I think I’m good with opening and closing my windows. Sure Texas you keep your windows closed 10 months of the year but it certainly beats spending a couple grand on a system that will break.
If you’re a resident of San Diego this comment makes sense but if you’re a Texas resident you’re willing to spend the money on a comfortable house. It’s HOT and Humid here. Add in bugs, mold, pollen, oak fever, cedar fever, etc and you’ll want a tight house with a good HVAC+D system
@ I do agree largely with your response. And yes, opening a window does zero favors with humidity. I guess I’m attracted to the simplicity of opening and closing a window. I guess I have greater faith in my arms and WD-40 than I do an entire extra add on. Ty for the kind response of course. I live in San Antonio.
I drive luxury cars because they’re comfortable and perform well, are there more potential points of failure? Sure but the added cost is worth it, look at long term cost, less doctors visits, asthma attacks, seasonal allergies, cost of medicine…
@@rykdheiner very well said and never fully thought through! While in high school I did check myself into the ER for respiratory distress during a bad cedar outbreak while training in Helotes, just outside San Antonio. Ty for the additional comment!
Sure, an ERV can break, but I think you're overestimating how complex one is. An air conditioning unit is vastly more complex and yet most Americans can't live without it. That's why HVAC companies run 24/7. The only mechanical part of an ERV is the intake fan and outtake fan. And then there's the cpu, but nowadays those are built to be pretty robust and replaceable. And operable windows is basically the failsafe for a broken ERV. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
If you got the money then by all means go for it. But if you mess up a "tight house", then you will have catastrophic problems. Which means you'll need to find a specialist builder (not your average builder). Which means a premium price for the design, labor, and materials. Yes, we all want a Ferrari, but if you have a Honda budget, then we just want a car(house) that gets the job done.
@@shellderp everyone just wants to sell whatever pile of crap they have, whatever they can shill and move the quickest. Cannot stand how this industry is.
Our methane/gas detector went off once in our bedroom. We had an infant at the time. I called the fire department at 6:30am thinking something was wrong with our furnace. They found nothing. My wife had farted in the bed a few minutes before it went off. I couldn't imagine a fart could set of an alarm but that's the only thing that could have done it. I occasionally bring it up that the fire department had to come her fart was so bad. Ten years later it still annoys her if I bring it up, but it's funny to me. ; )
Matt, you might want to do a video or comment on this one on how HUGE of a difference this makes in keeping house clean as well. The amount of dust that gathers in a well built house like yours vs a standard builder house is a huge difference. Less alergies as you alluded to, but less work to maintain as well. My2CentsWorth.
I live in Ireland where it's wet and cold in winter. Well, wet and colder. I would wipe down the doors and windows with a weak bleach solution every few weeks in winter before I installed an HRV system. It was the only way to stop them from being covered in mould and mildew. Now, with the HRV system, I really only need to do it on a sliding glass door that has metal frames - and only like once or twice over the whole winter. The PVC windows are fine - though the HRV system does nothing about dog nose prints. Still stuck cleaning those!
In the 90s code in my area required a fresh air intake on furnace returns. This was for radon gas. This is a good way to bring in fresh air, and pressurize the house to reduce drafts as well as provide make up air. I run my furnace fan 24h and it keeps my leaky house fresh. Not as energy efficient, but an effective solution to air quality issues.
Passive House Consultant here- to answer your closing question, the fogger + a blower door adding pressure to a traditional house would show where the infiltration's happening, just in reverse
Given the building materials we use in USA, there is no such thing as "too tight" No matter how tightly they are sealed, they wouldn't compare to "actual hermetically sealed"
Maybe your referenced comment was from someone who wasn't considering the additional implementation of a good air management system. For example, there is a call for airtight homes in New Zealand's building code, but no requirement for any air management systems, which causes a big moisture management issue. Maybe Matt, you could do the same test with your air management systems turned off....
A friend of mine rented an apartment that was under a year old and found that mushrooms started growing in the window sills because the system could not handle a window being opened. It was too air tight with a system that needed the house to be permanently sealed from the outside other than just opening and closing the entrance door. The problem with houses being built like that in Norway is that no one is used to living like that. We all love opening windows and having the balcony door open in the summer. This means disaster for many homeowners that move into a home expecting the freedom to live as they wish rather than being stuck inside as prisoners to a ventilation system.
Way to go Matt! What a headline! The trolls will have a go at this one. It's sad that they don't seem to understand controlled and conditioned air space. It sure is nice to have clean filtered air and the ability to open windows and doors. Great video. I laughed a lot watching and even more reading the comments. Thanks for sharing... 😁👍
This is huge in norther climates interior moisture will condense on windows and rot them from the inside. I have a HRV on a super tight house, works great.
Good stuff Matt... that said, I grew up with a Dad that just cracked the window when supply air was needed. A simple but effective solution to a stinky problem. 😅 Always enjoy and learn so much from your content...Thankyou
Some people hear the words "tight house" and then their minds shut down and refuse to hear the words "air exchanger" to justify their criticism that the house can not breath when you build the tight.
I have an HRV, I dont do a constant exchange, unless activated for showers, which is then only 60 minutes. I do a 10 on, 50 off. If at on of people visit, I turn it on while people are over. I dont see the need for a constant exchange, especially when people arent home for the day. But with any ventilation and humidity, every house and lifestyle is different
3:12 Evidence: water drip stains reflecting light on the wall-paint above the picture. 6:21 Bedroom door was closed for the fogging test but is now open. Hmm... 6:40 Would manually boosting the ERV be a required practice anytime someone takes a shower? Hmm, really not fond of having yet another 'thing' to manage. So, is that in tandem with a bathroom exhaust or is boost-mode the substitute? 9:00 Bedroom door is ajar so not open but not closed either. All this critiquing aside, I admire the wall covering behind the vanity mirrors. That's nice!
I have no personal experience, but I’ve heard that HRVs/ERVs can have an input of your bathroom exhast fan power, and automatically go into boost mode whenever someone puts the exhaust fan on.
Yes, the boost mode substitutes for the exhaust fan. In other words, rather than turn on an exhaust fan, you turn on boost mode. So it isn't "another thing to manage."
@@nwsvndr That’s unfortunate. It’d be better to have a relatively conventional exhaust fan in the bathroom, where it feeds its air into the exhaust strem of the ERV. Or some other way of ONLY boosting the exhaust from the bathroom, not from the whole house.
