Staying Dry
By Penny Dixon 21 December 2022
I awoke this morning to driving rain. No shock there, but as I dressed for my daily walk I realised that the jacket I wore yesterday was still wet. I picked up my old jacket to find the lining covered in mould. So I dug out a really old jacket and off I went. On our return we hung up todays wet jackets, trousers, gloves and hats with the set left from yesterday and I looked around at the layer of condensation on our (double glazed) windows. And I noticed the mould setting in around the rubber seals. I consider myself fortunate that I am warm, dry and housed well, yet we still have these issues.
Recent news has been full of mould and damp horror stories. The inquest for two year old Awaab Ishak, who tragically died in 2020 of a severe respiratory condition, concluded that it was as a direct result of the mould in the flat he lived in. The senior coroner said that Awaab's death should be a “defining moment” for the UK's housing sector, and I wanted to believe this was a one off, but as more and more stories emerged, it turns out these occurrences are the norm, not the exception.
About 450,000 homes in England have problems with condensation, which is not so surprising when every person creates 400g of water each day in the air they breathe out. Everyday routines such as washing, cooking, and drying clothes release moisture into the atmosphere such that an average family of four can produce 14 litres of water vapour in just 24 hours.All that moisture has to go somewhere.
This is not a new problem. Humans have not suddenly started respiring more, creating more moisture. The increase in moisture due to advances in lifestyle has not been a fast development – the acquisition of greater numbers of power showers and washing machines has occurred over many decades, and the UK has always been a wet maritime climate where our homes are designed to keep in the heat.
Our homes have gradually become better insulated and more airtight, but somewhere along the way we forgot to ventilate properly. We forgot that all that moisture has to go somewhere.
The problem feels like a very UK problem, that we have the technology to solve but seem unwilling to do so. Let me elaborate:
Ten years ago I bought a flat from a local developer, Ressance, which had MVHR installed. For the uninitiated Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery removes stale warm and moist air from rooms like bathrooms and kitchens. This warm air is passed through a heat exchanger on its way out of the building, and the energy is transferred to clean fresh cool air that is thus pre-heated before it is pumped into rooms like bedrooms and living spaces. The air in that flat was always fresh and clean, with no condensation or damp problems. The almost imperceptible background swoosh took only a few days to get used to, and after that, cleaning the filters a few times a year with a vacuum was the only inconvenience. I just checked out the Ressance website and to my great satisfaction they include MVHR on all but one of their flatted developments, and this is listed in the specification of their sales brochures. So I had look at other developers. My (limited) research – all three major volume house builders, plus some others who specialise in flats - did not uncover a single other example of a scheme with MVHR (feel free to tell me I am wrong! If you know of a development with MVHR please let me know). So either developers are not specifying it, or they do not think it is an important inclusion in their sales material (the spec of the sanitary ware in the bathrooms is MUCH more important apparently!) It actually blows my mind that this much publicised issue is still being ignored. I hate that it takes the death of a child to get this issue on to the public conscience, but I hope that it does, because it seems like that although technologically we have moved on, collectively, socially we have not. We collectively accept this status quo, when we should all be asking questions about the quality of our new housing, and we should be demanding something better. It feels, however, that we are all, equally, trapped by the volume housebuilders, who get away with the substandard product because there is nothing else for us to choose. They think that, as Paul Weller wrote in Going Underground, the “public gets what the public wants” but I do not buy that excuse. “The public gets what the public gets” is a more accurate summation.
Again and again I find myself looking back to Scandinavia who seem to a have a much more realistic, and practical grasp on their climatic situation. The house in the north of Sweden where I stayed with my family in the early eighties had MVHR. The flat in the Stockholm suburbs where they lived in the early noughties had MVHR (but was probably constructed in the 1960’s). MVHR is NOT a new thing. If you understand and accept, as they do in Sweden, that for almost half of the year the outside conditions need to be tempered before they are introduced to the inside climate then you have a grasp of the need for a better solution than the one we currently employ. We must accept that we live in a damp climate, and people want to be warm. We can’t expect people to ‘just open a window’ and then be surprised when they don’t want to, or can’t afford to, and condensation and mould occurs. We need to adjust our thinking to a fabric first approach and say “actually I will pay for the MHVR system, because I know it will be advantageous in the long term, and I will accept that I might have to wait a few months until I can afford carpets or a new sofa”. These systems will then become the norm which is important, because retrofitting MVHR is a lot more difficult than retrofitting carpet.
This approach is obviously squarely targeted at new homes. We have an existing housing stock in this country that will become increasingly under pressure of improvement, both thermally and in terms of ventilation strategies. Solving this colossal problem is going to be much more difficult, but not insurmountable.
We are currently working on a building of Victorian origin that was converted into flats sometime in the late 20th century with a standard makeover of uPVC windows, cement render coat, and chimney seals. In the intervening years the internal moisture levels have facilitated rotting floors, mould and fungus growth. Luckily we have the space to introduce MVHR, which, along with natural breathable fibre insulation and lime render, should allow the stone to breathe again and create healthy internal conditions to save this locally important building.
It is clear then, that there are scientists, architects, and engineers working right now on this newsworthy issue, and we will be able to solve it. For the sake of avoiding further tragedies, I hope we get it sorted soon.
Photo courtesy of Ridge and Partners LLP.
References available on request