Five Factors of Ventilation Design in Healthy Homes

Don't bring bad stuff home. That's a joke because you can't help it. There is a list here that you can see of the six classes of things that we want to try to avoid if you possibly can.

Hello, everyone. My name is Kendra Seymour, and I'm joined today by a very special guest, Corbett Lunsford, who's put together a presentation on a really important topic that you may not be thinking much about, but really should be. And it's all about ventilation. So thank you, Corbett, so for being here.

Thank you for the invitation, Kendra. I love talking about this stuff.

Yeah, I'm super pumped to talk about ventilation. You know, that's not something I think I would have said 20 years ago, but now that you know, I'm thinking more about my home and our health. It's definitely something that, you know, I'm excited to learn more about now for those listening, if you don't know, your TV series and your workshops have this really awesome goal, which is to really package building performance in an easy to understand way so it can be used by professionals and consumers, which I absolutely love because it change the Air Foundation. We're all about helping people learn to become their own advocates so they can understand how their home is impacting their health. But most importantly, take those actionable steps to fix it. So I am super excited to see what you have in store for us. Should we jump right in?

Let's do it.

Awesome.

Hi, I'm Corbett Lunsford with the Building Performance Workshop, and I have spent the last 15 years thinking about the science of homes. I've called it by different names, but I'd like to make sure that you are savvy with this too, specifically around ventilation. Because H Vac or H Vac is something that everybody knows they have a problem with at some point. If you're a homeowner, if you're a renter, you might be more savvy than most and you might think about H Vac, but the V stands for ventilation. And how exactly this works or is supposed to work, and how exactly it doesn't work is important to understand in order to do anything about it. So just so you know about me, I used to be a musician for a living. I used to play piano for ballerinas. And so I would like to just share a quick superpower with you. Raise your right hand, repeat after me. Sometimes I am an idiot. It's okay. You don't have to have all the answers for everything. Asking the right questions is the thing that people who are going to really accomplish things in home science have to do. And so if you're not asking the questions and thinking maybe this isn't going to work the way that I think it is, then we're going to end up probably not working out. So we do have a television show called Home Diagnosis on. It's on pbs. You can stream that. I will give you the link at the end of this session. And I also have a bunch of other trainings I do consulting for people. That's me. But. But coming at this from a beginner's mindset is a big part of what I do. And so just so that we can back way up, the first thing that we need understand at the Change the air conference is that everything is a system. Right. So all the other things that you're learning about in this online conference I hope is getting back to the systems thinking which is the heart of all science, just like ecosystems. So everything is a circle. Now, there are these three numbers that are very important for the topic that we're getting into. These, you might think, are they degrees? Is that 78 degrees? 70 degrees. They are all the same unit. But it's not degrees, it's years. 78 years is the average life expectancy of an American today. That's men and women averaged 70 of those 78 years. You and your children and your parents are going to spend inside of buildings. If we add vehicles to this, then the number goes slightly up above 90% of our lives. 50 years of the 78 years that we're alive, we will spend inside of our own homes. And so asking things like do we think it's maybe the vaccines that are causing children today to be different than children in the past I think is kind of ridiculous because look at these numbers. If you are exposed to things, it's probably in your home. And yeah, we can eat things, and that can be an exposure pathway. But our digestive system has all kinds of ways to mitigate and to protect us. It has defense mechanisms. We have other organs that absorb chemicals into our bodies and other and microorganisms and react to physics that do not have defense mechanisms. And so the three main topics that we always dive into on our channel on YouTube, which is called home performance, and also on the home diagnosis television series are physics. This is heat bleed, airflow and pressure, moisture and air quality or contaminants. The contaminants kind of make up two main classes which are chemistry and microbiology. Now, chemistry is a tricky one. And I'm going to get into that in just a second here. But chemicals are a part of that. And obviously if you're in this conference, you're hearing about chemicals that might be found indoors in buildings, but chemistry is slightly different. Microbiology is also a big component. Component of this. On the walls behind me, on my training duct system, on my sign here, on my face, there are creatures that are living their lives. They're breathing and eating and sleeping and excreting and they're making babies and they're doing work and they have no idea that I am giving a presentation right now. And that's okay. So that's something that we all need to come to terms with is when we build our homes, it's not just for us. So when we talk about chemistry and microbiology, which by the way, is part of the reason that I am still doing this as a profession, because I' was getting a little bit tired of just physics. It was, it gets a little dry just talking about vapor diffusion and thermal bridging. I don't, I'm not a big fan of that for years and years and years on end. And so the chemistry and the microbiology, we, we're, we're going to kind of conglomerate into one term we