The Best Energy Efficient Home Ventilation Options

Copyright (c) 2014 Matt Reardon

Ventilation systems make use of fans to move the air into your home and have the capacity of providing continuous good home ventilation. This assists in maintaining air quality and in removing moisture that is generated from your everyday living activities within the home. An excellently designed and installed energy efficient home ventilation system offers you the convenience of high-quality ventilation independent of existing weather conditions.

In Australia, all mechanical ventilation systems have to be planned in harmony with the Building Code of Australia. This Code in turn calls for compliance with Australian Standards 1668.1 and 1668.2 for the installation of mechanical ventilation systems.

Types of Home Ventilation Systems

Broadly, you will have the option of choosing between two types of home ventilation systems depending on your specific circumstances and needs:

1. Positive Pressure Ventilation Systems

Also referred to as roof cavity heat transferring systems, these propel filtered air from the house roof space through a vent or even multiple vents. This in turn pushes the air that is inside the home to go out through any available gaps such as windows and doors.

How efficiently these systems are going to ventilate your whole house be dependent on:

• The fans performance.

• The distribution of the ceiling vents in the house.

• How airtight your home is.

Because your roof spaces are frequently heavily polluted with mould, vermin and dust, it is better if your ventilation systems get fitted with air filters. The type of air filter that you use and how frequently it gets cleaned will be very crucial in determining the quality of the air that enters your home.

2. Balanced Pressure Ventilation Systems

These are also known as heat recovery systems and are particularly appropriate for homes found in colder climate areas. These systems work through two separate fans running two distinct air streams. While one of the two fans will be supplying fresh outdoor air into your home via a number of ceiling vents, the other fan acts as an exhaust extracting an equal air volume from within your house and discharging it towards the outside.

To ventilate your home effectively, there must be free flow of air between the exhaust and supply vents within the house. It is important that you ensure there are no 'short circuit' routes between your exhaust and supply vents, otherwise some areas in your home could get bypassed by the ventilation system.

During the winter, your home's heat exchanger transfers a fraction of the heat contained in the warm air being exhausted to the cold supply air, consequently reducing loss of heat linked with the ventilation.

The general effectiveness of your heat exchanger will be dependent on two factors:

• How tight your house is.

• Some difference in temperature between the outside and inside air. The bigger the temperature difference, the more heat that the heat exchanger is going to recover.

If you need further information, we would recommend the International Journal of Ventilation as a very useful resource. This is journal that is devoted to issues dealing with the ventilation of buildings that are already occupied and it also sets benchmarks to be observed during installation and maintenance of home ventilation systems.


----------------------------------------------------
Matt Reardon works for MouldBuster. He is a skilled ventilations artisan with extensive experience. He will make your MouldBuster experience a worthy investment as you shop for your home ventilation system, logon to our site at http://mouldbuster.com.au .