We want to hear from small and medium scale cafes, restaurants, gyms, pubs, bars and music venues to understand the challenges you face in delivering good ventilation.  

Provision of ventilation is an essential component of building regulations, and it is essential that any future changes to ventilation regulations understand the challenges in small and medium scale businesses such as cafes, restaurants, bars, pubs, small music venues. These types of venues are essential for a thriving city, but often have little purpose-provided ventilation.

This project’s purpose is to understand current ventilation levels, practices and challenges in a range of different buildings and businesses. The project will explore current levels of ventilation through CO2 measurement and building walkarounds, and explore business owners’, managers’ and employees’ knowledge, beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviours relating to building ventilation through face-to-face interviews.

We will:
Carry out a 1 hour interview with the business owner and up to 3 other members of staff
Carry out a walk-around survey to observe ventilation provision, and a number of occupancy counts during the venue opening hours
Install CO2 monitors for 1 week. Measuring CO2 helps us understand how much exhaled breath is in the air and how well the ventilation is working to remove this

Benefits to you
After the study we will provide you with the results from the CO2 monitoring, including an explanation of how to interpret the results. We will also provide recommendations for methods you can use to improve your ventilation, tailored for your building.

Each person who participates in the interview will receive a £20 e-shopping voucher as a thank you for your time and contribution to the research.    
 
 What happens to the results?
Anonymised results will be reported to Sheffield City Council and other District, Borough and County Councils to help them understand the challenges to ventilation and how these can be solved. Anonymised results will also be reported to the Health and Safety Executive as part of The PROTECT COVID-19 National Core Study on transmission and environment.

After you have registered your interest we will contact with full details of the work at which point you can decide whether you wish to proceed or not. Please note it may take a few weeks for us to respond to your interest.