MVHR and building physics knowledge for a healthy, comfortable and energy efficient home
Heat, Space and Light Ltd has completed the design, supply and commissioning of a Passivhaus-specification MVHR ventilation system for a luxury new build in the northwest of England. The home was also tested by our building airtightness team and achieved an incredibly airtight result of 0.76 m3hr/m2 @50Pa. It’s only slightly shy of a fully-certified … Read more
Our MVHR design and commissioning team has recently completed the detailed ductwork design, supply of materials and balancing of our Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery system (MVHR) at a highly sophisticated new build home in Surrey. As part of our turnkey MVHR design, supply and commissioning service we’ve issued the MVHR Ventilation Airflow Measurement and … Read more
A Mechanical Ventilation Heat Recovery (MVHR) unit is a cornerstone of a low energy home with healthy indoor air. There are a lot of MVHRs on the market, and one way to compare between another is to look at its Heat Exchanger Efficiency score. Today I’ll explain what to watch for when comparing a cheap … Read more
We have completed the design and first fix installation of a Zehnder Q350 MVHR system with ComfoTube ducting into a 100-year-old cottage that’s undergoing a low energy retrofit upgrade. The MVHR system will improve the indoor air quality, comfort and energy efficiency, but also protect the century-old building fabric by ensuring indoor humidity is dealt … Read more
When we consider examples of good hygiene in our home, we may think of easy-to-clean materials, strong disinfectants and mops and buckets. But as Covid-19 is proving, hygiene in the home also relates significantly to the air we breathe indoors, and the bacterial and viral particles suspended within the air around us. There are many … Read more
30 years ago house-builders in the UK would have never considered how airtight they were building new homes. “Aren’t all homes fairly airtight, once you put the windows and doors in and pump the gaps with insulating foam?” Well, not necessarily. Fireplaces used to be for both heating and ventilation Traditionally, homes built before our … Read more
14 June 2017: Today we finished the final stage of what was a complete design, supply, install and commissioning of a Zehnder ComfoAir Q600 Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery (MVHR) system – that also features cooling air-conditioning. Although we’ve commissioned many Zehnder and PAUL MVHR units in the past, this was the first time we … Read more
Modern homes are shifting towards increasing levels of airtightness in order to secure heat-saving benefits. With increasing levels of airtightness comes a need for a ventilation strategy. For Passivhaus, this means an MVHR system. Heat from the home is lost in two ways: through the fabric elements as it passes through our walls, windows, doors, … Read more
We spend a huge part of our lives indoors – I’ve spent 96 per cent of my last 24 hours indoors, and it’s not an unusual day for me in winter. Consider your day. How long were you actually outside in the sunshine (or rain) altogether today? During mid-winter in England here was my typical day: … Read more
See if any of this sounds true to you. You live in a typical English home. It’s made of brick, it has timber-frame and single-glazed or double-glazed windows and woolly yellow insulation stuffed into the rafters in the loft. It was built after the first or second world war in post-boom Britain. You spend £800 … Read more