I’m Keith Roe, an environmental consultant and owner of Advanced IAQ Solutions and I want to make sure that the air you breathe inside your home is as fresh as it would be when you’re out in nature. Our main goal is to make sure that you have the highest quality air. The average human takes 22,000 breaths every day. That comes out to around 30lbs of air and 3,000 gallons. This has a dramatic effect on your overall health. Consulting with an Environmental consultant can shine a light on any potential issues that may be present in your home or business. By having an on-site evaluation done you can ensure that you are breathing the best quality air and are minimizing the transmission of toxins, molds, infectious diseases and viruses.

What Does An Environmental Consultant Do?

The main purpose of an Environmental Consultant is to provide people with a service to address any potential indoor environmental issues they may have to deal with. Important impact areas include the key factors creating air quality and finding factors that promote the transmission of diseases and viruses, as well as the presence of unknown mold. We work with clients in residential, commercial, and Healthcare settings.
Maintaining a healthy living area is essential not only for the current occupants of these buildings, but for future generations as well. We offer our services to homeowners, government agencies, the business sector, and healthcare facilities. We inspect and test for indoor contaminants and most importantly identify the sources.  We also identify any indoor environmental conditions that actually facilitate the transmission of diseases.
Each environment is unique unto itself offering different sets of challenges to work with, identifying these is important to providing the best living or working area for the inhabitants. We first start by creating a site-specific survey to scope the project. Monitoring the indoor air provides us with the information that we need in order to best understand the ecosystem and how to best go about changing it to provide the safest living and working space for our clients. Based on those findings we then develop a plan and work with you to make that plan a reality.

Combining our experience, knowledge with testing, regulatory requirements, and technical expertise Advanced IAQ Solutions is able to provide an unmatched service for environmental indoor air quality assessments. With gathering all this information we are able to identify and minimize risks and preserve health and safety. It can also serve to stave off legal action, stop OSHA complaints, reduce illness, and ensure compliance with current environmental research.

Commercial Air Purifiers and Indoor Air Quality

Commercial spaces are directly affected by the product of service that they provide to your community. Using restaurants as a great example, they give off a big number of VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) and other gasses in their normal day to day operations. Meanwhile, office buildings since they are so densely occupied can give off high levels of carbon dioxide and transmissible diseases. With these two examples you can see that commercial setting just based on the effects of the business or people inhabiting the building can produce more effects than a normal residential area. An overall system check of HVAC functionality as well as conducting tests on the air quality and determining what contaminants are in that air is a critical first step.

Coronavirus - Covid-19 Environmental Consulting

The transmission of airborne disease has been on the forefront of everyone’s mind in the last year during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even after we move through this as a country we will still have to think about airborne diseases. That being said, it is imperative that commercial buildings have a viable and current pandemic preparedness plan and are compliant with the ASHRAE 62.2 and other recent position documents.

With an increase in the population receiving the vaccine and returning to a normal work schedule they are less likely to contract the coronavirus. They are however still about to carry and transmit the disease even without affecting themselves.

As the mask mandate is pulled back and normal business operations are beginning to reemerge the likelihood of other airborne diseases are still present to be contracted. When you are breathing in high levels of pathogens or find yourself in an area with above average dust and allergen levels it is important to monitor your time spent there. When these small respirable particles, the tiny sub-micron particles that enter our lungs are elevated, all of that has an effect on your health, and many times is a gradual decline in your health, or a gradual response that is being built up.

Other Reading Environmental Contaminants

Medical journals are now saying that our immune systems are becoming weaker and weaker as the years go by. This has many factors that play into it but the quality of the air that we breathe is a major player in the equation. For people who sit in office buildings with recirculated air for years and years that can add up to dramatically affect your quality of health. Most buildings are constructed to be as energy efficient as possible, but in doing so they are lacking in fresh air ventilation and proper air filtration, trap air particles, increase carbon dioxide and recirculate mold and other contaminants through the same ducts over and over again. The fresh air ventilation, even in a commercial building is a very small part of the air that gets heated and cooled. All of that has had an effect upon the health of our buildings and affect the occupants.

Environmental Consultant Day To Day Tasks

In homes, health care facilities, nursing homes, extended health care, daycares, and schools have been our most consistent clients in the past year. These types of facilities which have large gatherings of people on a daily basis need to be held to a high standard once business gets back to 100% following the pandemic. The indoor air quality of these facilities will be routinely checked to make sure that it is clean and safe moving forward.

Finding Your Answers

Once all the tests are run and metrics are reported what actually happens? As Environmental Consultants we evaluate about 14 different factors of air quality, and from those factors, establish what standards are out there to be complied to. And all the contaminants that we evaluate have had research, and there are standards of exposure that should be adhered to. We define those standards against what we found.

When it comes to long term solutions for commercial and residential structures it can start with a modification of the HVAC system, or increasing filtration levels. Increasing the level of fresh air into these enclosed environments is a way to improve the quality of air for the people who work or live there. Our first steps are to maximize what we can and create the best environment possible. Air purification and disinfection devices are an example of a solution and have grown in importance since the technology behind them has increased in recent years. We follow ASHRAE, EPA and IAQA guidelines and provide validation of the results upon which to build an effective remediation plan.

How Much Will This Cost Me?

Don’t worry about it! We provide initial consultations for free! We will discuss your current situation and develop a survey that will explain all the findings in a simple understandable format. We can then go about discussing a budget and plan to move forward.

Providing this service to your community is a joy for our team. You can contact us through our email address Keith.roe@rcn.com and schedule an appointment. We consider it a privilege to help you find out what’s in your air and how we can help to make it better.

Find Out What You Need

Check out our website and take our online questionnaire. Its 30 questions consisted of individual questions to help evaluate what could be happening in your home or office building. After you complete the questionnaire feel free to contact us and we can walk you through the findings and go over our plan to get you breathing better.

More Information on Environmental Consultants

An Environmental Engineering Consultant can assist you in environmental building system design and project oversight. If you have any questions on the scope of our services and whether we can help with your project, please contact us directly.

Areas We Provide Environmental Consultant Services:

We service the Lehigh Valley and beyond! The areas that are included in the Greater Lehigh Valley that we service include: Bethlehem, Allentown, Easton, Poconos, and all towns in the Carbon, Lehigh, Northampton, Delaware, Monroe, and Berks counties. If you need environmental consultant services in any of these areas, contact us today!