Getting to grips with new Ventilation Guidelines
The September 2017 edition of CIBSE Journal includes a helpful article by Liza Young on the new BB101 Guidance on Ventilation in Schools. (Page 45)
Suppliers, including Shaun Fitzgerald of Breathing Buildings, were interviewed about three types of ventilation system; mechanical, hybrid and natural.
The overriding tenet extolled by Shaun is that “System choice should be based on thermal comfort, air quality and energy efficiency, as well as acoustics”. As a unique supplier of a full range of solutions, Breathing Buildings is able to offer a completely unbiased and informed view regarding the optimal ventilation system on a room-by-room basis.
The challenges for ventilation vary from room to room, and in fact Breathing Buildings has never worked on a school where only natural ventilation is used. It may be just the toilet areas which need mechanical ventilation, but in many cases some form of hybrid ventilation in a room is the most appropriate solution.
Pure natural ventilation can be difficult either because of the risks of draughts (thermal comfort) or else because any heat recovery system which is designed to mitigate draughts using only the forces of nature is simply not robust and cannot provide guaranteed performance. Hence, Breathing Buildings approach to design is to review each space in turn and determine the right ventilation solution.