Where Should a Scent Machine Be Installed in a Multi-Floor Medical Centre?

By answering three questions in order, and by resisting the instinct to put one unit on each floor. First, how many volumes of air does the building have? Not how many floors — how many separate bodies of connected air. Multiply length by width by height for every space open to every other space without a door between them, and add them up. In most Raipur medical centres the ground-floor lobby, the reception, the waiting area and the open stair form one large volume, and that volume is much bigger than the floor plan suggests because the entrance is usually the tallest room in the building. A first-floor waiting area behind its own door, served by its own air handling, is a genuine second volume. A consulting corridor on the third floor is not a candidate at all. Second, where does the air actually go? Open stairwells and lift shafts behave as chimneys, and in the dry months the upward pull through them is strong and continuous. A unit placed in the stairwell because the stairwell looks central will be emptied upward all day, giving you a weak ground floor and an oddly strong second-floor landing. The main entrance door is the other trap: mount a unit in that draught and every time the door opens the level you set disappears, so the temptation is to raise it, and then the room is wrong whenever the door is shut. Return grilles are the third: mount beside one and the building will take your lobby air into the handling unit and distribute it somewhere you did not choose. Third, what is excluded? Clinical, treatment, diagnostic, imaging, procedure and post-procedure areas get nothing on any floor, and that list is written into the plan and signed by the clinical lead before anything is mounted. So the practical answer is usually one unit, low, in the lobby volume, above head height, three or four metres in from the entrance doors, on a wall away from the corridor mouth, or HVAC mounted on the supply side of the lobby zone if that exists. Where the lobby, an atrium and the open stair together form a very large single volume, one larger machine is the right answer rather than three small ones, because several units in one connected space produce competing gradients rather than combined coverage. And where an upper floor genuinely is a second volume, a second unit is correct — but sized for that volume, on its own schedule. If you would like a floor plan marked up honestly, including the floors that should get nothing, ask us for a Raipur scenting plan.