Top 10 Ways Homeowners Can Ensure Good IAQ

About the Author Max Sherman, Ph.D., is a senior scientist and group leader of the Energy Performance of Buildings Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif. He is former chair of Standards Project Committee 62.2P, Ventilation and Acceptable Indoor Air Quality for Low-Rise Residential Buildings. s HVAC&R professionals, our major concern is the engineering of indoor environments. Most of our industry’s emphasis is on providing comfort conditioning, but as professionals, health and safety must also be a primary concern. For indoor environments, where concentrations of many pollutants can be two to at least five times greater than in outdoor air,9 source control and ventilation are key control means. People spend, on average, nearly 90% of their time indoors,10 with the majority of that time in their homes. These facts, taken together, would suggest that residential ventilation ought to have a large emphasis in ASHRAE.