Posted By Granville Jenkins
Hi Jeanne
Having nearly completed this response I have come back to the beginning as I would like to mention that I am not a consultant nor looking for work - and the comments that I am about to make will provide some clarity or it could be confusion to the mountain that you may have to climb before finding a solution to your problem!
I have more than my share of theoretical knowledge and practical experience of such environments as you have described!
To be honest some of the conditions that you have described would concern me - two fully glazed external walls is a recipe for disaster, unless you have measures in place to control the amount of light entering the 'space' - otherwise some personnel will likely have problems with visual actuity when using visual display units (the eyes will adjusting to daylight level at their workstation say at around 1000lux whereas they are trying to view a screen at 200lux which is known to cause disability glare in some situations you could also have direct glare problems.
Introducing artificial lighting can cause as many problems as it solves and with the wrong fittings could themselves cause glare problems - a few years ago there was a practice of specifying CAT2 luminaires as a 'cure all' for lighting office environments this has recently been withdrawn from the CIBSE Lighting Guide LG3 'The Visual Environment for Display Screen Use' (as it did not work!) - and who knows how many offices rely on CAT2 Lighting?
Under LG3 it is no longer a case of specifying a CAT 2 fitting, the 'designer' must design the visual environment and take account of the amount of uplight (to the ceiling) and also the colours for the office as LG3 specifies percentage surface reflections between the Ceiling and Walls - Its no good painting the whole of the office 'white' - it will not satisfy the requirements of LG3.
Sorry to go on about 'lighting' - the next subject is the air conditioning, there are various questions that need to be asked, for example - is the fresh air reaching all occupants or are some relying on the polluted air that is being extracted from the office. By way of an example I will explain a situation that I was in - I used to be in an office where myself and another member of staff were sitting directly beneath the extract duct for the fresh air supply (the windows are sealed and there are two interconnected offices that are reliant upon the mechanical supply of fresh air) - so what happens! Well the extract system pulls contaminated air from the office spaces including the adjacent office (as their air supply/extract system is even worse!) and when a female member of staff puts on deodorant the extract system in our side of the office pulls the smelly's through to our office before being extracted and you could not escape breathing in these fumes - if the air is carrying such substances what other contaminants could the air be carrying e.g. a cold/sore throat virus which beset both offices. You mention that the ventilation system is 'up to scratch', but has anyone recently inspected and cleaned the heat exchanger to the fan coil units (not simply changed the filter!). We had a system of fan coil units introduced and it turned out that the supplier recommended that the heat exchangers be cleaned at 3 monthly intervals -as for the filters - these were a joke and I was surprised that such a reputable company allowed their logo to be used on such a poor system.
There are several conditions that arise before any improvement can be made, one of these is empathy with those who are suffering the health consequences of working in such an environmental 'melting pot'. I mention empathy as some people tend to put the blame on the occupants and say things such as 'they are a bunch of moaning minnies and don't pay to much attention to what they tell you, and they should be grateful for what they have got!' The mere fact so many people are suffering to such an extent shows that there are real problems with the 'space' they occupy.
With the right sort of advice you should be able to satisfy say 80% of the occupants or if your lucky 95% however, whatever you do the probability is that you will not please everyone (if you do, all the better), it should not be too difficult to make some adjustments - depends on how deep the clients pockets are, how far they are prepared to dig into that pocket, and how far they are prepared to go in making the changes to the infrastructure.
Regretfully, there is no easy solution to the problems that you face, but if you have any queries or require a bit more advice I can be contacted on the following email address:
granvillejenkins@msn.comBest Regards for 2008
Granville