In this video we talk about how to use and maintain your HRV system — what is it
— how to use it — and how to maintain it. That's starting right now.
– Welcome to Homebuyer's School,
brought to you by Brookfield Residential.
– Hi there I'm Karl,
welcome to another Homebuyer's School video, specifically our homeowner how
to's—and remember if this is your first time on this channel and you want to get
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So today I'm talking with Luke Staniscia with Brookfield Residential, and we're
talking about how to use and maintain an HRV. This is Part 2 of our video series
on humidity management. So Luke, what is an HRV and how does it work?
– An HRV, or the Heat Recovery Ventilation system, is on
the cutting edge of building science.
It's one of the best ways to reduce humidity in your home. Essentially what
it does is it takes the old, moist and stagnant air from your home and
exhausts it out while simultaneously bringing in fresh air. What makes it truly
energy-efficient is it uses the heat from that otherwise bad air to warm up
the fresh air as it comes to the furnace. This way your furnace doesn't have to
work as hard, and it reduces your energy costs. All-in-all, the HRV is a life saver
when it comes to mitigating humidity that would build up in your home.
– Perfect, let's go see how it works.
– Now we're upstairs. We've already gone over what
your HRV does. We're going to talk now about how to use it. In the link below,
you can see the first part of the series where we discuss your humidifier and
how you can add humidity to your air. As mentioned previously, the HRV is designed
to remove humidity from the air. You might be thinking, why do I have one
machine that adds humidity while the other one removes it, and the answer is
managing humidity is one of the most important things a home owner does and
it can be both good and bad for your home. So in the instances where we need
to remove the humidity, we're going to use this controller.
You will have one of these in every one of
your bathrooms, and every time you
shower, turn on a sink, flush the toilet, you are going to be adding lots of
humidity to the air. So most commonly when you're using your HRV it's going to
be in the bathroom.
The bathroom control is very simple,
you simply press this button, the light will
pop on. As you can see here,
I've pressed the button once — it will
turn on the HRV for 20 minutes.
If I press it again it will turn it on for 40,
and if I press it a third time,
you've guessed it, 60 minutes.
It's important to note that the HRV is one big system so if you turn it on in
one bathroom, you're actually going to turn it on throughout the entire house.
So don't be startled one day if you're in the bathroom and all of a sudden
you're HRV turns on, somebody else in the house is probably done. What's great
about the HRV system is instead of having those old rickety bath fans that
make a lot of noise and cause you potential air leakage issues in your
attic, you are now replaced with a simple vent that quietly removes the moisture.
Since the HRV is such an energy-efficient device and it does not
take a lot of energy to run, I recommend turning it on for 60 minutes after every
single shower to remove any and all humidity. Now that we've gone over this,
we're gonna head downstairs and we'll talk about your HRVs master control.
We've already discussed how to control your HRV from your bathroom which odds
are is the time I'm going to use it most frequently, because that's when you're
producing the most humidity, but if you want to turn it on from the main floor
you can use your master control. Make sure the power button is pressed on and
then you press this fan button here—
and it will operate just like your bathroom.
Pressing it once will turn it on for
20 minutes, pressing it again will turn it
on for 40 and so on.
That's how we can manually turn on our HRV, but there's one
more important setting you want to discuss, and that's the dehumidification
aspect of your HRV. So instead of always having to manually turn it on, we can set
the dehumidifier to a certain percentage and any time the home will go beyond
that percentage, the HRV will turn on and will continually run until the
humidity has dropped below that percentage. To do that
we're going to quickly turn our master
control on, we're going press the mode
button until "RH" is flashing—
and RH stands for Relative Humidity—
we're then going to pick a percentage.
In this case I will set it to 33%.
It's important that you never set the
dehumidification setting to a lower
threshold than the humidifier in the
basement or else these two appliances are going to be constantly
fighting one another. So whatever you have it set to in the basement you want
to make sure that your HRV is set a little bit higher. Once you've set that,
you can forget it. That will always happen any time the home gets above 33
percent humidity. Other than that there's not much to learn about your HRV fee.
Just remember, run it every time you have a shower and you'll be ahead of the game.
– So we're back downstairs, we've learned how to use an HRV.
So Luke, how do we maintain it?
– Good question Karl. Maintaining an HRV is
pretty simple. Really, all you have to do is clean it when you come down here.
To do your clean, don't worry if it's running
—by simply opening the door you will
disengage this switch and turn off the
HRV.
Inside you're going to find your core.
Like many things in your home, this is
friction fit, it can be a little tricky to
get out so don't be discouraged if it
doesn't come out that smoothly.
Once you've removed your core,
you're going to want to take off these
little filter pads and go give them a
thorough rinse.
You don't need to use any type of special
cleaner, just water and a little hand soap
will do just fine.
You're going to want to do the same thing
with your core.
Lightly spray some water in there, let it dry
and then we're going to reinsert it.
After this has been cleaned,
you're going to want to take a little rag
—come into your HRV,
and clean out the inside.
This is important because you're bringing in a lot of outside air with dust
and contaminants that you don't want to recirculate throughout the house.
After everything is clean and dry,
you're going to put your pads back in.
Make they're nice and evenly spaced so
that they cover the entire grate,
and then you're going to reinsert the core.
You're going to want to be careful to try
and line up corner of the core with these
guiding flanges—and it's important to
note that it does not go in straight,
you actually want to put it in on a bit of
an angle.
Like I said, they can be a little tricky so
don't be discouraged.
Once you're done, out the clasp back on
and the HRV should turn itself back on.
We recommend that you clean this thing about four times a year.
You can't over clean it. Like I said before, you're removing dust and
particles that could become airborne in your home so whenever you have a
chance to clean it, come down and do so.
– Perfect. Do you have anything else to add in terms of your HRV system?
– Well like I mentioned before, managing the humidity in a home
is one of the most important responsibilities for any homeowner.
Letting it go too long and letting the humidity be build up inside of your
home can cause a lot of problems. It's very important to run this HRV
diligently and that will reduce a lot of the service issues you have throughout
the course of your life in the home.
– Perfect, and remember to watch Part 1 of our
humidity management series, how to use and maintain a humidifier — in the
video above in the description below. Thank you very much for watching. If you
have any questions about an HRV system, how to use it, how to maintain, it let us
know in the comments section below —and if you enjoyed this video and found
it helpful, make sure to like and hit the subscribe button below. Thank you and
we'll catch you next time.
– That's another edition of
Homebuyer's School. Tune in next time
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