Heating and Ventilation

John Bradley, Managing Director at Homevent, (Elta Fans residential division), discusses why this winter could see a rise in condensation – providing the perfect breeding ground for mould and reducing indoor air quality.

Just when you think 2020 couldn’t get any worse, we start to enter condensation season. Unfortunately, this year there are a number of new factors at play which could exacerbate issues further.  Let’s take a look in more detail.

At last, there is significant interest being shown in the UK in the possibility of using heat pumps to meet the requirements for renewable heat in homes up and down the country. Heat pumps have made huge strides across the rest of Europe, in Scandinavia and Canada - which have far more testing climates than we have here in the UK.
Ground source heat pumps do require significant disruption to install and either a lot of land or an expensive drilling operation to get down into the ground, but air source heat pumps come with no such issues. There are a number of very advanced heat pump products readily available here in the UK now – like LG’s Therma V series - and sales have increased significantly, but they are still very much lower than in comparable European countries – such as Germany or Denmark.

To help people understand the full benefits of air source heat pumps, Mitsubishi Electric have created a series of podcasts all about renewable heating with Ecodan Ambassador, architect and TV Presenter, George Clarke and in one of the latest, they look specifically at the social housing sector.

Titon has introduced the new FireSafe™ Air Brick – a non-combustible compact inlet/outlet grille suitable for new and refurbished houses and apartments. Designed with architects, mechanical engineers, contractors and local authorities in mind, the product is an upgrade of Titon’s (plastic) Q Plus High Flow Brick and can easily be built into external walls during construction.

In a previous article for Mitsubishi Ecodan’s ‘The Hub’ (https://les.mitsubishielectric.co.uk/the-hub/good-indoor-air-quality-is-essential-for-wellbeing) I mentioned that the average British person spends 22 hours a day inside… or around 90% of their overall day. Unfortunately, this is also true of our children too; 36% of parents think their kids are not spending enough time outside, whilst 1 in 6 are uncertain themselves of how much time outdoors is actually sufficient, according to various studies.

With all this time being spent indoors, it’s easy to think we are protected from the various coughs, colds and illnesses typically associated with prolonged exposure to adverse weather. We don’t tend to think about the harmful gases, chemicals and toxins that we breathe in unknowingly whilst inside throughout the course of any given day. Yet these pollutants are to blame for many of the migraines, skin and eye irritations, allergic reactions and general tiredness that we all suffer from, from time to time.

The i-Sense is a British designed range of Wi-Fi electric radiators delivering convection and radiant heat via cast aluminium radiators that contain a patented Thermodynamic fluid that heats up in seconds, controllable to within +/- 0.1 degree and fully compliant with the ECO Design LOT 20 regulations for SMART controls and energy efficiency.

i-Sense is a state-of-the-art SMART control technology which delivers maximum comfort with minimal energy consumption. With every radiator connected to your Wi-Fi and communicating via the IoT to a cloud based central dashboard, you can control the performance of up to 1,000 radiators on each dashboard.