Greenheck Marries UV-C Lights, HVLS Fans
VR demo shows how the combination clears the air for warehouses, gyms
VIRUS BUSTING: At Greenheck’s AHR Expo booth, Andy Dunst peers through a VR headset and uses a handheld controller to zap floating viruses. Greenheck’s new Amplify with Northern Light overhead HVLS fan rotates above. (Staff photo)
Whether indoor air is clean or laden with pathogens isn’t usually something you can see with the naked eye. Except at Greenheck’s AHR Expo booth, where visitors were treated to the full visual experience, courtesy of a VR headset — complete with video game-style controllers that let them “shoot” a UV-C beam to clear the air in a living room loaded with floating red airborne contaminants. A squeeze of the trigger, swipe left and right, and poof — the air was clear.
The VR demo was a visual for Greenheck’s brand-new Amplify with Northern Light overhead HVLS fan, rotating on display overhead as attendees played with the headset at the booth. The fan incorporates UV-C lighting technology, with bulbs at the end of the fan blades.
“UV-C lights are not a new technology. HVLS fans have been around for a while,” said Andy Dunst, application engineer, HVLS product line at Greenheck. “So with the current state of the world right now that we're living in, we’re marrying these two together.”
The fans are ideal for commercial and industrial spaces such as fitness centers, gyms, and manufacturing facilities — anywhere there’s a large occupant count.
According to Greenheck’s testing, the Amplify with Northern Light overhead HVLS fan inactivates 87.9% of pathogens on one pass-through.
“When the air is going through the fans, it is being disinfected every time,” Dunst said. “So obviously, the more air rotations in there and air changes throughout the fan in that space, it continues to get cleaner and cleaner. It's basically deactivating the pathogens and tearing apart the molecules in the viruses, making clean air for safe work environments.”
Looking ahead to IAQ in a post-COVID world, Erik Koenig, director of marketing and digital commerce, said Greenheck takes “very much a systems approach” to planning what’s next.
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“I always use a Lego analogy,” Koenig said. “Our product line is now as broad as anybody’s in the industry. So how do we take our Legos to create a configurable system that works for any built environment? Especially as we move into the explosion of warehouses and data centers, how do we get this up and running fast? How do we make them really safe, comfortable spaces to breathe in?
“And how do we retrofit?”
That’s the trend that Koenig is looking into the most — the retrofit model. In particular, he sees a need for new IAQ products that can help make retrofit buildings both healthier and more energy-efficient.
“Warehouses and data centers are two verticals that we're really interested in,” he said. “I think both are high growth potential.”
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