NOW more than ever, Malaysians are staying at home for both work and play. It has been more than a year since the pandemic began; however, businesses that are especially reliant on a physical customer presence have been struggling to adapt.
A key issue that has been a key concern for office workers and businesses is Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). To better serve Malaysians, Daikin Malaysia has developed a series of air purifiers and conditioners that provides both fresh and pure air for Malaysians.
Lawrence Song, the General Manager of Daikin Malaysia Sales and Service Sdn Bhd shares his thoughts on the recent advancements Daikin Malaysia has made in response to the challenges during the pandemic.
Why is Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) so important, especially now?
IAQ has been especially significant lately because of the Coronavirus. Ever since it has been proven that this virus is easily transmitted because it is airborne, the worries and fears of being affected have led to a more cautious attitude and awareness towards what people actually breathe into their lungs.
Proper indoor air ventilation has also been a hot topic as people are now wanting to be more educated on how they can improve their home ventilation to ensure they breathe in cleaner air and achieve good indoor air quality.
What are key factors contributing to IAQ?
There are five main factors: air ventilation, circulation, filtration, relative humidity and air temperature. Air ventilation is the process of how well air exchange happens between outdoor and indoor air, especially when it’s being occupied by people while air circulation deals with the flow of internal air within the room.
Air filtration deals with providing filtered and clean air to the room while relative humidity and air temperature revolve around the comfort level of the room for its occupants.
Good IAQ happens when a room has proper air ventilation. This is when outdoor air is allowed to enter a room as easily as indoor air leaving a room. While combining air circulation with filtration, better IAQ can be achieved as cleaner air is circulated within the room at an optimum comfort level.
The relative humidity should be around 40%-50% and the temperature should be around 23 to 25 degrees respectively.
Can indoor air be worse than ‘fresh air’ outside?
Definitely. Most of us might not realise this, but many harmful pollutants from outdoors such as exhaust gas, haze and PM2.5 particles can be trapped indoors even if there are no proper ventilation systems in place.
Making matters worse, there are a set of harmful pollutants indoors. These pollutants come from carbon dioxide, cleaning agents, pet dander, formaldehyde from furniture and even house dust. These further reduce the air quality inside a home.
How do I test my air quality indoors?
It depends as commercial buildings like offices and restaurants are different from homes. More often than not, homes will have their windows open for ventilation, unlike offices which are mostly air-conditioned with their windows closed.
We advise installing an IAQ control system for commercial use and offices. This system provides companies with the capability to identify the quality of their indoor air based on CO2 sensors, PM2.5 detection sensors as well as relative humidity and air temperature sensors.
Do regular air conditioners work well enough?
Not really. This is because the main function of air conditioners is cooling comfort. Depending on features, our premium SMARTO model has built-in streamer purification technology; however, it does not provide any extra ventilation. This makes it especially important for offices to have a good ventilation system during this pandemic season.
What is Daikin’s Fresh and Pure air?
Daikin Fresh Air is our company’s innovative ventilation solution that expels polluted air in a room and introduces filtered external air. This ensures that our customers can constantly enjoy fresh indoor air.
While Daikin Fresh air caters to our customer’s ventilation needs, Daikin Pure Air focuses on the purification side of things by purifying indoor air through our very own streamer technology.
We believe that through these two initiatives, we can provide our customers with comfort and peace of mind knowing that with our products, the air they breathe is safe and clean for their loved ones.
What key products does Daikin produce to solve the problem of unhealthy indoor air quality?
Aside from air conditioning, we also cater to our customers’ needs when it comes to air ventilation and purification. We have products such as our heat reclaim ventilator (VAM) that comes with an optional PM2.5 filter which works specifically for cleaner air ventilation.
The VAM recovers heat energy lost through ventilation and saves energy while maintaining a comfortable and clean indoor air environment. Other products that focuses on both cooling and ventilation like our outdoor air processing and air handling units are also available.
When it comes to purification, we have recently just launched our new air purifiers that focuses on double method purification technology. We have three different types of air purifiers, namely the MCK55 model, MC55 model and MC40 model that caters to the different needs of our customers.
How do Daikin Fresh and Pure air products work together?
Well, simply put, Fresh air deals with the ventilation side of the air while Pure Air deals with purifying the ventilated air.
With both Daikin fresh and air products integrated into a room, a process is activated. First, our fresh air ventilation products will bring in outdoor air that has already been cleaned and possibly cooled by our system into the room.
Once clean air enters the room, our pure air products will further clean the air by purifying it with our exclusive double method technology that involves both our steamer and active plasma ion purification technology.
This ensures that the room is constantly filled with both fresh and clean air while customers enjoy the cooling comfort from our air conditioners.
Can you tell us more about Daikin Streamer Technology?
Daikin Streamer technology was developed by Daikin Industries Ltd in 2014. It is a type of plasma discharge technology that effectively generates high-speed electrons which are then combined with air components to produce strong oxidative decomposition power to decompose and remove up to 99.9% of viruses, bacteria and allergens.
It is a thousand times faster than normal plasma discharge and is also capable of inactivating more than 99.9% of the novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2).
Can you tell us more about Daikin Double Method Technology?
Daikin’s exclusive Double Method technology is a dual purification process of our Daikin air purifiers. It involves two different purification technologies that cleans air simultaneously.
It combines the decomposition capabilities of our streamer technology that functions inside the unit with active plasma ions that are being released outside the unit to further purify the air.
This means superior air purification is achieved as cleaning is done both inside and outside the unit to ensure you have cleaner air to breathe.
What are the results of Daikin’s Fresh and Pure air for inhabitants of buildings?
Customers will not only enjoy fresh air but clean air as well since both types of air can be achieved by our Daikin Fresh and Pure Air products.
We also hope that this can further promote a safer and healthier lifestyle for customers, especially to help curb the spread of the recent pandemic.
Daikin’s heat reclaim ventilator (VAM) and air purifiers are already available in the market. You can order it from our Daikin authorised dealers or Daikin’s Official Store on Shopee and Lazada.
