Accent Group details how to minimise condensation in the home
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Indoor air quality expert Stuart Smith of ventilation firm Nuaire said: “Those living on the breadline are going to be worst hit by this fuel crisis and my fear is that some people are already turning to extreme measures to help keep bills low.” To see the level of desperation some have already reached, one need only look at poor Nicola Elson, 32, who has turned to heating and lighting her home with candles. Or Kelly Thomson, 43, who says she has been hospitalised twice as a result of malnutrition because she only has £40 per week to feed herself and her two children — and routinely only eats one meal a day in order to economise.
While it can be easy to see how not getting enough sustenance poses a health risk, the perils of other cost-saving measures — such as lowering the heating, turning off appliances like extractor fans and cooker hoods, and, counter-intuitively, adding insulation — are less obvious.
The key but oft-overlooked factor, Mr Smith explains, is air quality.
He said: “People are just not aware of the indoor air quality, because it’s invisible to them.
“As many turn off their heating this winter, not only will they suffer from extreme cold, they’ll also create a ‘sick home’ scenario.”
In a “sick home”, Mr Smith explained, inadequate heatong and ventilation leads to higher humidity levels, condensation, damp and mould that can damage the very bricks and mortar of a house.
“This, in turn, can result in harm to the human body with respiratory problems like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), asthma, heart disease and extreme lethargy.”
All these, he noted, add “to the pressures already seen on the NHS, not forgetting the cost — bad indoor air quality already costs the NHS £2.9billion per year.”
In fact, a fifth of all houses in the UK suffer from damp and mould — a proportion that is even higher in local authority housing where tenants are more likely to be hit hard by the cost-of-living crisis.
Mr Smith notes that the ventilation problem is being exacerbated in some homes by the drive to improve household insulation.
He said: “We should be insulating our homes — and we have to for the net zero approach.
“What we’re doing is that we’re making these houses ‘airtight’. So, we’re keeping the heat in, which is great — that’s what it was designed for!
“But if you can imagine, once people have got ‘airtight’ homes, their ventilation might not be up to the job anymore.”
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According to Mr Smith, the solution to avoiding a sick home is to ensure your house is properly ventilated.
But, of course, if one is opening a window or using a mechanical ventilation system, there is going to be an energy cost as a result.
A better alternative, he says, may lie in the use of heat recovery systems, which draw the energy out of stale air before releasing it out of the building and put into the fresh air coming into the property by means of a so-called heat exchanger.
This, Mr Smith concludes, “would make a home more heat efficient and in turn save on rising fuel costs — while keeping the home and its occupants healthy.”
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