Ventilation: Boost wellbeing with safer indoor air quality

Gift you and yours safer air quality for Christmas and New Year

Open fires and stoves must be carefully handled to avoid burdening the air with particulate matter that can be taken deep into the lung. Keep stove doors shut. File picture

We all know the old saying — build tight, ventilate right. Truly airtight, highly insulated homes smugly hovering at BERs of A3 and above, are becoming the standard, as we attempt to decarbonise hundreds of thousands of buildings in our chill, outdated housing stock. We spend 80%-90% of our time indoors, half of this at home. Every one of us breathes in around 20,000 litres of air a day. The impact on our health and overall well-being of indoor air quality (IAQ) is coming under intense scrutiny by natural scientists.

If you believed that sensory comfort and low heating bills were enough to make a happy, healthy home you would be wrong. If your home has undergone serious energy improvement, including a holistic, deep-retrofit project, it does not mean that your air quality is automatically tip-top, and the ventilation is handling the invisible burden on the air we breathe.