Health Care HVAC

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The 2016 Sustainability Benchmark Report released by GreenHealth showed that sustainability is rapidly becoming a design requirement of most health care organizations.

This month’s Facility File will focus on the Back2Basics test on a hospital capital project to furnish and install a combined heat and power (CHP) co-generator of electricity and use of engine coolant heat rejection directed to the facility’s new pre-heat domestic hot water storage tank.

During ASHRAE’s June 2019 annual meeting in Kansas City, I became optimistic that the society is truly expanding its horizons to include occupant health as an important building performance metric.

Approximately six years ago, we visited the manufacturing plant of one of the largest boiler manufacturers in the country. The visit was related to a specific project that required high-efficiency condensing boilers for heating and steam boilers for humidification.

Have you ever wondered how chemical compounds or microbes actually get into the cells of your body and have a powerful influence on your health?

Pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities are energy intensive, and the HVAC system — the chilled water plant, the steam and hot water plant, and air distribution — typically consumes a full 65 percent of the energy used, according to research by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Heather Platt, P.E., a senior project manager for Dewberry, has been appointed to the Facility Guideline Institute’s Health Guidelines Revision Committee (HGRC) for the 2019-2020 term.

Engineering departments in today’s health care environment are tasked with an ever-growing list of responsibilities, such as emergency readiness, PMs, reactive maintenance, ensuring regulatory compliance, managing infection control, maintaining life cycle budgets, managing utility spend, and the list goes on.

This article describes the remodeling of a hospital kitchen in which workers experienced high temperature and humidity levels as well as turbulent airflows most of the year.

From my perspective of working in the intersection of two very different professions, medicine and design of the built environment, I’m frequently surprised by the resistance of each group to embrace concepts from the “other side.