Find Out If Your Business Requires Critical Environment Solutions
Critical environments. Mission-critical spaces. Cleanrooms. Controlled environments. IAQ. ISO. You may have come across these terms and acronyms while reading about custom HVAC for your facility; but unless you’re a specialized engineer, they may not be a part of your working knowledge base.
However, these terms are essential to learn when deciding on the kind of HVAC solutions your building (and the smaller environments within your building) may need. Keep reading to discover how to make these determinations for your business and to find a critical environment manufacturing facility that designs and builds for critical environments and cleanrooms.
What Is a Critical Environment?
A critical environment is any space with specific requirements. These requirements can include:
- Temperature.
- Humidity.
- Airborne particle counts.
- Air pressure.
- Air changes.
- Air flow.
A critical environment is a more loosely applied term than a cleanroom. Therefore, a critical environment may have the qualities of a cleanroom, it is not measured in quantities that internal and external parties monitor for facility compliance.
Cleanrooms have specific and strict requirements determined by the International Standards Organization (ISO), which creates agreed-upon standards to promote uniform best practices. Industry-specific cleanroom standards also exist and are governed by federally regulated industry organizations.
For example, in a healthcare facility, the entire building is considered a critical environment. Facility managers ensure that infection prevention measures (masking, cleaning protocols, and more) outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are adhered to throughout the building. However, within the hospital, there are rooms with more specific parameters, such as operating rooms, where stringent cleanroom requirements must be met to ensure patient safety.
To use another example of an industry that requires cleanroom environments, pharmaceutical compounding and manufacturing are both regulated by the U.S. Pharmacopoeia (USP), which sets indoor air quality (IAQ) standards for these industries.
Is My Facility a Critical Environment? Does It Require Cleanrooms?
To determine whether your facility is a critical environment, it is important to consider your answer to these two statements:
- Carefully considered environmental conditions will help your facility meet its goals.
Your facility has air-quality-specific regulatory requirements for certain facility operations. - The first statement suggests that your facility contains environments that should thoughtfully include critical environment HVAC solutions to ensure the safety, health, and quality of your assets and human capital.
The second statement is relevant for facilities with cleanrooms.
These industries typically have facilities that are considered critical environments:
- Healthcare
- Data centers
- Manufacturing plants
- Buildings with sensitive electronics
The following industries typically require cleanroom facilities:
- Research centers
- Laboratories
- Healthcare
- Pharmaceutical
- Electronics fabrication
- Biotech
- Medical device manufacturing
However, your facility doesn’t have to be listed here to reap the benefits of critical environment HVAC solutions. If your facility is an office building, you may, in fact, consider your building a critical environment, purely because you’ve explored the research about IAQ, productivity, and employee wellbeing.
Any industry that requires critical environments or cleanrooms can partner with a critical environment manufacturing facility to acquire highly effective air distribution and filtration products and systems for their facilities.
What Cleanroom or Critical Environment Solutions Do I Need? How Do I Find the Right Partner?
Both critical environments and cleanrooms require air filtration and environmental-control products that affect indoor air quality, depending on your specific requirements.
Custom HVAC manufacturers design and build products for critical environments and cleanrooms, like:
- HEPA and ULPA filters: These highly effective products filter air as it blows into a space, preventing infectious particles from getting into a room. HEPA filters catch particles that are .3 microns in diameter or larger, and ULPA filters catch particles .1 microns in diameter or larger.
- Ceiling diffusers: Diffusers disperse air in targeted directions to ensure that the appropriate air volume is released into a room.
- Fan filter units: These systems include a fan, blower, and diffuser to provide direct, immediate clean air.
- Suspended ceiling systems: These systems are drop ceilings installed in a critical environment or cleanroom to provide fan filter units, filters, ceiling diffusers, lighting, and more in a highly localized setting.
Vetting a custom HVAC manufacturer involves three simple steps, so you can acquire the best-performing equipment for your facility’s purposes.
- Experience: Conduct research on the manufacturer’s website to view the projects they’ve taken on in the past. If your industry or industry-adjacent facilities are represented in their list of projects, this critical environment HVAC solutions manufacturer can likely meet your needs.
- Approach: Modular design, in which your systems or products are largely prefabricated before shipment, is considered the most cost-effective approach for today’s critical environments and cleanrooms. This approach allows you to limit invasive construction practices, additional people on-site, and the introduction of construction dust and debris.
- Innovation: The manufacturer you choose should be on the forefront of designing critical environment solutions based on current best practices and the latest research, such as far UV-C lighting for infection prevention.
Learn more about a critical environment manufacturing facility that has 50 years of experience engineering innovative solutions for many key industries that require superior IAQ.