QuietCool | Frequently Asked Questions

17. Why is ventilation important?
Effective ventilation is a process that keeps the air circulating and exchanges the over-heated and moisture-laden air in your house with cooler air from outside. Most homes built today are sealed tight during the construction process and allow almost no air infiltration. This is efficient for heating and air-conditioning a home (heating and air-conditioning systems recirculate the same old, inside air over and over again) but makes it all the more necessary to ventilate. Without ventilation, moisture, cooking odors, tobacco smoke, and other foul-smelling odors are locked into the house and cannot escape.

Moisture in the air comes from everyday activities such as cooking, bathing, laundering, and even breathing. Moisture that is allowed to remain in a closed house can create many problems for the homeowner. The most serious is mold growth, which can seriously threaten the health of all the people in the house. Mildew is another problem, which is usually encountered around showers and laundry facilities. The moisture in these areas generally causes problems with peeling paint and wallpaper, but under the surface, structural damage may be taking place. Moisture can also be present in the attic and this dampness can deteriorate the insulation and also cause structural damage.

Did You Know?
Doctors are now recognizing that “sick” homes can damage people’s health and vitality, decrease their productivity, increase their health costs, and reduce home values.

Today’s homes contain over 1,500 hazardous compounds from approximately 3,000 man-made products. Even low levels of pollutants emitted by these products will affect human health over a period of months or even years.

The EPA recently rated indoor air pollution as one of the five most urgent environmental issues, accounting for over $1 billion annually in direct health care costs and up to $60 billion annually in lost productivity.

A 1999 Mayo Clinic study associated nearly all of the chronic sinus infections afflicting 37 million Americans with molds. Recent studies also have linked toxic molds to the tripling of the asthma rate over the past 20 years.

The EPA has stated that 50%of all illnesses are caused or aggravated by indoor air pollution.

A whole house fan is by far the best method of providing ventilation for the whole house.

Every time a whole house fan is operated, it draws the foul air within the house up into the attic and then forces it out of the attic through the attic vents .