Across the world there are serious differences in the air quality that every human breathes. Whether it’s in the countryside or the suburbs, the city or at sea; the air that we breathe in and out can have serious consequences on short- and long-term health. Many building managers and OHS (Occupational Health and Safety) professionals will be familiar with Air Inspection, sometimes part of a wider HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Cooling) system inspection.
Thanks to the rapid uptake of mobile devices in the corporate space, it is now possible to carry out inspection of these systems or general air quality using paperless solutions. Air inspection is not only key for the performance of buildings, machinery, and any other asset; it’s an important measure of health and safety in the workplace and should be considered fundamental to any business or organisation. Whilst those in an inner-city office in Beijing may have different values to those at offshore windfarm installations in the Pacific, the principal remains the same – it’s important to monitor what every worker and employee is breathing in and out.
Air inspection can be greatly boosted by the ability to inspect digitally with mobile devices. Pairing the smartphone or tablet with an inspection application means that there is a potent yet effective inspection tool that can now be used for any air quality inspector. Like many other business inspections that an organisation may carry out on a mobile device, air inspection too uses any inspection application that is capable of data capture and retrieval. When taking readings from instruments or monitoring screens, it can be simple to record the values on electronic checklists with pre-defined values or manual data-entry. Similarly, if there is a visual inspection required e.g., monitoring an air filter to check for residue, the inspection evidence can be recorded using the device camera and any necessary annotation of the resulting image. This means that the ambiguous previous record of description of the air filter condition has been replaced by physical evidence of a picture. This may sound like a small difference, but it becomes a much better way of tracking any degradation or change in conditions than the subjective view of the inspector on the day. Just like any other asset inspected digitally, the air filter or HVAC system can often be categorised in the inspection platform as an equipment piece, causing for every inspection report attributed to that piece to be historically recorded and categorised. As another way to track degradation and changes in condition, this also provides for a much simpler audit trail and is useful for any ROI (Return on Investment) analysis.
