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Biowall – Morristown Building Goes Green
Biowall
The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation installed a biowall in their New Jersey building. The bio-wall is a 3 story (38 ft tall by 14 ft wide) vertical garden that uses a water and air permeable growing media. That allows the air to blow right by the roots which take the VOC’s right out of the air.
Multiple studies have been done showing the it’s actually the roots that take most Volatile Organic Compounds out of the air.. not the plant leaves. The roots are able to completely break down many of the VOC’s and even use some of the results of the process for food. A biowall can potentially replace a complete air exchange system if done correctly.
This biowall was integrated with the HVAC system so that the air is pulled through the plants and the growing media and into the HVAC system behind it which in turn circulates it through the building. So while most living walls use a passive system to clean the air by the plants naturally removing the CO2 and few VOC’s, this goes a step further and, through the roots of the plants, becomes extremely effective at removing a large amount of VOC’s.
An advantage to this system is that the air doesn’t need to be reheated or recooled as other ventilation systems do when they exchange air from outside… thereby saving energy. The air is simply returned through the room through the raised floor duct system.
The plants were placed into pockets from slits in the fabric. The plants are watered hydroponically with the water dripping down from the top, ending in a trouph, then getting pumped back up to the top again. There’s a biowall video below, and it’s definitely worth watching. You can see the planting in action there.
Biofilter wall
Biowall filter
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about 2 months ago
“A biowall can potentially replace a complete air exchange system if done correctly”
-How to do it correctly? Do you have any estimations on how much carbon dioxide is produced per square meter?
about 2 months ago
I don’t have any myself. But the owner of Naturaire in Guelph, Ontario, says that 1 square foot of a biowall can clean the air of 100 square feet of space approximately. Naturaire has done the tests and has successfully integrated the wall into HVAC systems in a couple locations in the US already.