Aerating your home during winter: how do you go about it?

Insulation is your safest bet for warmth and comfort during those cold winter months. So you could be forgiven for not exactly having ventilation on your mind in December or January. Yet it is every bit as important to properly aerate your home during winter. Read on to find out how to go about it.

Why ventilate?

There can be no doubt as to the expediency and importance of ventilation. It is vital for the health of the occupants of any home for the polluted and humid indoor air to be replaced by fresh outdoor air on a continual basis. After a while, the indoor air holds a lot of moisture, carbon dioxide and harmful substances. Letting in fresh outdoor air with plenty of oxygen makes for a healthier and more agreeable indoor climate. This swapping of air is called ventilation. By properly aerating your home you also prevent persistent, unsightly and unhealthy damp inside the home.

Doing your own aerating = first step in the right direction

There are a few very simple things you can do yourself to aerate your home. Opening the windows in the bedroom in the morning for an hour or so is a great start. Don't be afraid to throw the windows wide open at either end of your home to get a brisk and vigorous air flow blowing right through your home for a short while. Not a very pleasant prospect perhaps, especially in winter, but it is a good way of swiftly aerating your entire home.

Another important tip: make sure the place is properly heated. You may well be wondering what this has to do with ventilation. When the moisture inside the air comes into contact with a cold surface, it will condense. This condensation may cause moisture problems such as moulding. So it is better to properly heat your home to prevent condensation from building up, and to properly aerate your home at the same time, to evacuate the humid air.

Benefits of mechanical ventilation

There is a lot you can do yourself to aerate your home yourself to a degree. Yet, natural ventilation is certainly not ideal. You lose a lot of energy and throwing open the windows in the middle of winter is not exactly the most obvious thing to be doing. So play it safe and get a mechanical ventilation system. These systems control the supply and evacuation of air in your home in the most efficient way possible, whilst you do not need to worry about a thing: it all happens automatically. Moreover, C and D systems are energy-efficient.