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What is the best home ventilation system?

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Most of us don’t think twice about the way we ventilate our homes. If we feel we need fresh air, it’s too hot or we want to enjoy a view without an intervening pane of glass, we’ll open a window. If we’re cooking or showering, we’ll flick on the relevant extractor fan. In winter and rainy weather, we dry clothes indoors without worrying about where all the moisture goes once it’s evaporated off.

This relatively relaxed attitude to ventilation arises for a few reasons. First off, a lot of older homes in the UK are so draughty and so riddled with small imperfections that they – rather endearingly – ventilate themselves. Unfortunately, this also makes them more expensive and inefficient to heat.

What is the best home ventilation system?

In the late 20th century, builders, government regulators and homeowners cottoned on to the latter fact and took steps to change things. Cavity-wall insulation, sealed windows and doors, and re-vamped loft insulation became the standard for new-builds and were commonly retrofitted for older homes.

This made them cosier and saved energy, but also made them harder to ventilate. Poor home ventilation makes damp, mould and bad indoor odour more common, as well as aggravating problems such as chronic asthma and indoor air pollution.

Thankfully, there are solutions — this is your guide to home ventilation.

Why should you ventilate your home?

In the early days of urban living, people theorised that illness was caused by bad air or “miasmas”, but lacked scientific proof. Nowadays we know there are multiple health threats from poor home ventilation. These include toxic black mould, poor lung health, exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs), dust and pet smells, bad bathroom and kitchen odours and even a general feeling of malaise.

On the other hand, a well-ventilated house can feel fresh and smell clean. This can increase both the market value and your enjoyment of your home. As humans, it seems we’re naturally drawn to fresh air in architecture and nature — think of the appeal of orangeries, sunroofs, seaside towns and mountain air.

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.

Home ventilation systems

Aside from using windows, vents and single-room extractor fans (sometimes called “uncontrolled” ventilation), it’s possible to take a systemic, whole-house approach to ventilation. We aren’t experts here — it’s best to speak to someone in the know, but you can get a good ventilation system overview here.

Mechanical ventilation is a sure-fire way to circulate air around the home, but fitting new mechanical ventilation systems for a whole home can be expensive and fiddly. Similarly, home air-conditioning is quite a controversial means of ventilation. The UK’s climate is such that it hardly ever provides better temperature regulation than simply using fresh air from outside, and aircon is famously energy-intensive.

At Britannia, we believe the future lies in using less energy to do more — and that passive ventilation methods like trickle vents and night vents are a cheap, easy and sustainable solution to most home ventilation problems.

Our team is always happy to talk about home ventilation solutions — why not give us a call?

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