I work in the building performance field. Field technicians use blower doors to diagnose building air leakage and air exchanges. We’ve recently adopted a tactic of “flushing out” the air in a home prior to sending workers in, to reduce the levels of virus in the air if anyone in the home is infected but not showing symptoms. (If anyone were a known carrier or showing symptoms, we wouldn’t send workers in.)
Some folks have gotten this cool idea and I wonder if anyone here has an informed opinion to share:
It’s basically using the regular tools of our trade to increase building ventilation levels during polling hours. Given what I know of the virus and of blower doors, this sounds really good, but I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts. Especially anyone with medical or fluid dynamics expertise.
Alas, not an issue here, where end-game climate change means that the main danger to having open-air polling places in October is heatstroke. Wife dropped off our ballots today and reported that the open air early voting/ballot dropoff in East Tucson was doing booming business.
How do you handle a cold (or wet) air environment? That kind of air exchange isn’t something a heating system can keep up with, we’d expect to see poll opening temperatures below or near freezing here by early november. Covid is apparently largely about ventilation, so in theory it seems functional, but practically, if it’s outside of a reasonable range of temperatures, say 50-80 degrees F, or if it’s raining a sizeable amount, what then?
I’m not sure what you’re asking, but the proposed approach isn’t about heat or humidity. The blower door is basically a big fan we put into an opening (generally a door) to either pressurize or depressurize a building to increase air changes per hour, or ACH.
So if we use it up here (I’m in Maine) it might increase heating costs, but generally when we go to the polling station the door is open all day anyway.
I think in theory, in would definitely make the environment safer, especially for workers spending hours there as long as we’re mindful of directionality of flow. But as mentioned above, I’m not a medical or fluid dynamics expert.
And this is just proposed as a way to keep polling stations safer for the limited time they’re operating. Not sure I made that clear above. Hope this helps.
You’re going to increase the ACH, my point is that the increase is with new air that is not going to be 70 degrees. Here, or in Maine, it’s going to be something around freezing temperature air sucked in, rapidly lowering the temperature inside the building.
And this is not particularly encouraging either. (Worth noting, this is more a collection of anecdotes than a rigorous study, but that is where we start.)
Because they have no interest in doing so? And I’m not a fan of private interests doing so, honestly. If people are going to build alternatives to institutions like academic publishers, why not go the co-op route instead of the depending on the good will of the elite class route?
I hear “Why won’t people who have aggressively prioritized their own personal enrichment over all else spend some of that fortune on the common people they don’t know or love out of the goodness of their own hearts and a deep sense of gratitude?”
