Between a third and half of an Irish building's heat loss typically occurs through cold air exchange. Heat Recovery Ventilation is a technology that, whilst having been in existence for some time, is now rapidly gaining recognition in Ireland as an extremely efficient, health-beneficial, cost effective solution to saving energy.

How does it work?

A set of ducts extracts moist, stale air from the wet areas of the building such as the kitchen, laundry and bathrooms. This stale contaminated air travels through the HRV unit and is released outdoors; another ducting system then takes in fresh clean air from outside. As the two air-streams bypass within the center of a non-energy consuming heat transfer exchanger, heat from the stale air is used to warm the fresh incoming air. As the two air-streams remain separate, no contamination occurs. Finally, the HRV unit succeeds in retaining up to 95% of the energy from the exhausted warm, stale air. This allows clean, filtered air to be distributed throughout the building - where and when needed.

In contrast to conventional ventilation systems, a HRV is well advanced to offer year round comfort in the building, as while also drawing fresh air in it serves the dual purpose of keeping the living areas at a warm, constant temperature. More than 35% of heat loss in today's homes can be attributed to ventilation, as where high-quality conventional systems are well equipped to handle the procedure of air exchange they tend to create an uncomfortably cold living environment in the process. This ultimately means that energy that might have been wasted in re-heating a naturally ventilated building can be saved with a HRV.

Why install a HRV System?

We humans generally like to be warm in winter and cool in summer, we like our habitat to be a mild with a comfortable temperature and hence we warm the building interior in winter and we cool during summer. By warming our habitat in winter we are effectively creating a warm box with cold surrounds, the interior is warmer than the exterior and it is these thermal differentials that cause condensation which is effectively moisture contained in warm air being dumped from the air rapidly as the air cools.

With a well insulated and reasonably airtight building you can make your home feel like one.