called Home Chem. This is based on a chemistry experiment. By the way, we have an entire Home Chem playlist on our YouTube channel. It stands for House Observations of Microbial and Environmental Chemistry. And the three rules that we want to follow are, number one, don't bring bad stuff home. That's a joke, because you can't help it. There is a list here that you can see of the six classes of things that we want to try to avoid if you possibly can. This would be a great presentation all on its own. And I hope that someone in this conference is dealing with this. This is a list from the Green Science Policy Institute, by the way. Sorry, I've. I've got daughters. I'm a daughter of dads. I'm a dad daughter. So I've got painted nails. Yes. In case you just catch that. And so this listing of classes is something that we can kind of like use to just think big picture about stuff. Because knowing every single chemical that you're trying to avoid is pretty impossible. Number two, chemistry is the reaction. It's the formation of new chemicals that were not there to begin with. And you cannot predict what you are going to create in your chemical reactor today, AKA your home. Everyone lives inside of a chemical reactor. When we do things like cook and clean and be in our space, we are causing reactions within our confined space, which is this, like, little, if you think of it as a test tube, little beaker that we live inside of that is becoming more and more and more airtight as time goes on because of code changes in the building codes. So the fact that we want to try to bring good stuff home only is silly because, like, we are bad stuff. Technically. Humans are very polluting. Cooking is polluting. But we want to. We want to cook. That's an important thing. We want to clean. But every time we do those things, we are making bad stuff. So try and avoid this. But when you invariably cannot avoid this, you also do the other two things, which are ventilate and keep it dry. Both of these are in the topic of today's conf presentation. So let's just address this big question. This is the glaring question that all of you are probably thinking, like, automatically this happens to people all the time. Well, I just. I'm going to do what my grandparents did. I'm just going to open a window. The reason that that does not work anymore consistently, and that's the big word that we're talking about today, we want control. That's one of the things that we on our. In everything that we write and teach and in videos and on TV is all about gaining control over your space. Not about energy efficiency. It's not about green. It's about control, being able to. To modulate and balance what is in your space. The reason window opening does not do that is these three things. Number one, don't bring bad stuff home. Well, you are going to bring bad stuff home. If you open a window, you're getting unfiltered air. That means things like dust from outside, pollutants, smaller particles from traffic. Smog is just a collection of pollutants. Ozone, all of those things are coming inside. Pollen, grass clippings, tiny bugs, et cetera, et cetera. The list goes on. You can't. There's no such thing. By the way. Somebody's going to say, well, I saw these screens, these window screens that were on sale that claim to be the same as a MERV 11 filter. Absolutely not true. Please don't believe people when they say that you wouldn't be able to see through it. Number two, it will not ventilate. Sometimes the number two rule is ventilate your home. And sometimes it's not going to work because it's uncontrolled, because it's depending on stack effect mainly, which is the temperature inside and outside the house. The difference in temperature H vac motivations Fans inside the house, pushing air around, pushing air from the house to outside, like an exhaust fan. And also on just weather fluctuations like night to day. So sometimes you'll get good ventilation. That's great. But I'm not talking about sometimes, I'm talking about all the time. So that you can absolutely balance and control and know where your air is coming from and how healthy it is. Number three, keep your home dry. It's not going to work sometimes because it's going to rain outside or it's going to snow or it's going to get really dry or it's whatever. So if you're depending on the weather to drive your ventilation, it's kind of a losing battle. And also it's getting crazier as time goes on. Global weirding so all homes in the world need these two things. They need to have heating and cooling to make sure that we don't get cold exposure or heat exposure, because those two things do kill people. So we need to maintain a comfortable temperature. That's a given. The second thing is we need exhaust fans where contaminants are created. If you think about ATP, which is an old North American and probably elsewhere as well, structure, it has heating and cooling. It has, it uses shade, it uses circulation and ventilation with wind. And also the fire that they build in the middle of the tip in the wintertime has a chimney directly above it with a makeup air system underneath the hem of the tipi. So all of those things are taken care of in something as primitive as just a teepee. Any home should have this. If your home doesn't have any exhaust fans and bathrooms, that's a problem. It's not like, oh, that's just the way they used to build it. No, it's dumb. So we need to make sure to correct that. Now, newer homes need these five factors. Circulation, capture and filtration, humidity control, dilution, air and pressure relief. I'm going to go through these right now. If you want to know way more about this, I have a course on ventilation that gets really deep into how to execute all of these strategies, how to install this stuff, how it needs to be maintained, et cetera. Now, the first factor that we're going to go into is circulation. This might seem like duh, but ductwork. Now I'm just going to give you a couple examples of ways that people don't have ductwork. If you live in the north and you have a boiler