Ventilation and low-income housing: a sensitive problem

It is well known that appropriate ventilation represents one of the prerequisites for achieving goodindoor comfort, and we try to ensure a continuous and sufficient intake of fresh air into a building. But,ventilation losses are also one of the most important components of a building thermal balance, andwe try to reduce them as much as possible. In theory, these two seemingly contradictive facts can betechnically adequately solved in various ways. In practice though, the extent of the problem, thepossibilities to deal with it, and the final results depend on many relevant technical, but also userdependent factors. In the paper typical examples of ventilation-related problems is presented, with stress on the ones observed in apartments owned by municipal housing funds and social housing organisations. Our on-site investigations performed in the past few years showed that difficulties with quite similar consequences can occur regardless of the building age, type, or thermal characteristics. As expected, improved building air-tightness can significantly contribute to the extent of the problems, particularly when incorrect ventilation manners and patterns are already present.