The Role of UVC in Improving HVAC Maintenance and Efficiency

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 | HVAC Maintenance and Efficiency

We all know that HVAC maintenance follows a seasonal cycle.  Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring all carry their own HVAC-related tasks and challenges.  So it’s interesting to find Robert Scheir, Ph. D., president and chairman of California-based Steril-Aire, calling attention to a different sort of seasonal cycle, namely, the cycle of economic downturns, and pointing to the effectiveness of UVC devices installed in HVAC systems for enhancing HVAC maintenance and efficiency efforts and thereby helping to absorb the blow of downturns like the one we’re all currently experiencing.

In “The ABCs of UVC” (Today’s Facility Manager, Aug. 2009), Scheir points out that our current “Great Recession” (not his word, but the one that nearly everybody has taken to calling it)

has placed greater pressure than ever on facility managers (fms) to reduce operating costs and defer costly capital expenditures — without compromising green initiatives and building quality or performance.  Ultraviolet C (UVC) devices installed in HVAC systems can provide an effective, yet often overlooked, tool for helping meet these challenges.

Before returning to his write-up, and given the historic nature of our economic emergency, we thought it might be interesting to offer the following highly (as in, drastically) condensed history of  UVC’s use as a way to control microbial growth:

• First, in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries the Danish/Faroese/Icelandic physician and scientist Niels Ryberg Finsen (1860-1904) pioneered the field of phototherapy by using UV rays to treat diseases, a feat for which he won the 1903 Nobel Prize for Medicine (making him, incidentally, the first Danish Nobel laureate; don’t you just love Wikipedia?).
• Next, beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the mid-20^th century, UVC lamps were used for germicidal and sterilization purposes in hospitals, kitchens, dairies, pharmaceutical plants, and elsewhere.
• In the 1950s UVC was first used in ventilation equipment, where it was used to prevent the spread of TB.
• In the 1960s UVC was on the way out in HVAC because the widespread move to mechanical ventilation and modern AC produced a system that didn’t work well with it.
• In the 1990s, Steril-Aire — yeah, Scheir’s company — pioneered the modern use of UVC in HVAC systems.

So there you have it (thanks, largely, to the much-appreciated timeline “What is UVC?” presented by IAQ – Energy Solutions, Inc.).  The punch line for our present purpose is that Scheir is head of the company that started the modern UVC movement. So he’s quite qualified to write about it.

We’ll let you read his well-mounted article at Today’s Facility Manager for yourself, although first we’ll point out that he talks about: 1) the way UVC works, 2) its benefits for IAQ control, energy and maintenance savings, equipment efficiency and service life, water conservation, and contribution to earning LEED credits and 3) question to ask off a given UVC device when you’re considering it for your building.  It’s a very nice package, and one that could well prove useful to your HVAC maintenance and efficiency efforts in the midst of this very interesting economic season.

FYI, you can also read Scheir’s March 2006 article for Buildings.com, “Keeping Buildings Healthy via UVC Technology,” if you’re so inclined.

Matt Cardin
Goodway Blogging Team

Image Credit: Public domain

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Written by: Goodway Blogging Team

Tags: HVAC Maintenance, HVAC Maintenance and Efficiency, HVAC systems, LEED certification, UVC

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