MVHR: The Design Only Works If It Can Be Built
I’ve worked on enough MVHR (Mechanical Ventilation with Heat Recovery) installations now to know that a design can look perfectly reasonable on a drawing and still become a completely different proposition once you get onto site. One project in particular brought that home to me. The MVHR design itself made sense on paper. The required extract and supply points were there, the duct routes had been considered and technically the system worked. The problem was that the building didn’t quite agree with the drawing. A central corridor formed the main route through the property, and once the other services and the actual construction were taken into account, the available space for the ductwork was far more restricted than it first appeared. That is where MVHR design becomes less about drawing…