By James K. Lin, PE, LEED AP, Certified Passive House Designer, Associate Partner, JB&B
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically re-schematized the private residence as the nexus of work, schooling and entertainment as well as of family life, and brought home, quite literally, the same environmental safety concerns that had already presented themselves in medical and commercial scenarios. Now, even as the pandemic has evolved, the same strategies that have been developed, applied, and proven successful in other sectors are showing themselves to be equally viable for residential environments with little or no qualitative adjustment.
A three-pronged approach—indoor air quality, flexible design, and people counting—can inform residential design in a way that addresses abiding—and evolving—concerns with state-of-art technological responses and regards an uncertain future with a steady eye on where the technology is pointing.
1. Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)
Indoor air quality maintains pride of place at the forefront of these successful strategies, and the creative reconfiguration of filtration, disinfection and monitoring technologies inspired by work with healthcare facilities early on in the pandemic has become industry standard for application to other sectors.
One of the developers JB&B is currently working with on a multi-family, market-rate rental project asked, “How can we get to hospital-grade filtration EVERYWHERE?” With this particular client, as with many other residential sector owners and developers, it’s the common spaces such as lobbies, amenity spaces and elevator areas—that is, the places where one is most likely to encounter other people’s “particles”—that constitute the “everywhere” where they want to have higher levels of filtration.
The dwelling units themselves are generally considered to be acceptable with lower levels of filtration—an acceptance determined largely by the practical limitations of the equipment involved. At the central ventilation units, achieving a minimum of MERV 13 is the bare minimum to meet CDC guidelines, but many units can accommodate MERV 14 or 15 filters. At terminal units (fan coil units, evaporators and heat pumps) within dwelling units, it may be difficult to achieve the MERV 13 rating. Here, electrostatically charged filters can be used to achieve the desired MERV 13 rating without the penalty of higher pressure drops. However, in some applications, upgrading the filter is simply not feasible. When that’s the case, portable filtration units (often offering close to HEPA filtration levels) can be deployed in common spaces as well as in individual residences.
So, what does a developer who is designing a residential building right now do? Should anything be done at all? What technology should be selected?
2. Flexible Design
Flexible design, a design process that heightens the creative and analytic dynamics of the design phase of a project both to meet the present demands of a space while anticipating future safety-, environmental-, and technology-driven needs, has become an intrinsic element of engineering’s New Normal.
Since more and more scientific data is emerging at an increasingly rapid rate, the “best” keeps on changing. This leads some developers to ask, “Do we have to decide now?”, to which the answer is a resounding “NO!” The future of multi-family residential design is a future whose hallmark is flexibility. Design the HVAC systems to be able to readily accept the best available technology when the decision absolutely needs to be made instead of a year before the drop-dead date. Similar to the strategy of installing a deeper filter rack, one that could accommodate a 4 inch filter, but installing a 1 inch filter initially, we lean toward an “IAQ chassis” approach, whereby the space, access and power to accommodate future technologies is designed into the system initially, taking its cue off of existing and emerging technologies that are currently leading the pack. The chassis approach also allows for a solution that has been implemented to be swapped out for a newer and better technology in the future.
3. People Counting
Electronic sensors that measure the number of people entering a facility or zone of a facility can, via a simple app, provide the resident of a building with an accurate count of how many people are, for example, in the laundry room, the lobby, the gym, or waiting for an elevator.
The level of comfort with being indoors around other people varies drastically from one person to another. Polls have shown, for example, that there are wide discrepancies among age groups, economic levels and political affiliations regarding the perception of safe distancing—and even wider when it comes to hugging and handshaking. This variability makes it extremely difficult for building managers and owners to decide to spend precious capital to deploy an IAQ measure to enhance occupant experience when in fact the upgrade may not represent meaningful change for all residents in the building. One way to help address this is to couple IAQ upgrades with people-counting technology that is readily available in the marketplace today.
The technologies range from infrared beam counters to video-, thermal-, and WiFi-based sensors, each with their own pros and cons but generally easy to afford and deploy. For example, with a people-counting app on a tenant’s cell phone, a resident could check out the count in the laundry room before heading down with a basketful of laundry; or see how many people are in the Fitness Room—and even if someone’s using the elliptical machine! Now, that’s an amenity to help differentiate a building from the others!
Choosing Effective Change
We’ve probably all heard the saying “The only constant is change.” Our experience of the past year and a half plus might allow us to update that to “The only certainty is uncertainty.” We’ve learned to live with rapidly shifting information, rapidly shifting perspectives, rapidly shifting emotions. But the constant here is the growing knowledge that we need to take more concerted regard of the spaces in which we work and especially, in which we live. That focus has taken in three primary strategies, IAQ chief among them as the most developed and effective through widespread deployment and development in healthcare and commercial space applications. But improving IAQ—or, for that matter, implementing flexible design or people counting—will take ongoing commitment from developers as well as coordination between the engineer and the architect. While we all look forward to the time when COVID is relegated to a more flu-like status with similar prophylaxis, that day may still be far off, but these technologies are here right now. We have only to continue our creative exploration of their possibilities to make the safety of our private spaces a reassuring constant in a time of bewildering change.
