Solutions for the requirements of the NZ Home Star

SolutionAir offer innovative products and advanced solutions, to protect our living environment and enhance our personal well-being. Adequate ventilation within a building ensures good air quality, by removing toxins and CO2. It also helps to control humidity, thus reducing the risk of condensation.

Our living conditions are changing. What once was the norm, today is becoming unobtainable. Changes to the Unitary Plan in Auckland, increases in industrial investment, increases in noise pollution are contributing to changing our lives as they once were.

Residential buildings are also changing to keep pace with an ever-changing environment, new building requirements, new materials and the introduction of new technologies.

New Zealanders are slowly coming to the realisation that in winter our houses are actually cold, humid and damp, and that mould spores are the cause of many respiratory illnesses such as asthma.

The World Health Organisation and the Global Initiative for Asthma predicts that by 2025, some 400 million to 450 million people will have asthma. A New Zealand-led assessment, which combines previous studies, estimates that about 5 per cent of the global population, suffers of asthma. The rate among New Zealanders is 15 per cent. Should these numbers call for warmer homes, better insulated homes, healthier homes as a whole? We believe so!

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Energy efficiency and thermal comfort can also be enhanced. Air quality can be affected by a number of impurities, such as low-level irritants (dust, pollen) right through to radon and volatile organic compounds. In humid or colder areas, and particularly in uninsulated buildings, there is also a significant potential for condensation when humidity levels are too high, and this can result in mould growth and various health issues like asthma.

The market is currently saturated with wrong or misleading information. One such misleading example is that you can vent your house by opening windows and doors for a few minutes. This process is known as natural ventilation.

International studies have shown that to ensure adequate ventilation by natural means, the windows in a reasonably well-sealed home would have to be opened at least four to six times a day for a reasonable amount of time (around 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size of the home, openable window area, prevailing ambient conditions, etc). Now refer this to a cold winter’s day when you have just spent the entire morning trying to heat it up. Opening windows and doors to introduce much needed fresh air is going to push all the heat you have generated and paid for out of the window and simultaneously it will introduce cold air. Not the ideal result we should be looking for.

Take positive pressure ventilation as an alternative solution. This is the process of pushing roof air into your house. Air that has to find a way out of the building envelope in order to take stale/moist air and pollutants out of your home. Unless the home offers dedicated escape routes for this air to exit the building envelope, air will start to exit your home through power points, downlights and other unconventional openings in the house. Once stale/moist air starts exiting your home through power points, it will start to rot your house from the inside out. As there is no escaping the building paper and gib cavity the timber will start to absorb this moisture to the point of saturation and then it will start to rot. Once again, not the ideal result we should be looking for.

None of the above is not a new phenomenon, in fact many countries around the world have been working on how to deliver fresh air ventilation while keeping heat inside your home. Maybe because some countries have much harsher winter conditions, they have had to find a solution faster than we in New Zealand. The advantage we now have is that such solutions have been developed by internationally acclaimed companies such as Blauberg and Maico from Germany or Utek, Elicent and Aertesi from Italy.

Solutionair is privileged to have been representing these companies in New Zealand and to be in a position to benefit from years of experience to help New Zealanders find a solution for their home ventilation.

Talk to us - our solution is air!