Poor Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is a common and widespread issue in British buildings.
Poor IAQ is a function of a building’s ventilation performance.
There are two main reasons why IAQ problems have dramatically increased in recent decades:
- Improved quality and performance of heating and insulation characteristics in millions of new and existing buildings has effectively sealed them up, increasing the ventilation performance requirement to dilute and displace pollutants and help heat distribution.
- The vast majority of the 30 million or so new and existing buildings in Britain today are naturally ventilated and it is impossible to scale the performance of natural ventilation. You cannot go outside and tell the wind to blow harder if and when you need more ventilation. Also is inherently inefficient and ineffective, it facilitates uncontrolled heat loss during the colder months and is subjectively controlled by the building occupants. If you combine this with commonplace underperformance of extraction and other key Part F ventilation processes this invariably results in strategic underventilation in millions of buildings and the unwanted consequence of pollutant build-up, not to mention £££ in wasted energy costs and increased energy consumption.
Natural ventilation is the most common background or supply ventilation strategy in millions of new and existing buildings because it is the cheapest and easiest way for builders and specifiers to comply with Part F. The fact that it rarely performs well and comes with these unwanted consequences is invariably overlooked and never considered to be an issue because to the prevailing industry assumption that official guidance and recommended systems in Building Regulations cannot be wrong or lead to problems.
The unfortunate truth is that natural ventilation and its performance is at the heart of every single condensation and mould, radon and poor IAQ problem in Britain today and perhaps worse we continue to build this strategic inefficiency into the vast majority of our new builds.
At Better Indoors, when we fix a condensation and mould problem, a radon problem or a poor IAQ problem, one of the most important features at the heart of our solution is the change from the natural ventilation strategy to a mechanical strategy that delivers key performance improvements such as scalability and continuous operation. This has the effect of increasing dilution and displacement rates throughout the property which improves IAQ. Our solutions makes the extant natural strategy redundant which means occupants can keep their windows closed throughout the colder months of the year which not only helps optimise heat distribution and relative humidity control but makes the property warmer and more comfortable and saves ££££ in wasted energy costs.
Better Indoors is a highly experienced IAQ solution provider. If you are worried about poor IAQ at your home or office book an appointment today.