For your 2nd and 4th timestamps, I don't think you "caught" him in anything. As he explained at the beginning, there are 3 exhausts in the bathroom/closet and no supplies. The supply air has to come from somewhere - the bedroom supply being that location. We don't know how big of a gap is under the bathroom door, but in order for it to work, the supply air has to have a way to get into the bathroom.
@kc9scott There are systems that will open an intake damper when rangehood or bath fan are running. The issue being an ERV doesn't have dampers for direct control and has limited CFM compared to a relatively massive exhaust fan.
Just do a positive pressure blower door test on a fogged traditional house, Matt. I live in a naturally ventilated house; we have air conditioning in the bedrooms, but the moderate climate doesn't need much. I still wish the house was tighter though; it would make humidity control so much easier and help in dealing with outdoor pollution when it is an issue. Not sure how we would work the operable walls though.
Hey Matt, I run this test almost daily lol My teenage son takes a shower before school and can never seem to remember to turn on the bathroom exhaust fan. When he opens the bathroom door the steam or humidity rolls down the hall and even steams up the kitchen window. Within about 15 minutes the kitchen window is clear and there is no evidence of the deodorant steam mixture.
Set up a fog machine outside of the house near typical leaky point and turn bath fans and maybe the hood range on something that doesn’t have a makeup air system
I've learned so much watching your videos Matt, but this vid shows off one design choice I wonder about as you show the closet full of smoke... I don't like the idea of everything in my closet being exposed to the fumes of all my showers and poops. Why is it so popular to have the closet entrance right by the shower and toilet?
My house is tighter than average imo and we constantly leave windows cracked to get fresh air in. We have neighbors that have 5 XL size adults living in their house and they never ever ever have windows open. We have had frequent discussions about not only the fumes in the house but also the high CO2 levels and conversely low O2 levels they must live in constantly.
What about humidity? Can you test the relative humidity change that your ERV introduces. Might be hard to do both worst-case scenarios now, but now is a good time probably for the negative test (more humidity inside vs outside) and then in the hot summer do the reverse as well as tell us how much condensate your ERV generates with the warm most summer air compared to winter air.
I am kinda shocked that at your house and your level of OCD that you have not painted your air registers on your wood ceiling yet and left them white. I would go crazy if it were at my place......and i LOVE the ceiling!!!!
Where does the air come into the bathroom? I’d pop in a lower door vent. If there isn’t good ventilation into a bathroom, the extraction fans have to run much harder than necessary to move the air. Lower door rather than upper as this supports the natural flow.
I worked in a modern office building for many years that was sealed up like a submarine. None of the windows opened. All of the air moved in and out of the building with fans. It’s fine until something nasty gets into the ventilation system and nobody can find it. I can’t tell you how many people had respiratory problems. Moreover office buildings are mainly concrete, steel and glass. Nothing that rots. Unlike homes. The idea that air/water tight houses last longer is highly suspect. I lived in a home on the north coast of France that was built in the 15th century, one of the oldest in Europe, Nothing sealed anywhere. The house was cold in the winter for sure, but it breathed. Water that got in through the centuries quickly evaporated. The house still had some of the original windows and doors. Very cool place. I don’t think people realize how much the current thinking about building methods is driven by marketing. I remember when asbestos shingles were all the rage. “They’ll last forever.” It takes time for materials to prove themselves. Like 50 or100 years.
When your ERV is in boost mode, it goes from 70 or 130 to 240, an increase of 110 CFM. Since you have a 10-12 inlets so that is split around them, so individually each is only drawing about 7-13-24. Is there an ERV that boosts by single location only?
I’m in the process of building my house now and I want to make sure it’s done right since not many people building high efficiency homes in my area. Would a fresh air system and a dehumidifier take care of the issues people claim come with a tight house? In my area people say that a tight house will be eaten up with mold and rot in a pile in a year because of it not being able to breath.
In part, yes. Building tight and controlling how air flows into and out of a building and keeping all HVAC ducting and air handling inside the conditioned space will go a long way. ERV and dehumidification will help keep the airborne moisture under mold growing levels too. But you also need to make sure anything that can possibly see water can both drain and dry.
Fresh air, Yes. Things that have scent are actually consisting of particles on the molecular level. Onions makes you tear up because the oils have settled on your face and right below your eyes. A T Shirt makes a perfect fart filter. 😮
Currently I hace an older house(1960's) and the bathroom shows how much dust comes in from outside... once I remodel and and fresh air(ERV) I expect to have a much cleaner house!
Too bad we have so many builders and Muni inspectors who prescribe to the we build them too tight myth. We need to build tight and right and the home will perform even better.
I hope you didn't spend too much on your more powerful fog machine. Rockville is the brand I use. It is really overkill. One burst would fill up a 1000 Sq foot room no problem
I have a feeling this video is gonna get a lot “responses”. lol. I’ve watched a lot of your videos and the way you build to passive house standards would be a dream come true to me! 🎉. I don’t think some people realize what all exactly is happening here. 🎉 Also, how well would your setup do in a heavy RADON area/house?? Utah, it seems new builds go one of two ways when dealing with RADON, 1. The out vents in almost every wall and above every door!!! (There goes any sound deadening) and 2, a RADON INSTALLED DEVICE that runs from the basement to over the roof. Sure the radon system is cheaper, but imagine if you had your ERV tight house! It seems to me, always getting fresh air would all but eliminate the radon problem? 🎉 What are your thoughts on radon and tight houses?! 🎉
From the data I've gathered, you should target around 5 air changes every 24 hours. The blower door testing is done at a pressure differential of 50 pascals. Your house should never get beyond+/-2 pascals normally. With that in mind, you can pretty well predict what your natural ACH is by dividing the ACH50 number by a factor of 20. If that number doesn't result in 5 air changes every 24 hours, you need an ERV.
1 - Cracking the door seemed in poor order, explaining that there was not a lot of airflow under the door would have been better. 2 - How does your system work with cooking? Sure you put it into boost mode with 240CFM, but looking @9:57 you appear to have 26-28 inputs/output to balance. Let's say 20, half for each, means you have 10. So if it is equally pulling, you got only 24CFM being pulled from the burnt eggs or pancakes. Please run that test. Burn eggs / pancakes and see how it handles clearing the smoke. Would it take 2 hours? meaning you are grabbing a towel, opening a door and manually fanning out your home b/c your system cannot keep up. I guess while we have Grey vs black water. I guess we can also say we got grey/black air (literally if you burn something). Perhaps a bypass, that opens a sealed port and Jettisons everything. Or we have a way to temporarily shutter 9 intakes, so the full 240 is being pulled from just the 1 fan, much better than 24cfm. Also, I don't think we want that Burnt Smoke going through your ERV. Seems like a great way to dirty the ERV core and out filter (to protect the core) very quickly, thus, my analogy to black water, it is black air and we should have a different path of expulsion for black air.