system or you're building a new home and you want to have Just radiant floors everywhere. You are not building in a circulation system. You need a way to get the air, this healthy air that we're talking about around the house. And that's the first thing that you need to be thinking about. If you don't have this, then there are. There's always a way to do everything is the kind of basis of my consulting with my clients. But you. You will need to address this. And so if you haven't gotten to this point yet, be thinking about this. There are rooms inside of a home that don't have circulation built into them. Think of like a linen closet. There's no duct in there. But also, you don't put stinky stuff inside of your linen closet. Right? It's clean laundry that's supposed to go in there. And maybe the clean laundry is stinky. And by the way, that's the way, you know, we use unscented detergent to try and avoid that. Because like the VOCs that you might have heard about in other presentations, that's basically just fuel for chemical reactions. So they're not necessarily bad in and of themselves. When you smell a voc, you smell a field of flowers, you smell a pizza, you smell a bakery. Those are all VOCs. They're not bad for you, necessarily, but they are fuel for the chemical reactor that you live in. So factor number two is capture. This is capture and filtration, and filtration is capture. It's just a different way of thinking about it. So capture means just grabbing the pollution where it's created. On the left, you can see my daughter over here. That's Nanette. She's standing next to a toilet in our home that we built. I built this home with my mother and father. They none of us knew how to build a home, but we did it. It took us longer and probably more steps, and it was more expensive than, like, a real builder could do it. But we did it to prove a point, because if we could do this, builder could do this. So we put our exhaust fan next to the toilet, not overhead. And that's so that when you are sitting there going to the bathroom, the pollutants are coming. You know, the fresh air is coming under the door and then grabbing the pollutants and going out with them behind you rather than up above, which is how most people have it. And all the pollutants that are from the toilet bowl are coming up and washing your body and marinating you in them before they go out above your head. That just seems crazy. I don't know how that happened. Second picture you see here is the shower that's in our master suite. And that round thing up at the top right on the wall is the exhaust port. That Exhaust port pulls 25 CFM, half the size of a typical bath fan. That's the smallest size you can get at a big box store and it's pulling all the time. It's continuous. That's one way to do exhaust and that's a topic for another presentation. Go to our YouTube channel and check out our ERV series on that if you want to. But the short answer is every exhaust in a bathroom that has a shower should be in the shower, period. There is no other way to do it. Right. If you're looking to have a best case scenario, it goes in the shower. It doesn't go in the middle of the room. The far side of the glass that we are yet to install in this picture never gets fogged up. Now that we've lived in this house for two years, you can see the third picture here is our kitchen. That is our exhaust hood over the kitchen stove that is in process of being built. Like I said, we've lived in this house now for two years. So it's done now and it works beautifully. And the last picture you can see here is our radon system. Radon mitigation is a big deal and I'm going to show you why in just a moment. But all of these things I installed myself, it's not that hard. This is not rocket science. Like I said, I used to play music for a living. Now you only have two things to work with, really. When you're thinking about planning this capture, you have fan power, which is what Grace is pointing to in the picture here. You can just get a bigger fan. That is going to hurt you more and more the bigger you go and the more airtight your home is. And a lot of people are thinking about things like replacing windows, adding insulation, using spray foam, having their home air sealed, having their ducts sealed, things like that. That's actually going to. The bigger the fan you put in and the more you air tighten a home, those two things argue with each other pretty intensely and you're going to maybe cause problems. So the other more elegant thing that you can use, which is passive, doesn't draw any energy at all, is geometry. And you can see that inside of our tiny house on wheels, which is called the tiny lab here, which is the highest performance tiny house on wheels in the world. I'm not a tiny house person, but I did Build this house to show people how building science can work in a very tiny space. It's 200 square feet. You can see the kitchen here is nestled into a corner. And so geometry is forcing all of the air that's coming into that hood to replace the air that's leaving to come in over the cooktop. If you have a kitchen island and you have a downdraft exhaust fan, then that's the worst geometry you could possibly have. Number one, there's no limitation on where the makeup air can come from. So it could be sneaking around the kitchen exhausted and not grabbing any of the cooking fumes at all. And also, downdraft just doesn't work as well. I'm sorry, but warm air goes up. So when you're cooking, it's all going. Trying to shoot up toward the ceiling and trying to drag it back down is totally silly. So please avoid that if you can. Second factor, the after capture is filtration. Like I said, filtration is capture. And in fact, it's the only way to capture that is going to be non reactive. So please, if you hear nothing else in this session, hear kitchen exhaust. Super important if you're going to do one thing that's going to make your family healthier. Kitchen exhaust fan that goes outside. I have a video on this. We have all kinds of videos. Please go check that out. Second