Blog Layout

Improve Air Quality with Better Commercial AC

admin • July 9, 2018

The air quality in your commercial building is important for many reasons. The building is where your employees will spend the majority of their day, and healthier air means healthier employees. But improved air quality also benefits customers, clients, and/or tenants, and can protect important equipment. And poor indoor air quality can take a number of forms, such as high humidity (a serious problem during our New Jersey summers), dusty, unpleasant odors, and even infectious microbes.

So how do you improve your commercial indoor air quality? The best option is to work with professionals who offer commercial air conditioning in Fair Lawn, NJ. Yes, air conditioning! A good step on the path toward better air quality is a better AC system.

An Old Air Conditioner Can Mean Dusty, Unpleasant Air

How long has your commercial building had its current central air conditioner? If it’s more than fifteen years and was part of the building when you moved in, the age of the AC may be contributing to poor air quality in a number of ways.

First, the system will simply be dusty, and it will circulate that dust. Annual maintenance helps with this—and you should always have maintenance for the AC each year—but the older the system gets, the faster it will collect more dust and dirt.
Next, as the AC declines, humidity will increase. An air conditioner isn’t designed specifically as a dehumidifier (you can have dedicated commercial dehumidifiers installed if humidity balance is a major problem), but it does have dehumidification properties. Simply by running, it removes some moisture from the air. When it starts to lose its cooling power, humidity will rise in the building. If humidity has become an unexpected problem, we recommend looking into a new AC.
An air conditioner may also be the source of the unpleasant odors moving through the workspace. If the odor is a damp, sour smell, you’ve probably got “dirty sock syndrome” in the AC. This means mold and mildew are developing along the evaporator coil because the air conditioner is not removing moisture through the condensate pan. This is another warning that it’s time to get a better air conditioning system.

The Poorly Sized Commercial Air Conditioner

Your building may have an air conditioning system that isn’t the right size for the space, and this will lead to poor ventilation and poor air quality (as well as the previously mentioned humidity control issues). An AC must be accurately sized for the commercial space it must cool as well as account for the number of people in the space on average. If a non-licensed contractor handled the installation, the stale and humid air may be the fault of an air conditioner that wasn’t sized right. For modular systems, professionals can add on to an undersized AC. If the AC was oversized however, it may need to be replaced entirely.

If you’re ready for a new commercial air conditioning system, it will make a big difference in the indoor air quality for your building. If you still need help with IAQ, our experts are glad to offer other commercial solutions.