Comments on: 7 Good IAQ Practices for the Holidays

By: Mike Barcik

Mike Barcik — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 13:57:49 +0000

Happy New Year!
I understand what you are trying to promote with #3 but I am wary of giving the advice to run the AHU all the time for good IAQ. More than once, that advice has led to degraded IAQ due to poor humidity control (yes, less of a risk in colder months) but mainly the concern is due to leaky ductwork and associated pressure imbalance.
Leaky ducts can greatly contribute to pollutants being exchanged with the indoor occupants and can effectively over-dry a home during colder months (due to duct leakage spurred infiltration) – the opposite is true in humid months. Recommendations to run the fan continuously for IAQ without specifying that the ducts are proven to be air tight could backfire.
Cheers, -mikeb

By: Allen Linoski

Allen Linoski — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 01:03:33 +0000

In reply to Fred Bacher. Introduce her to 21st century induction electric cooking - boils water faster than gas.

By: Fred Bacher

Fred Bacher — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 21:56:19 +0000

I always use ceiling fans when I humidify to mix the air to avoid local wet spots. And it can get so dry that you get shocked all the time during santa anna events. But I’m 8-10 miles from the beach and much drier than the beach which is generally always high humidity, 70+%. I agree San Diego beaches and the zone close to the beach probably has major mold issues but SD has a large variety of micro-climates that don’t fit the definition of humid at all. It is important to mix the air if you humidify though and keep it in a health range.

By: Cindi

Cindi — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 18:44:30 +0000

In reply to Fred Bacher. Just be very careful with those humidifiers. Even in the high desert mountains where humidity is often in the teens, many homes that try to humidify end up with mold in hidden places. And SD is already a pretty moldy place. I recently checked out over a dozen short-term rentals and long-stay hotels, and every one had mold.

By: Fred Bacher

Fred Bacher — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 15:45:59 +0000

Indoor humidity is also affected in locations like San Diego where the outdoor air can be extremely dry. If you run the kitchen exhaust hood for a very long during a Santa Ana events here in San Diego, you’ll find the indoor humidity levels can drop extremely low in spite of any effort to humidify the house, which I do during the these events. It’s also important to note that if you are using an ultrasonic humidifier in your house your need to make sure that the water has zero parts per million of dissolved solids. I found that the orange flame on my stove burners were being caused by using water from my RO system that had only 20 ppm of dissolved solids and that the humidifier was then pumping tiny particles back into the air that caused the stove burners to burn orange. My solution was to use a secondary “zero filtering” system that removed the rest of the dissolved solids from the humidifier water (DI water is recommended by the manufacturers). Since I was starting with only 20 ppm my zero filters lasts a very long time only having to remove a small amount of dissolved solids. Prior to discovering this anomaly with ultrasonic humidifiers, I thought there was some issue with my stove. Now the nice blue stove flame is back. Running a natural gas stove is yet another issue of course as we’ve all found out with recent reports and running the kitchen exhaust hood can help mitigate some of the resulting pollutants until you can convert to electric, which most cooks like my wife hate, so that might not happen for us, lol.

By: Dale Dellario

Dale Dellario — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 15:38:13 +0000

As part of our remodel that added a new full basement under our house I included an HRV. We live in the Pacific NW so this is supposed to be the right choice vs ERV. At present it is connected only to basement rooms and has stubs up into the rest of our two story Victorian for inclusion as we rework those floors. Already we love it. The basement now generally smells like nothing. It is fully finished and had that new home smell. We use it as our base of operations and paint things down there and when we do, I set it to MAX for the first hour or so after application of stinkier paints and the smell is undetectable in the rest of the house so it seems to be working really well. The ductwork was a real pain as I ran almost all of it between and through the floor joists, the latter using 3″ x 7″ oval but so worth it. We did include a bath fan in the new bath down there and will in the baths we plan to add upstairs. Many Victorians had no baths so we are catching the building up after 125 years.