Go watch this video on my kitchen exhaust with make-up air. This ERV doesn’t handle cooking ventilation. th-cam.com/video/rSIqKGsF2ZA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=aITNtpXAvtelPvr4
Cooking ventilation is usually a separate system, though I don't know about this house in particular. Usually the strategy is to adequately size an exhaust hood, fan and duct work and than have an identically sized makeup air just for it supplying fresh air as close as possible so there's just a single column of air going around the oven/range. It doesn't interact with or rely on the ERV in any meaningful way.
Built an ICF house 17 years ago and absolutely necessary to have an air exchanger, (HRV) in our case. Enjoy your technical content, always educational. Keep it coming!
What is the constant energy draw for your ERV system? I'm interested in doing ERV in the house I'm going to build, but I will also be dependent on Solar for power, so I need energy efficiency to be a top priority.
I have a 96% efficiency furnace. I was wondering about getting a HRV. So, that I was putting heated air in my furnace and not winter air in my furnace from the outside? That's what I thought the main reason is for HRV?
I have a new house built to the air tight codes. I hate it and leave a window cracked 24/7 - 365 days a year. I line north of 55 degrees north, so I'm getting -40 gegrees in the winter and very hot summers.
USA offers cheap energy. Hawaii is 4 times the cost of mainland energy. Uk, the last 3 years, energy so expensive that the government had to offer energy subsidies. Something like 1 in 6 households having energy cost issues. Many energy intensive businesses moving from Europe to the USA because of cheap clean energy. With modernization of the grid, more AI computing power, switching to more solar/wind USA rates will be increasing energy costs. Energy efficiency of homes will become more of an issue. I also have solar with powerwall battery storage. I live on Hawaii saving $500/month on home electricity and gas savings as also An EV. Plus I have power if power outages
I would have trusted this more if you did not open the door of the bathroom to the rest of the house before calling time on the initial test while it was still smoky like a reggae bar.
Opening the door is a more realistic use case in my opinion. Without intake in the room directly, leaving the door closed forces it to suck through the door cracks. I think this is a totally fair way to demonstrate the effectiveness of this system as installed.
@@Alfredas-u7x Then do the test that way. Do not change the parameters at the end because you are not getting the result you expect. It is the moving of the goalpost that is the issue here. Even in the second test he changes the parameters of the test somewhere between the 3 minute and 10 minute mark where the door to the bedroom goes from closed to cracked open by 4-6 inches. The honest thing to do is to restart the experiment with new rules rather than changing the rules when your experiment does not yield the expected results. He never needed to have the door closed as it is a system where ventilations works together in all the rooms to attain the intended effect. In effect he highlighted the issue that when you close a door you make the system ineffective in that room rather than showing the system doing a good job.
I don't entirely disagree with you and it certainly would have been better to call it out, but it seems like you are implying this is some kind of bait and switch. This comes across to me as a very casual experiment, not intended to be rigorous. As I saw it, the only real reason the door was initially closed was to build the fog. I would say, however, that some other way to bring fresh air into the room with the door closed should be implemented. Some kind of passive from the bedroom probably.
@@Alfredas-u7x I dont think it was intended as a bait and switch, but I do think it became that from not being stringent about the parameters of the test. You ended up with a video where what he says does not line up with what he does. I do not think this was anything intentional, but rather that the tester was unfamiliar with how to test something in a meaningful way. He just unintentionally self sabotaged his tests because he is not a science person and was not mindful about how altering the test altered the validity of the result and it invalidated many of his earlier statements.
Hi Matt, You stink.... lol. You forgot to add the ERV systems recover the energy from the out going air and put it into the incoming air. I added a Panasonic system in my older upstate NY house to (hopefully) fix my Radon issue, went from 10 to 0.2 and as a bonus the house smelt heaps fresher, big difference on the first day. I also tested my unit mid winter and lost about 1 deg between the out going and incoming air at the inside exit points. FYI if anyone retro fits a unit in cold areas make sure you double insulate the incoming and out going pipes once it's inside the envelope so you don't get condensation on the cold/warm vents pipes and angle those pipes down so they drip outside (if they do). Love to see a story on Greenstone's Ice Panels.... As I'm thinking of building my Georgia mountain home with it. Keep up the good work mate. =)
Yes, but it would take a long time to become an issue. You'd have bigger, more urgent problems in an outage lasting long enough to matter. And if it did last that long and you had no power backup, you can still open windows.
If you calculate the total cubic feet of your house, you could then figure out how long it takes the ERV to do a full air change of the house. It seems to me that once or twice a day ought to be enough.
@@kc9scott it seems that everything requires an app now to run and I absolutely hate it. There should be a law that if a company goes under or stops supporting their product, the software should be made open source.
This! Don't install anything as a fixture in your home that requires internet to function or be configured. Things should have 100% functionality without network connectivity of any kind or at a least without internet so they can be firewalled off and not an exposed attack surface and so you can retain use and configurabillity even if the manufacturer goes out of business or takes their service down.
You need to connect to your fresh air inlets from your other rooms. So if you have the doors closed to your bedroom which is the nearest fresh air inlet, you're going to need to do a bypass vent above the door into the bathroom. Other than that it's like you're sucking air in a bag. Not going to work too well so it's just sucking air around the cracks of the door into the next area that has a fresh air inlet
So literally your master bedroom has visual access straight into your bathroom room from the street!! So that means if u r naked and blinds open and pocket door open, someone can see into your bathroom from the street. 🤔🤔🤔
Can i have an ERV like this AND a regular old fart fan?? When you shower, it produces steam. How long til that steam clears out? Is it still 10 or 30 min or 2 hours or whatever? Because of course a regular fart fan / bath fan will clear it out faster -- i worry if i build like this then the steam will sit against the walls and towels and everything for way longer each time.
You could, but that's why locations of exhaust points matter - to be more effective at pulling the worst out before it really spreads out. That and boost mode and potentially even tying boost mode to humidity levels detected in bathrooms means additional exhaust isn't really necessary in well designed systems.
It would de-fog way faster if the make-up air (fresh air) were able to get into the bathroom -- you closed the bathroom door and made the room a big vacuum. It needs make-up air from the supply side of your ERV to replace the air being sucked out by the ERV.
