Introduction - The Current State of Indoor Environments
By current estimates, people stay within buildings for around 90 % of their time, including houses, workplaces, schools or transport. As people have moved into those indoor habitats, the structural and mechanical systems that support the spaces have not changed to match human biological requirements. In those areas the air is not a single unchanging mass. It is a shifting system that changes because of building designs, how individuals act, the use of electronics, heat from the sun and the weather outside.
And yet the usual method for controlling the areas is based on a primary error, which is the assumption that conditions are the same everywhere. Traditional Heating, Ventilation besides Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems manage a whole house or a floor of a building as if the entire space is one identical volume. With this large scale method, the specific conditions in small areas are ignored. Because of this indoor microclimates exist without being monitored or recorded.
An untracked microclimate is a small area where the air is not clean, the temperature rises quickly and the moisture levels change - those conditions occur inside specific rooms or even in certain corners of one room. For the central controls of a building, those areas are invisible. To understand the impact of this lack of data, one must see it as a three part problem that affects the health of people, how well the brain functions and how much energy the world uses.
The Mechanics of the Untracked Microclimate
To see why local indoor conditions are so different from central settings, it is necessary to examine the physical processes.