As the weather starts to get colder outside, many of us are spending more time indoors. This can raise concerns about the quality of air inside your home and what you can do to enhance it. Home ventilation is one of the best places to start, as it can have a significant impact on the quality of the air inside your home.
What Is Home Ventilation?
Ventilation is the exchange of outdoor and indoor air. While it’s necessary to properly insulate your home to help enhance energy savings, having an airtight seal is not ideal. Rather, having strategic ventilation is necessary to help harmful contaminants and moisture exit your home. Otherwise, an airtight home would allow these things to be trapped inside your home and severely decrease your air quality level.
Why Is Proper Home Ventilation So Important?
When you go through your everyday routine, it can create contaminants in your air. For example, burning wood in your fireplace or even cooking dinner on your stove can allow contaminants to be introduced into your indoor air.
Furthermore, allowing excess moisture in your home through things like boiling water or taking a hot shower can also be unhealthy. Excess moisture leads to mold and mildew growth. This can not only ruin your insulation and cause structural damage to your home but also be extremely dangerous to your respiratory health over time.
Types of Home Ventilation
Increasing ventilation in your home can be done in a few different ways. HVAC professionals break home ventilation into three main categories: natural ventilation, spot ventilation, and whole-home ventilation. It can be helpful to understand what each one of these is so that you can choose the best strategy for your home.
Natural Ventilation
Natural ventilation occurs when there is uncontrolled air movement in your home. This is where air seeps in around door and window frames alongside any cracks in your home. Natural ventilation is very common in older homes.
Spot Ventilation
Spot ventilation happens when there is controlled air movement in a localized area of your home. Some common examples of this are exhaust fans in the bathroom and hoods over the stove. This helps to divert airborne pollutants and moisture from a specific area of your home to the outdoors.
Whole-Home Ventilation
Whole-home ventilation uses one or more fans alongside air ducts to get rid of stale air and replace it with fresh air. Whole-home systems provide a uniform and controlled source of ventilation. This is the most effective type of home ventilation to keep your air safe for your family to breathe in.
Install and Use Exhaust Fans
One of the best ways to help improve your home’s ventilation is to install and use exhaust fans. You should have an exhaust fan in every bathroom in your home. You also want to have a rangehood fan over your stove and food preparation area. These exhaust fans will help to ensure that you can properly vent air outdoors as needed. It’s imperative to make it a habit to turn on the exhaust fan or range hood whenever you’re going to be raising the relative humidity of your home in any way.
Ensure All Vents Lead Outdoors
There may be various exhaust vents throughout your home. These are for things like your clothes dryer, plumbing fixtures, range hood, and exhaust fans. For these exhaust vents to be effective, they need to lead outdoors. If any of your exhaust fans only lead to the attic, you’re setting yourself up for poor indoor air quality. This will allow contaminants to accumulate indoors, which is unhealthy and can prematurely deteriorate your roofing materials and cause structural problems.
Seal Up Your Home
If you have an older home that has air gaps on its exterior walls and around the foundation, then outdoor air can easily seep indoors. This can bring in outdoor contaminants and excess moisture as well. To have better control over your home’s ventilation, it’s best to seal up these areas of uncontrolled natural ventilation.
Invest in a Whole-Home Ventilation System
By far, one of the best ways to enhance the ventilation in your home is to invest in a whole-home ventilation system. There are four main types of whole-home ventilation systems: exhaust, supply, balanced, and energy recovery and heat recovery ventilators.
Exhaust
Exhaust vents are typically recommended for cold climates. They work by depressurizing the air inside your home and allowing new air to infiltrate through passive vents. An exhaust ventilation system is simple and inexpensive to install. It usually has one single fan that gets connected to a central location, such as ductwork for multiple rooms. It’s important to know that an exhaust ventilation system should not run at the same time as your exhaust fans because they can draw in airborne pollutants, doing more harm than good.
Supply
Supply ventilation systems rely on a fan to pressurize your home. This forces air from the outdoors into your home while exhausted air naturally escapes through vents. These ventilation systems are inexpensive and easy to install. The main advantage a supply ventilation system has over an exhaust ventilation system is better control of the air that comes into your home. Because they pressurize your home, these ventilation systems help to minimize the infiltration of outdoor pollutants. This type of ventilation system is best for hot and mixed climates.
Balanced Ventilation
Balanced ventilation systems are specifically designed to both introduce and exhaust equal quantities of air so that your home is neither pressurized nor depressurized. This type of system uses two fans along with two separate air duct systems that will supply fresh air to the most used rooms of your home, like your bedrooms and living rooms. It will also exhaust air from rooms that maintain the most moisture, like your kitchens and bathrooms. Balanced ventilation systems work for homes in all different types of climates.
Recovery Ventilation Systems
Recovery ventilation systems provide a controlled way of ventilating your home while minimizing energy loss. There are two main types: heat recovery ventilators (HRVs) and energy recovery ventilators (ERVs). Both systems use a heat exchanger and at least one fan to move air through ductwork, transferring energy from the outgoing air to the incoming air.
The primary advantage of these systems is their ability to capture 70–80% of the energy from the outgoing air, reducing heating and cooling demands. HRVs focus on transferring heat, ensuring the incoming air is at a similar temperature to the outgoing air. ERVs, in addition to transferring heat, also manage humidity by transferring some moisture between outgoing and incoming air, helping to maintain comfortable indoor humidity levels.
Reliable Home Ventilation Service
Absolute Services offers reliable home ventilation service for the Louisville, KY area. We can also help with all your heating, cooling, plumbing, drain cleaning, electrical, generator, and garage door needs. This includes new equipment installation, routine maintenance, and emergency repairs.
Simply call our office today to schedule a service with one of our knowledgeable technicians at Absolute Services in Louisville for your indoor air quality.