Are you planning to build a new house for you and your family? Are you planning to provide all comforts to your family in your home with a living room with a lavish sofa and a study that keeps you glued to your desk? A home however has more factors to look at than just comfort and luxury; house ventilation being high on the priority list. A home could be filled with luxury items to fulfill your comfort needs and could provide you technology to help you with your work at home, but a good ventilation helps you multiply the comfort levels and ensure good air quality for you and your family.
Ventilation is more important in the modern homes being built today, than the houses erected in the earlier centuries. The homes created before weren’t perfect works of architecture, as in the material used in building up the walls and roofs were such that they left minor cracks and crevices which helped the home breathe in and breathe out. The material used then like, mud, grains of sand, different types of soil, were porous and thus helped your house maintain the process of ventilation. This was a natural way of providing ventilation in your house. But for this, there was a need for a gentle breeze and as we moved forward in time, our materials became sturdier and the breathing space for walls decreased exponentially. The walls that are now erected are erected with a need to provide a solid structure, not ventilation for homes. And this how the need of ventilation arose. It’s a basic necessity while building a home to have proper ventilation or your home would be no different than a gas chamber with the temperatures soaring ever so much every day.
Ventilation in homes is becoming a very important point of study for architects as homes are being built on every piece of barren land and hence, its important to provide homes with the proper ways of ventilation to exemplify the comfort levels.
Following are the common practices that one can use to improve ventilation in their homes –
Traditional ventilation method
This is the most traditional way of providing ventilation for homes all across the globe. Here there are no mechanical devices utilised and ventilation is purely based on traditional ways of providing cracks and crevices for the home to breathe. This is common because it doesn’t require any extra effort by either the architects or by the residents to either spend more or tweak the design of the home.
This however is a traditional way to ventilate a home which relies largely on a gentle breeze blowing outside or a significant difference in temperature between the both sides of the walls. The reason being, with the afore mentioned conditions, a pressure difference is created to circulate the air and create ventilation. But, for this ventilation method to work, the walls need to have natural cracks and openings which are impossible to achieve with modern materials and building techniques.
How to Ventilate a House - Modern House Ventilation Design Ideas
Today the walls and the roofs are so built, as to not allow any external factor to hinder the lives inside hence no ventilation is a no-go for modern times.
Below we have mentioned four house ventilation options for a well ventilated house:
1. Natural Ventilation
Natural ventilation is the most common mode of ventilation in modern homes, where not a lot of money is spent and the design is more important. Here, the ventilation is carried out through a lot of sunlit windows provided in strategic locations, so as to help regulate exhaust and supply of air. In this technique, the sun coming through the windows help heat the air inside the house, which then gets lighter, rises up and cooler air from the outside or other places rush in to take its place. This hot air has an outlet and the cool air as an inlet, through which it can gush in to take the place of hot air, thus providing very crisp ventilation with strong circulation of air. But again, on a dry and humid day, this type of ventilation is futile as it is dependent on a breeze blowing outside and a difference in temperature between the two sides of the windows.
2. Drain only Ventilation
This type of ventilation is an exhaust only ventilation in which mechanical devices like an exhaust fan is stationed in rooms like the kitchen and bathrooms which are the sources of foul air and hence leaving the home with more space to fit in fresh air which can be circulated through windows. This type of ventilation is effective in a way to remove the air which can harm the atmosphere in a home and help in creating more space for fresh air. This is most effective in kitchens, above your cooking area to extract the smell and the fumes rising from the food being cooked. It’s also effective in bathrooms to not let the moisture settle down on the walls, the roof and floor, thus not allowing bacteria and fungi a chance to grow and contaminate the surrounding. However it gets ineffective with no powerful supply of air against the mechanical exhaust system. This system is again effective if there’s a breeze blowing through the windows to replenish the air being extracted.
3. Inlet only Ventilation
This type of ventilation is the exact opposite of the drain only only ventilation method. This method helps the fresh air from outside to gush. There is no mechanical extraction method to drain out the air inside the house, but that is not a big issue as with fresh air coming in, the surrounding air inside the home can be extracted through open windows or cavities. However, generally people don’t open windows all around the year and are only comfortable to do so in the summers. This limits the effectiveness of this mode of ventilation and can cause the moisture laden air to be infused in the walls which can create a lot of problems.
4. Balance Ventilation
This is the perfect mode of ventilation, if the residents are ready to shell out a little money. In this mode of ventilation, there are exhaust and supply fans situated at strategic locations to regulate the incoming of fresh air from the outer surroundings and extract the stale and moist air from the atmosphere inside the house. This is a balance mode of ventilation. The extraction fans are situated in rooms like the kitchen and bathroom while the inlet fans are situated in most lived areas like the living room and the bedrooms. This helps in creating a balance of the inlet and outlet of air and drives the ventilation of a house most effectively.
A well ventilated house is no less than a haven as the surroundings inside always remain fresh and healthy and the family breathes easy. All the comforts of a home are worthless if the ventilation is ineffective and when you live in that same bout of stale and moisture laden air from kitchens and bathrooms. With the use of balanced ventilation or other mechanical modes of ventilation, we can assure regulated fresh air inflow in our homes. So, let’s keep our homes well ventilated and our families healthy.
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