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Having proper ventilation is essential for creating a healthy, comfortable indoor environment. Unfortunately, a lack of ventilation is a problem that affects many homes and creates significant issues with indoor air quality and humidity control. In this article, we’ll explain why that is and look at some of the most effective options for ensuring your house is properly ventilated.
The Role Ventilation Plays in Indoor Air Quality
Indoor air quality is something everyone should be concerned with since the average person spends at least 90% of their time inside. The air inside the average building also contains a two to five times higher concentration of certain harmful pollutants than you typically find outside. The main reason is that many different things inside a home give off chemicals and other pollutants. Unless you use all-natural products, you’re contributing to airborne pollution every time you clean your house. Laundry is no different since detergents, fabric softeners, and dryer sheets contain many chemicals that get released into the air. Many people are surprised to learn that cooking indoors also releases various contaminants and pollutants.
The biggest concern in terms of indoor air quality is volatile organic compounds (VOCs). VOCs are found in a huge range of things, such as furniture, building materials, cleaning agents, and laundry products. They can also come from electronics like copiers and printers. The issue is that the chemical compounds continually “off-gas” or get released into the air. Formaldehyde is one of the most common VOCs and is used to manufacture mattresses and other types of furniture. It’s also found in paints, varnishes, glues, etc.
The fact that formaldehyde and other VOCs continually off-gas for a long time after products are manufactured and are found in so many products you use regularly means there really isn’t anything you can do to prevent VOCs from being present inside your home. Most air filters also aren’t effective at trapping VOCs. Air filters work well at filtering out dust, pollen and other allergens, but VOCs and many other pollutants are so small that they just flow right through the filter.
This is where proper ventilation comes into play since it dilutes the VOCs and other pollutants with fresh air to keep the concentration much lower. Along with pulling the stale, polluted air outside the house, mechanical ventilation systems also bring clean air inside. The result is that the air inside the house stays much cleaner and purer, so you have far fewer issues with poor indoor air quality. A ventilation system also helps to keep a home smelling fresher and cleaner by drawing out odors from pets, chemical smells, cooking, etc.
How Ventilation Helps With Humidity Control
If your house was built within the past few decades, its exterior structure should be fairly well encapsulated. That means the building’s envelope is mostly airtight, with very few places where air can flow in and out. This is part of the reason why indoor air quality tends to be much worse in newer buildings since it results in the pollutants getting trapped inside and continually building up. Older buildings usually have fewer air quality issues since they have numerous places where the polluted indoor air can flow outside, and fresh air can get in.
In addition to creating air quality issues, another problem when a house is well encapsulated is that moisture gets trapped inside. Simply having people inside a building causes humidity to slowly rise since human bodies continually give heat and moisture. You’re also adding more moisture to the air every time you run your washing machine or dishwasher, cook, and take a shower or bath.
Making sure you always turn on the exhaust fan in your bathroom and kitchen before bathing and cooking, leaving the fan running for at least 15 minutes after you finish, helps to draw much of the moist air outside. Nonetheless, even in drier climates like Northern California, you often have issues with newer homes being humid unless they have an adequate ventilation system.
Mechanical ventilation systems are much more effective than exhaust fans at drawing moist air outside. The other advantage they have over exhaust fans is that they pull drier air in from outside to lower the overall humidity level throughout the house.
The Most Effective Ventilation Options
Three main types of ventilation systems are commonly used in residential buildings: energy-recovery ventilators (ERVs), heat-recovery ventilators (HRVs), and whole-house fans. ERVs and HRVs have an intake fan and exhaust fan that run occasionally to draw air out of the house and pull additional air back in from outside. They do so without causing the house to get hotter in the summer or colder in the winter. The reason is that these units have a heat exchanger that captures and transfers heat between the two air streams.
During the warmer parts of the year, the heat exchanger pulls heat out of the air, and the ventilation system brings it inside so that the air gets mostly cooled before flowing into the home. All of the heat then gets transferred to the other air stream so that it gets blown outside. The heat transfer process then works in reverse during the colder months when the air outside is colder than inside the house. This prevents the ventilation system from pulling all the hot air your heating system produces out of the house. Instead, the system uses the warmer air it’s drawing outside to heat the air it’s bringing into the house.
The only difference between an ERV and an HRV is that an ERV can also capture and transfer moisture between the two air streams, whereas an HRV can only transfer heat. ERVs are almost always better for humid climates or areas with much colder winters. If you often have issues where the interior of your home is too humid, an HRV is the better choice.
Whole-house fans also provide extremely effective ventilation since they fully exchange the air inside a building once every few minutes. The only issue is that the fan can only be used at certain times since you need to have a few windows cracked for the fan to work properly. There is just a large exhaust fan in the attic, which means the only way to pull air in from outside is through the open windows. As heat naturally rises, cooler air is pulled in through the windows, and hotter air is pushed out of the attic.
A whole-house fan is highly effective at keeping a home cool. In fact, it can cool far more quickly than your air conditioning while using only a fraction of the energy. That’s why it can be worth investing in a whole-house fan.
Your Sacramento Ventilation Experts
Atticman Heating and Air Conditioning, Insulation is a locally owned and operated company offering expert home comfort and air quality services in Sacramento and the surrounding areas. We specialize in installing whole-house fans and can care for all your ventilation needs. We’re also the area’s top choice for air conditioning, heating, and attic insulation. Contact us today for more information on how we can help ensure your home is sufficiently ventilated.
