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Ely’s Historic State Theater goes high tech for air safety

Keith Vandervort
Posted 8/13/20

ELY - Out of concern for the safety of their patrons in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ely’s Historic State Theater (EHST) installed a Needle Point Bipolar Ionization (NPBI) air …

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Ely’s Historic State Theater goes high tech for air safety

Posted

ELY - Out of concern for the safety of their patrons in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ely’s Historic State Theater (EHST) installed a Needle Point Bipolar Ionization (NPBI) air purification system, believed to be the first such system in the area, to provide state-of-the-art protection.
Research by the theater’s engineer, Denis Miller, also the treasurer on the organization’s board of directors, focused on the tiny particles that are suspended in the air and cannot be filtered out by existing high-quality air filters.
“This is especially important in helping to make public spaces safer,” he said. “This new system injects billions of electrically charged particles, called ions, into the air. If COVID-19 is in the air or on surfaces, the ions attach to the virus and render it harmless.”
He explained that the naturally occurring and now-concentrated ions have proven to kill many pathogens including COVID-19 by up to 99.4 percent in independent tests by Innovative Bioanalysis Co., of Cypress, Calif.
The improved technology developed by Global Plasma Systems (GPS) is self-cleaning, virtually maintenance free and certified ozone free, he added.
“Ozone is a toxic gas produced by some other ionization systems but is not produced by the (GPS) NPBI system,” he said.
“With the new system that has been installed our EHST theater will be much cleaner and safer during your movie, music, and theatrical performances,” Miller said.

Details for the HVAC-curious
Ely’s Historic State Theater (EHST) was designed with a 187,000 BTUh cooling (15 tons) and 400,000 BTUh heating rooftop HVAC system. The system is designed to supply 6,250 cubic feet per minute (CFM) of air to the facility.
A minimum of 340 CFM of outside air is continuously mixed in with the return air from the theater. All of the air flow is then filtered with MERV8 filters in the HVAC unit.
The largest heat loss factor in any properly ventilated building is the outside air introduced through the air delivery system. To save energy when the building is not fully occupied a Room CO2 sensor was installed to maintain acceptable CO2 levels in the space by gradually increasing the amount of outside air to 2085 CFM as more people exhale more CO2.
EHST installed a state-of-the-art Global Plasma Solutions (GPS) Needle Point, Bipolar, Ionization (NPBI) system to their HVAC air delivery system.
In addition, the GPS NPBI system causes small and even submicron particles which can hang indefinitely in the theater air to agglomerate. These larger particles are more effectively filtered out by the standard MERV 8 filters. This significantly improves the MERV8 filter by removing most of the agglomerated particulate matter passing through the filter.
Source: Denis Miller