Tom, last weekend on your radio show, you answered a guy about dust in his house. You told him to do something to the house like exterior vent, or something that you said would reduce dust and improve the air quality. You mentioned to look on your website , but I can not remember what you called it. I searched for dust, and looked at the air quality video, but can not find it. Please help.
Shawn
Tom’s Answer:
Tom: First off on the website, if you go to the right angle section, the article I wrote about this particular subject I’m going to get into is there for you if you want to read it. In fact, the pictures on that website at the right angle area is my own attic. We’ll leave it at that.
As far as what we are talking about, it’s called a fresh air return. It’s quite the controversial subject right now with a lot of air conditioning contractors, but as far as controlling dust, it really works in my house. I’ve had it for 16 years or something in the house.
Charlie: How does it do that?
Tom: I’m going to tell you. What it does is you’re going to have infiltration in your home one way or the other. What you do is by putting a duct to the outside and bringing in fresh air from the outside to replace any of the air lost from the duct work, you’re going to bring it in through a filter. You’re going to bring it in through the air conditioning or heating system depending what time and year it is.
Even though you’re going to get infiltration, you’re controlling it and you’re cleaning the air before it gets in the house. A lot of people think our houses are so tight that no air couldn’t get in. Think about your chimneys, think about your vent hoods, think about your dryer vents. They pull in air and if you let them pull in air from those places, you’re going to get dust in your home. Specially just think of a dryer vent and how much lint is coming in with that.
Charlie: So the idea here is to positively pressure your house?
Tom: Positively pressure the house and you’re going to have infiltration one or the other, so you control it, you condition it and you filter it before it ever enters into the house itself.
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