Letting fresh outdoor air into your home is one of the best ways you can improve your indoor air quality. But opening a window doesn’t make much sense when it’s 30 degrees outside and you’re trying to heat your home! If you want to ventilate your home all year long, the best solution is a home ventilation system.
Why is home ventilation important?
These days, homes are built as tightly as possible to conserve energy and prevent air from leaking in and out. Although this has significantly improved the efficiency of today’s homes, it has also posed a problem when it comes to indoor air quality: when air can’t flow in and out of your home, air contaminants get trapped inside. As these contaminants build up, they can create health problems for you and your family.
3 kinds of home ventilation
Ventilation is one of the three fundamental ways you can improve your home’s indoor air quality (the other two being source control and air filtration). There are three types of ventilation:
- Infiltration. Infiltration is an unintentional form of ventilation. It occurs when air flows in and out through leaks in your home. As we mentioned above, today’s homes are built to minimize infiltration, making this an undesirable form of ventilation.
- Natural ventilation. Natural ventilation is when you open a window or door to allow fresh air inside and stale, polluted air out. This is an effective type of ventilation, but it only makes sense during mild days when you aren’t using your HVAC system.
- Mechanical ventilation. Home ventilation systems fall into the category of mechanical ventilation. These systems allow for the exchange of indoor and outdoor air all year long without losing much energy.
Benefits of installing a home ventilation system
By exchanging polluted indoor air with fresh outdoor air, a home ventilation system can dilute the number of contaminants in your home’s air. In the process of ventilating your home, these systems are also able to transfer the heat and humidity from the outgoing conditioned air to the incoming cold air from outside. This allows ventilation systems to recover 70-80 percent of the heat from the air that’s leaving your home, making them an energy-efficient way to improve indoor air quality.
If you have any questions about a home ventilation system, or if you’d like a heating system serviced or installed in your home, contact Jerry Kelly Heating & Air Conditioning, your St. Louis HVAC company. We service the St. Louis area and surrounding towns like Creve Coeur, Manchester, and Dardenne Prairie.
