Why Is Good Ventilation So Important?

Every home collects various indoor air pollutants as a part of normal living that can affect your health. Some common indoor pollutants include:

• Dust and allergens, including pollen and viruses

• Mold and mildew from excess humidity

• Particulates from smoke

• Dangerous gases and fumes from combustion, including carbon monoxide

• Household chemicals from cleaning products

• Off-gassing from furniture, cabinets, flooring, and fire retardants

These indoor pollutants can build up inside a home without proper ventilation, causing breathing problems and potentially dangerous conditions.

How Do Ventilation Systems Work?

Traditional ventilation fans such as kitchen range hoods and bathroom fans exhaust indoor air outside. While these can provide relief to specific areas while cooking and after steamy showers, they don’t provide fresh air to replace what they are blowing out.

That’s why many homeowners in the greater Wells, South Berwick, and Portsmouth areas are choosing to upgrade their home ventilation with whole home air exchangers. Air exchangers like HRV and ERV units replace stale indoor air with fresh outside air without losing energy or heat. This improves indoor air quality while maintaining home efficiency and comfort. Whole home ventilation is an especially great upgrade to consider if you are air sealing your house and thus making it more airtight.

With our experience with ventilation and improving indoor air quality, we recommend these ventilation improvements:

Panasonic Bathroom Exhaust Fans

 Panasonic bathroom exhaust fans are a major step-up from the standard bathroom fans you may have in your home. The Panasonic bath fans we install are whisper-quiet and feature a condensation sensor to control moisture and prevent mold and mildew. The fan kicks on automatically to keep indoor humidity at a healthy level.

Broan Fresh Air Systems

Broan’s family of Fresh Air Systems offer continuous air replacement for a healthy indoor air supply. These units are available with or without heat recovery to replace stale indoor air and excess humidity with fresh outside air. Heat recovery ventilation (HRV) captures heat and uses it to warm outside air, so that heat is not lost. Energy recovery ventilation (ERV) captures the energy in conditioned air, and because it removes excess moisture in the air, is recommended for high humidity areas like coastal locations in Southern Maine. Removing indoor pollutants is key for a healthy and energy efficient home — especially for family members who have asthma or other respiratory challenges.

CERV Ventilation

For the enhanced efficiency, air sealed construction of Retrofits and Passive Houses, the CERV Ventilation offers multifunction air circulation. CERV combines continuous ventilation with energy recovery, temperature controls, humidity controls, and HEPA filtration. This hybrid ventilation unit brings in oxygen and removes excess humidity that can lead to mold and mildew in tightly sealed homes. Exhausting indoor pollutants such as household chemicals, combustion gases, dust, viruses, and allergens creates a home with healthy indoor air quality. Incoming fresh air is filtered with advance HEPA filtration to maintain healthy air indoors. The added heat pump and energy recovery functions translate into extraordinary energy efficiency, meeting the ultra low energy consumption goals of Passive House construction. This means that dehumidification in the summer results in a cooler space unlike a high energy heat producing de-humidifier.

Breathe easy and improve indoor air quality with an air exchanger. Energy efficient home ventilation is key for a healthy home.