Addressing Airborne Health Risks
We’ve Taken Our Air for Granted. Until Today.
Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) is one of the most effective ways to address
airborne health risks in your building, including COVID-19.
The pandemic has shed light on what is truly takes to improve the IAQ in the buildings we work, educate and live in. The quality of the indoor air we breathe impacts our well-being. Indoor pollutants can be invisible to our senses, yet harmful to our health and productivity. In your lifetime, you breathe over 250 million litres of air, 4X more than food and liquid combined. Airborne health risks have risen to the top of health concerns, and we must start taking IAQ seriously for the safety of the people in our spaces.
Defender by Schaefer products were born out of necessity. Innovation helped our founders get back to work safely. We understand the challenges with existing systems. Our purpose is to engineer solutions that use science-based, proved applications to eliminates risks in the air we breathe.
Know the Difference
Air Purification vs. Filtration
Air filtration gets rid of the airborne particles through the use of an air filter, which “captures” the particles.
Air purification (air cleaning) removes contaminants—viruses, bacteria, mites, bugs, spores, molds, fungi, smells, gasses, etc.—from the air in a room by killing them first and then capturing them, sanitizing the air returning to the space.
What particles get removed depends on the type of filtration and sanitization/purification methods get used. Some trap, some neutralize, some kill.
Air purification is an important part of an overall strategy to improve IAQ in your space. It should be a part of the ventilation and filtration strategy, particularly in areas where ventilation is inadequate. This includes high traffic areas where people are generating a lot of aerosols into the air from talking, sneezing, coughing, even just breathing.
Retrofitting HVAC systems is extremely costly and only gives us marginal benefit because of its inability to clean the air in these high traffic zones. Increasing the level of overall filtration needs a much higher air flow for the filters to be efficient, which can upset the balance in the building needed for overall comfort.
The challenge: how to effectively clean and move high volumes of air. Defender’s approach answers this question.
