Exhaust only ventilation used for green homes


The easiest kind of mechanical ventilation system, exhaust-only ventilation uses one or more exhaust fans to drag air out of the house, and passive air inlet ports introducing fresh outside air-providing makeup air.

The exhaust fans should be located in areas of the house where moisture or pollutants are generated, usually bathrooms and also the kitchen, but sometimes hobby rooms as well. Individual fans may be used in these locations, or perhaps a central exhaust fan may be used with ducts to those locations.

The passive air inlet ports should be located in bedrooms, the family room, along with other places in which you spend probably the most time.

For exhaust-only ventilation safe and effective, there are many requirements:

1. The exhaust fans should be durable, quiet, and energy-efficient. When the fans are extremely noisy, you and also your family is going to be not as likely for their services as frequently, or so long, when needed.

2. The home needs to be very tight. When the house has a lot of leaks in the envelope, the replacement air fromoutside will go into the house near to the exhaust fans rather than with the intentionally placed inlet ports in your bedrooms or family room, so the outdoors won't circulate at home.

3. Exhaust-only ventilation shouldn't be combined with forced-warm-air heating, which is not particularly effective in houses that use furnaces or heat pumps with ducts for heat delivery. It's best with baseboard hot-water heat, radiant-electric heat, individual space heaters, and passive solar systems that avoid using supplemental heating.

4. All combustion equipment in the house should be sealed-combustion. What this means is that outside air comes straight to the combustion chamber, and flue gasses are exhausted straight to the outside. With fireplaces and wood stoves, combustion air should be ducted straight to the firebox, there should be tight-sealing doors.

5. Air should be in a position to circulate easily from area to area in the house. This might require providing grilles through walls and/or providing air gaps under doors.

Legal Disclaimer

Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Articleinput.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.

Note: This article was sent to us by: Larry Edwards at 04202011

Related Articles

1. Hiring a builder to build a green home
Design-build firms provide both home construction and design services. If you don't go for this kind of approach - or if your design-build firm with expertise in green buil...

2. Building a new green home or renovating an old one
From an eco standpoint, every building project has environmental impacts. Green building is, really, a problem of attempting to maintain those impacts to a minimal level. B...

3. Regulatory constraints of green building
While you examine potential properties for that ideal building site, it's also wise to check out the land-use regulations that govern what can and can't be achieved in the ...

4. Configuring your new green home
What will the basic form of your house be? Is is tall and boxy? Low and disseminate? Long and narrow, or roughly square? They are fundamental questions that may hav...

5. Rigid foam insulation for green homes
Rigid foam insulation increases the insulating value per inch of thickness and therefore helps maintain highly insulated walls from being too thick. Most often, one or two...

6. Structural insulated panel construction for green homes
Although structural insulated panels (SIPs) were originally developed for enclosing timber frames, manufacturers quickly realized that, because the panels had oriented stra...

7. Using concrete for green homes
Concrete masonry unit Currently, the 2nd most typical building system for houses in the US (after conventional wood framing) is concrete masonry unit (CMU) constr...

8. Insulation options for green homes
Providing a very insulated, airtight building envelope (the insulated walls, roof, and floors that surround the living area) may be the number one priority in designing an ...

9. Heat distribution systems for environmentally friendly homes
In selecting a heating system, the first decision you should make is exactly what kind of heat distribution system you would like. The most typical option is forced-air, ba...

10. Maximize heating efficiency for green homes
Heating System Efficiency An electric heating system's efficiency is really a function not just of the combustion efficiency, but additionally of the heat distrib...