MR Cool’s take on the IAQ Problem
We at Donald P Dick Air Conditioning recognize the increasing problem with poor Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) in the valley, particularly in new homes.
Did you know that a newly constructed home is full of water?
There is water in the drywall, water in the carpets, and even water in the insulation, and these things don’t even account for the human element. This doesn’t mean that your house is a fishbowl, but merely that all the materials used in the construction of your house require time to properly dry out.
New homes, more so than older homes, tend to sweat when it gets colder outside. Much like the condensation that forms on a cold glass in the summer time, the moisture in the air in your house tends to condense to water on cold surfaces. This means that the moisture that you might notice near the edges of windows is actually quite normal in newer homes. Over a period of several years, the materials in your house eventually dry out, and thus drastically reduce the amount of moisture in the air.
There is however, another more dramatic source of moisture in your home. You!
Showers, baths, even cooking dinner. All these things add potentially huge amounts of water to the air. If this moisture is allowed to fester in the house, we wind up with a big problem.
A solution we’ve found to this problem that helps solves the moisture problem as well as many of the critical problems that you face with poor Indoor Air Quality. We’ve introduced a system call an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) which through a single input and output, can control the infiltration of air from the outside, and force air back out of the home.
The ERV is a balanced system, meaning that for every CFM (cubic foot per minute) of air that it brings in, it exhausts an equivalent amount of air back out of the house from the inside. The ERV allows us to pull the moisture out of the air, exchanging it with dryer air from the outside, and thus nearly eliminating the moisture buildup, and thus all the other negative IAQ principles that pop up as a direct result of too much moisture.
The last benefit to the ERV application as described above, by controlling the air infiltration, you’re now able to filter the fresh air as it comes into the house, removing the outside pollutants, further increasing the overall quality inside the house! The ERV also has a patented heat exchanger which transfers heat between the air leaving and the air entering the house, lessening the burden of conditioning the incoming air to the temperature of the rest of the house.
Running your Air Conditioning System is the most effective way to remove moisture, but given the area’s utility rates, it is also the most expensive way. The ERV uses as much energy as a standard 100W light bulb!
So if you have a problem with moisture, or you notice that your house doesn’t have a lot of exhaust fans, particularly in bathrooms and laundry rooms, you may find the ERV a perfect solution.
