Air Exchanger

Can you please tell me if an air exchanger is a must?


In a home being built to Energy Star requirements/certification and will have foam insulation in the attic and blown fiberglass elsewhere (Spiderfiber). The homeowner is trying to cut costs in both building materials and on going operation cost of the air-exchanger. If they open windows on a regular basis would that suffice?

Thank you

weather777 said:

Can you please tell me if an air exchanger is a must?


In a home being built to Energy Star requirements/certification and will have foam insulation in the attic and blown fiberglass elsewhere (Spiderfiber). The homeowner is trying to cut costs in both building materials and on going operation cost of the air-exchanger. If they open windows on a regular basis would that suffice?

Thank you

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What are the requirements of an energy star home? also how tight is the house actually going to be? I would opt on the air exchanger. Just for fun, every house I ever wired that got foam insulation had air exchangers installed.

We have to deal with this up here a bit.

1. You Musthave to have an air intake.
2. You don't have to have a Air heat exchanger yet.

>If they open windows on a regular basis would that suffice?
NO

The idea here is that it's a lot easier to add a Air heat exchanger at a latter time than to make a house air tight at a latter time.

To meet the requirements here (the requirements vary state by state).
Add a 4 inch duct from outside to the cold air return duct on the furnace.

This pressurizes the house and will force some air out the remaining cracks or up a chimney.

Latter on in the future, you can then add an Air heat exchanger to save energy as desired.

FYI: Fiberglass looses it's R value during cold weather due to air piping unless you blow a small amount of cellulose over it. For example a R48 at -40F will be cut down to ~R30 (The exact actual resulting R value varies based on other factors, but it's always low)

Edit: There is a requirement that totally sealed houses have some sort of fan and have a planed exhaust.
But this could be as simple as using a small duct fan and use the bathroom exhaust as the house exhaust.

weather777 said:

foam insulation in the attic and blown fiberglass elsewhere (Spiderfiber).

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Don't you have this backwards?

It's normally foam in the walls and fiberglass in the attic

Maybe?

When I had my A/C / heat pump installed in my house, my contractor just installed a 6” vent pipe plumbed into the return air duct work from the outside. He said that it would cost me about ¼ ton of efficiency, but it would pressurize the house, so any outside air, (from small leak, like around can lights, outlets etc.) would not infiltrate the house, and that would off set the ¼ ton loss. I don’t know if this would help, in your situation.

Mike

By the time I typed this, and sent it, Bill had already said the same thing…sorry.