Are you building to ASHRAE241 health standards? They have clean air delivery targets based on occupancy. The Ashrae 62 standards used to target 30CFM/person to stop Tuberculosis until the smoke lobby changed it to an odor control standard
My understanding is that a tight house is desirable for its energy efficiency. But if you then have to have a special system to pump in fresh air, that takes energy. So what's the breakdown of how much energy you save in retaining heat/cold vs energy spent running the ERV. Not saying it's a bad idea just saying theres more complexity and more maintenance costs for what benefit?
When experts tell us that we have to seal to reduce flow to a tiny amount, I ask them this question, and they cannot answer. My range hood pulls 90-120 cfm out of the house. My bath exhausts pull 50-80 cfm out of the house. That is much greater than the recommended allowance, so where is the replacement air supposed to come from?? In my house, it come mostly from under the exterior doors, if no windows are open. I think it best to have a gap down low, because a gap high on a wall will send warm air out by convection.
Continuous ventilation systems are an example of our progress along Joseph Tainter's trajectory described in "The Collapse of Complex Societies". That, and the requirement that it must be possible to put a crock pot on any spot on a kitchen counter and plug it in. And oh, we had that requirement for islands and peninsulas too until we found that putting crock pots on these places is a bad idea. So the current requirement is that you have to provide the home owner the means to still do that.
A tight house can always have a window cracked open to make it behave as a leaky house. A leaky house will always leak and require more energy to condition. Should we get rid of cars and go back to horses?
@@phamlam3720 The continuous ventilation systems run all the time, even if it is pleasant weather and you have windows and doors wide open. Here in Colorado, I only run an air conditioner for a few hours a day in the middle of summer, and for most of the day the doors and windows are wide open. But bathroom exhaust fans run 24x7x52. There is no ERV. The balcony door leaks all the time. So, this mandated ventilation requirement for this newly constructed apartment wastes money and energy and accomplishes nothing. But the bigger objection is to continued growth of mandated solutions that are subject to regulatory capture and guilds.
@@richdobbs6595 The people on this channel are talking about building better. Better houses with fresh filtered air. You can build and live in whatever you want.
@@richdobbs6595new houses are generally built tighter and pay more attention to ventilation than older homes (bathrooms and kitchens being a big area of focus with mechanical ventilation). It’s better this way because it creates a healthier home that doesn’t have mold problems, poor air quality, wasted energy, bugs, drafts and other problems.
I think people ask way too much from a house. If they are so worried about the fresh air, then just open the windows or install a single unit system in each room.
Matt, something that you have to remember. Your new home is not the standard home. You put a lot of extras into things the average home and builder don't have or do even today. You built your home to a standard that is difficult to find in most homes. That's not to say we shouldn't, but are the savings worth your health? I have seen many newer homes in the past few years, and I can say from what I have seen, very few homes are installing fresh air systems. Your home is far and above the norm. Even multimillion dollar homes don't go to your standards in home building.
It depends on where you live. Where I live, it can be in the 90s and humid in the summer and below 0 in the winter. Opening windows at either extreme tends to make people justifiably upset. I get about 3-6 weeks of window weather per year. Other places will differ.
I believe it would be better to condition the air in the house instead of constantly bringing in fresh air. You should use an I wave and see how fast it clears the air. Astronauts do it in space all the time I don't know how it's done but it's doable
Astronauts need air (oxygen) replacement. It's not 100% continuously recycled; the carbon dioxide is removed (scrubbed) from the air, but it can't be turned back into oxygen. (At least, not in space, at this time.) So, yes, they bring in fresh air.
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I think I’m good with opening and closing my windows. Sure Texas you keep your windows closed 10 months of the year but it certainly beats spending a couple grand on a system that will break.
If you’re a resident of San Diego this comment makes sense but if you’re a Texas resident you’re willing to spend the money on a comfortable house. It’s HOT and Humid here. Add in bugs, mold, pollen, oak fever, cedar fever, etc and you’ll want a tight house with a good HVAC+D system
@ I do agree largely with your response. And yes, opening a window does zero favors with humidity. I guess I’m attracted to the simplicity of opening and closing a window. I guess I have greater faith in my arms and WD-40 than I do an entire extra add on. Ty for the kind response of course. I live in San Antonio.
I drive luxury cars because they’re comfortable and perform well, are there more potential points of failure? Sure but the added cost is worth it, look at long term cost, less doctors visits, asthma attacks, seasonal allergies, cost of medicine…
@@rykdheiner very well said and never fully thought through! While in high school I did check myself into the ER for respiratory distress during a bad cedar outbreak while training in Helotes, just outside San Antonio. Ty for the additional comment!
Sure, an ERV can break, but I think you're overestimating how complex one is. An air conditioning unit is vastly more complex and yet most Americans can't live without it. That's why HVAC companies run 24/7. The only mechanical part of an ERV is the intake fan and outtake fan. And then there's the cpu, but nowadays those are built to be pretty robust and replaceable. And operable windows is basically the failsafe for a broken ERV. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
It sure made it easy to weed out contractors. Contractor: "If you build it that tight you won't be able to breathe." Me: "Next."
every HVAC contractor tells me something different about ERVs, its so tiring
The issue is I end up with nobody left this way 😆
If you got the money then by all means go for it. But if you mess up a "tight house", then you will have catastrophic problems. Which means you'll need to find a specialist builder (not your average builder). Which means a premium price for the design, labor, and materials. Yes, we all want a Ferrari, but if you have a Honda budget, then we just want a car(house) that gets the job done.
@@shellderp everyone just wants to sell whatever pile of crap they have, whatever they can shill and move the quickest. Cannot stand how this industry is.
@@JeremyBell uh if you mess up a drafty house you have problems too
We usually just cover those problems up by throwing energy at the problem
Our methane/gas detector went off once in our bedroom. We had an infant at the time. I called the fire department at 6:30am thinking something was wrong with our furnace. They found nothing. My wife had farted in the bed a few minutes before it went off. I couldn't imagine a fart could set of an alarm but that's the only thing that could have done it. I occasionally bring it up that the fire department had to come her fart was so bad. Ten years later it still annoys her if I bring it up, but it's funny to me. ; )
I don't like how you're using a fog machine for this test. Much prefer the traditional method: chimichanga, beans and nachos.
this is my swamp
a delectable mix of Taco Bell & White Castle 😏💨
Broccoli, chick peas, beans and boiled eggs in a salad and your in-laws will never visit you again.
