I would have thought good ventilation would bring much colder air in from the outside thereby mitigating the benefits of good insulation. How do modern houses deal with this issue or is good ventilation much less important and I expect? (I’m in the UK so we don’t have blown air heating/cooling as standard here)
In: Engineering
In older homes it was believed that the “leaks” in a home will keep fresh air and air quality at reasonable levels, which also increased our costs to heat/cool our buildings. Many newer homes seal the house very well, required by laws on energy reduction, in all areas including around framing, windows and doors which was the cause of most old air leaks, “drafts”. When thus started to happen we found indoor air quality started to be an issue, sick building syndrome.
With all this in mind we needed to find a way to introduce fresh air into homes, that was not drastically causing us to loose energy in the form of heat. Equipment was modified/invented to help with this. We use items like heat recovery units (HRU), in ventilation systems. This allows some of the heat from the indoors to exchange with the heat from the fresh out doors, basically equaling the temperature of the fresh air coming in to the “old” air going out in a heat exchange medium. They keep the two air streams separate, but allow their heat to transfer. They save money, heating/cooling cost, while providing the fresh air you need in a house/building.
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