Efficiency And Indoor Air Quality In Relocatable Classrooms
School districts in California and throughout the U.S. are increasingly using relocatable classrooms (RCs), also known as modular or portable classrooms, because of a growing student population and state and federal mandates for class-size reduction. California schools are estimated to have 85,000 RCs, and this number is increasing at a rate of 4,000 to 10,000 per year.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Davis Energy Group, American Modular Systems (a manufacturer of RCs), and two California school districts collaborated to perform a field study of four new, high-performance RCs. The results of this study indicate that it is possible to engineer solutions that simultaneously increase the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) and energy efficiency of RCs.