Ventilation Systems

Let’s face it, we all need to breathe. However, if you live in a very hot, humid or cold place, this air can be very energy intensive and expensive to condition. In winter time, the more outside air you bring in the drier your home becomes, causing havoc with your guitar’s tuning and shrinking the very wood within your home. That’s why really cold climates have to have humidifiers to prevent uncomfortable dryness. On the other hand, high humidity results in damp and potentially mould issues. Here you will need air conditioning to remove unwanted moisture.

How Much Air?

There are two reasons for bringing in fresh air:

Breathing, and
Improving air quality

How much air do we need to breathe? Modern building codes will stipulate the flow rates and timing on a per-room or per person basis. You will need to check the code that applies to you.

What is good air quality? The most important aspect of this is the removal of indoor pollutants. Plastics and paints give off (‘off gas’) all sorts of products that they contain, many of which can be quite bad for you. Clothing and furniture may well contain fire retardants. Not good for you. By regularly flushing your house out by either opening the windows or using a dedicated fresh air ventilation feed you can limit your exposures.

This can be as simple as running a bathroom or kitchen exhaust fan to remove excess moisture (too much moisture can lead to conditions that mould likes to grow in) or cooking smells.

We’ve mentioned leaky houses under Building Envelope. You can think of this as inadvertent ventilation. It’s better to seal up your house, then deliver the air properly, using either the existing duct system you use for heating, or via dedicated ventilation ducts. A heat (or energy) recovery ventilator (HRV or ERV) can extract useful heat from any air you exhaust and pass it on to incoming air, without passing along the things you don’t want.