thing is, don't use anything that cleans the air that has any electronics in it, aside from a fan. So a fan plus a filter is perfect. That is going to capture the pollutants. We do not care if the microbes in the air, including viruses, are dead or not. Once they're on the filter and they're stuck there, you take the filter and you throw it away. Now it's outside of your house and we don't care if they're alive or dead. The idea of killing things in the air so that then their tiny corpses are floating around is like. It just doesn't make any sense. And also any blue lights or hydroxyl or hydrogen peroxide or alcohol sprays or ionization, blah, blah, blah, any of that stuff is a chemical reactor. When it says it tears molecules apart and eliminates things, destroys it, means it's ripping molecules apart or tearing things into component parts and you don't know what those component parts are. Axe Body Spray has six things on the list of ingredients because they don't have to tell you that there are 100 chemical compounds in there. We have a video on that if you'd like to Check that out. Okay, so here is a filter that's a MERV 13 filter on the left that's coming out of our dehumidifier in the house. I'm going to get to humidity control in a minute. And on the right you have what's called a comparetto. It's a cube that's DIY with a box fan on top and then four filters around it. And you can just make these and use them. That's a really cheap. That's like less than a hundred bucks, that one right there. So when you move up through the factors, you need to go back and revisit. So we've got this captured and filtered air. How are we going to circulate it? So just thinking about that, if you have, you know, a ductless mini split system throughout your house, you do not have a circulation system between rooms and you do not have a filtration system because those things have terrible filters in them. So thinking about, you know, how we can make up for these deficiencies built into certain pieces of equipment is important. Factor number three is humidity control. And we want to make it the perfect area. Not too wet or too dry. So between some people say 30 to 50, some people say 40 to 60. Let's just say 30 to 60 is the optimum zone. If you get too dry, you can see you have problems with bacteria and viruses and all kinds of things. If you get too wet, you have other problems like fungus and microbes generally take off. Fungus is also. Mold is a kind of fungus. And so you want to make sure to stay in this zone. And if you. Again, if go back to the window analogy at the very beginning, the reason we don't just open windows is because you. This is going to go crazy immediately. In the wintertime, you will dry your house out like crazy. And in the summertime you'll make the home super moist, especially if you're doing things like turning your AC off to save money and make your home more energy efficient. Okay, so now we need to go back again. We're on third factor. We need to go back and figure out how we're going to circulate this humidified or dehumidified air. How much of it is there? That. Do you mind of our. That I showed you just a minute ago pumps about 350 CFM. And so where am I going to put that if I have a little tiny duct that like some people say, can I combine my ERV and my humidifier or my dehumidifier probably can't because an ERV typically pumps out about 150cfm, and that dehumidifier does 350 more than twice as much. So now how are we going to design this ductwork that's supposed to sometimes be just blowing this much, and then sometimes it'll be blowing through more than three times as much? It doesn't really make sense. And also, how are we going to filter that? Right. Okay. And also, how are we going to filter the water going to your humidifier, by the way? Because using something like an ultrasonic humidifier or a misting humidifier is a terrible idea unless you're using the most pure distilled water that you can get your hands on. Because all of the microbes and the chemicals in that water are now evaporated, and they're floating around in the air as little particles for you to breathe. And your lungs are one of the organs in your body that does not have any defense mechanisms at all. Factor number four, dilution air. This is the second way to clean the air inside your home. It's literally changing the air. And we call these air changes. But that top. That term gets a little confusing if you use that term with an H Vac professional. They're talking about the number of times per hour air changes. Per hour means how many times per hour you're putting the air through with a filter. So dilution air means bringing air from outside in. You can do this four different ways. You can use exhaust fans all the time. So if I turn on my exhaust fan in my bathroom in the furthest end of the house, 24 hours a day, is that going to draw air out? Well, if I test it and prove that, yes, it is drawing air. And you can do that with just, like, a little tissue. You put the tissue up. If it sticks to the fan, then it's working. We don't know how much. You can test it with an actual instrument if you wanted to. And that's another topic that we get into in depth. But it is drawing air out. Therefore, air must be coming in. But air follows the path of least resistance, which means that the air is probably being supplied back into the house in the bathroom itself, like through, around the window or somewhere close to the bathroom. So is it a whole home dilution air strategy? Probably not. It's just going to really serve that zone that that thing lives in. Supply air is the other type. And this is an easy. It's a duct with nothing but a damper in it that opens and closes, and it goes from outside into the return of your H Vac system, your central ductwork. So that then when you need it, a controller opens up the damper, brings air in from outside, along with bringing air from the house back to the equipment. It filters that air, it conditions the air, it mixes it, and then it distributes it throughout the house. That's