How to air your house properly?

Properly airing your house is absolutely essential. In particular, it:

• eliminates domestic pollutants (solvents, maintenance products, glue, ammonia, fungus spores and mould, etc.)
• reduces tobacco pollution
• eliminates odours
• evacuates CO₂ from breathing and combustion and increases the level of oxygen
• reduces the level of damp, increasing heating efficiency

All this benefits your health, your level of comfort and your wallet!

But how do you ventilate without cooling the whole house down? A few tips:

15 minutes is enough to air the house properly

A window open for 15 minutes is enough! That's it. With this method, only the indoor air will be cooled. It will take just a few minutes to heat the room again.

Leaving a tilt-and-turn window ajar all day, however, is not effective: it cools the walls and it costs much more to heat the room back up again.

Ventilate preferably before 10am or after 9pm

Outdoor air is less polluted before 10 am or after 9 pm. So make sure you make use of these times, and if you can, open windows that don't open onto the street.

Do not worry too much about pollution though: studies have shown that indoor air in offices and homes is, on average, more polluted than outdoor air!

Priority for the kitchen and the bathroom

The kitchen and bathroom are the rooms that benefit most from a good airing. Next come the bedrooms.

In other rooms, air generally circulates properly. It is therefore less important to air them regularly, unless there is a damp problem.

Air or ventilate?

If airing takes place occasionally, the installation of a ventilation system ensures the continuous renewal of air. This is also a solution for rooms without windows (the bathroom, for example).

Many systems exist and some windows are even now equipped with adjustable ventilation grilles that allow the passage of the air to be adjusted.

Si aérer s’effectue de manière ponctuelle, l’installation d’un système de ventilation permet d’assurer le renouvellement de l’air en continu. C’est également une solution pour les pièces qui ne disposent pas de fenêtre (la salle de bain par exemple).

Plusieurs systèmes de ventilation existent  et certaines fenêtres sont même aujourd’hui équipées de grilles d’aération réglables qui permettent d’ajuster le passage de l’air.