The Other Side

By Sarah Huang

After a full week of collecting data, Katie was able to get us a tour of Bruin Fitness Center (Bfit) with the director of housing maintenance, Jared Meyer, and his two colleagues, John and Jeff. The tour started with a short history lesson of the facility, which began as a reserved area with no definite purpose, but was later on earmarked to become a gym. This backstory play a big role in understanding the airflow of the gym.

The air system can be seen near the ceiling area where it is painted black and hidden behind wooden boards. Unlike John Wooden Center which has several central air systems that manage the airflow of specific rooms, the air system at Bfit is made up of multiple fans and tubs that push air through filters into the room. This results in a positive air pressure, meaning more air is let into the rooms than is let out, which is the opposite of what John Wooden Center does.

However, because Bfit is a newer facility than John Wooden Center, their air system uses advanced technology that gathers data like temperature, and automatically adjusts to the optimal setting. In addition, they have sensors that collect data on carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, which may come in handy for our research in the future. The tour was a fun experience and showed us the other side of the gym. And now that we’ve toured both gyms and have a better understanding of the differences and similarities of their air systems, hopefully we can analyze these differences alongside our air quality data once our data collection is complete.