actually a pretty sophisticated way to do it. Much better than exhaust only in many people's opinions. And it'll slightly pressurize the house. At that point, exhaust only depressurizes the house. And those have different. You know, it's not a topic for today because this is a short presentation, but there's all kinds of side effects that happen when you do these things. Balanced. And I should have put this in quotes because it's like a comb, a combination of those two things. Use exhaust fans and supply at the same time. And the idea is that it works, but the more complicated a system gets, then the less likely it is to work. Generally that can work. I would say it's probably less necessary. Balanced plus, energy recovery is what really airtight homes have to do. So something like a supply only you could use something like an air cycler or there are supply fans that you can bring into the house. Exhaust only. You're using a bath fan, like a Bron or whatever, just whatever you happen to have in your bathroom on the balance. And energy recovery, that's called an energy recovery ventilator. Erv, you might have heard that term or HRV because of a reason that I put into a video that again is like 10 minutes long. ERVs are the right way to go unless you are in Miami or Alaska. So ERV is generally the way that I'm talking about it because it balances for airflows. It also balances for temperatures and humidities. Now when you are adding dilution there, you need to think about how am I going to circulate this dilution air. Make sure to get into every room. And maybe there are rooms that don't have a load, that do not have ducts that are connected to the heating and cooling system because they don't have any exterior exposure. They don't have any walls or ceiling or floor. It's exposed to outside. Therefore there's no need for heating or cooling in those rooms. Maybe this is a good place to put more circulation. With the dilution air that we're using, you would generally replace. In a super airtight home like the one that I built here and many of my clients built, you would use the ERV to exhaust from bathrooms, not bath fans, because you can't anymore. And that's for the next topic that we're going to do. How are we going to filter that air? Most of the ERVs are coming in through like a MERV3 MERV8 filter, not very good. MERV11 is where you want to start if you want healthy air. MERV 11, MERV 13, MERV 16 or HEPA. So filtering it a second time by bringing it into the central duct system and then taking it through a nice big 4 inch pleated filter would be great. And then how are we going to humidity control that air? An ERV already has some humidity neural built into it, but it's certainly not a dehumidifier or a humidifier. So it will slowly start to dry out the house or slowly humidify the house, depending on the season. Okay. And the last factor is pressure relief. This is really only for super airtight homes. So if you don't know how airtight your home is and it's an older home, you probably don't have to worry about this. If you have spray foamed your home or done anything where you've started to notice that like things like your fireplace doesn't draw like it used to, or you're smelling the, the, you know, fireplace smell just at weird times of the day, or doors open and close themselves in weird combinations when things kick on around the house, those can be indications that you need pressure relief. So you've got two options. This is really, this is really simple at first. You can either use passive, which is a hole opening between the house and outside. That's what you see on the left. That's the tiny labs ventilation makeup air solution. And on the right you have what's called active, which is the black thing. In the middle of that duct is a fan that can blow up to 750cfm. And then we've got a damper, we've got a filter, we've got the fan, we've got a silencer and we've got a heater. That is a very sophisticated chain of events that can happen to the air that we're coming in from outside. Of course we want that air to be filtered, we want it to be slightly conditioned. Especially if it's like a 20 degree day. I don't want to bring 20 degree air inside. That would be very uncomfortable. Likewise, 95 degree air when it's raining, that's going to be kind of uncomfortable. So again, thinking back on how we're going to CIRCULATE this air where it's going to go. And there are rules for makeup error and I address those again on our channel filtering. If you're not going to use the makeup error, that's active, which is $3,500 solution, and you want to try and go with the $100 solution instead. How are we going to filter it? You got to now kind of cobble together something. How are you going to humidity control it? Or how are you going to predict and prevent condensation issues or drying issues? For example, if you blow super cold air along a very nice wood floor, it will cause the wood to shrink and you'll actually hear the finish on the wood on the wood floor start to crack as it splits open. And I know that from experience. How are we going to maybe interact that system, that pressure relief makeup air system with our dilution air? Because if we're cooking all day long, if you live in a family where you cook for long periods of time, then you are getting dilution air as a result of your makeup air pressure relief. And so maybe we're going to combine those two things. So I hope that this hasn't been too heady for anybody. There's like a whole bunch more that you can get into that's on the basic level. Again, here is our television series. You can binge watch that at home. Diagnosis tv. It's two seasons so far. We're filming the third season right now, which is all about disasters and the science behind them. It's pretty interesting. These are all the companies that have really put their money where their mouth is and trying to teach normal people about building science so they can make smarter decisions with their home. So please do go check them out if you get a chance. I will now turn to Kendra for questions.

