Cleaning ventilation in the apartment

Residents of apartments rarely recall normal ventilation. But if the windows begin to fog up in the rooms, the smell of dishes prepared in the kitchen spreads freely throughout the apartment, in the bathroom water constantly appears on the walls, musty and stale air is felt, which means the ventilation system has stopped working in normal mode. In order not to risk the health of the people living in the apartment, the condition of furniture and other interior items, it is better to eliminate the causes of these malfunctions as soon as possible. This may require cleaning. ventilation in the apartment.

Checking the operation of the ventilation system

Before proceeding with active actions, you should check how ventilation works in the house. Doing it yourself is not at all difficult.

The forums advise you to check with a flame of a burning match or a lighter. With a normally working range hood, the flame should deviate towards the ventilation grill. Many people remember similar pictures of the Soviet era, calling to check the draft in the gas column and the hood in the kitchen.

Representatives of public utilities, especially gas workers, strongly oppose the method of checking the operation of ventilation in the apartment with a lighter. In residential buildings with gas mains, gas leaks are quite possible, which should just be drawn into the common ventilation pipe. In this case, it is possible to provoke an explosion of the combustible mixture, which will lead to the most sad consequences. Therefore, it is recommended that verification be done in a safer way.

In order to be safe check ventilation, you need to do the following:

• Cut a strip about 30 cm long and 3 cm wide from a newspaper or just a sheet of ordinary writing paper.
• Bring this strip to the ventilation grill with closed doors and windows.
• If the strip is attracted to the grill, then everything works fine and cleaning the ventilation is not required. And if attracted weakly or does not react at all, then we must look for reasons. Most likely, you will have to clean the ventilation ducts.

Similarly, you need to do with all the ventilation grilles to get the full picture. In most apartments, they are necessarily in the kitchen, bathroom or bathroom.

Causes of clogged ventilation

The most common problem leading to a malfunction in the ventilation system is clogging of the air ducts. Most often this is due to the long-term accumulation of fat, soot and dust inside them, because most of the residents of apartment buildings are limited to wiping the outer part of the gratings.

In old houses, the brickwork of the ducts collapses under the influence of time and the water that gets inside, seeping from above or evaporating from the bathroom, and fragments of brick can fill up the ventilation shaft, interfering air exchange. There are often cases when unscrupulous residents, wanting to improve their apartment and expand their living space, destroy the ledge in which the ventilation shaft passes, blocking the access of air to the apartments of the remaining inhabitants houses. Unsolicited residents: birds or wasps also contribute to ventilation blockages.

Residents of multi-apartment buildings should remember that representatives of special services should deal with cleaning the main duct. So if ventilation does not work due to clogging, you should contact the management company that serves the house. The maximum that residents can do on their own is to clean the ventilation ducts leading from the apartment to the common duct pipe.

How to clean the ventilation

After checking each hood in the kitchen, bathroom and rooms, it will become clear which channels are clogged. If ventilation does not work in all rooms, most likely the problem is in the common channel and make you can’t do anything on your own, if only in one thing - there is a local blockage, which can eliminate. To do this, you must:

• Remove the decorative grille and clean it of accumulated deposits. In this case, it is quite possible to use neutral detergents.
• Carefully clean dust, dirt and soot from the walls of the ventilation duct with a scraper, and then pull it out with a vacuum cleaner.

Do not use aggressive reagents when cleaning, which can corrode and ruin the walls of the shaft. Debris from the ventilation duct leading from the apartment into the common duct is not allowed. When cleaning, care must be taken: sometimes in ventilation there are nests of wasps or hornets.

Ways to improve ventilation in the apartment

What to do if cleaning ventilation did not help? It is possible that the air circulation inside the apartment itself is disturbed. By understanding the causes of this violation, you can improve ventilation in the living room.

Violation of air circulation between individual rooms

The first step is to repeat the check with a strip of paper, but at the same time open all the interior doors. If the paper is attracted under such conditions, then the air circulation between the individual rooms of the apartment is disturbed. To improve it, it is recommended when installing the doors to make a gap between their lower edge and the floor a few centimeters.

If the doors are already installed or you do not want to make such a gap, for example, in a bathroom or a bathroom, then you can drill a number of holes in the door, with an inclination inward. Subsequently, they should be decorated with a fine mesh. This design will provide ventilation with tightly closed doors and will not violate the privacy of people in the bathroom or toilet.

Airtight double-glazed windows

Another reason for the violation of ventilation may be the installation of plastic windows with double-glazed windows. In Soviet-built houses, the influx of fresh air from the outside was implied through small crevices and gaps in wooden window frames. Qualitatively installed plastic windows in a completely closed state exclude such recharge. As a result, ventilation in the apartment is also disturbed. Therefore, if you are thinking about installing double-glazed windows, then preference should be given to models with a micro-ventilation system.

Already installed double-glazed windows, devoid of such functional features, are easy to modify on their own. Low-cost ventilation valves are available for installation on the frame and window fold.

There are models of ventilation valves with manual adjustment and automatic devices that respond to increased humidity levels in the room.

Lack of natural ventilation

Some rooms, such as a kitchen, toilet or bathroom, it is advisable to equip with additional ventilation devices so that water vapor and odors are drawn out as quickly as possible, rather than spreading through the whole apartment. The simplest solution to this problem is to install a device that provides forced ventilation. A fan adapted for continuous operation in high humidity conditions can be mounted at the outlet of the ventilation duct instead of the grille or inside the duct.

As a rule, modern houses already at the construction stage are equipped with an integrated supply and exhaust ventilation system. But a major restructuring of the entire apartment is required if there is a desire to install it in old houses. A centuries-old natural ventilation system is preferable if normal copes with its tasks, and to improve its work it is enough to use the above methods.