Ventilation systems – for your improved health.
Ventilation systems are important for your home’s health. Everyone needs clean air to breathe. Often we don’t realize that the air we are living in is inferior.
Every house has some amount of mould. Most homes have experienced invasion by mice. Carpets and furniture give off fumes that pollute the air. If the home is well sealed, then air changes are reduced, and pollution builds, sometimes to the point of making people ill. Modern high efficiency furnaces further reduce the number of air changes a building experiences because they draw their combustion air from outside.
Air is the single most important requirement for life. Water comes second, and food is a distant third. We often spend much effort on our food supply and give very little thought to our air supply. You can’t survive for more than a few minutes without air.
Radon gas is the latest indoor air quality concern, but other pollution concerns are as important. Systems have been engineered specifically for radon gas elimination, but they do very little for the other pollutants present in most homes. The heat recovery ventilator, often referred to as an HRV, is a Canadian invention that mechanically changes the air in a building while transferring the heat from the exhaust air to the incoming air. I like to think of an HRV as lungs for a home. If an HRV is able to improve a person’s health and extend their lifetime, it could prove to be a very sound investment. Making you feel healthier is the main reason, but making the home smell fresher is a very attractive benefit of an HRV.
The nicest installations involve continuously removing air from all of the bathrooms in the home, and replacing the exhausted air with pre heated fresh air into the main ducting system. In that way, bathroom exhaust fans become a thing of the past, and bathrooms receive continuously fresh air. This helps to reduce the opportunity for moulds to grow by drying and freshening bathrooms. Mould is generally what makes bathroom renovations necessary, so by reducing mould growth you are also avoiding renovation costs for longer.
If you would like to investigate HRV’s further, go to the CMHC web site, or google R2000 homes.