residential ventilation systems

From a product point of view, today’s state-of-the-art ventilation boxes for residential buildings are generally reliable, efficient and silent according to formal European and national product standards. Ongoing development projects are focussing on making the products even better, but because of the maturity level of today’s solutions, breakthrough revolutions should not be expected. 

Research shows that, despite compliance with building codes, residential ventilation systems do not deliver the requested air exchanges in the individual rooms. One of the reasons for this can be found in the way the building codes are composed. In general building codes only specify the minimum ventilation capacity that need to be installed in the various rooms. The actual performance of the ventilation system is left to the market.

Residential ventilation standards, especially in Europe are slowly but substantially moving away from their usual prescriptive approach towards performance based specifications. While academics and policy makers argue about the relevant IAQ indicators, housing developers and end users need to make a choice between the different ventilation system options they are faced with in the market. Although several IAQ rating systems have emerged, a comprehensive assessment method to rate the inherent qualities of the ventilation system itself is not available [6].