did you know

HEPA Filtration and COVID-19 Micro Droplets

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In case you were wondering why we should wear a mask in public and filter the air around us, check out this demonstration of suspended micro droplets.

Micro droplets suspending in air from MixonK on Vimeo.

Our CFB HEPA Filters are currently being used by a number of hospitals to create negative pressure isolation rooms for COVID-19 patients. They are typically paired with an inline fan to exhaust the contaminated air from those areas, filter and then discharge it safely outside. Discharging the air without any filtration is considered risky since you are spreading/distributing the virus particles extracted from the patient areas. If you have questions on how to build negative pressure isolation rooms give us a call.

What is a HEPA?

HEPA stands for high-efficiency particulate arrestance. To be classified as a HEPA, the air filter must remove at least 99.97% of particles whose diameter is equal to 0.3 μm. Classification at 0.3 μm is important because this is the weakest point in the filter’s performance – typical HEPA filtration efficiency increases for particle diameters both less than and greater than 0.3 μm.

Image courtesy of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)

Virus particles, due to their small size, typically fall in the diffusion regime of HEPA collection efficiency. Specifically, the virus that causes COVID-19 is approximately 0.125 μm in diameter. That diameter is perfectly within the particle-size range that HEPA filters capture with great efficiency: 0.01 μm and bigger (see the NIOSH diagram above).

Want to ready more about HEPA and how they filter particles the size of viruses? We found the Submicron and Nanoparticulate Matter Removal by HEPA-Rated Media Filters by NASA study is a great source of reliable technical info. Page 7 of the paper has an excellent illustration of filter efficiency as a function of particle diameter for sizes 0.01 μm and above.

Airflow Customization for Your Home – A Suncourt Solution

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Winter is here and with it so are higher energy bills. Are you looking for ways to cut energy costs and save money? Is there a room or area of the house that you rarely use? Do you like certain rooms to be kept warmer or colder than the rest? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it might be time for you to zone control your home with Suncourt ZoneMaster™ Fully Adjustable Motorized Dampers.

ZoneMaster Adjustable Motorized Airflow Control Damper

WHAT DOES A MOTORIZED DAMPER DO? Motorized Dampers are mounted in duct-work to control the amount of airflow in the duct in order to zone control your home. Zone control refers to regulating the temperature in one single room or space. In other words, zone controlling your home allows you to send heated or cooled air to an area of the house when you need it, when you want it.

WHY DO I WANT TO ZONE CONTROL MY HOME? Increased comfort, control and lower utility bills. Would you control your entire house with 1 light switch? No! So why would you control the temperature for your entire home with one thermostat?

GIVE ME AN EXAMPLE OF HOW I WOULD SAVE MONEY: Why heat a guest room that you only occasionally use to 70°F all winter long, or cool it to 76°F all summer? Keep it instead at 55°F in the winter and 85°F in the summer. Same story for a bedroom. Like to sleep in a 64°F bedroom and keep the rest of the house at 70°F? During the cooling season you may want the room for the baby a little bit warmer than the rest of the house. The possibilities are endless.

HOW MUCH MONEY COULD I SAVE? Zone controlling a home can save homeowners up to 30% on a typical heating and cooling bill, according to the US Department of Energy. It is estimated that heating and cooling makes up 40% of the monthly energy bill.

WHAT MAKES SUNCOURT MOTORIZED DAMPERS DIFFERENT THAN THE REST? Suncourt’s patent pending adjustable damper has 0°- 90° adjustment capabilities for BOTH powered and unpowered positions providing full control of airflow to any specific room. A safe, UL listed 24 VAC 15 VA stud mount transformer is included with each damper sold by Suncourt for ease of installation. Suncourt dampers are proudly made in the USA.

WANT TO LEARN MORE?
Suncourt’s website: www.suncourt.com
ZoneMaster Motorized Damper Product Overview video: https://youtu.be/U6aP6SL6Mlo
ZoneMaster Motorized Damper Product Installation Video: https://youtu.be/ZSxEgMHDpzg
Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/suncourt-inc/

The Stack Effect

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Do you feel like your home doesn’t retain heat well, or is just plain cold and drafty? Are your energy costs during the winter months out of control? It could be because all your heat is escaping through your attic.

