Designing Indoor Air Quality Boosts, Health and Wellbeing at Home

Indoor air quality is absolutely paramount in personal health and wellbeing, especially as most people spend large parts of their day and night inside. The Covid-19 pandemic has brought home the importance of the air we breathe, but scientific studies have been showing for quite a few years that pollutants have a clearly negative impact on the health of the people who inhabit interior spaces. This means ensuring suitable air flow using mechanical or natural means is the first, critical step in boosting how healthy an environment is, both at home and in the workplace.

Natural airflow has multiple problems, though, as keeping windows open inevitably pushes up the energy consumption for heating or cooling, while potentially also allowing external pollutants or allergens – especially in certain seasons – into internal spaces. Such realizations show just how fundamental it is for designs for new buildings or restructuring projects to include what we call “controlled mechanical ventilation” systems. These are able to purify the air flowing through internal spaces, without warming or cooling it, and without inadvertently adding further pollutants into the mix.

Alpac is heavily involved in designing and developing innovative solutions to boost energy efficiency, increase user comfort and optimize interior health and hygiene. As such, it has a range of decentralized, controlled mechanical ventilation (CMV) solutions that provide optimal airflow management in most building types.

A decentralized CMV system, with devices in each room that run autonomously and independently, is the best solution as it avoids the need for extensive building work to create the necessary inflow and outflow channels. This means simpler installation, improved management and better consumption monitoring.

The Ingenius Alpac unit uses integrated Helty Flow forced ventilation to exploit window openings to create a system that constantly refreshes the air, improves interior wellbeing and bolsters energy performance. The enthalpy double counter-current cross-flow heat exchanger provides optimal thermal energy recovery, without any complex maintenance. For energy upgrades or refurbishment projects that do not include changing the windows, inbuilt decentralized CMV systems can be installed in wall-mounted cavities with EPS. Once the installation is complete, only the cover will be visible, and can be in white metal, or black or white plexiglass.