A116 Office IAQ benchmark

Indoor air quality benchmarking for air conditioned offices

Brief:

Maintaining acceptable indoor air quality (IAQ) for a healthy workplace is of major concern. Based on proper assessment methodologies and monitoring plans, policymakers have proposed indicators to address office IAQ. To streamline the assessment of office IAQ performance and offer incentives for maintaining better IAQ, this study proposes and investigates the feasibility of simple IAQ benchmarking using an IAQ indicator. The IAQ indicator is a benchmarking parameter derived from exposure concentrations of three selected common indoor air pollutants. This benchmark used a 5-star rating system which assigned 1 star to the top 10% of samples with the highest levels of the three pollutants, 2 stars to the next 22.5%, 3 stars to the next 35%, 4 stars to the next 22.5% and 5 stars to the bottom 10%. The application of this benchmarking system was tested in 525 air conditioned offices in Hong Kong. Taking an existing IAQ certification scheme as a reference, the proposed benchmarking system proved to be useful in distinguishing offices with different IAQ labels, and illustrate the performance of office IAQ with different star ratings. Therefore, the proposed simple method can help promote better IAQ and serve as a screening assessment for IAQ in air conditioned offices of Hong Kong.

Further information:

Hui PS, Wong LT, Mui KW, 2009. Indoor air quality benchmarking for air conditioned offices, Clean-Soil, Air, Water 37(6) 481-486.