What is the best home ventilation system?

How do you ventilate a room?

The simplest and easiest way to quickly ventilate a room is to open a window, allowing fresh air in and stale air out. Even in winter, the home insurer Axa recommends you open the windows to ventilate any given room three times a day, even if you can only manage it at the weekend. Remember to close the room’s door for the fastest and most thorough ventilation, otherwise you might just push stale air deeper into your home.

Some rooms require a little more input to ventilate properly, especially in winter or high summer. For kitchens and bathrooms, especially ones that lack large windows, extractor fans should be your go-to. In the kitchen they help to get rid of any and all cooking odours and moisture, preventing gradual build-ups of hard-to-remove grease and damp in the room’s corners. They’re particularly useful for quickly wafting away particularly acrid smells like smoke. In the bathroom, extractor fans help to clear steam, toilet smells and the vapours from strong cleaning products.

If you’re fitting a conservatory, you might think about fitting a ceiling fan. As well as being a stylish aesthetic feature, fans can help to recirculate warm air around the room, saving on heating.

How do you ventilate a house?

Ventilating a whole home requires a slightly more systemic approach. First, when you aren’t trying to conserve heat, cooking, bathing or drying clothes, you should try to leave open all of the internal doors in your home. This helps to produce a natural passage of air through your home over the course of the day, and can allow a well-ventilated room to ventilate the whole house by simple diffusion.

In particularly airtight homes, however, you’ll still definitely require some openings to the outdoors. Unfortunately, this isn’t always practical — you can’t always leave the windows open at night or while you’re at work, especially in the dead of winter. Thankfully, modern windows tend to come equipped with ready-made solutions — trickle vents and night vents with secondary locking points.

Many houses come with airbricks or in-wall vents built in. These are all well and good, but they can cause uncontrollable cold draughts, clog with dust or wail and moan in high winds.

Trickle vents offer the best of both worlds. They can be opened or closed by hand, can extensively ventilate your whole home and make precious little difference to a home’s indoor temperature. Trickle vents are a requirement under building regulations, so where current windows have them, replacement windows must also have trickle vents. Don’t worry if this isn’t the case; all our windows without dedicated trickle vents come with night vents with secondary locks, letting you securely lock them very slightly open. This provides essentially the same effect, so your air stays fresh while you stay warm.