Eldercare, nursing homes, dormitories and confinement centres

The problem is one building with dozens of different rooms

If you run procurement or facilities for a nursing home, an eldercare daycare centre, a dormitory block or a confinement centre, you are not solving one air quality problem — you are solving dozens of them at once. A six-bed ward, a physiotherapy room, a dining hall and a staff pantry each move a different volume of air and hold a different number of people at different times of day. A single "buy N units for the building" instruction from head office rarely survives contact with the floor plan. Our guide to sizing wards and common areas in a nursing home and our guide to sizing confinement centre nurseries both start from the same principle: size room by room, not building by building.

The sizing arithmetic, worked through

Required clean-air delivery (CADR, m³/h) equals floor area (m²) multiplied by ceiling height (m) multiplied by target air changes per hour (ACH). US CDC guidance for occupied indoor spaces sets a floor of at least 5 clean-air changes per hour, a reasonable starting target for a ward or common room.

Take a 40 m² six-bed nursing home ward with a 2.6 m ceiling. At 5 ACH that is 40 × 2.6 × 5 = 520 m³/h. On floor area alone, 40 m² sits inside the Classic 400S's stated 31–54 m² coverage band, but the Classic 400S has a CADR of 480 m³/h — short of the 520 m³/h this ward actually needs. The Pro 800S, rated at CADR 800 m³/h, clears that requirement with margin, which is why an area band is a starting point, not the final answer; always check the CADR figure against the arithmetic for the room in question.

A 24 m² eight-pax dormitory room at the same 2.6 m ceiling needs 24 × 2.6 × 5 = 312 m³/h — comfortably inside a single Classic 400S. A 150 m² nursing home dining hall with a 3 m ceiling needs 150 × 3 × 5 = 2,250 m³/h, which calls for three Pro 800S units (2,400 m³/h combined) positioned apart rather than one unit in a corner, because a single unit cannot move that volume of air evenly across a hall that size — see our guide to sizing a nursing home dining hall. A confinement centre's attached infant room, often 15 m² or smaller, is usually sized to a higher 6 ACH target: 15 × 2.6 × 6 = 234 m³/h, which a single Fillo Plus (CADR 300) covers; our guide to confinement centres and attached infant rooms sets out why that room gets its own figure rather than sharing the confinement room's plan. Our sizing calculator runs this arithmetic for any room dimensions you enter.

Matching equipment to how the room is actually used

Area and ACH tell you the CADR you need; how the room is used tells you which unit fits it. A confinement centre or eldercare daycare room under 30 m² suits the Fillo Plus, which pairs H13 HEPA with UV-C and stays under 53 dB — quiet enough for a room adults sit in for hours; see our guide to introducing filtration into an eldercare daycare centre. A nursing home ward running overnight needs a unit that can be left on its quietest setting without disturbing residents while still moving air continuously alongside the aircon — the placement and noise detail is in our guide to overnight ward filtration. Dormitory rooms with higher occupancy density than a typical household bedroom need the same CADR-first check described above, plus certification checks such as H13 HEPA specification, CE and RoHS, which our dormitory sizing guide covers in more detail. Where a campus has daycare, nursing and residential wings on one site, servicing and unit specification are easier to standardise across buildings than to solve wing by wing — our guide to coordinating a multi-building eldercare campus sets out how.

Procurement: buying, renting, and responding to an outbreak

A facility on a long lease — a dormitory operator on a multi-year tenancy, for instance — faces a genuine buy-versus-rent decision that shifts with lease length, headcount and how often rooms get reconfigured; our guide to buying versus renting for a long-lease dormitory works through the maths. A nursing home running dozens of rooms usually finds a bundled rental plan — filters, preventive servicing and two-way delivery all in one rate — simpler to administer than tracking filter-change schedules across a purchased fleet; see our guide to what's bundled into a nursing home rental plan. Either route is quoted only after rooms are measured; we do not publish a fixed price list because room count and coverage area vary too much site to site.

A respiratory illness wave moving through a nursing home is a different problem again: a facility-wide survey done at pace, grouping rooms by size so extra units can be deployed to the rooms that need them fastest, is more useful than a slow room-by-room quote process. Two-way delivery under a rental agreement keeps that redeployment practical once the wave passes. Time to clear 99% of an airborne contaminant from a room is roughly 276 ÷ ACH in minutes — 55 minutes at 5 ACH, 46 minutes at 6 ACH — the kind of figure a rushed survey needs to hand over quickly. Our guide to responding to a respiratory illness wave covers how that survey and rental deployment work together. AIRE units carry an FDA Class 2 medical device listing held by the manufacturer, alongside H13 HEPA specification, CE, RoHS and ISO 9001/14001 management system certification; chamber testing recorded over 99.99% of tested organisms (E. coli, Staphylococcus albus, Influenza A) eliminated within 60 minutes under chamber-test conditions, against roughly 4 hours 23 minutes of passive decay for a plain-HEPA comparison unit in the same test — results in an occupied room will differ from a sealed chamber, which is why sizing and placement still matter more than the certificate on the box.

What we will not claim

We will not tell you that filtration reduces resident infections, cuts staff sick days, or prevents an outbreak. We have no clinical data linking our units to those outcomes in an occupied ward or dormitory, so we do not make that claim, and we would treat a supplier who does make it with the same scepticism you should. What we can size, quote and verify is clean-air delivery for a specific room, backed by the manufacturer's chamber-test data and the certifications listed above. Our page on how we verify our claims sets out what evidence we do and do not stand behind.

The next step is a measured room, not a quote

Before recommending a unit for any ward, dormitory room, dining hall or infant room, we run a Clinic Air Report: a S$150 site visit, minimum two rooms, every room measured on site, with a report emailed within two working days. If a specified unit does not reach the report's stated air-change figure once installed, we upgrade or add a unit at no extra cost. There is a one-month rental pilot available for a facility that wants units in place in one or two rooms before committing further — this is priced as rental, not a trial. From there, our commercial rental page and product range cover the rest of the fleet, and our contact page is the fastest way to book a site visit.