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Keeping Safe

From "Best Built Home"
episode DBBH-105F

Not all outside air is good air and the traditional method of bringing this air in is inefficient. Many production builders are going to be using energy recovery ventilators (ERV) in the process of bringing fresh air into the house. Build IQ's Michael Dickens shows host Lynda Lyday what an ERV is and how it works in this final segment of Best Built Home workshop. He explains what it does and why builders use them. Michael also discusses the harmful gas Radon. He shows Lynda how easy it is to have a system put into a new home to take care of the danger automatically -- keeping the occupants of a house healthy and safe.

In this final segment of DIY's Best Built Home workshop, host Lynda Lyday talks with Michael Dickens, the CEO of Build IQ, about keeping your home safe with clean air.

Figure A

Our homes are filled with something that can keep us healthy or make us ill -- that is air!

Treatment and movement of the air is key to the health of your home. Michael says a healthy house starts with an integrated approach, which means the home is air tight, water resistant and that the air is filtered properly.

An innovative way to filter your home's air is with an Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV -- figure A), which allows the outside air to come in where the ERV takes the moisture "out", mixes it with air from the room and then pipe the clean, healthy air back out into the indoor rooms.

Another major air-quality concern is radon, a gas that you can't see or smell. "It comes from the earth," Michael said, "in many parts of the country, comes up underneath the house -- will come through cracks in the foundation." The answer to solving this problem is in a couple of areas of your basement, install PVC piping and then a high-efficiency fan.

The fan basically sucks the radon up through the gravel and evacuates it out through the roof vent of the house.

After watching the five-episode Best Built Home workshop you know that the better built homes are not just about location, square footage and wall colors. Remember that a best built home starts with an integrated approach to building.

A home needs to be --