to design it. Oh, and it's in Vancouver or it's in," I'm trying to think, somewhere in California, they're going to roast me now.
Rebecca Schmidt:
All of California.
Greg Nilsson:
All of California, yeah. You're going to want to design maybe a little bit higher level than say a building that's going to be occupied half the time because half of its server farms.
Daniel Bourque:
Right, and in terms of mobility, I mean you're talking about a retirement home where people may not have as much mobility, but there's also prisons, and it's not that they don't have as much mobility, they have very, very, very limited mobility unless they're being evacuated some trucks or whatever the process is. The guideline is also looking at those situations and how to deal with prisons.
Greg Nilsson:
Institutional settings are included. They are not directly focused to that setting, so some of the settings you can employ the more generic approaches, the strategies, and they are set up so that you can make decisions throughout this. It's like, "Oh, I really want to do this, but to do this, I have to replace my entire HVAC system and I can't afford that, so I'm going to go down a tier. I'm going to use localized filtration." Maybe I use some kind of a ducted system that just services that one area, cycles the air, or maybe I use portable air cleaners. In a prison setting, which is a very unique kind of an occupancy, the operators of that type of facility would need to make choices on how to best, I guess, serve both those that they're employed plus their occupants.
Daniel Bourque:
The guideline has something for institutional buildings, some residential, does it touch on the single family home or is that where you get into the DIY recirculation filters that you were discussing?
Rebecca Schmidt:
I believe it covers all of those situations. You can use the DIY measures for air purifiers in any kind of building. It could be residential, but it also could be schools and other things where you want a less expensive option for additional air cleaning, but it covers all types of buildings.
Greg Nilsson:
There's certainly more of an emphasis on a commercial, and the same approaches could be used for a single family, like a standalone house, but there's already a lot of really good resources for those environments from sources like EPA, the BCCDC, so that's British Columbia Center for Disease Control, they have some great source documents, Health Canada, and these are all available online. You can search and you find them and you'll see that there's a lot of common themes. Basically it's do what you can to keep the smoke out, and if you can't then make some kind of a filter to deal with the smoke that's inside.
Daniel Bourque:
This is not an official guideline, you say it's still in development, so I think that's why right now we have the letter P after it's Guideline 44P for a proposed guideline, although it's not like proposed like, "Hey, we think we should do this, it's we know we need to do this," and it's proposed in terms of the language and the format and stuff like that. If somebody wants to join the conversation and say, "Oh my gosh, this is interesting. I can't wait for the full version to come out. I need to see what the industry is talking about now, what the experts are discussing," can they get involved? Can they get an advanced copy of this and comment on it or something?
Greg Nilsson:
The guideline is currently in public review, so you can find it on the ASHRAE website. You are more than welcome, and we encourage people to search it out and review it, add thoughts, comments. In terms of participating in the committee, we do have guests and you can reach out and connect with myself. I'm actually the Vice Chair of the committee. The Chair of the committee is Steve Emmerich, so you can reach out to either of us and participate in a meeting. Guests, of course, they're non-voting members and they can't view materials that are not public, but it is in public review right now. Our next meeting won't be until after the review period has ended, which is October 2nd. We still have roughly a month to go and interact with the guideline.
If the guideline... If it's not published yet, I mean we will have some sort of a meeting or seminar in the winter meeting. However, our current discussions, we are looking at doing seminars for the next summer meeting. We did a hybrid meeting in the last meeting there, and we had some people that participated as guests. We have usually two or three guests, but minutes and other material are restricted to committee members. We're not currently seeking because we are getting very close to completion, but you could always reach out to Steve. If you're really interested, it's not like we're likely to say no to extra help. We do have members that just participate and listen or their focus or their interest is very... They're a filter manufacturer, so they're very interested in what we're talking about filters, right? That's a pretty important part of this topic, but there's also, we have design engineers and they're the ones saying, "That's a great idea, but let's not do that because that's not practical."
Daniel Bourque:
I'd have to rebalance my whole system every time there's a smoke event. No, thanks.
Greg Nilsson:
Exactly. We do have some building operators or folks that are very... They understand how these things are, they've done a lot of inspections so they're like, "Yeah, that's not how that works." We have very conversational type meetings. I don't know. I have a different perspective, I'd love to hear what Rebecca has to say.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I mean, yeah, I think most of our conversations are pretty to the point of getting the guidance completed and covering most conditions possible. But yeah, it seems like it welcomes people to join as guests. I guess the ones we've had seem to have their different reasons for being there, and maybe what we're talking about that particular day isn't always necessarily what they came to hear about, but I think they can always come back.
Daniel Bourque:
Any final notes on this? I mean, my goal when I started this process and then got asked to host the podcast was to look for almost a one-pager or something that would say, "Hey, listen, are you a facility manager? Hey, do this. Is this your type of building?" Or Greg, you talked about a flow chart. "Hey, I'm going from this tier to that tier because I have decisions to make." I'm going to be reading the guideline, and if I don't see some type of flowchart, I'm going to be making recommendations, suggestions to the committee.
Greg Nilsson:
There are some decision-making flow charts for sure, and it's more of a when to engage kind of approach and/or different things you can try taking. There are different charts in terms of your decision-making kind of idea, like, "Okay, I really want to put in pressurized zones, but that means I have to have a complicated building automated system, and I wasn't planning on doing that. I was just going to go with the rooftop system." Yeah, there's different ways. By all means, Daniel, I'd love to see you look at it and give us your thoughts. If the feedback says, "Hey, you guys, you've got a great start, but we need more," then we're certainly going to welcome more people to come and help us develop content.
Rebecca Schmidt:
I was just going to say, I don't think we've boiled it down to a one-pager, but we've talked about making some summary slides and things to make it digestible to different audiences, but the one-pagers probably also... If we can't get it to one page, it's a good idea.
Daniel Bourque:
An infographic I can share on LinkedIn or something like that, right? That's the key. Ooh, you like this infographic? Get the guideline and join ASHRAE.
Well, this has been a very informative conversation. I'd like to thank both Greg and Rebecca for joining me, answering my questions, and for talking more about Proposed Guideline 44 on Wildfire Smoke Management. Yeah, I'll definitely be reading the rest of the guideline and providing comments before October 2nd, 2023 for the next revision cycle. Thanks for being my guest today. All right, this is Dan Bourque signing off for ASHRAE Journal podcast. Thanks for listening.
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.