Improper sealing and insulation of the attic space in a home can lead to a great deal of your warm air escaping. It is known that heat rises, so this makes sense. Heat rises to the highest point in a confined space, the same as it would in a hot air balloon to make it rise.

As warm air escapes out the top of the house, the negative pressure created by this action sucks cold exterior air in through lower areas of the house, often times the basement and crawl space areas. This occurrence is known as the stack effect (also called the chimney effect) and can be the primary culprit in loss of warm air in many houses that haven’t had energy-saving upgrades.

Properly sealing the attic can help your home retain much of its heat. In addition, your home should have controlled ventilation to keep the air fresh and reduce pollution in your home. This can be attained through HRVs or ERVs or other ventilators.

HRVs and ERVs are essentially mechanical ventilators, but with a heat exchanger. This allows them to transfer heat between air streams, allowing for proper ventilation without sacrificing efficiency. They can take some of the load off your heating and cooling systems because of how they pre-warm and pre-cool air before it enters your home. HRVs can remove stuffy air from rooms with limited airflow and ERVs reduce humidity in the summer and help retain moisture in the air in the winter.

How HRVs and ERVs work.

Keeping a good temperature in your house, while properly ventilating is a delicate balance, but this is why there are so many products on the market to help you achieve the correct ratio, while also saving on energy.

An Investment in Green Packaging

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If there’s one thing that’s true about being an online retailer, it’s that you go through an incredible amount packaging material. That’s always been a sore spot for us here at HVACquick, considering our commitment to being as environmentally friendly as possible—it’s more likely than not all that packaging ends up in a landfill somewhere. It’s something of a comfort that cardboard boxes are actually pretty green (since so much of them come from recycled paper), but still, we can’t afford (as either a business or as environmental citizens) to be constantly replacing products damaged in transit to our customers. Thus, every day, we use a huge amount of bubble wrap and similar padding, which generally cannot be recycled.

Our (very large) Cardboard Dumpster

Given how much packaging we go through, you might expect our dumpster to be pretty big as well. It is not. We use only the smallest-sized commercial garbage dumpster; our commingled recycling dumpster is quite a bit larger, and our dedicated cardboard dumpster is even larger yet. We send approximately 7 cubic yards of cardboard to the recyclers every week. To get an idea of just how big a volume this is, consider that the largest residential garbage collection in our area (and probably in yours) is 96 gallons. That’s slightly less than 1/2 of a cubic yard, or less than 1/14th the volume of our cardboard dumpster!

We’re much happier to be recycling all that cardboard than sending to the dump, but, according to the Three R’s, it would be better for us to reduce that amount or find a way to reuse it. Almost all our waste cardboard comes from the boxes of items sent to us, which means we can’t easily “reduce” its volume, and we can’t send our customers their purchases in reused boxes, so recycling has always seemed the best we could do. It was an interesting day in the office, then, when one of our engineers ran the numbers and figured out we recycle a greater volume of cardboard each week than we use of bubble wrap. If only there were a way to turn our waste cardboard into something we could use in place of bubble wrap . . . .

Our new shredder
Our new Shredder

It turns out there is! A number of companies manufacture shredders that can turn flat sheets of cardboard into packaging fill. We’ve recently invested in one, and are beginning to “reuse” our waste cardboard boxes by turning them into a substitute for bubble wrap.

The advantages to this are almost too many to name here. Firstly, we’re saving money by no longer needing to pay for so much bubble wrap or cardboard disposal. Secondly, we’re replacing bubble wrap with something more environmentally sound. The paper in cardboard ultimately comes from trees, which are not only a renewable resource, but consume carbon as they grow. On the other hand, the plastic out of which bubble wrap is made comes from dirty petrochemicals (BAD!). Finally, once our customers have received their packages, the cardboard can be easily recycled, whereas bubble wrap cannot.

We’re very excited about this new development and hope you are as well. When you receive your first package with our new cardboard fill material, please make sure to reuse it in your own shipments or recycle it at your local recycling center.

