Residential ventilation

Air handling units

If a residential house or apartment is equipped with a centralized heat recovery air handling unit, perfectly balanced ventilation can be achieved. The main task of the air handling unit is to automatically and intelligently provide healthy, comfortable and energy efficient indoor climate for the specific building and its inhabitants, by allowing the low-powered supply and exhaust air fans to simultaneously provide fresh and filtered outdoor air, while extracting the used indoor air. A ventilation unit also includes rotary or counterflow heat recovery, two high quality filters, and integrated automatic control to ensure energy efficient demand-controlled operation. The advantage of balanced ventilation is the high level of comfort, adequate oxigen levels, and the reduction of the harmful fumes and other odors that could enter from the outside. With our intelligent automatic control solutions we can guarantee healthy and fresh air, as well as energy saving with automatic operation.

Returns

As human beings, we require sufficient levels of fresh oxigen all day, even when we are indoors. But because we live in a highly mobile society, and we spend a large portion of our time outside our homes, running our ventilation systems at 100% all day is a waste of energy. In order to keep the operating cost down, ventilation systems has to be run as energy efficiently as possible, without compromising on good indoor air quality. Airvent, therefore, provides multiple smart operation modes with its intelligent air handling unit controller, to save energy. Airvent's air handling units are also equipped with a heat recovery unit, that is able to recover up to 95% of the heat energy of the extracted indoor air. However what can not be measured by financial returns is a cleaner, healthier environment, higher comfort, a more relaxing sleep.

Healthy indoor environment

We spend approximately 50 percent of our lives in our homes, thus the necessity of a comfortable indoor climate has a major impact on our well-being and health. Every day, we may experience undesirable effects from the polluted outdoor air such as external noise, dust, pollen, and spore loads as well as chemical contaminants, radon, fine dust, VOC, which might also lead to asthma, allergies and other deseases. Human presence also have a detrimental effect on the indoor climate quality, by increasing humidity and CO₂ levels. Higher CO₂ levels are responsible for headache, deteriorating concentration, fatigue and insufficient, low-quality sleep. In modern airtight buildings, adquate levels of fresh oxigen can only be provided efficiently with a centralized air handling unit. The series of ventilation units by Airvent creates a healthy and comfortable indoor home environment, while simultaneously saving energy.

Look for the energy label!

According to EU regulation 1254/2014, the requirements for residential ventilation units must be labeled with a special energy efficiency label. This label must include the most important information about the product: manufacturer's name or brand; the model or type; energy classification of the product according to energy efficiency calculation; sound power level dB (A) rounded to the nearest value; maximum air flow in m³ / h (at 100 Pa external pressure).

Basic mechanical ventilation without heat recovery

The most basic mechanical ventilation is placing an exhaust fan in the bathroom/toilet. The extract air fan delivers the heated indoor air to the outside, which might create a loss of up to 1.4kW of heat every hour. The extract air fan is able to operate more efficiently, if there is a complementar supply of outdoor air (e.g. through a wall passage, a built-in air diffusor, etc.), but the fresh air intake is cold or warm, and most importantly unclean. The indoor dust and pollen content will increase as a consequence.

Decentralized ventilation with heat recovery

A more advanced mechanical ventilation solution is a decentralized heat recovery unit that is able to provide fresh air for 1-2 rooms. It filters the outside air and regains the heat content of exhaust air to a certain degree. Due to the inefficiency of the heat recovery, during winter time the supply air temperature may be 5-6 ° C lower, relative to the exhausted air.

Centralized air handling unit with heat recovery

The highest level of comfort can only be achieved with the installation of a centralized heat recovery air handling unit, and a complementary distribution system that provides energy efficient high quality indoor air in each room of the house or apartment. A ventilation unit includes rotary or counterflow heat recovery, two high quality filters to capture dust and pollutant content from the outside, and an integrated automatic controller to ensure energy efficient, economic operation.

01 Air Handling Unit

Airvent's air handling units were designed to efficiently ventilate residential houses or apartments from 50 to 400 m².  All units have a deliberate small footprint architecture and a high heat recovery efficiency of up to 95%. The ventilation units do not require any external wiring, they can be plugged directly into a common power supply and can be started immediately. As standard, the units also includes a complete control system, that ensures economical and convenient operation. The settings are done on a wall-mounted or handheld aesthetic, easy-to-use touch-screen control panel

02 Duct System

Ducts are used to distribute air from the centralized air handling unit, to the rooms in our homes, and vice versa, exhausting the used, polluted air to the outside. The overall diameters of the ducts allow to hide the installation in ceilings or suspended ceiling. Flexible ducts are made of high-impact polyethylene and are press fit with the other installation components. This results in very high mechanical resistance in the entire system. The duct interior surface is smooth, which leads to low pressure losses in the installation. These ducts are maybe used whenever flexibility and durability is required. Given their high stiffness, the ducts may also be covered with concrete.

03 Commissioning plenum boxes

Our commissioning and distribution plenum boxes in galvanized steel are equipped with multiple connection spigots, designed to connect flexible duct systems, which form a distribution network for mechanical installations, including centralized ventilation with heat recovery. The connection boxes can be used for both exhaust and supply air and are directly connected to the central air handling unit via the flexible air duct system. Due to their small size, the boxes do not require a lot of space or special installation, which allows to save more usable interior space. If required, all plenum box types can be supplied including insulation for better sound attenuation.

04 Supply, extract and transfer air units

The supply and extract air distribution in each ventilated room of our homes is performed with either circular or rectangular ceiling/wall-mounted diffusors. Our visually discreet diffusers were designed to be useful, performing their task of distributing fresh air from the air handling unit to the rooms, as efficiently as possible, without causing draft or noise. Each of our diffuser units have the capabiloty to be individually set, depending on the designed supply or exhaust airflow. Our wall-mounted air transfer units are as standard equipped with environmentally-friendly insulation to help prevent any noise deriving from the extract airflow moving towards the exhaust points in our homes. Our diffusers and transfer units are powder-coated with Airvent's standard color RAL 9003 signal white, in a matt finish.

05 Acoustics

Different sources of noise can be found in most ventilation systems. Commonly, the most dominant noise is generated by the supply and extract air fans within the central air handling unit. To prevent the noise from reaching the living area, we recommend to install sound attenuators in the supply air and exhaust air system, close to the air handling unit. If the air handling unit's outdoor inlet and outlet ducts are connected to a outside wall (close to the neighboring house or apartment), it is recommended to install silencers in those branches as well. Learn more 

06 Automatic control

The operation of our air handling units is performed with our new generation automatic control system with a touch screen display. With this control solution, the user or operator is able to simply adjust and control time schedules, ventilation rate, pressure, temperature, humidity and the heat recovery. The touch screen display provides access to basic operating data, setpoint settings, actual measured values and to the programmable timer.  Our air handing units are delivered in a a plug and play design, with a power cable equipped with a power plug. Learn more