0:32 " 'If you fart in that house you're going to smell it a week later.' Kind of a crude comment" 7:28 Literally labels the switch "FART FAN" 😂
You need a control, where you turn the ERV off completely for the test.
Exactly! The fog would naturally clear on its own, even without any ventilation
Matt, you might want to do a video or comment on this one on how HUGE of a difference this makes in keeping house clean as well. The amount of dust that gathers in a well built house like yours vs a standard builder house is a huge difference. Less alergies as you alluded to, but less work to maintain as well. My2CentsWorth.
I live in Ireland where it's wet and cold in winter. Well, wet and colder. I would wipe down the doors and windows with a weak bleach solution every few weeks in winter before I installed an HRV system. It was the only way to stop them from being covered in mould and mildew. Now, with the HRV system, I really only need to do it on a sliding glass door that has metal frames - and only like once or twice over the whole winter. The PVC windows are fine - though the HRV system does nothing about dog nose prints. Still stuck cleaning those!
Much of the average household dust is actually human generated.
In the 90s code in my area required a fresh air intake on furnace returns. This was for radon gas. This is a good way to bring in fresh air, and pressurize the house to reduce drafts as well as provide make up air. I run my furnace fan 24h and it keeps my leaky house fresh. Not as energy efficient, but an effective solution to air quality issues.
Passive House Consultant here- to answer your closing question, the fogger + a blower door adding pressure to a traditional house would show where the infiltration's happening, just in reverse
Given the building materials we use in USA, there is no such thing as "too tight"
No matter how tightly they are sealed, they wouldn't compare to "actual hermetically sealed"
Bullshit. Illiterate?
Maybe your referenced comment was from someone who wasn't considering the additional implementation of a good air management system. For example, there is a call for airtight homes in New Zealand's building code, but no requirement for any air management systems, which causes a big moisture management issue. Maybe Matt, you could do the same test with your air management systems turned off....
A friend of mine rented an apartment that was under a year old and found that mushrooms started growing in the window sills because the system could not handle a window being opened. It was too air tight with a system that needed the house to be permanently sealed from the outside other than just opening and closing the entrance door. The problem with houses being built like that in Norway is that no one is used to living like that. We all love opening windows and having the balcony door open in the summer. This means disaster for many homeowners that move into a home expecting the freedom to live as they wish rather than being stuck inside as prisoners to a ventilation system.
Way to go Matt! What a headline! The trolls will have a go at this one. It's sad that they don't seem to understand controlled and conditioned air space. It sure is nice to have clean filtered air and the ability to open windows and doors. Great video. I laughed a lot watching and even more reading the comments. Thanks for sharing... 😁👍
Appreciate the support my friend!
@buildshow Tell the truth and the truth will set you free... 😁👍
This is huge in norther climates interior moisture will condense on windows and rot them from the inside. I have a HRV on a super tight house, works great.
There are CO2 based fog machines that are a lot more pleasant to deal with. Not having to burn that jungle juice or whatever they call it.
Good stuff Matt... that said, I grew up with a Dad that just cracked the window when supply air was needed. A simple but effective solution to a stinky problem. 😅 Always enjoy and learn so much from your content...Thankyou
Some people hear the words "tight house" and then their minds shut down and refuse to hear the words "air exchanger" to justify their criticism that the house can not breath when you build the tight.
Wife: "You did *_what_* to our bathroom!?" LOL
THAT WAS MY FIRST THOUGHT!!! LOL
I appreciate you moderating thr crudeness for which the industry is hallowed
The heat exchange between incoming and outgoing air is also a killer feature of ERV/HRV!
I have an HRV, I dont do a constant exchange, unless activated for showers, which is then only 60 minutes. I do a 10 on, 50 off. If at on of people visit, I turn it on while people are over. I dont see the need for a constant exchange, especially when people arent home for the day. But with any ventilation and humidity, every house and lifestyle is different
3:12 Evidence: water drip stains reflecting light on the wall-paint above the picture.
6:21 Bedroom door was closed for the fogging test but is now open. Hmm...
6:40 Would manually boosting the ERV be a required practice anytime someone takes a shower? Hmm, really not fond of having yet another 'thing' to manage. So, is that in tandem with a bathroom exhaust or is boost-mode the substitute?
9:00 Bedroom door is ajar so not open but not closed either.
All this critiquing aside, I admire the wall covering behind the vanity mirrors. That's nice!
I have no personal experience, but I’ve heard that HRVs/ERVs can have an input of your bathroom exhast fan power, and automatically go into boost mode whenever someone puts the exhaust fan on.
Yes, the boost mode substitutes for the exhaust fan. In other words, rather than turn on an exhaust fan, you turn on boost mode. So it isn't "another thing to manage."
@@nwsvndr That’s unfortunate. It’d be better to have a relatively conventional exhaust fan in the bathroom, where it feeds its air into the exhaust strem of the ERV. Or some other way of ONLY boosting the exhaust from the bathroom, not from the whole house.
For your 2nd and 4th timestamps, I don't think you "caught" him in anything. As he explained at the beginning, there are 3 exhausts in the bathroom/closet and no supplies. The supply air has to come from somewhere - the bedroom supply being that location. We don't know how big of a gap is under the bathroom door, but in order for it to work, the supply air has to have a way to get into the bathroom.
@kc9scott There are systems that will open an intake damper when rangehood or bath fan are running. The issue being an ERV doesn't have dampers for direct control and has limited CFM compared to a relatively massive exhaust fan.
Just do a positive pressure blower door test on a fogged traditional house, Matt.
I live in a naturally ventilated house; we have air conditioning in the bedrooms, but the moderate climate doesn't need much. I still wish the house was tighter though; it would make humidity control so much easier and help in dealing with outdoor pollution when it is an issue. Not sure how we would work the operable walls though.
Depends on the Fart, now my Wife for example...
Absolutely spot on! Thank you. 😁
Hey Matt, I run this test almost daily lol My teenage son takes a shower before school and can never seem to remember to turn on the bathroom exhaust fan. When he opens the bathroom door the steam or humidity rolls down the hall and even steams up the kitchen window. Within about 15 minutes the kitchen window is clear and there is no evidence of the deodorant steam mixture.
Matt! Start thinking up a Halloween video so you can use that new fogger!
Set up a fog machine outside of the house near typical leaky point and turn bath fans and maybe the hood range on something that doesn’t have a makeup air system
Friend of mine had a college professor who built a house so air tight, you could fart and leave then come back two weeks and still smell it.