Shredded Cardboard Packaging Fill
Shredded Cardboard Packaging Fill

Radon awareness

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What is Radon?
Radon is a cancer-causing natural radioactive gas that you can’t see, smell or taste. Its presence in your home can pose a danger to your family’s health. Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in America and claims about 20,000 lives annually. The areas affected across the United states are shown here on this map:

– Zone 1 counties have a predicted average indoor radon screening level greater than 4 pCi/L (pico curies per liter) (red zones)
– Zone 2 counties have a predicted average indoor radon screening level between 2 and 4 pCi/L (orange zones)
– Zone 3 counties have a predicted average indoor radon screening level less than 2 pCi/L (yellow zones)

 Consulting this map is only for broad reference. In order to determine the level of Radon in you home the most effective method available to the public is a liquid scintillation or other radon test kit:

http://www.hvacquick.com/products/residential/Fans/Radon-Fans/RadonAway-Radon-Test-Kits

This test is a simple first step towards peace of mind in protecting your family and yourself from the deleterious effects of Radon.

What Is This CFM Thing, And Why Do I Care?

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In this industry, CFM ratings are the “horsepower”, so to speak, that people use to compare products.

This statistic is used to measure how much air a fan can actually move. Here is the tricky part…Static Pressure. This is the number you see, usually measured in inches of water column, on those charts that show CFM for a given fan. Fine, what is it then?

In a word, resistance. That is, how much duct does the fan have to push or pull through? How many bends in the run? These are factors that can increase the Static Pressure and decrease the performance of the fan.

When fan shopping, be sure to compare apples to apples as some Manufacturers provide CFM at 0″ SP, while others may show what the fan could do under more adverse conditions such as .2″ or more. Which is more likely how it will perform when installed.

Here is a sample chart to let you see how things can change…

A Little About Air…

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We believe that a well informed customer will always have a more gratifying experience. So in that regard, here is the 10 minute ‘expert’ course in airflow. What we won’t discuss for now are the human engineering aspects. Thermal comfort is a complex science.

What is CFM?

You see the numbers everywhere, what does it mean? CFM stands for cubic foot per minute. This term is used as a measurement of airflow rate for ventilation systems. The cubic foot refers to a cube of air 1 foot x 1 foot x 1 foot. CFM represents a volume flow rate, since we measure how many cubic feet are flowing by per minute.

Air is really, really light.

It takes 13.5 cubic feet (101 gallons) of air to weigh 1 pound. For a 2,000 square foot house, that means all the air in that house weighs 1,185 pounds – not much. Warming or cooling air is “low calorie”. To warm all that air in your house up from 50 degrees F to 70 degrees F takes about 5,688 BTU’s. The smallest house furnace puts out 40,000 BTU’s per hour. So how come it takes so long to heat up the house on a cold morning? (hint: you’re not just warming the air) An unsealed door jamb, leaking 50 CFM, would over the course of 24 hours, leak out 72,000 cubic feet of air – not “low calorie.”

Wasted Water!

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The average family can dump 10,000 gallons or more down the drain every year waiting for hot water.  That’s half a swimming pool wasted!  If only there was a way to save all that water…  hmmmm…

Luckily there is!  A recirculation pump (retrofit or dedicated return line) can save water from being wasted and the corresponding money. 

How do the retrofit systems work you ask?  The problem of course is that water heated by your water heater sits in the line between the heater and the tap(s) where it cools off. Let’s call this “previously hot” water. When you turn on the tap you need to flush out this previously hot water to get to the fresh hot stuff. With low-flow faucets and long plumbing runs, this can take a long time – and waste a lot of water.  An instant hot water system – or hot water recirculation system – flushes the previously hot water back into the hot water tank (rather than you running it down the drain) through the cold water line, so you have freshly heated water waiting for you when you turn on the faucet – instant hot water. 

Metlund and Laing pumps:
http://www.hvacquick.com/products/residential/Instant-Hot-Water/Hot-Water-Recirculation-Pumps-NON-TANKLESS