Purpose and Importance of Ventilation in Your Home

All homes require good ventilation. Ventilation is where indoor air is exchanged with outdoor air to help reduce odors, moisture and pollutants. Why is home ventilation so important? For many reasons, including the reduction or elimination of contaminants, moisture, mold, and backdrafting. It can also improve your comfort inside the home.

Contaminants
Contaminants like volatile organic compounds (VOCs), formaldehyde and radon, which could lead to serious health issues, can accumulate inside your home if it’s poorly ventilated. It’s also hard to remove unpleasant odors without adequate ventilation.

Mold
Extra moisture in your home can lead to mold growth and physical damage. Mold exposure caused by inadequate ventilation can also cause health problems, including:

Headaches
Immune system issues
Eye, throat and nose irritation
Respiratory damage
Fevers
Worsen symptoms in patients with autoimmune diseases

When you properly ventilate your home, you’ll eliminate this moisture buildup by maintaining air movement. Proper ventilation moves extra moisture out of your living areas, preventing damage to furnishings and structures and mold growth that high moisture levels cause.

Backdrafting
When your home’s pressure inside is lower than the home’s outside pressure, then your home has negative pressure. This negative pressure can cause backdrafting where outdoor air is pulled inside your home.

If this happens, it can become dangerous if carbon monoxide and other combustion gases are pulled into your home through your chimney or another opening, becoming concentrated in your home. Proper ventilation controls your homes inside pressure, eliminating this issue.

Temperature
When you and your loved ones are in a confined space, it can lead to a hot and stuffy environment. You’ll make the room instantly more comfortable with ventilation.

Natural and Mechanical Ventilation
Your home can benefit from both natural ventilation and mechanical ventilation.

Natural Ventilation: Opening up your doors and windows will allow air to flow inside and through your home. This is known as natural ventilation. Natural ventilation can even occur through cracks surrounding your windows, but to conserve energy, you should really seal these up.

Mechanical Ventilation: Examples of mechanical ventilation are air ducts of your house, exhaust fans and whole house fans. Let’s take the whole house fan as an example. A whole house fan draws in the fresh outdoor air from open windows, exhausting it through your attic and roof. Whole house fans provide excellent whole house cooling and good attic ventilation.

Unless you have a good home ventilation system in place, you won’t have any control over the airflow in your home. Proper home ventilation can help.

If you’re interested in improving the ventilation in your home, take a look at our inventory of products, which include whole house fans, attic fans and garage exhaust fans. Then, give us a call at 1.888.229.5757 if you have any questions.