Mitsubishi Electric's infographic
Mark Grayston, head of product marketing at Mitsubishi Electric said: “It’s hard to believe, but we spend a staggering 92% of our lives indoors. A large proportion of this time is spent in office buildings where the levels of pollutants can be two to five times higher indoors than outdoors. This is a damning indictment of the air we can be breathing at work, when so much emphasis has rightly been placed on outside air pollution in the UK’s cities in recent years – and yet indoor areas often aren’t held up to the same level of scrutiny and analysis.
The key to maintaining good indoor air quality is removing polluted air from a building and replacing it with fresh, filtered air. Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) can transfer up to 80% of the energy from outgoing stale air to heat incoming fresh air, which means less energy is required to heat the building compared to non-heat recovering ventilation systems. When paired with building management systems, this can also be used to regulate air flow throughout an entire building.
As buildings and offices re-open following the pandemic, the host of benefits associated with improving indoor air quality, from better staff health and wellbeing, as well as improved efficiency, make prioritising it a move that businesses will profoundly gain from.”