I've finally moved into a house with a fresh air system. It's not as fancy as a Zehnnder, but it does make a difference. It's never stuffy.
Are there more discrete looking registers for the Zehnder system?
I've learned so much watching your videos Matt, but this vid shows off one design choice I wonder about as you show the closet full of smoke... I don't like the idea of everything in my closet being exposed to the fumes of all my showers and poops. Why is it so popular to have the closet entrance right by the shower and toilet?
My house is tighter than average imo and we constantly leave windows cracked to get fresh air in. We have neighbors that have 5 XL size adults living in their house and they never ever ever have windows open. We have had frequent discussions about not only the fumes in the house but also the high CO2 levels and conversely low O2 levels they must live in constantly.
What about humidity? Can you test the relative humidity change that your ERV introduces. Might be hard to do both worst-case scenarios now, but now is a good time probably for the negative test (more humidity inside vs outside) and then in the hot summer do the reverse as well as tell us how much condensate your ERV generates with the warm most summer air compared to winter air.
There's no condensate produced from an erv. He has a whole house dehumidifier to control any excess humidity introduced by the erv.
"We're going to test that"... thought this was going to be Matt ripping one.
I am kinda shocked that at your house and your level of OCD that you have not painted your air registers on your wood ceiling yet and left them white. I would go crazy if it were at my place......and i LOVE the ceiling!!!!
Have you thought about using a blower fan above your shower to dry the area quickly?
Come do a blower door test with fog on my leaky 70's house in the mountains of NC. It would be hilarious.
Or maybe somebody's living in your attic and farting into your ERV
8:40 "Nathan Taylor To you & Tim Hill - Just so y'all know, the inspector was smoking inside of the hou..."
Where does the air come into the bathroom?
I’d pop in a lower door vent. If there isn’t good ventilation into a bathroom, the extraction fans have to run much harder than necessary to move the air. Lower door rather than upper as this supports the natural flow.
Don't forget the kitchen exhaust (if you have one). Completely useless in a tight house unless you have a way to provide make up air.
Now the wife is going to expect a fart extract button in our bathroom…thanks Matt!😅
I worked in a modern office building for many years that was sealed up like a submarine. None of the windows opened. All of the air moved in and out of the building with fans. It’s fine until something nasty gets into the ventilation system and nobody can find it. I can’t tell you how many people had respiratory problems. Moreover office buildings are mainly concrete, steel and glass. Nothing that rots. Unlike homes.
The idea that air/water tight houses last longer is highly suspect. I lived in a home on the north coast of France that was built in the 15th century, one of the oldest in Europe, Nothing sealed anywhere. The house was cold in the winter for sure, but it breathed. Water that got in through the centuries quickly evaporated. The house still had some of the original windows and doors. Very cool place.
I don’t think people realize how much the current thinking about building methods is driven by marketing. I remember when asbestos shingles were all the rage. “They’ll last forever.” It takes time for materials to prove themselves. Like 50 or100 years.
When your ERV is in boost mode, it goes from 70 or 130 to 240, an increase of 110 CFM. Since you have a 10-12 inlets so that is split around them, so individually each is only drawing about 7-13-24. Is there an ERV that boosts by single location only?
Lol. Thanks for sharing Matt.
I’m in the process of building my house now and I want to make sure it’s done right since not many people building high efficiency homes in my area. Would a fresh air system and a dehumidifier take care of the issues people claim come with a tight house? In my area people say that a tight house will be eaten up with mold and rot in a pile in a year because of it not being able to breath.
In part, yes. Building tight and controlling how air flows into and out of a building and keeping all HVAC ducting and air handling inside the conditioned space will go a long way. ERV and dehumidification will help keep the airborne moisture under mold growing levels too. But you also need to make sure anything that can possibly see water can both drain and dry.
Fresh air, Yes. Things that have scent are actually consisting of particles on the molecular level. Onions makes you tear up because the oils have settled on your face and right below your eyes.
A T Shirt makes a perfect fart filter. 😮
Currently I hace an older house(1960's) and the bathroom shows how much dust comes in from outside... once I remodel and and fresh air(ERV) I expect to have a much cleaner house!
Too bad we have so many builders and Muni inspectors who prescribe to the we build them too tight myth. We need to build tight and right and the home will perform even better.
I hope you didn't spend too much on your more powerful fog machine.
Rockville is the brand I use. It is really overkill. One burst would fill up a 1000 Sq foot room no problem
It's all good but what's the limit on those flex hose runs? Last I remember checking it was pretty limited
Matt reads and remembers all our comments and thinks about them for years
*can barely see Matt* "I wish this thing would work!"
you had me at "fart" I did not hear a word after that.
I have a feeling this video is gonna get a lot “responses”. lol.
I’ve watched a lot of your videos and the way you build to passive house standards would be a dream come true to me! 🎉. I don’t think some people realize what all exactly is happening here. 🎉
Also, how well would your setup do in a heavy RADON area/house?? Utah, it seems new builds go one of two ways when dealing with RADON, 1. The out vents in almost every wall and above every door!!! (There goes any sound deadening) and 2, a RADON INSTALLED DEVICE that runs from the basement to over the roof. Sure the radon system is cheaper, but imagine if you had your ERV tight house! It seems to me, always getting fresh air would all but eliminate the radon problem? 🎉
What are your thoughts on radon and tight houses?! 🎉
I had a slight radon issue in my basement; installed an ERV just for the basement and no more problem. A Broan sytem, DIY'd it.
i have read that if a house tests less than 3 then it requires a fresh air handler.
How tight can a house be before you need an ERV? 3 ACH? 2ACH?
I guess 3 ACH because it is code.
From the data I've gathered, you should target around 5 air changes every 24 hours. The blower door testing is done at a pressure differential of 50 pascals. Your house should never get beyond+/-2 pascals normally. With that in mind, you can pretty well predict what your natural ACH is by dividing the ACH50 number by a factor of 20. If that number doesn't result in 5 air changes every 24 hours, you need an ERV.
When you remodel a 15 year old house and wonder excatly when owens corning made desert camo colored insulation…
Well when I fart my wife still complains a week later…guess I need whole house ventilation
ok your master on the first floor facing the street is a travesty...........who does this?!
I wish I had a fresh air system. I have to open my windows and doors to achieve a similar effect. It doesn't work in the winter nor most of the year.
Hey Matt, Can you please rerun this test with the ERV totally off?
