The Importance of Air Balance
Air balance is an important but often overlooked part of ensuring your building is optimized for both efficiency and personal comfort. We understand you need to look at more than just removing undesirable elements, such as moisture, toxins, cold or heat. To ensure your heating and cooling is working at its most cost effective, you must balance the air between rooms.
Why Air Balance?
Air Balancing is essential for staff comfort as well as to ensure that your valuable commodities are kept at their best for the longest time possible. If air is improperly balanced it can cause many problems such as condensation. It will also cost money, in extra stress on heating and cooling equipment and also in damaged equipment and you many end up with health and safety problems.
What is Air Balancing?
When air is not correctly balanced, it wastes energy, allows contaminants to enter the room, or condensation to form. It can cause food safety or even air safety issues with dangerous levels of carbon dioxide. The room may also be unpleasant to work in with drafts and cold spots.
To understand why air balancing is important, you must understand that air will always try and equalize pressure. Think of a leaking balloon, the higher pressure inside will leak out until it equals the lower pressure of the world outside.
If you bring in the same amount of air as you expel you have a neutral air balance. If you bring in more air, you have positive air balance and if you expel more air you have negative air balance.
In old buildings or those that have been extended or re-purposed, it is common to be in negative air balance. In this case air will be drawn in from even the smallest gaps as well as when doors open etc. The air that comes in is untreated, so it will be a different temperature, causing efficiency or condensation problems and may well contain contaminants.
What is the Correct Air Pressure?
The use of your room will determine its ideal pressure. Highly sophisticated machinery will require different pressure to ancient artifacts and rooms used by children or for food preparation will have their own requirements.
What about Economic Efficiencies?
If Many rooms require a precise temperature, this could be for something as simple as staff comfort or it could be highly technical to prevent spoilage or to control humidity. If the air is not balanced the air conditioning systems will need to work that much harder to keep this temperature, and it will cost considerably more. Without proper balancing it will also be harder to prevent damaging and costly condensation.
A negatively balanced room will draw air in creating drafts and putting extra pressure on air conditioning or heating systems. These extra demands lead to waste of energy and extra costs.
Though based in Orange County and Palm Springs we can assess and balance your air conditioning system wherever you are, lowering your cost and ensuring that the air balance of your buildings is optimal for people, equipment, cost efficiency and safety.