Setra Blog

Requirements and regulations are becoming ever more stringent for critical environments, making finding the right products for a space increasingly difficult. Not only must the specs of the product be considered, but the supplier must be taken into account as well. Shopping around with the intent to purchase from a variety of vendors takes a significant amount of time and effort. In addition to wasted time and effort, buying from multiple vendors comes associated with a number of risks and drawbacks, including:

• Incompatible hardware
• Incompatible software
• Minimal or disjointed tech support
• Inability to integrate products
• Installation and operational issues

Hot-wire anemometers are widely used throughout hospitals. Although their initial accuracy remains undisputed, a hot-wire anemometer's accuracy is not stable over time. Hot-wire anemometers must be cleaned at regular intervals to remain an accurate and effective solution for monitoring room pressure. Without regular cleaning and calibration, the accuracy of a hot-wire anemometer decreases significantly over time.

Proper room pressure and airflow are crucial for maintaining critical environments in hospitals. When talking about pressurized hospital spaces, the most well-known are operating rooms and isolation rooms. However, these are not the only two pressurized spaces within a hospital. ASHRAE Standard 170 details 60 different types of rooms in a hospital requiring pressurization. Without proper room pressurization, hospitals put their accreditation by the Joint Commission in jeopardy.

In a hospital environment, alarm fatigue is an increasingly prevalent issue. Alarm fatigue is the sensory overload when clinicians are exposed to an excessive number of alarms; this can result in staff ignoring alarms, particularly if different devices employ similar sounds or frequencies. Nuisance alarms are those not representative of a patient in danger but come from devices that don't allow configuration for non-critical circumstances.

Twice a year, many critical environments - such as compounding pharmacies and cleanrooms - undergo particle certification. To obtain room certification, either a minimum sample volume (as written in the EC GMP Annex 1) should be taken, or the sequential sampling technique (as identified in both FS209E and ISO 14644-1) should be used. However, since this particle certification usually occurs only every six months, many critical environments are unaware of their particle counts during the remainder of the year.

Flow rate is important to consider when selecting a particle counter for a critical environment. The flow rate of a particle counter is the rate at which a pump draws air through the sample chamber, measured in cubic feet per minute (cfm). Two common flow rates for particle counters are 1 cfm and 0.1 cfm. Depending on the application, each flow rate can be valuable.

Setra FLEX Environmental Monitor helps to ensure safe and energy-efficient indoor environmental and ventilation control conditions for pressurized critical spaces. Compliance with the standards and regulations for monitoring and control of critical environments requires highly reliable yet easy to use products, and FLEX was designed with compliance of these standards in mind. FLEX is the highest performing and most flexible room monitor and controller in the industry.

Setra FLEX is a comprehensive environmental monitoring system for critical environments. Winner of the 2018 AHR Innovation Award in the Building Automation category, FLEX provides flexible room control and monitoring in a pre-configured, simple to use unit.

In hospitals, pharmaceutical compounding centers, and other sensitive healthcare environments, one of the biggest threats to patient health is the spread of pathogens. Exposure to viruses, bacteria, pollen, and fungi all pose hazards to patients and care providers and can compromise critical spaces like operating rooms and other procedure areas.

In most hospital pharmacy cleanrooms, standard operating procedure includes sampling of air quality for viable particles (i.e. particles that include or are composed of microorganisms). These tasks are traditionally executed with an air sampler containing agar strips or simply by placing agar contact plates on surfaces throughout the facility. These samples are then left to incubate and are then analyzed to determine the environment’s air quality.