Setra Blog

Protective Environment (PE) rooms are hospital rooms designed to protect a high-risk immunocompromised patient from human and environmental airborne pathogens. These are positive pressure rooms intended to keep patients safe during recovery from cancer treatment or stem-cell transplant.

Airborne Infection Isolation (AII) rooms, commonly called negative pressure rooms, are single-occupancy patient care spaces designed to isolate airborne pathogens to a safe containment area. AII rooms are a specialized application of a hospital’s HVAC system, where the airflow supplied into the room is balanced with exhaust airflow to create at least -0.01” WC negative differential pressure with respect to an adjacent space, usually the hallway or an anteroom. In simple terms, this provides a gentle flow of air under a closed doorway and into the room so that no airborne particulates escape into nursing staff or public areas. Exhaust from these rooms is not recirculated in the HVAC system. Instead, exhaust air typically moves in dedicated ductwork to ventilation stacks on the rooftop, where atmospheric air provides sufficient dilution to make the resulting air safe.

We have gone over the best practices for selecting a unidirectional and a bidirectional differential pressure transducer based on usage and application. So why should you use a unidirectional differential pressure transducer over a bidirectional model for an isolation room? When requiring an increased accuracy reading for positive and negative pressure, it is best to use a unidirectional transducer. For positive pressurized rooms, you can place the low port on the reference area and the high port on the room of concern. For negative pressurized rooms, you place the low port on the negative pressure room of concern and the high port on the pressure reference area.

There is no guarantee of a perfect, contaminant free cleanroom. However by adhering to room pressure requirements, proper gowning procedures and by understanding the origins of the contaminants, users can minimize contamination risk to ensure safe testing and manufacturing environment. These are some of the things you may not have realized can compromise a cleanroom, and some possible ways to reduce the contamination of the source.

Thank you to all who visited us at Booth 1244 in the Building Automation and Controls section of the AHR Expo this year in Orlando, Florida. We enjoyed seeing both new and familar faces! The world's largest HVACR event was anything but boring and we think the 60,000 attendees would have to agree.

With over 2,000 organizations as featured exhibitors this year, there will be thousands of brand new products being highlighted across over a dozen applications. With only three weeks away from the 2016 AHR Expo, Setra is excited to be sharing its newest lineup of products to attendees.  Some of Setra's newest products are:

Hospital staffs face a barrage of beeping devices daily while caring for patients. Alarm fatigue, as it’s known, can cause staff to ignore alarms, especially if different devices have similar sounds or frequencies. Nuisance alarms are those sounds that do not represent a danger to the patient, but come from devices that cannot otherwise be configured to stop the alarm from sounding when a situation is neither important nor urgent.

The baud rate is the rate at which information is transferred in a communication channel. Baud rate is commonly used when discussing electronics that use serial communication. In the serial port context, "9600 baud" means that the serial port is capable of transferring a maximum of 9600 bits per second.

Pressure Sensor Installation: In the Wall or In the Ceiling?

The landscape of room pressure monitors is diverse, with many different options of product design from various manufacturers. One of the basic choices in product design is whether to include the differential pressure transducer on-board with the touch screen, or external in the ceiling or interstitial space. There are pros and cons for each approach, depending mostly on the preference of the A&E firm or customer.

A frequent question asked about room pressure monitoring applications is “how much sensor accuracy do I need?” The most common thought is to order the most accurate sensor available. For a moment, consider all things are equal with regard to price. Is the best accuracy the best choice? Not always. It depends on the application.