RenewAire
Making Indoors Safer

A return to how life was at the beginning of 2020 seems like a far-fetched dream. With countries globally turning into sites of the pandemic’s greatest tragedies, world’s busiest cities are no more the same—streets are not crowded, containment areas are being abandoned, businesses shuttered, and staying indoors is synonymous with staying safe. Having slipped into an atomized existence, majority of the global population has restricted its movements. However, the fact is that the coronavirus thrives inside.

Be it at home or in a workplace, where the density of office buildings has increased over the past decade, more people are sharing the same air with fewer physical barriers. As such, tightly sealed buildings and confined and crowded environments have become a breeding ground for contracting the spreading SARS-CoV-2 virus and cross-contamination. To increase the amount of fresh air in buildings, organizations need to rethink and re-evaluate their current setups with more sustainable ventilation systems to protect the health of occupants inside structures of every type. In a nutshell, increasing building ventilation can make all the difference and mitigate the spread of the disease.

This is precisely where RenewAire steps in as a game-changer. A pioneer in Energy Recovery Ventilation technologies for over 35 years, RenewAire is committed to improving people’s health, cognitive function, productivity and wellbeing by enhancing IAQ through energy recovery ventilation technologies. The company offers a fifth-generation, static-plate, enthalpy-core Energy Recovery Ventilators (ERVs) and Dedicated Outdoor Air Systems (DOAS) that have been instrumental in optimizing energy efficiency, curbing capital costs and operational expenses by reducing HVAC loads.

“RenewAire promotes the use of outdoor air to be brought inside the built environment, which today is extremely tightly enclosed for energy conservation,” says Nick Agopian, VP, Sales and Marketing, RenewAire. However, if you don’t ventilate in such environments, you end up with sick building syndrome or deficient indoor air quality. Scientific research has established that the contaminants that we don’t smell, see, or touch have a negative impact on our life with regards to health and longevity. To this end, one methodology many studies use is Disability-Adjusted Life Year (DALY).

The DALY metric compares an individual’s current life expectancy against an idealized one in which the individual is in perfect health and lives to the standard life expectancy. This model clearly shows humans can live healthier and longer lives if they have better indoor air quality. A Lawrence Berkeley Labs study (Ventilation Rates and Health LBNL Indoor Environment Group, 2019) found that “the number of reported statistically significant improvements in health with increased ventilation rates far exceeded the anticipated chance improvements in health .” And, Agopian notes, “other IAQ studies have cited improvements in cognitive function, sleep habits, work performance, test scores and decision-making.”

Empowering buildings to become energy efficient and sustainable, RenewAire has spent over 35 years in the field designing its products to score the highest levels possible. Furthermore, the company’s ERV systems offer best-in-class efficiency, where cross-contamination between the exhaust and outdoor air streams is near zero, and the activities of employees within a facility can increase the amount of outdoor air entering the building with little change in energy consumption. “Facility managers can either manually or through sensor technologies put our ventilation systems in boost mode based on the quality of air in a workplace,” adds Agopian. To further ensure the efficacy of its products, as a standard, RenewAire designs its systems to accommodate the MERV 13 filter, a device that percolates 2.5 micron particulate matter, which are fine particles in the air that promote health issues like heart attacks and strokes.

RenewAire’s products are able to achieve such desirable air quality results via a quick response manufacturing (QRM) methodology developed by the University of Wisconsin. “This process breaks away from the typical assembly line, lean, and Six Sigma manufacturing methods and uses a cellular structure,” explains Agopian. Leveraging QRM techniques, an individual is trained to take any ventilation product from the beginning sheet metal to the final shipping stages all by himself/herself. As a direct result of the company’s QRM implementation, RenewAire’s work-in-progress times are measured in days, which consequently helped it achieve industry-best lead times.

Owing to its quick customer service and exceptional ERV systems, RenewAire works with over 300 exclusive customers—mainly distributors and manufacturers reps—as a prominent solutions provider. The company’s ventilation expertise has recently reached out of its conventional marketplace and found many applications in the real estate realm. “A developer in New York City came to us and asked to design a system that would triple the amount of outdoor air ventilating through a facility with optimum energy recovery. This caught us by surprise, and we asked why,” recalls Agopian. The client intended to sell condos worth $2million in Manhattan, and cutting-edge ventilation would prove to be a strong value proposition to make the sales. With the help of RenewAire’s immense experience and product development skill, the client was able to present their customers with thoroughly engineered ERV systems that provided better, cleaner indoor environments for the residential properties.

RenewAire, in the past six years alone, has witnessed an exponential growth upwards of 300 percent due to its ventilation systems’ unmatched capabilities. “With the rising number of COVID-19 cases in the world, organizations and factories can greatly benefit from our products as better ventilation is proven to minimize the spread of infection and the disease,” says Agopian. Moving forward, the company intends to continue its uphill climb and carry out its mission to provide cleaner, fresher indoor atmospheres for organizations and residential facilities throughout the world.