Many commercial HVAC systems pull in outside air to replenish oxygen levels
Although some building supplies are used across all applications, there are important differences to spaces meant for living versus those meant for commerce.
It’s easy to imagine that a business intended to sell shelves worth of items to a small assortment of customers each day is going to have more electricity demands than a small apartment that houses a single person.
Getting a space wired properly so it is safe to use commercially can vary in price widely depending on how large the business is going to be. The plumbing might need to be more extensive if it’s going to be a restaurant with a dish room and several bathrooms. But these differences go even further than that. One small fact that few people realize is that most commercial heating and cooling systems draw in small amounts of outdoor air into the indoor climate control system. This might seem puzzling to some, but there’s a simple explanation for why this is done. With the larger a business gets with its foot traffic each day, more and more of the oxygen indoors is being depleted by the customers breathing it into their lungs. As they exhale, this oxygen is converted into carbon dioxide. If you’re a store as large as Walmart, this effect happens at an exponential rate. If these large HVAC systems didn’t pull in oxygen from outside, all of the customers would be breathing carbon dioxide after enough oxygen is depleted from the air. Although this is still technically true with any indoor climate control system, it’s not an issue so much with homes where the foot traffic is minimal and the air flow is immense by comparison.