ventilation

Condensation and mould specialists, Airtech Solutions, is offering expert advice and help to social housing providers following the Rt Hon Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, writing to council leaders and social housing providers regarding damp and mould. His letters highlight landlords’ responsibility to take action to protect residents from hazardous damp and mould following the tragic death of Awaab Ishak. As a result, the minister asks both council leaders and social housing providers to treat damp and mould more seriously.

For the offsite sector, the focus is not just on building efficiently but also building efficient and healthy buildings. To achieve both aims, offsite manufacturers need to be able to rely on their supply chain partners to make sure every aspect of a build is as efficient as possible. Close and early collaboration is key, as the fabric first approach demonstrates with more efficiencies achieved when important ‘hidden protectors’ are designed in from the start.

Building Product Design Ltd, which encompasses three subsidiary companies – Glidevale Protect, Passivent and Kingfisher Louvres, is an excellent example of this industry collaboration in practice and as Adam Ford, director of technical & marketing at Building Product Design Ltd explains, the company has developed
a package of specialist support and healthy solutions tailored specifically for the offsite sector.

Airtech, the condensation, mould and radon specialists, is supporting UK Radon Awareness Week (7- 13 November 2022) by giving five important facts about radon. Run by the UK Radon Association, this year’s theme for UK Radon Awareness Week is ‘Give Me 5’ with the campaign giving five important facts about radon, covering five sectors in five days. In support of Radon Awareness Week, Airtech is therefore advising households, private landlords, social housing landlords and employers, to take 5 minutes to read the facts and make themselves radon aware since this could be one of the most important decisions they make this year.

Many people are still unaware that radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking, posing a significant risk to lung health with 1,100 deaths each year estimated to be caused by exposure to the gas. Lung cancer diagnosis and treatments have been the most delayed of all cancers during the pandemic due to factors including overlapping symptoms with COVID-19 and shared needs from respiratory medicine services. It’s therefore vital to learn about radon and its health effects and simple to carry out a radon tests in homes and workplaces to help protect families and employees.

With autumn now our doorsteps, Tom Bowland looks back at a scorching hot summer in the UK and what this means when it comes to overheating and building design.

I’d like to say that as I write this blog in the fading heat of what was a really hot summer, I am sitting in the comfortably air conditioned Mitsubishi Electric offices in Manchester. Unfortunately, I’m working at home, with no cooling other than an open window and plenty of ice cubes in my drink.

Here in the UK, our buildings have primarily been designed on the principle that this is a cold country, leaving them ill-designed to cope with heatwaves. Years of legislation aimed at reducing energy use (with the best intentions) have resulted in air-tight buildings that effectively lock in the heat when temperatures rise.

The HVR awards have been championing innovation, excellence and achievement across the heating and ventilating industry for over a decade. The awards were held at Chelsea Harbour hotel on 29th September 2022, where over 200 heating and ventilation elite celebrated the very best of what the industry offers.

Titon entered the original Titon FireSafe® Air Brick following a successful product launch, and are proud to have won ‘Ancillary Product of the Year’. This is a fantastic achievement highlighting the hard work Titon’s teams have put into developing and manufacturing an innovative product range to the industry.

Titon’s FireSafe® Air Brick has recently been installed at the new Hayes Village development in West London.
Hayes Village, situated at Nestles Avenue, Hayes in Middlesex, is a brand new development from Barratt London offering 1,473 new homes.  Built on the former Nestle Factory, the area is undergoing signification regeneration.

With the topic of air quality gaining in importance for end users and landlords, SIEGENIA’s compact single room heat recovery ventilation unit can now provide an even healthier indoor environment as it is available with CO2 regulation on request.

Ventilation remains an ongoing challenge not just for private developers and self-builders, but also for those of us undertaking any refurbishment works on properties. With increasing airtightness standards in the UK for new build homes and the focus on procuring the most energy efficient products, we end up creating nothing more than highly efficient sealed boxes. This may sound ideal (and from an energy conservation point of view it is) but without a properly considered holistic ventilation strategy, poor indoor air quality and issues of condensation and mould will ensue and become a recurrent problem for housing managers and landlords.