Green Building Bible, Fourth Edition |
These two books are the perfect starting place to help you get to grips with one of the most vitally important aspects of our society - our homes and living environment. PLEASE NOTE: A download link for Volume 1 will be sent to you by email and Volume 2 will be sent to you by post as a book. |
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Posted By: djhUsual solution is mechanical ventilation (preferably MVHR) but there are alternatives.
Posted By: derekeI'm planning to put in MVHR in my current house but in the meantime I've found humidity monitors in each room and opening windows when required to be quite effective.Yup. Opening windows (plural) is a good way to increase ventilation. It does cause the heating bills to increase of course. It's what we did when we were renting a Victorian house. I can confirm that MVHR is much more comfortable and less effort
I'm still looking forward to MVHR as that will be one less job to do, more effective and more efficient but in the meantime this works quite well.
Posted By: djhIt does cause the heating bills to increase of course.
Posted By: derekeBecause what I was surprised to learn (shouldn't have been a surprise) is that when you have higher humidity you have more thermal mass (the water in the air) to heat up... so reducing the thermal mass in the air should make it easier to heat.. so lower heating billsI don't think that will be very important in the grand scheme of things. It's true that higher humidity air will take a bit more energy to heat but the higher humidity air is already heated when it goes out the window. The incoming air is lower (absolute) humidity so doesn't take quite as much to heat up but then all the humidity that you add to the air within the house has to be warm as well (it often will be already if it's in your breath or from the shower or evaporated from a cup of tea but you have to pay for that heat somewhere). MVHR will automatically exploit the difference in humidity levels (unless it's a humidity-recovery enthalpy type, which gets even more complicated) to recover the energy. But all these numbers are small compared to the main event. You heat the house because heat is lost through (a) the walls and roof etc and (b) the air exchange with outside. (a) is bigger than (b). Humidity is a fraction of (b).
Posted By: RobL…and we had to put in 13W*24*365 = 83kWh/year to achieve it.A significant proportion of which contributed to heating your house (assuming the fans are on the warm side of the heat exchanger; it'd be a nutty bit of design if they were on the cold side except, maybe, from the noise point of view).
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