3 Aug. 2023
The holidays are always a little chaotic, but this year poses completely new dynamics for commercial buildings with lots of visitors. There are lots of decisions to be made-how to maintain all rooms when guest occupancy is more unpredictable, how to maintain standards of safety when your residents are bringing in more guests, and especially how to make sure every person who enters your building feels safe.
Indoor climate automation offers low-risk solutions to a lot of the concerns of the New Normal, including minimizing shared surface contact and maximizing fresh air in the building without raking up energy costs.
Here are a few of the key solutions that indoor climate automation can offer your business this holiday:
Clean air is critical to minimizing transmissions. Indoor air quality is crucial for so many reasons. Not only does clean, filtered air make your buildings’ residents immediately safer, but greater air filtration cycles out potential germs significantly more often. The EPA recommends implementing increased airflow through a filtration system as part of your building’s COVID strategy.
With a smart HVAC automation system, you can increase airflow through your building based on your residential capacity to ensure that every person in your building is breathing the safest air without racking up your energy bill this winter.
The holidays are notorious for their crowds. With offices and schools all on break, most holiday activities are designed to have several people in one physical location. Mitigating the amount of germs existing in common places seems to be the intuitive solutions. This season, ask yourself how many of your residents’ requests can be conducted without public devices.
Implementing touchless systems to handle customer interactions offers multiple benefits. Customers are provided with a visual guarantee that your business cares about their health, and you have less potential for transmission within your building. Robert Hemmerdinger, on the subject of smart HVAC systems, notes that “filtration will help with airborne contaminants, but it still doesn’t reduce the risk of someone coughing into their hand and then touching a door handle or light switch.” Offer your residents a minimal-contact experience with maximum comfort this winter.
How can you know what’s going on in your building unless you deploy a person to go into the room and check? The answer is simple–sensor solutions! Colin O’Gallagher, a WSP Global smart building consultant, notes that “a landlord could have a very aggressive cleaning strategy that is comprehensive, so that every six hours a cleaning crew is cycled through the building, but it will be a lot more efficient to target disinfection at spaces that have been used.”
Smart sensors can detect movement, capacity, and even whether a window or door is open. Using Setpoint’s plug & play climate node network of sensors, you can track which rooms have windows and doors open, indicating potential surfaces to be clean and rooms receiving fresh air circulation. This sensory technology allows you to provide targeted safety precautions without spending extra time and money on safeguarding spaces that no one occupies.
This holiday season, keep your guests, residents, and loved ones safe with these tips:
Interested in automating climate in your business? Get in touch with one of our indoor climate experts today and find out how you can save during your holiday season.