Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines

The building biology^TM profession has developed a set of standards to provide exposure guidelines for the general public that are as low as possible. Nature is our guideline. This is particularly applicable to those individuals who are electrically hypersensitive (EHS) and/or sensitive to petroleum-based and other chemicals (MCS) in their living and work environment.

Those of us in the building biology^TM profession rely on these guidelines every day to assist us in our environmental home and office evaluations to help our clients and their families create a safer living and work environment. The guidelines follow below.

You will find safe indoor EMF guidelines from our profession on page one of the handout you link to below at the bottom of this page. You will notice these guidelines are for Sleeping Areas. Section A on page one covers “Fields, Waves, Radiation”.

Section A1 covers AC Electric Fields, which we primarily deal with in sleeping areas (as well as making sure your computer is grounded—see my article on Electric Field EMFs for information on nighttime Electric Fields, and my Safer Use of Computers article for information on how to keep daytime electric field levels low when using your computer.).

Section A2 deals with AC Magnetic Fields, and section A3 deals with Radio Frequency (RF) EMFs. (So-called “dirty electricity” is defined by our profession as the electric and magnetic field components in the room from harmonics of the fundamental frequency of electricity on power lines in homes, which in North America is 60 Hz.)

Our primary goal is to get our clients out of the Severe Anomaly and Extreme Anomaly columns on the table, which are the two right-hand columns. We want our clients to sleep in bedrooms that have EMFs in the Slight or No Anomaly levels for all three EMFs. That means, below 100 milliVolts (mV) for electric fields when measured with a body voltage meter and below 1.5 Volts per meter (V/m) when measured with a standalone electric field meter, such as the three-axis Gigahertz Solutions NFA1000 meter that we use in our EMF evaluations.

For Radio Frequency (RF) EMFs, we want our clients to sleep in bedrooms that ideally have 10 microWatts per meter squared (µW/m²) or less, which is very difficult to achieve in urban and suburban homes with cell antennas nearby, as well as with WiFi routers in operation somewhere in the house overnight and the charging on the bedside table of cell phones not placed into Airplane Mode (with WiFi and Bluetooth turned “Off” through true Settings while in Airplane Mode).

The one type of EMF that the IBN Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines do not specifically provide separate safe exposure levels for is dirty electricity. The guidelines do, however, mention that when considering AC magnetic and AC electric field levels at higher frequencies above 50-60 Hertz (Hz), which are the frequencies of electric utility-provided power to homes and businesses in Europe/much of the world and in North America, respectively (60 Hz in the U.S.), you must multiply the safe levels found on the guidelines table upwards by a factor of 10 to 100 because the biological effects of long-term exposure to dirty electricity are reportedly more severe than from the other types of EMFs (I personally do not subscribe to that theory, in my professional experience).

We in the building biology profession define dirty electricity, which we call “Microsurge Electrical Pollution” or MEP, as AC magnetic and AC electric fields that radiate into occupied rooms at frequencies above 60 Hz, which again is the frequency of electricity, and hence, of AC magnetic and AC electric fields, provided to your house by your electric utility. Dirty electricity is usually measured with a plug-in meter, such as from Stetzer Electric in Units, or by Greenwave in milliVolts, or mV. They both publish their safe levels on the back of their plug-in meters as less than 25 being “Ideal” or “Good”, from 25 to 50 as “Average”, and above 50 as “Undesirable”. See my article on Dirty Electricity EMFs here.

Note: This is an updated set of guidelines, published in late 2024 by the Institute of Building Biology + Sustainability, or IBN (Institut fur Baubiologie + Nachhaltigkeit) in Germany. The IBN first developed these guidelines years ago and has been updating them every five to ten years. You can access the direct link to an English language version of the IBN’s newest guidelines from their website by clicking here and then scrolling down to “Downloads”, then clicking on “Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines 2024 (PDF)”. A direct link to these updated guidelines is found by clicking here.

You can find an article with background information on the IBN’s latest update of these guidelines by clicking here. You can also find Building Biology Testing Conditions 2024, which provides detailed information about how the committee arrived at the recommended safe exposure levels for sleeping areas that they did and how they recommend testing for these various types of EMFs. That document is found here. Finally, a separate document listing the guiding principles by which the committee recommends doing testing is provided here.

This information is provided by Katharina Gustavs of Victoria, Canada, a German-Canadian graduate of the German IBN who translated the guidelines and related articles from German into English for the IBN. Katharina also says the IBN’s monthly newsletter is now available in English by clicking here.

These guidelines, which are published periodically by the IBN, are used by the Building Biology Institute (BBI) with the permission of the IBN as recommended guidelines for our practitioners trained by the BBI here in North America. You can access the direct link to the IBN’s newest guidelines from their website by clicking here.

In addition, to see more examples of healthy building guidelines, see the Services page of the website for Safe Living Technologies, then scroll down to “EMF/RF Exposure Guidelines”. Or, access the page directly by clicking here.

To view a PDF of the most recent set of Building Biology^TM Evaluation Guidelines for a safer indoor EMF environment, click HERE. For EMF levels of Magnetic, Electric and Radio Frequency Fields, print out pages one and two of that PDF.