Most cleanrooms move far more air than their cleanliness class requires. The Cleanroom Energy Saver estimates the energy, cost, and CO₂ you could save by reducing air change rates to what the room actually needs in your currency, on your grid.

Air handling is the single largest energy consumer in most cleanrooms, and the air change rate (ACH) is what drives it. For decades, cleanrooms have been designed to fixed ACH figures — 240 to 600 air changes per hour for ISO 5, 150 to 240 for ISO 6 — numbers inherited from tradition rather than derived from the room’s actual contamination load. The result is enormous: energy spent moving air that the product never needed moved.

What the tool does

You enter a few facts about your cleanroom — its class, size, occupancy, your local electricity price and grid. The Energy Saver estimates what your current air change rate costs to run, what a reduced rate would cost, and the difference: annual energy saved, money saved, and CO₂ avoided. It is built to be honest about uncertainty — results are shown as ranges, not falsely precise single figures — and it adapts to where you are in the world, with multi-currency support and country-specific grid intensity.

Why lower air change rates are defensible

The standards have moved. ISO 14644-1 classifies a cleanroom on measured particle concentration, not on a minimum ACH — how you achieve the class is a design choice. ISO 14644-16 openly questions the value of ACH as a design metric and points toward ventilation matched to the actual particle load. Peer-reviewed research has demonstrated that far lower air change rates hold their class in operation, because personnel are the dominant contamination source, and at low occupancy the required ACH drops proportionally.

In other words: the room is almost certainly cleaner, more of the time, than its design ACH assumes. The energy spent covering that gap is the saving the tool reveals.

The one condition: you have to be able to prove it

There is a catch, and we state it plainly. Reduced air change rates are only safe when the cleanroom is continuously monitored — so that if contamination ever does rise, you know immediately. Without continuous, validated monitoring, lower ACH is not defensible, and we do not recommend it. This is exactly what continuous particle deposition monitoring with APMON provides: the evidence that lets you run leaner with confidence, and prove to an auditor that you are still in control.

The tool shows you the prize. Monitoring is what lets you safely claim it.