The Most Important Areas of Your House for Ventilation

You can’t have home comfort and health without reliable, effective heating and air conditioning, but that’s only part of the story. Modern homes, built more airtight than ever, also require effective air exchange to make sure indoor air doesn’t become stuffy, stale and unhealthy. This involves a combination of mechanical ventilation and strategically placed vents.

In the old days, planned ventilating strategies weren’t as necessary since most homes had incidental air exchange. In other words, they had enough gaps, cracks and other openings to allow a constant exchange of indoor and outdoor air. This also made them harder to heat, however. With increases in energy costs in recent years, along with a vigorous focus on energy efficiency, home construction has become much tighter. Without planned ventilation, indoor air quality can suffer badly.

Examples of residential ventilating strategies include bathroom and kitchen exhaust fans, attic fans and vents, and whole-house mechanical ventilation.

In the bathroom, an exhaust fan removes bad smells and contaminants as well as moisture. The kitchen exhaust fan, usually part of the stove-oven set-up, removes smells that result from cooking and food preparation. These exhaust systems make your home a more pleasant place but also a healthier one.

Ventilating the attic is essential, especially in the summer when the hot sun shining on the roof all day can turn the attic into an oven. Strategically located vents, along with a powerful attic fan in some cases, will remove that heat, keeping it from transferring into living spaces below.

For effective air exchange on a whole-house basis, supply-only and balanced ventilation systems are popular. For example, Heat Recovery and Energy Recovery Ventilators (HRV and ERVs) maintain a constant exchange of indoor and outdoor air. They use two parallel air streams, one removing air from the home and the other delivering fresh air into the home. While this is happening, heat energy and moisture (in the case of the ERV) are also exchanged, supplementing home heating, cooling and humidity control.

For help developing an effective ventilation strategy for your Orlando area home, please contact us at Rinaldi’s Energy Solutions.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Orlando, Florida and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).

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