So thank you so much for that. It was really eye opening. Now we talk about how we spend 90% of our time indoors breathing in air that is potentially bad for our health. But there are steps we can take to remedy that. And I love that you covered so many different things for us to think about. Now you said something. If we do nothing else, if there's no other takeaway from this presentation, it's to either get or use our kitchen range hood. So I want to know, can you tell us just a little bit more about things to consider when it comes to that range hood in our kitchen? Some high level points that people maybe want to think about?

Yes, we actually I'll point you to a YouTube video that we made. I, I speak in terms of YouTube videos now. So we made one that's specifically about what to think about. But the bottom line is, it's not as simple as it would seem. It's not like going and buying a box fan or an oscillating desktop fan or something like that. Like, this thing has to go outside, first of all. Has to go outside through a duct that is properly sized and is the proper length. And it doesn't take too many turns because that all increases the pressure on the fan. And the fan can't work as well. It has to be quiet. That might be the first thing that it has to be, actually, in order to get people to use it. It has to be easy to use. You know, like, if it's just on off, and it sounds like a jet engine when you turn it on, we have one in our tiny house that's really perfectly. If we use it on low, which is where we use it most of the time, you can't even hear it. Like, we'll forget that it's on all night long. And then we replace the entire volume of air inside of our house overnight. And it's really weird and dry in the morning, in the wintertime. But. But I think that not trusting that what you have is good by just looking at it like, if it's a microwave, even if it does go outside, those microwave fans can't possibly do what a kitchen exhaust hood is designed to do. So that's the first thing is if you have a microwave above your cooktop right now, you need to figure out a way to get that thing out of there and put it someplace else. Or just don't have a microwave. Like, we don't have a microwave. We have all kinds of other air fryer. Like, you know, things that didn't exist 15 years ago that are, you know, have changed the way that people cook. So I think that being flexible is the first thing. Being married to facts and inspecting looking at it. Turn it on, put your hand up. If it blows back, if it's blowing on your hand, it's not going outside. If you see event, go around the house and look at where that vent is coming out of the house and make sure that the flap is wide open and that there is actually air moving. So there's all these things that, like, we assume things are a certain way and they're just not. And we assume that builders know about this stuff. They don't. We assume that, H Vac people are the ones that install our kitchen hoods. They're not. There's just all these kind of one after the other dominoes that. That work together to help or hurt the way that our homes function, especially when it comes to things like ventilation, which are invisible.

