CHAPTER XIV
AIR AND ITS ENTRANCE AND EXIT
“Am I an _airess_?” not _heiress_, ought to be the question to ask yourself if you are really a responsible home manager. It seems strange that with all the air to be had for the asking you let it pass you by, content with whatever draughts and gusts filter through the cracks and crevices of your house.
Now it so happens that although air is to be had for the asking, you have to woo it if you want it. But it pays. Keep the air about you in good condition and you and all those of your household will soon find yourselves approaching the 100% efficiency ideal.
Business has found this out already. Do you know of any factory, good school, bank or department store, where there is not installed some sort of ventilation apparatus including weather strips as well? Of course not. Why? Because fresh air keeps costs down and keeps health up. On this relation of health and output, efficiency depends.
Does it not flash into your mind now that if housewives thought more of home ventilation and especially kitchen ventilation, you might have improved service, better tempered cooks, and more satisfactory life in general?
Of late there are cults of out-door fiends. All kinds of cold-attracting, pneumonia-coddling out-door fanatics, who try to tell you it is good to sleep in draughts, to have cold feet, and the like. Their advice is wrong. The thing to do is not to subject yourself to the rigours of cold, but to approximate, in your warm, comfortable rooms, the sweet clean purity of out of doors. And this is easy to do by proper ventilation.
Ventilation can render air even better than the outdoor variety by purifying it of dust and by supplying it with the right amount of moisture and motion.
For the ordinary home the great air conditioners and ozonators, which are installed in institutions and factories, are unnecessary, so we will not consider them. The best, simplest and least expensive ventilating system for the home is the system regulated by fans and blowers, and to this method we will introduce ourselves.
Now, it is conceded by ventilating and heating engineers that the air, to be healthful, must be in ceaseless motion, and it must be renewed constantly and evenly. In other words, it doesn’t make much difference if the air is burdened with carbon dioxide gas which we exhale from our lungs, as it does if the air is stationary. Hence the use of air agitators such as fans, etc. The theory is that, as the pores of our skin exude moisture, the body is comforted and cooled by its evaporation which is effected more readily by constantly moving air. Moving air, however, does not mean a draught.
In the ideally warmed house, the doors and windows are nicely placed so that the warm air gracefully exits from the top of the room and the cold air comes in from the lower parts of the room (such as lower windows or well-placed air takers.) Thus, the air is moving nicely without the least draught.
So it will in the use of the fan and blower types of apparatus on the market. But before we go on to describe them, it will be well for us to review some of the reasons why humans need special air treatments.
It is said by scientists that:
A Woman exhales 600 cubic feet of carbon dioxide per hour. A Young Man exhales 614 A Young Woman “ 453 A Boy “ 363 A Girl “ 343
Whereas women don’t breathe so much of what is noxious yet they have to look after their men folk! But joking aside, doesn’t this impress you with the foolishness of inhaling so much vitiated air when the supply can be renewed so easily with fresh air? Also when you realize that humans give off 1000 grams of water vapor under normal conditions per hour, and emit 350 British Thermal Units per hour. (A B. T. U. is the amount of heat which will raise 1 pound of water 1° Fahrenheit or from 32° thru 33° of heat--at normal, not heavy work.)
Another authority says that air should be renewed per hour:
10 times for public toilet rooms. 6 “ “ clothes lockers. 4 “ “ small meeting rooms. 5 “ “ public offices. 4 “ “ ball rooms. 15 “ “ kitchens. 20 “ “ laundries. 3 “ “ libraries.
The average air change in the average room is one to two times per hour. In the well-built house it is two to three--due to fire-places, windows, doors, etc.
Of course there are other opinions, but this data gives you an idea of the necessity of changing old for new air.
[Illustration:
_Courtesy of Ilg Electric Ventilating Co._
SHE IS COOL EVEN IN SUMMER WITH MOVING AIR]
GOOD VENTILATION
The requisites then for good ventilation are:
1. Equable temperature from about 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit, and the moderate relative humidity or moisture of 45 to 65 per cent. In order to keep the room moist in winter it is well to keep a pan of water on the radiator. Regular humidifyers can be bought for this purpose.
