Take it outside – Exhausting your fans outside of the home.

You’ve read all the articles about proper ventilation and improving indoor air quality. You went out and purchased the perfect exhaust fans for your home and are now ready to install them. Good for you, great job. As you start the installation you realize that you will need to run ducting for these fans and there isn’t any existing ducting. No problem, you’ll just run it into the attic, away from the living area. HOLD IT RIGHT THERE! We are going to need to stop you.

Making sure you exhaust the air outside of the home is one of the most important steps when it comes to ventilation. Even if you have existing ducting that you are connecting to, you want to confirm that it is running outside the home. If you are like most people, the first question is why, what’s the big deal.

The most commonly mistaken place people run their exhaust fan into is the attic. Now stop and think about your attic. It is not the most pleasant place to begin with. In the summer it is probably very hot, even if it is properly insulated. Now take that hot area and add almost 100% humidity to it as the moist air from your shower is pumped into the space. Before long you will have what feels like a rain forest in your attic. This will quickly turn to mildew and then mold. Because it is an attic and not a common living space, it might be years before you detect that mold is growing (think of those renovation shows on TV where the host finds mold that has been growing for years – not a pleasant sight). Anytime you find mold growing in your home, it is not a good thing. All that can be easily prevented by just exhausting the fan outside the home through a wall, roof or gable mounted cap.

To learn more about ventilation visit www.airkinglimited.com.