A revolution is nothing without a solution. For indoor air quality (IAQ), dilution and filtration are two components of the ventilation equation. Nick Agopian, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at RenewAire, teamed up with Armin Rudd, Principal AB Systems, LLC, to add context to this IAQ IQ conversation.
Agopian said ventilation and filtration try to complement each other to achieve good indoor air quality. Rudd said he starts the IAQ process with source control by local exhausts and removes the air contaminants at the point of generation. After that, Rudd said he employs whole dwelling ventilation, which utilizes dilution. “If you have a cooking source, an oven or a stovetop, you should be ventilating and removing all source contaminants before they diffuse within the structure,” Agopian said.
Balanced ventilation strategies bring in outdoor air (supply air) and exhaust out stale, indoor air (room air), which is a much better solution than simply opening a window. Energy recovery solutions like ERVs bring further benefits, helping to optimize energy usage by passively recovering otherwise-wasted energy to temper incoming outdoor air. There are also hybrid systems available, as well, and filtration can be used to enhance balanced ventilation.
“A hybrid system is a supply ventilation system that would activate whenever the heating and cooling was called for by the thermostat,” Rudd said. “But then maybe use an exhaust strategy to fill in all the gaps when there is no heating and cooling; essentially supplementing that supply ventilation.”
With the particles found in the air, one of the leading concerns in IAQ, no matter what type of ventilation system is employed, it is critical to have a high-quality air filtration system.