Heating your home in the winter can be more than you can afford most years but when the cost of fuel keeps rising, this year may be the costliest of all. No matter how your home is heated, it will be affected by rising costs and this is the year that energy efficiency will be a priority for anyone and everyone who pays to heat their homes.
The solution seems to be staring us right in the eyes but many may not have heard of HRV technology. Heat Recovery Ventilation can significantly reduce the cost of running home heating systems because it is energy efficient in several ways.
1. Uses Heat Recovered from Ventilation
The simplest explanation of how HRV works is that it transfers heat being ventilated out of the home to fresh air being drawn in from the outside. A heat recovery ventilation system literally reuses the heat already produced, which will put less of a draw on HVAC systems.
The proximity of warm air being ventilated outside is transferred to the air being brought in so that there is less of a need for the heat your furnace needs to produce. It is far less expensive in terms of energy to ‘reuse’ heat than to produce new heat.
2. Lessens Need for Space Heaters
One of the things so many families do in the coldest months of winter is to use their central heat less while placing space heaters within rooms being inhabited. Somehow, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because in an effort to cut costs, we’ve just added a significant amount of energy usage common among space heaters of all kinds.
Those can significantly raise your power bills by a huge margin and HRV systems are 60% to 70% energy efficient while having the capacity to send recycled warm air throughout the entire home.
3. Ventilation Keeps Air Fresher
Then there’s the practice of running air purifiers to take the nasty dampness out of the air we are breathing when the entire home is sealed up for the winter. Since the temperatures are usually below freezing in the coldest of winter months, it is not possible to open a few windows to let fresh air in.
Many homes utilise air purifiers to take pollutants out of the air we are breathing. Since an HRV ventilation system needs a continual supply of air from inside the home to be ventilated by fresh air from outdoors, there is also no need for air purifiers, thereby reducing the draw on electricity even more.
No one knows at this time if the ongoing skirmish between Russia and Ukraine will further cause a rise in the cost of crude, but the ‘war’ is by no means close to being over. Many countries in the free world have begun boycotting Russian oil and so a short supply just got even shorter.
With the rising cost of fuel not even close to plateauing and already dwindling supplies of the fuel to run our power plants, an energy-efficient HRV system for the home seems to be the most energy-efficient solution.
