East Midlands Engineers
Brief
The customer is a small engineering company in the East Midlands, employing around 25 people, mostly highly skilled engineers doing a combination of design work in an office and prototyping work in a larger workshop. The company’s site consists of an office inside of the workshop, the roof of the office block is a light structure and not completely airtight. The original need was to provide as much protection as possible for employees in the offices from passing on airborne viruses to each other. During the COVID pandemic the company did move to mostly working from home for the engineers. However, the company’s work is collaborative in nature so there were occasions when team members needed to be in the offices working together in order to successfully complete tasks. The company had already established a risk assessment and made several modifications to its ways of working to mitigate the risk of COVID. These protections took the standard approaches of social distancing, cleaning of surfaces and one-way systems. For a technology company these seemed adequate but did not exemplify the company’s commitment to science and engineering to make a difference. The company felt that it could do better than just the widely adopted standard approaches.
Solution
The company reviewed the options available and came to the conclusion that Healthy Air Technology’s combination of a filter and the DNO catalyst provided the best protection available. Critically the DNO technology’s ability to also address NOx and VOC was a key consideration. While other solutions appeared to also address the issue of COVID only the DNO solution offered by Healthy Air Technology seemed to offer post pandemic issues like NOx and VOC. As a result, the company felt that it would get a longer-term benefit from the investment in DNO and not just a quick fix for COVID.
Additionally Healthy Air Technology’s use of Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD) struck a chord with the company which also uses advanced analytical techniques to develop better products. In the case of the HA500 the fact that CFD had been used to ensure better airflow and significantly reduced dead-spots where filtered air does not reach was a significant added value.
Results
The unit was placed in the main engineering office and set-up to run constantly when people were in the office. While the company did have subsequent cases of employees contracting COVID there were no simultaneous cases. The implication being that having the HA500 unit in the office did offer some protection against person transmition and that employees were only contracting COVID away from the workspace. Obviously, this doesn’t constitute a conclusive experiment as it lacks key components such as a double-blind element, a large data set and of course other controls were also in place. None the less the company is pleased that it escaped COVID without any signs of employee-to-employee transmition.
Employees have also noticed environmental benefits from the additional protections offered by the DNO technology. For example, there have been occasions where the activity in the workshop has led to odours spiling into the office, for example from prolonged use of the gas-powered forklift truck. On these occasions it has been noticed that the HA500 unit makes a difference in cleaning the air. This seems to justify the company’s decision to go with the solution with the longer-term benefits and the ability to address a wide range of environmental polutants.
Our product works quietly, constantly, like breathing itself – restoring the air you need to live well.