Hey thanks for watching this video we're gon na talk a little bit about ventilation and specifically, when I'm talking about ventilation here, I'm talking about bringing in outdoor air into the home, there's also ventilation, ventilating air out of the home, and that's through you know, bath fans, Kitchen hoods that sort of thing, but I want to talk about how to bring air into the home and why we would even want to do that in the first place. So we talked a little bit about vault organic compounds VOCs and how they come out of the carpet of the vinyl flooring and out of the paint and all that sort of thing. And the first thing, if possible, is to reduce that by you know, choosing your carpet in your paint and furniture and all that to be low. Vocs generally made domestically generally things that are made of naturally sourced materials and not made in really toxic factories are gon na, be better because a lot of the VOCs that get into that stuff get in there, because they're processed in these very intense factories and made Of materials that are largely synthetic and are processed with chemicals and that sort of thing - and you know as much as possible, you want to reduce that stuff.

I'm not personally somebody who thinks that everything has to be perfectly natural, but as much as possible. You want your home to be free of those of those types of chemicals, so we want to bring in outdoor air to dilute that, but we also want to bring in outdoor air to dilute co2 carbon dioxide. So not carbon monoxide, carbon monoxide, CEO, is the really nasty stuff that we don't want any of in our house, but co2 is something that we can't really. You know we can't go without one strategy you can use, it's very natural is if you can bring in certain houseplants that can help purify your air.

We have a dollar tree in our house. That is, you know, designed to help absorb some of that co2, and you can do some of that. The challenge is: when you bring plants into your house, a lot of plants also require moisture, and then that adds to the relative humidity, like we talked about relative humidity, is the enemy of indoor air quality. So you got to think about that when you're bringing in too many house plants house plants, are one strategy to reduce co2 and a natural way.

But you can't get around the fact that you need to bring in some outdoor air in order to dilute that co2 to bring in some oxygen and to also just in general, keep the indoor environment pretty close to the outdoor environment. As long as the outdoor environment is something that you can even stand dealing with, if you live in the middle of a smokey city that I don't suggest bringing in as much and instead focus on maybe some more advanced air purification strategies which may not be ideal In and of themselves, but are better than you know, bringing in nasty smog, but in most of Central Florida our air isn't too bad other than being high humidity, and so we want to bring some of it in now. Here's the problem is that in Florida, like I mentioned, our outdoor dewpoints are outdoor relative, humidities are really high, and so, whenever our outdoor relative humidity is high enough, that the dew point outdoors, meaning the point at which the temperature at which the outdoor air will start To condense, moisture is higher than the indoor temperature. Then it's really dangerous to bring that outdoor air inside.

Let me state that again, because that may have been a little bit much, but when the outdoors relative humidity is high, then the dew point outside is also high, meaning that the temperature that it takes in order for it to start building up Dew or condensation is A pretty high temperature, and so when that temperature is higher than the indoor temperature and you bring that outdoor air inside then that air is essentially going to rain when it hits your indoor air. Now, why does this matter, and why, especially, why does it matter more now than it used to well back in the day in Florida, we built houses in the cracker style. That's the term that was used. It means houses that were built and not to have air conditioning and they were built to have the windows open.

During the day they had big porches. They generally had big breezeway, so you'd have a door that you'd open in the front a door you would open. In the back - and you would just allow the indoor air to basically become the same as the outdoor air and that's okay, because at that point there's not surfaces aren't going to hit dewpoint because inside is going to be the same as outside. So it doesn't matter how high your dew point gets.

There's nothing in the house, that's cold and so you're, not gon na have issues with moisture and creepy-crawlies you're still gon na have high relative humidity. The good news is back. Then they didn't have VOCs, because most furniture was handmade. You didn't have as many toxic chemicals now granted.

They were eating some crazy stuff. In fact, then, in a lot of cases, so then not necessarily healthier all and all as it relates to indoor air quality. They didn't have a lot of the same challenges that we have today, because they weren't battling co2 build-up. They weren't battling VOCs and they didn't have to try to control temperature and humidity.

Of course, on the other hand, they were sweating, their rear ends off because they didn't have air conditioning. So as houses started to transition, we started to make them tighter and tighter make them with different materials. But we weren't considering the impact of tightness, and so we ended up creating sort of contaminated internal environments, which is very much what I'm talking about in this series of videos. The idea that somehow somebody has thought about all this - and some scientist has figured this all out, and this has all been well thought through by your builder and everything when they built it.

