During ASHRAE’s June 2019 annual meeting in Kansas City, I became optimistic that the society is truly expanding its horizons to include occupant health as an important building performance metric. This is a tremendous step forward because we spend about 90% of our time in buildings, so there is a very good chance the indoor environment is going to affect our health.
For the financially motivated reader, a cost-benefit analysis review study in 2005 found that allowing office workers to control their own IAQ resulted in up to a 60% reduction in sick-leaves and an increase in productivity of around 6.5%. The benefit-to-cost gains following the renovations needed for this self-controlled indoor-air management was a ratio of at least 10.