Yeah. You know, it's so funny when you. When you buy a house, nobody's, like, handing you a manual of things that you need to be doing. Like, if you're listening and you. And you don't know this and don't feel bad if you don't, there's often, like, a filter above your range hood that you need to replace. Now, I am really bad about that. I literally have to write myself a reminder. It's not my favorite thing to do, but otherwise, it gets clogged. And another interesting piece we moved into our house five years ago was a new build. I'm very anal about using my range when I'm cooking. Right. I don't want the moisture going out into the house. I don't want the fumes. We have gas, and I use it the whole time. Well, we had an issue and recently had to have a home energy assessment and a blower door test done. And the guy's there, and he's kind of playing around, and he goes, you know, your makeup air is not working. And I'm like, what? And for those. And please jump in if I'm explaining this wrong. When you turn on your kitchen hood, it's pulling air from your home, which means makeup air has to come from somewhere else or your house would implode. Right. Essentially, kind of.

Actually, the air will get made up. It'll just come in through gaps and cracks, and it'll cause moisture problems instead.

Right. So it's. It's coming from somewhere else, maybe places you don't want it coming for those interstitial cavities, those spaces between the walls and who knows what's behind there. And so you don't want that. So for five years, I'm sitting here thinking, this is. You know, I'm very good about it. I'm using it. And it turns out that the electrician or somewhere during the course of the build, it was never wired, so it was all set up. But that damper that's supposed to open and close to allow that makeup there was never working. And our home inspector missed it. Five years went by. So there's all these pieces that, you know, I didn't think that was something I had to be aware of, but it's probably something to pay attention to.

Yeah. Two things. One is that we all think that there's somebody out There. Who knows about this more than we do. And there's just not like I'm. I'm proof of that. I was a piano player for ballerinas for a living. And then now I, you know, we have. The only television show that's ever made about this topic is totally insane. That's not the world I want to live in. But, like, that's reality. Second thing is, let me just, like, make a point about a great builder client of mine who is doing amazing things. His name is Scott True. He's in Texas, and he had this home where he was having this issue where the floor was getting wet and the floorboards were warping by the sliding door. I mean, it's like, is it rain coming in? What's the. You know, and then there were all these hypotheses, and then there were these other things that came up, and he told me about these other things. We kind of glued them together into. Oh, let's go up in the attic and look at this makeup error. Is it the right size? Does it open on the right, you know, time, et cetera? It was locked wide open all the time. So that's one thing. The other thing, though, is afterward he said, hey, you know what? I wanted to give you a little follow up on that because I didn't tell you about this other thing that was happening at the same time, which is that her clothes weren't drying in the dryer. And I thought. I didn't tell you because I didn't want to bother you. It seemed unrelated to me. I have since learned it was totally the exact same thing that was causing all the other. And so that's the bottom line here, is that, like, these invisible dynamics they were always looking at, heat flow, airflow and pressure, moisture and contaminants are at work, and they're doing things, and the things that they do, the symptoms that you might, like, experience are going to seem very unrelated, but in fact, they're often. They come back to the same root cause, and that's why testing is so important.

Yeah. And it does take a little bit of investigative work, which, you know, I sometimes find frustrating as a homeowner, finding the right people. And, you know, like, we think this is it, and then they open something up, and that's not it. So you have to kind of be patient and be willing to kind of dig into the solutions there. So I really appreciate it. Is there any final thoughts you want to leave us with in terms of ventilation before we. We sign off here?

Yeah, I think that Just remember that cleaning is not just bringing air in from outside. In fact, that can make it dirtier if you do it the wrong way. So thinking about filtration and thinking about cycling the air inside your house through a filter, not through any electronics. Just remind everybody. Don't get blue lights. Don't get bipolar ionization. If it says it destroys or eliminates or transforms or anything like that kills, don't buy it. That's marketing. Red flag for this thing is going to induce chemistry inside your home.

I love that. That's the message we try to hammer home too at the foundation. Thank you so much for being here. I've learned a ton. I know people listening have and I'm sure we'll have some follow up questions. Maybe we can shoot your way in the future if that's okay.

Excellent. No, that sounds great and I hope that we'll do this again. Download or down the road.

Thank you. And for anyone listening if you found this helpful, do me a favor, head on over to changetheirfoundation.org and sign up for our newsletter because it really is the best way to get tips and tricks like this directly to your inbox. We'll see you next time.