Which Areas of Your House Need the Most Ventilation?

While heating and air conditioning are essential in modern homes, a third element of home comfort and well-being sometimes gets shortchanged. That’s ventilation. Without an effective ventilating set-up in a home, over time the indoor air will get stale and dirty. The resulting poor indoor air quality not only creates discomfort, it’s also unhealthy.

Surprisingly, the risk of trapped indoor air in homes is higher now than in the old days when most houses had plenty of air leaks that allowed for an incidental exchange of air. In recent years, in pursuit of energy efficiency, tighter construction practices have resulted in homes that have very little air leakage.

That’s why it’s so important for modern homes to have proper ventilation, through a combination of mechanical means and strategically placed vents.

The bathroom is the most obvious place where air exchange is necessary. The common bathroom exhaust fan removes unpleasant smells and moisture, making this room tolerable (plus allowing you to see yourself in the mirror).

Likewise, the exhaust fan in the kitchen removes smells and contaminants that result from cooking and food prep.

In most homes, attic ventilation is essential in order to avoid problems during both the heating and cooling seasons. In the summer, the sun beating down on the roof all day will heat up an attic to unbearable temperatures. That heated air will transfer down into the rooms below unless the attic is ventilated effectively with different types of vents and maybe even an attic fan. In the winter, an unventilated attic can help cause damaging ice dams on the roof.

Increasingly common in modern homes are whole-house ventilating strategies. Heat Recovery and Energy Recovery Ventilators are balanced systems that use two parallel air streams, one moving outside and the other coming inside, to enable a constant exchange of air. These systems offer a bonus – they also exchange heat energy and (with the ERV) moisture to aid in home heating and cooling and humidity control.

To learn more about effective ventilating strategies in your Middletown area home, please contact us at C.R. Wolfe Heating & Air Conditioning.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Middletown, New York about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about ventilation and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Guide or call us at 845-367-4482.

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