2. Clear air, free from impurities such as dust, insects, oily vapors, soot, etc.
3. Odorless air (you have been sickened by the use even of the most costly of perfumes!) free from gases and vapors.
4. Air motion; but the motion must be accomplished without those objectionable blasts of wind that so frequently startle you in some houses which are supposed to have the most up to date equipment. The weather strip is insurance against the gale.
Air isn’t a mysterious chemical combination. It is a mechanical mixture of 21 parts nitrogen, 79 parts of oxygen, from 0 to 4% of moisture, and usually 4 parts of carbon dioxide gas per 10,000 parts of air, so it need not distress you to effect a good clean supply of air and equip your house with some of the steadily improving devices now on the market.
SOME DEVICES
Any device to be useful to the home must, of course, be convenient, economical, safe to operate, and durable.
Well, let’s begin with the kitchen; for this ventilation is more necessary than any place else in the house.
Not only is it difficult to keep the kitchen in equable temperature, but to have it cool often means a draft, and a draft means a cold for the cook, and a cold for the cook means danger to the whole household. Then there are odors from the kitchen. These are continually getting loose, unless the door of the kitchen is kept closed (which is trying) and infecting the house prematurely with the taste of dinner. All of which is uncomfortable and gives the home a commonplace, tenementy atmosphere. Your home may be judged by its laundry and cooking odors! The fewer, the better. Did you ever think of that?
The cellar is another important room to keep well aired and should be provided with windows and doors to formulate a current of air. Pantry and laundry, too, should be built with ventilation in view in order that, as in the kitchen, these rooms can be kept sweet and savory.
Without extra ventilation apparatus, you can take advantage of the movement of air; as it cools, it falls and as this falls it is heated and rises again--keeping up a rotary circulation:
1. Lower windows from top and bottom so that the warm air will go out at the top and the cold air come in at bottom, starting the circulation of air.
2. If not too draughty, have a door open opposite the windows, or use a draught board or screen which can be easily placed on window sill to curb current.
3. Cool moist air can be had often by hanging up a damp sheet and re-wetting it as it dries.
4. Fireplaces with small or large fires in them cause air current.
5. In some rooms which have a grated air intake cut into the walls near radiator--air circulation is effected easily.
6. Give the risen hot air a chance to get out of the top of room, and give the cold air a chance to come in at the bottom of room--and keep it agitated--this is about the best advice. If you can’t do this, call in a ventilating and heating engineer--he will.
With the new type of ventilators, cookery odors, draughts, smoke, steamy vapors, smudges collecting over walls, curtains, etc., are obviated because they are all dissipated and sent flying to the big outdoors. Its blowers blow out the bad air. The apparatus, which is simplicity itself to operate, is attached to the ordinary lamp socket and placed in effective places. The improved motors are encased and almost frictionless in action, which means the minimum wear and tear and no cost for repairs. Some of the motors are self cooled which also does away with wear and hot boxes.
There are various kinds of fans which may be used. Those which change their direction in process of revolution are good. Some think they are better than the one-direction fan, and maybe, where the fan is used alone without other attachments such as purifiers and blowers, this style may be more efficient. It at least does the work more swiftly. But whatever kind you use, they should be so placed as not to make draughts. The steady movement of air is the only thing necessary, not hurricanes.
In the study it is necessary to have light and air and no draughts to blow papers away. The ventilator (which may be put on the window sill over the radiator thus obviating the uncertain winds coming crassly through the open window) will prove a boon to the writer or housewife.
Oh, Homekeepers, it is often that these office devices which are always employed where work is done, if installed at home, would keep your men folk and even your women office workers happy. You would be surprised how many people would come home to do after-hour work if the home were as office-shape as business places. And the ventilator is a very good point at which to start.
It is nice to think that along with ice cream, the steam boat, and other American inventions, applied ventilation seems to be an almost pure American product! So, you patriots, here is a way to build real air castles that will build finer and finer things as you profit by the stimulus which fresh air, more than any one commodity in the universe, can give.
WEATHER STRIPS AS AID IN VENTILATION
No consideration of ventilation of houses could be complete without a few words on the value of weather strips. It is strange too that this precaution in the home is so little known and that the house-wife has so little knowledge of their infinite good.
Disregarding them as a factor in the cleanliness and noiselessness of the home, disregarding in this chapter the intriguing facts of their manufacture and application, they are adjunct at their best in the home because:
They reduce the possibilities of draughts and therefore reduce the possibilities of colds and rheumatism and the like. See