| Maintaining good Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) aimed at meeting human requirements on health and comfort of a space. Indeed, no agreed monitoring and assessment protocol is available for practical environmental control measures. Resources justified sampling tactics with quantified uncertainties for correct results interpretation must be worked out.;The objectives of this study are to develop a practical IAQ monitoring and assessment protocol for promoting better IAQ of air-conditioned offices in subtropical climates. The protocol presents IAQ assessment results with a simple benchmark, using the selected representative pollutant levels obtained from a number of alternative sampling schemes at acceptable assessment uncertainties regarding sampling locations and times. The development and feasibility of the protocol are demonstrated using comprehensive cross-sectional surveys on common indoor air parameters from long-term measurement in Hong Kong air-conditioned offices.;Regarding the choice of assessment parameters, it was shown that selecting representative parameters by identifying a small number of dominant contributors of unsatisfactory IAQ, or by three judged indicative parameters for the performance of IAQ control would provide acceptable accuracy with reduced measurement effort.;Furthermore, the uncertainties of various sampling schemes were analysed using the year-round longitudinal measurement results. For a selected representative parameter, the required measurement period by a proposed scheme would have potential reductions up to 30%. And reducing the number of sampling points by 50% would decrease the probability of obtaining the sample-spatial average concentration at the same confidence level by 10% only.;In view of the technical difficulties in applications of the schemes, feasibility of accuracy improvement with the epistemic approach which uses past information and assessment accuracies to improve present understanding for judging IAQ acceptance and regional monitoring were demonstrated.;Finally, a simple IAQ index compiled by the representative indicators was used as a benchmarking parameter for air-conditioned offices of Hong Kong. The benchmark system, presented in a widely adopted star rating system, was demonstrated to be effective in distinguishing the relative performance of IAQ.;Taking the assessment uncertainties into account, this study provided a useful tool for setting up an efficient IAQ monitoring and assessment programme, and ultimately can help promote better IAQ. |
