Indoor Air Quality in Kindergartens in Poland

Abstract

The universal ventilation system in Polish kindergartens is the natural ventilation system. This is due to the fact that these buildings are several or even several dozen years old. National regulation for natural ventilation define only general guidelines. There are in the legislation acts only the permissible tightness of the building joinery and the minimum value of the air infiltrate to the rooms. The amount of air is constant regardless of the room’s purpose or the number of people staying in them. Over the last decade, in such buildings incomplete thermomodernization treatments were carried out, as a result of which the inflow of air to the rooms was most often limited, and thus the indoor air quality decreased. While, the low indoor air quality may lead not only to the poor well-being of users, but also to low efficiency of work and insufficient learning of new messages. This problem is extremely important in the case of a group of people who are not be able to determine the requirements in relation to IAQ. As has been shown in the Scandinavian countries, in the rooms where children are staying there the proper ventilation system several times reduces the chance of allergic symptoms. At the same time, research carried out in Denmark showed that the low indoor air quality in school premises negatively affects the learning efficiency of children. That is why it is extremely important to ensure proper microclimate conditions in the rooms where the youngest children are staying. The article presents the results of research on the indoor air quality (IAQ) in 4 kindergartens in Poland, located in the city with 200,000 inhabitants. The buildings in which research was carried out were built in the years 1970-1993 and were equipped with a gravity ventilation system. The analysis covered the variability of the basic parameters describing the indoor air quality, i.e. temperature, relative humidity and concentration of carbon dioxide.