Each month, Indoor Sciences Inc. features an educational website that will expand the knowledge of green building and indoor air quality professionals.  January 2010’s featured website is EPA Base Website.

It is every IAQ consultant’s dream… being able to spend multiple days analyzing every detail that affects a building’s air quality.  Ok, maybe that’s just my dream.  Now imagine the data you would collect if you performed a detailed assessment on 100 randomly selected office buildings in 37 cities throughout the US.

With all that data, you would know baseline symptom rates and mean concentrations for IAQ contaminants.  It would help you establish if the symptoms and concentrations in a problem building were beyond normal amounts.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Building Assessment Survey and Evaluation (BASE) study provides this excellent information.  The BASE study was conducted over a five year period from 1994-1998 in 100 buildings in cities with populations greater than 100,000 within 10 climatic regions.

You can find some general summaries of the data on the EPA BASE website.  Here are some of the sections of the BASE website that I recommend:

• Statistical breakdown of volatile organic compounds measured
• Mean ventilation rates
• Airborne mold counts and comparisons
• Standard occupant questionnaire (Appendix F, page 295 of 311)

If you really want to leverage the information, you can get the raw data in database format (.dba) from the EPA.  Digging through the database is not for the faint of heart, but you will reap a better understanding of what is normal.

So next time a client asks, “Is that normal?”, you have the answer.  “Let me check the EPA BASE data!”

To visit this month’s featured website, click EPA BASE Website.

To learn more about the indoor environment, please visit our section on training.  If you would like to receive our free e-newsletter, just click: Sign Me Up.

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Indoor Sciences, Inc. does not guarantee the accuracy of information on the featured website.  The featured website does not endorse Indoor Sciences, Inc. nor is there a connection between the  two organizations.