What would be the point of that? You don't build a house to tight performance standards without an ERV.
1 - Cracking the door seemed in poor order, explaining that there was not a lot of airflow under the door would have been better.
2 - How does your system work with cooking? Sure you put it into boost mode with 240CFM, but looking @9:57 you appear to have 26-28 inputs/output to balance. Let's say 20, half for each, means you have 10. So if it is equally pulling, you got only 24CFM being pulled from the burnt eggs or pancakes.
Please run that test. Burn eggs / pancakes and see how it handles clearing the smoke. Would it take 2 hours? meaning you are grabbing a towel, opening a door and manually fanning out your home b/c your system cannot keep up.
I guess while we have Grey vs black water. I guess we can also say we got grey/black air (literally if you burn something). Perhaps a bypass, that opens a sealed port and Jettisons everything. Or we have a way to temporarily shutter 9 intakes, so the full 240 is being pulled from just the 1 fan, much better than 24cfm.
Also, I don't think we want that Burnt Smoke going through your ERV. Seems like a great way to dirty the ERV core and out filter (to protect the core) very quickly, thus, my analogy to black water, it is black air and we should have a different path of expulsion for black air.
Go watch this video on my kitchen exhaust with make-up air. This ERV doesn’t handle cooking ventilation.
th-cam.com/video/rSIqKGsF2ZA/w-d-xo.htmlsi=aITNtpXAvtelPvr4
Cooking ventilation is usually a separate system, though I don't know about this house in particular. Usually the strategy is to adequately size an exhaust hood, fan and duct work and than have an identically sized makeup air just for it supplying fresh air as close as possible so there's just a single column of air going around the oven/range. It doesn't interact with or rely on the ERV in any meaningful way.
Good "real life" experiment to show how effective the air exchange system is working.
Glad you liked it!
Built an ICF house 17 years ago and absolutely necessary to have an air exchanger, (HRV) in our case. Enjoy your technical content, always educational. Keep it coming!
i remember laughing at that exact comment
What is the constant energy draw for your ERV system? I'm interested in doing ERV in the house I'm going to build, but I will also be dependent on Solar for power, so I need energy efficiency to be a top priority.
I have a 96% efficiency furnace. I was wondering about getting a HRV. So, that I was putting heated air in my furnace and not winter air in my furnace from the outside? That's what I thought the main reason is for HRV?
i saw that same comment too and have thought about it ever since as well LOL
Nothing is ever too tight. It's either too big, too small, or just tight. Not sure about a house in that respect.
I have a new house built to the air tight codes. I hate it and leave a window cracked 24/7 - 365 days a year. I line north of 55 degrees north, so I'm getting -40 gegrees in the winter and very hot summers.
USA offers cheap energy. Hawaii is 4 times the cost of mainland energy. Uk, the last 3 years, energy so expensive that the government had to offer energy subsidies. Something like 1 in 6 households having energy cost issues. Many energy intensive businesses moving from Europe to the USA because of cheap clean energy. With modernization of the grid, more AI computing power, switching to more solar/wind USA rates will be increasing energy costs. Energy efficiency of homes will become more of an issue. I also have solar with powerwall battery storage. I live on Hawaii saving $500/month on home electricity and gas savings as also
An EV. Plus I have power if power outages
I would have trusted this more if you did not open the door of the bathroom to the rest of the house before calling time on the initial test while it was still smoky like a reggae bar.
Opening the door is a more realistic use case in my opinion. Without intake in the room directly, leaving the door closed forces it to suck through the door cracks. I think this is a totally fair way to demonstrate the effectiveness of this system as installed.
@@Alfredas-u7x Then do the test that way. Do not change the parameters at the end because you are not getting the result you expect. It is the moving of the goalpost that is the issue here. Even in the second test he changes the parameters of the test somewhere between the 3 minute and 10 minute mark where the door to the bedroom goes from closed to cracked open by 4-6 inches. The honest thing to do is to restart the experiment with new rules rather than changing the rules when your experiment does not yield the expected results. He never needed to have the door closed as it is a system where ventilations works together in all the rooms to attain the intended effect. In effect he highlighted the issue that when you close a door you make the system ineffective in that room rather than showing the system doing a good job.
I don't entirely disagree with you and it certainly would have been better to call it out, but it seems like you are implying this is some kind of bait and switch. This comes across to me as a very casual experiment, not intended to be rigorous. As I saw it, the only real reason the door was initially closed was to build the fog.
I would say, however, that some other way to bring fresh air into the room with the door closed should be implemented. Some kind of passive from the bedroom probably.
@@Alfredas-u7x I dont think it was intended as a bait and switch, but I do think it became that from not being stringent about the parameters of the test. You ended up with a video where what he says does not line up with what he does. I do not think this was anything intentional, but rather that the tester was unfamiliar with how to test something in a meaningful way. He just unintentionally self sabotaged his tests because he is not a science person and was not mindful about how altering the test altered the validity of the result and it invalidated many of his earlier statements.
What about power outages?
Hi Matt, You stink.... lol. You forgot to add the ERV systems recover the energy from the out going air and put it into the incoming air. I added a Panasonic system in my older upstate NY house to (hopefully) fix my Radon issue, went from 10 to 0.2 and as a bonus the house smelt heaps fresher, big difference on the first day. I also tested my unit mid winter and lost about 1 deg between the out going and incoming air at the inside exit points. FYI if anyone retro fits a unit in cold areas make sure you double insulate the incoming and out going pipes once it's inside the envelope so you don't get condensation on the cold/warm vents pipes and angle those pipes down so they drip outside (if they do). Love to see a story on Greenstone's Ice Panels.... As I'm thinking of building my Georgia mountain home with it. Keep up the good work mate. =)
matt likes shoes 😁🤣😂
Better add an automatic generator to your house or all that air exchange will stop will it not?
Yes, but it would take a long time to become an issue. You'd have bigger, more urgent problems in an outage lasting long enough to matter. And if it did last that long and you had no power backup, you can still open windows.
You are assuming outside city air is fresh air?
200-300 cfm doesn't seem like enough... my cooktop range hood alone is up to 1200 cfm at full bore...
If you calculate the total cubic feet of your house, you could then figure out how long it takes the ERV to do a full air change of the house. It seems to me that once or twice a day ought to be enough.
A good test might be a co2 monitor.
Have a little party with build buddies (cross promo) watch the graph, easy video
I'm just wondering... what happens in 20-30 years when the software is all incompatible for the Zehnder system?
