ASHRAE Introduces Guide for Reopening Schools

By Chad Edmondson

School is back in (sort of) and the ASHRAE Epidemic Task Force is doing everything it can to help school districts and university campus environmental health managers, facility managers, administrators, technicians, and service providers navigate through these unprecedented circumstances. Most notably, last month the task force released an updated Reopening Guide for Schools and Universities.

The 41-page document, complete with a series of detailed checklists, covers all of the following topics:

• Determining Building Readiness

• Equipment & System Specific Checks & Verifications During the Academic Year

• New/Modified Facility Design Recommendations

• Filtration Upgrades • Operations of Occupied Facilities

• Controlling Infection Outbreak in School Facilities

• Higher Education Facilities Recommendations

The guide is organized in order from the simplest steps that should be taken to mitigate the airborne transmission of Covid-19 (SARS-CoV-2) to more long-term improvements and references important links to the latest relevant ASHRAE standards.

The guide places particular emphasis on building humidification, a topic the we are currently covering in our series on Reducing Virus Transmission with Humidification. In fact, more than half of the pages reference humidity, underscoring what scientists now saying about the importance of maintaining a minimum 40% RH in public spaces to reduce the float time of aerosolized viruses.

We encourage all of our readers to follow along with this series, in addition to downloading the ASHRAE guide. We also suggest that HVAC operators, servicing personnel and engineers review our Humidification Basics Series. This is an excellent resource for understanding everything from how to handle humidifier condensate to reading a psychrometric chart.