Most schools today, profoundly advertise their establishment as air-conditioned, from classrooms, libraries, labs and auditoriums. Air conditioning in schools is still a debatable topic in India. While some parents do not acknowledge the use of ACs in school, the increasing amount of temperature in Indian cities, and the current lifestyles of spending more time in indoor environments are making way for more air-conditioned classrooms in India. Schools with AC classrooms advocate its application. They mostly argue that cooler classrooms help students to be better attentive with studies and also help teachers to cope up with a large group of youngsters, in the hot weather.
While AC solves one of the problems of thermal discomfort, it certainly opens Pandora's Box for another critical one. Bonphul CEO, Prodyut Bora, comments, “Bringing in ACs to classrooms shuts off the doors and windows, which was priorly the only method of ventilation in a room with a high occupancy of carbon dioxide exhaling people. Also, as per research, children have faster respiratory rates than adults. An average school-goer child aged 6-12 years has 18-30 breaths per minute and an adolescent child aged 13-17 years 12-16 breaths per minute. As children are comparatively more active and engage in more outdoor activities than adults, they breathe more rapidly. With a high rate of respiration, air-conditioned classrooms are witnessing a surge in Carbon Dioxide levels in the rooms, which is a very alarming situation, even more than high temperature, or thermal discomfort.”
With schools with smart IoT-based CO2 sensors, sends timely reports to parents about the rising CO2 levels. This has caused alarm amongst parents for their child's health.
One such issue was observed in one of the top-notch schools "British School" in New Delhi. The school was on a lookout for a similar solution for their high classroom CO2 levels. Bonphul VentiMax ventilation solution is now solving the stale air problem for the school. This is VentiMaxs first entry in public domain solving CO2 issues.
