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Helping You Make Your Home Your Castle |
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How to Ventilate Your Home
Home Ventilation
Introduction: Building a tight home is paramount to conserving energy but often builders build homes that are too tight leaving the residents with a living environment that is not necessarily conducive to good health. A tight home is a home that is constructed to reduce if not completely eliminate air drafts and air infiltration though the structure.
Having a tight home is great for conserving energy
for cooling and heating but unfortunately if it is
overdone the air inside the house becomes stale and
laden with carbon dioxide. In short, proper home
ventilation is necessary so the house can breathe
as well as provide a continuous supply of fresh air
for the occupants. Without proper ventilation the
occupants can feel drowsy, tired and suffer from
headaches.
A combination of sealing the home from air leaks
and providing adequate ventilation is critical for
comfort for saving energy, moisture control and to
reduce indoor pollution by proper ventilation. To
achieve adequate ventilation there must be a
circulation of air from 100 to 200 cubic feet of
air per minute through the house. The circulation
will remove the stale air and other contaminates
that build up in the house.
The question is how to ventilate your home and have
an energy efficient home at the same time. Some
homeowners install low volume home ventilation
systems to circulate the air from inside the house
to the outside. This is all well and good but is it
really necessary to go through the expense when in
most homes there is already an adequate ventilation
system that homeowners may be unaware of.
Most modern homes have two or more bathrooms with
ventilation fans that are installed to remove
moisture from the bathroom when taken showers and
baths. These exhaust fans remove the bathroom
moisture and vents it to the outside through a
network of ceiling air ducts. As the moisture is
exhausted so is the air from inside the house
ventilated. A good quality two-speed bathroom fan can vent 100 to 150 cupid feet of air per minute (CFM) which is more than adequate to vent most houses. Even with the fan off air is vented through the fan and out of the house through the vent duct by aspirator action. On a windy day the fan will aspirate vent the house at approximately 50 CFM. If you have two bathrooms there is adequate ventilation without even having the fan in the on position. However, the bathroom doors should remain open so the entire house can vent.
If you do not have two bathrooms in the house a
single bathroom working in conjunction with a
kitchen or laundry room fan will suffice. As a side note, people who lived in older houses many decades ago seemed to be always in good health. Those old houses had many sources of air infiltration and as a result offered a better living environment than many modern homes. Proper home ventilation is essential to maintain a healthy living environment. There are different alternatives on how to ventilate your home but the bathroom fans that already exist can do the job. Related
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