Guidelines

Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines

Building Biology Evaluation Guidelines

The building biologyTM 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 biologyTM 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 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, as well as with WiFi routers in operation somewhere in the house overnight.

Note: This is an updated set of guidelines, published in late 2015 by the Institute of Building Biology + Sustainablility, 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. They were translated into English by Katharina Gustavs of Vancouver, Canada, a German-Canadian graduate of the German IBN.

These English language guidelines are used by the Building Biology Institute (BBI) with the permission of the IBN. You can access the direct link to the IBN’s 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 the updated set of Building BiologyTM Evaluation Guidelines for a safer indoor EMF environment, click HERE.