Mechanical ventilation with heat recovery (MVHR) and passive stack ventilation (PSV) systems are both proposed as methods of ensuring satisfactory ventilation rates in UK housing. MVHR provides controlled ventilation in all rooms together with heat recovery, while the cheaper PSV system offers lower running costs, but without heat recovery and without a controlled air supply to all rooms. The relative energy consumption of the two systems depends on a number of factors that are difficult to predict.
The continual reduction of the transmission heat losses of residential buildings causes an increasing importance of the ventilation heat losses. Energy saving can be achieved by using a mechanical ventilation system with heat recovery. A great improvement is the combination of heating and ventilation in one system. In this project such a combined system was developed to reduce the energy consumption of the fans, the operating expenses and also the investment costs in comparison to existing systems. In future a high market acceptance is expected for combined heating and ventilation systems.
This research project was performed to gather field experience with houses that had ventilation systems that were expected to be able to meet the CSA F326 Residential Mechanical Ventilation Systems Standard.
The study focused on houses that had central forced warm air heating systems along with central ventilation systems. Two of the houses had air to air heat exchangers, and two had central exhaust fans. The four houses were built between 1983 and 1986.
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