A Heat Recovery Ventilator Ensures Fresh Air–When You Need It Most

When your home is sealed against winter cold and summer heat, your indoor temperatures remain comfortable and your energy waste is minimized. But there’s one drawback to tightly sealed homes: reduced ventilation. As the supply of fresh air into your house is cut off by closed doors and windows and tight seals against the weather, your indoor air quality may decline.

 

A heat recovery ventilator offers an effective way to increase fresh air and ventilation in your home while maintaining comfortable temperatures — and without losing the energy and money you’ve spent to heat your living spaces in the winter or cool them in the summer.

 

Heat recovery ventilators, also known as air-to-air heat exchangers, are usually installed in your home’s attic, where they act as whole-house ventilation systems. They contain an efficient heat exchanger and one or more fans to push air through the system. The unit operates continuously, pulling in air from throughout your home and routing it into the heat exchanger, which contains several individual air channels.

 

At the same time, air from the outdoors is pumped into the system and into the same heat exchanger. Within the heat exchanger, the streams of indoor and outdoor air pass by each other but do not mix. When the air streams are close together, heat from the outgoing interior air warms the incoming air before it’s sent throughout your home. In the summer, the opposite occurs, as air-conditioned indoor air helps cool incoming outdoor air.

 

Heat recovery systems can recover as much as 80 percent of the energy in outgoing air and transfer it to incoming air, which reduces utility expenses and demand on your heating and cooling systems.

 

Contact Home Comfort Experts today for more information on heat-recovery ventilation, to get a quote on a system or to schedule an installation. Serving Northern Indiana and Southwest Michigan, our certified technicians always welcome questions.