Air exchangers are basically a mechanical means of exhausting a percentage of stale or ambient air in a home or office and replacing it with fresher air from outside.
Why do we need to do this?
Most homes and offices built prior to the 1990’s had little regard for making sure there was no air leakage between the interior and exterior of a home. Energy was relatively inexpensive and if felt good to live in a home or office that breathed.
Time has taught us that this thinking can also lead to our encouraging contaminants such as mold to grow within walls and closed spaces.
Once we started building energy efficient homes that were more air tight, we stared to realize that we still needed our homes and offices to breath in a controlled manor because with a better sealed home we were also sealing in other contaminants such carbon dixode, radon gas in some areas, off-gases from new building and decorative materials.
One of today’s solutions is the installation of air exchangers. There are passive air exchangers, motorized air exchangers, energy recovery air exchangers and heat recovery air exchangers. Each of these types can provide air exchange but we must be conscientious that as we exhaust air from the home, we are bringing air that can be hotter than what we are looking for, cooler that what we want and bring in moisture when we are trying to reduce moisture. ERV and HRV’s area solution to these issues.
One our future blogs will explain the difference between these types of units and their benefits.