In the old days, none of us had to worry about
ventilation.
Radiator heating was fine all by itself in ourdrafty
old houses, which got plenty of fresh air
from the wind that blew in around the windows
and through the walls.
When the new air-tight homes first showed
up on the Canadian prairies, almost all of them
had "forced-air furnaces—so cutting off the
wind from blowing through the house didn't
cause many problems. The furnace fan kept the
air moving.
But when we built energy-efficient houses
with electric baseboard heating, here's what we
did:
First we eliminated the chimney, which
previously had served as a 24-hour-a-day exhaust
fan to draw bad air out of the house.
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