How Efficient are Heat Recovery Systems

Can Heat Recovery Ventilation Reduce your Energy Costs?

By Ruth MacEachern

Product Manager

With heating bills rising and a drive towards making homes more energy efficient to protect the environment and reduce carbon emissions, it is essential for anyone undertaking a home improvement project to consider the impact of the changes they are making to both future costs and the environment.

Good ventilation in a home is essential. Ensuring a good quality fresh air supply prevents the build-up of irritants and allergens, prevents condensation from causing problems with damp and mould, and improves your quality of life. Good ventilation means circulating air within the house as well as replacing stale air with fresh air from outside, and this raises the potential for heat loss.

Modern homes are well insulated to retain as much heat as possible, and this helps to make them more energy efficient. Still, as air circulates out of the building, it carries heat with it, which means that on colder days, the incoming air will need to be heated to prevent the house from getting cold.

Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery

Single-room extractor fans and whole-house Mechanical Extract Ventilation (MEV) systems work similarly. They draw stale or humid air out of the property, which is replaced with fresh air from outside. This is a highly effective way of maintaining good quality air in the home and reducing humidity levels to prevent condensation. Still, it does mean that any heat in the air is lost to the environment.

Heat recovery ventilation systems (MVHR) use a heat exchanger to extract the heat from the outgoing air and use it to heat the air coming into the house. Both whole-house MVHR systems and single-room solutions such as EnviroVent’s HeatSava are available, and these are effective ways of using the heat in outgoing air to warm up the fresh air before it is released into the home.

How efficient is ventilation with heat recovery

Heat exchangers are a well-understood technology and are highly effective at capturing energy.

A heat exchanger works by conducting heat from the outgoing air and conducting it directly into the incoming air.

Heat recovery systems are designed to reduce energy consumption and improve the efficiency of ventilation systems in homes. They capture the heat that is usually lost when air is exhausted from a building and preheat the incoming air. This can help to reduce the energy required to heat a home, as the incoming air is already partially warmed by the recovered heat.

A whole house system such as the EnviroVent EnergySava 400 is up to 90% thermally efficient – it captures 90% of the outgoing heat and uses it to warm the incoming air. Single-room units are more compact and have a smaller heat exchanger. The EnviroVent HeatSava is still highly efficient and is up to 75% thermally efficient.

Find out more

Improving the ventilation in your home does not need to mean making your house less energy efficient. Installing heat recovery ventilation helps reduce energy use while preventing issues with condensation, damp, and mould. To find out whether your home could benefit from modern heat recovery ventilation systems, please enter your postcode below. Our local ventilation specialists can visit your home to conduct a free survey that will identify the causes of condensation in your property and then provide you with advice about the best solution for your needs.