Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)
IAQ in Large and Commercial Buildings
Indoor air quality (IAQ) problems are not limited to homes. In fact, many office buildings have significant air pollution sources. Some of these buildings may be inadequately ventilated. For example, mechanical ventilation systems may not be designed or operated to provide adequate amounts of outdoor air. Finally, people generally have less control over the indoor environment in their offices than they do in their homes. As a result, there has been an increase in the incidence of reported health problems.
Developed by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory with funding support from EPA, the IAQ Scientific Findings Resource Bank is a resource for public health professionals, building professionals, and others who seek scientific information about the effects of IAQ on people’s health or work performance.
The IAQ Scientific Findings Resource Bank provides information summarizing the state of scientific knowledge about the relationships between people’s health and productivity and the IAQ conditions or associated building characteristics in which the people work or reside. This web site also provides links for downloading published journal articles that were developed under the project. Learn more at www.iaqscience.lbl.gov
Featured
Now Available from ASHRAE: Large Building Guidance on Indoor Air Quality - The Indoor Air Quality Guide: Best Practices for Design, Construction and Commissioning is new guidance for achieving enhanced indoor air quality (IAQ) in large buildings. The Guide provides strategies needed to achieve good IAQ using proven technologies and without significantly increasing costs. Ensuring good means everyone breathes a little easier: occupants who experience improved health, comfort and productivity, and owners who see increased building value and reduced risk.
The Guide is a collaboration between EPA, American Society Of Heating, Refrigerating And Air-Conditioning Engineers, the American Institute of Architects, the Building Owners and Managers Association International, the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors of North America, and the U.S. Green Building Council. Available on book and CD, the Guide describes 40 strategies for achieving critical IAQ objectives related to moisture management, ventilation, filtration and air cleaning and source control. It also highlights how design and construction teams can work together to ensure good IAQ strategies are incorporated from initial design through project completion. A summary document of the Indoor Air Quality Guide – ideal for a general understanding of the importance of major IAQ issues can be downloaded for free at www.ashrae.org/iaq 
EPA's Green Building Portal - This site is a gateway to many different EPA programs to improve the environmental impacts of building and development. These include Energy Star, Water Efficiency, Environmentally Preferable Purchasing, and more. www.epa.gov/greenbuilding/
Resources
The Indoor Air Quality Building Education and Assessment Model (I-BEAM) is a guidance tool designed for use by building professionals and others interested in indoor air quality in commercial buildings. I-BEAM updates and expands EPA's Building Air Quality guidance and was designed to be a comprehensive state-of-the-art guidance for managing IAQ in commercial buildings. I-BEAM contains text, animation/visual, and interactive/calculation components that can be used to perform a number of diverse tasks. Go to the I-BEAM Table of Contents.
To gain a better understanding of indoor air quality (IAQ), EPA's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air conducted a major study of IAQ in public and commercial office buildings. This study, the Building Assessment, Survey and Evaluation (BASE) study, was a cross-sectional study of 100 randomly selected office buildings. Learn more....
The BASE raw dataset will be most useful for researchers, scientists, building professionals, public health officials and policy makers working on indoor environments. Using it will require familiarity in working with a complex dataset characterizing public and commercial office buildings in the U.S. with respect to IAQ and occupant perceptions. The dataset allows examination of possible relationships among building and HVAC features, pollutant concentrations, and occupant symptoms and perceptions. In addition, the data allow for hypotheses development regarding these relationships. Get the BASE data on CD-ROM
The text of Building Air Quality is available here as a series of PDF files which you can download and view or print. You can go to the table of contents and select just the form or section that you need to download and view/print, or you can download the entire PDF version of the guide as a ZIPPED file to view/print.
This guidance is only available in PDF. Go to the BAQ Table of Contents to select a chapter and/or appendix or download a zipped file of all of the PDF files
The Building Air Quality Action Plan (BAQ Action Plan) was designed to meet the needs of building owners and managers who want an easy-to-understand path for taking their building from current conditions and practices to the successful institutionalization of good IAQ management practices. It emphasizes changing how you operate and maintain your building, not increasing the amount of work or cost of maintaining your building. The BAQ Action Plan follows 8 logical steps and includes a 100-item Checklist that is designed to help verify implementation of the Action Plan.
This guidance is only available in PDF (PDF, 28 pp, 845 K, about PDF)
More Studies/Research
In 1999, EPA completed an extensive modeling study to assess the compatibilities and trade-offs between energy, indoor air quality, and thermal comfort objectives for HVAC systems, and to help formulate strategies to simultaneously achieve superior performance on each objective. Variations of Constant Volume (CV) and Variable Air Volume (VAV) HVAC systems were modeled in three different climates-hot and humid (Miami), temperate (Washington D.C.), and cold (Minneapolis). Buildings included several variations of an office building, plus a school, and an auditorium. Learn more....