My guess is in 20-30 years you replace the system like you would an hvac system
@@jundossantos Or upgrade/replace the software, if Zehnder is still around.
Don’t put anything in your house that requires an app to manage it.
@@kc9scott it seems that everything requires an app now to run and I absolutely hate it. There should be a law that if a company goes under or stops supporting their product, the software should be made open source.
This! Don't install anything as a fixture in your home that requires internet to function or be configured. Things should have 100% functionality without network connectivity of any kind or at a least without internet so they can be firewalled off and not an exposed attack surface and so you can retain use and configurabillity even if the manufacturer goes out of business or takes their service down.
You need to connect to your fresh air inlets from your other rooms. So if you have the doors closed to your bedroom which is the nearest fresh air inlet, you're going to need to do a bypass vent above the door into the bathroom. Other than that it's like you're sucking air in a bag. Not going to work too well so it's just sucking air around the cracks of the door into the next area that has a fresh air inlet
It’s a balanced system. That means the air coming inside is equal to the air going outside.
Um. You do know who has made the video, yeah?
Toot first ask questions later
Better out than in
So literally your master bedroom has visual access straight into your bathroom room from the street!! So that means if u r naked and blinds open and pocket door open, someone can see into your bathroom from the street. 🤔🤔🤔
Watched this video and farted, and it still stinks inside. Coincidence?
But how many people got $10,000 to spend to get fresh air what is a heck of a lot easier to crack a window and turn on a fart fan
Toot, First.
☺💨
Can i have an ERV like this AND a regular old fart fan??
When you shower, it produces steam. How long til that steam clears out? Is it still 10 or 30 min or 2 hours or whatever? Because of course a regular fart fan / bath fan will clear it out faster -- i worry if i build like this then the steam will sit against the walls and towels and everything for way longer each time.
You could, but that's why locations of exhaust points matter - to be more effective at pulling the worst out before it really spreads out. That and boost mode and potentially even tying boost mode to humidity levels detected in bathrooms means additional exhaust isn't really necessary in well designed systems.
Your wife is going to smell a fart for 2 hours
It would de-fog way faster if the make-up air (fresh air) were able to get into the bathroom -- you closed the bathroom door and made the room a big vacuum. It needs make-up air from the supply side of your ERV to replace the air being sucked out by the ERV.
Can't have less than 3 exchanges in 1 hour here in FLA,
re-read that.
You mean more?
@@isaiahanderson7237 It has to be between 3 and 7 exchanges per hour.
Are you building to ASHRAE241 health standards? They have clean air delivery targets based on occupancy.
The Ashrae 62 standards used to target 30CFM/person to stop Tuberculosis until the smoke lobby changed it to an odor control standard
At 240 cfm on high capable unit, he's well above the standard.
My understanding is that a tight house is desirable for its energy efficiency. But if you then have to have a special system to pump in fresh air, that takes energy. So what's the breakdown of how much energy you save in retaining heat/cold vs energy spent running the ERV. Not saying it's a bad idea just saying theres more complexity and more maintenance costs for what benefit?
Building science taken to a new level. A lower level.
When experts tell us that we have to seal to reduce flow to a tiny amount, I ask them this question, and they cannot answer.
My range hood pulls 90-120 cfm out of the house. My bath exhausts pull 50-80 cfm out of the house. That is much greater than the recommended allowance, so where is the replacement air supposed to come from?? In my house, it come mostly from under the exterior doors, if no windows are open. I think it best to have a gap down low, because a gap high on a wall will send warm air out by convection.
Continuous ventilation systems are an example of our progress along Joseph Tainter's trajectory described in "The Collapse of Complex Societies". That, and the requirement that it must be possible to put a crock pot on any spot on a kitchen counter and plug it in. And oh, we had that requirement for islands and peninsulas too until we found that putting crock pots on these places is a bad idea. So the current requirement is that you have to provide the home owner the means to still do that.
A tight house can always have a window cracked open to make it behave as a leaky house. A leaky house will always leak and require more energy to condition.
Should we get rid of cars and go back to horses?
@@phamlam3720 The continuous ventilation systems run all the time, even if it is pleasant weather and you have windows and doors wide open. Here in Colorado, I only run an air conditioner for a few hours a day in the middle of summer, and for most of the day the doors and windows are wide open. But bathroom exhaust fans run 24x7x52. There is no ERV. The balcony door leaks all the time. So, this mandated ventilation requirement for this newly constructed apartment wastes money and energy and accomplishes nothing. But the bigger objection is to continued growth of mandated solutions that are subject to regulatory capture and guilds.
@@richdobbs6595 The people on this channel are talking about building better. Better houses with fresh filtered air. You can build and live in whatever you want.
@@phamlam3720 BS. This is part of mandated codes that are routinely enforced.
@@richdobbs6595new houses are generally built tighter and pay more attention to ventilation than older homes (bathrooms and kitchens being a big area of focus with mechanical ventilation). It’s better this way because it creates a healthier home that doesn’t have mold problems, poor air quality, wasted energy, bugs, drafts and other problems.
I think people ask way too much from a house. If they are so worried about the fresh air, then just open the windows or install a single unit system in each room.
Why put an ERV in every room when you can have 1-2 for the whole house?
@@niktak1114 Because people are too worry about things.
Matt, something that you have to remember. Your new home is not the standard home. You put a lot of extras into things the average home and builder don't have or do even today. You built your home to a standard that is difficult to find in most homes. That's not to say we shouldn't, but are the savings worth your health? I have seen many newer homes in the past few years, and I can say from what I have seen, very few homes are installing fresh air systems. Your home is far and above the norm. Even multimillion dollar homes don't go to your standards in home building.
Nothing beats good old window in my personal life long experience
It depends on where you live. Where I live, it can be in the 90s and humid in the summer and below 0 in the winter. Opening windows at either extreme tends to make people justifiably upset. I get about 3-6 weeks of window weather per year. Other places will differ.
I believe it would be better to condition the air in the house instead of constantly bringing in fresh air. You should use an I wave and see how fast it clears the air. Astronauts do it in space all the time I don't know how it's done but it's doable
Astronauts need air (oxygen) replacement. It's not 100% continuously recycled; the carbon dioxide is removed (scrubbed) from the air, but it can't be turned back into oxygen. (At least, not in space, at this time.) So, yes, they bring in fresh air.
I just want to note here that the “fart testing” thumbnail complete with dumb face in the corner is what made me unsub from your channel. Peace!