That's just not true. A lot of these things were built without a lot of thought and without a lot of foresight as far as what was going to happen when we started building differently so fast forward to today, there's an association that sort of is one of the governing bodies over The air-conditioning industry called ASHRAE and they made this standard called the sixty two point, two or sixty 2.2 standard, and it talks about how you have to bring in outdoor air, which is great. Most of the country works great, bringing outdoor air that helps to loot the VOCs it helps you know, kind of purify the air from having too much co2 concentrations, it's all dandy, but in Florida we have these high dew points and when you bring in outdoor air And you just dump it inside or you dump it into an air-conditioning duct, what happens it rains and when it rains you have moisture. When you have moisture you get those other ugly M words that we don't say on these videos, the ugly growths that I can really be very damaging to certain people's respiratory and again outside molds mildews bacterias viruses exist as well.

When you walk around outside, you know, even in an even in clean environments, you know, with places we consider to be clean, the beach, the mountains, whatever those things exist there, but they exist in a balance with the rest of nature. We don't want creepy-crawly grime ease growing inside of our houses. Our houses were not designed for that, especially in places that we can't see under our sinks and our walls and our air ducts inside our air conditioners. Those are not good places for that stuff to grow.

So we want to prevent that from happening, but the unintended consequence of bringing in outdoor air is that we increase the relative humidities in our homes and we potentially start growing stuff where it doesn't belong. I have looked at all of the potential strategies to try to solve this in Florida, but the fact remains that in certain circumstances we get outdoor dew points of about 81 degrees. Now I don't know about you, but I like to keep my house below 81 degrees, which means that everybody stands the chance of condensating outdoor air if they bring it straight into the house, which is why I suggest bringing an outdoor air. It's a great idea.

It's very healthy: it's really good for your home, but bringing it through filtration, so a good quality filter and also through a ventilating dehumidifier. Now some of you may say well I'll, just bring it through the filter. The filter will do it now the filter won't. Do it, the filter is not going to pull out the fungus spores that grow into yucky stuff that you don't want.

It filters, not gon na capture. All that you need to have a combination of a filter and a ventilating dehumidifier. It's the only strategy that I will really stand behind it soon when I'll put my name on and in Florida in our market, because the dew points are so high other places, other parts of the country, HR, VZ, RVs, all sorts of other ventilation strategies. You can come up with great if you look them up online.

They look super fancy in Florida and my experience. They just don't work, and this is you know I actually put an erv in my own house and eventually I was just completely unhappy with it. It wasn't doing the job that I needed it to do so. A lot of what I've learned on this topic is through trial and error and reading and talking to building scientists and all this ventilating.

The humidifier is the way to go. If you want to bring outdoor air now, the thing is: is that there's a code currently in place that says that every house really needs to bring in some outdoor air if it reaches a certain level of tightness and it's a level of tightness that you want? Your house to be because again nowadays we want our houses to be tight, because we are trying to control that indoor temperature and humidity we're trying to hit that in general 75 degrees, 50 percent relative humidity mark with nice. You know well well, filtered air, that's sort of you know when you walk into a house that has a well filtered air, seventy five degree temperature and 50 percent relative humidity. It feels pretty nice right, and so in order to do that, we've got to keep it pretty well sealed and then then, in order to do that and to keep the carbon dioxide at check and to keep the VOCs at check now, we've got to bring in Outdoor air and the way to do that is through a ventilating dehumidifier.

We would work with a company called ultra air under out of Wisconsin. They make their stuff in America they're a really nice company. They have a lot of different solutions to choose from and for people who want to go with this ventilation solution. That's really the one that I would suggest feel free to research, the others.

I've spent a lot of time doing it, but any time you're bringing in outdoor air and that outdoor air has a higher dew point than the indoor temperature. Not only are you going to increase your home's relative humidity by bringing in that that warm humid air but you're also running the risk of growing stuff inside your air, conditioner and inside your home, and and that just isn't a good strategy in Florida. We don't want. We don't want the creepy crawlies growing, especially in places that we can't see pretty practical, I would say, but something to definitely can thanks for watching.

We will catch you on another video soon.