Foreword

There are some excellent textbooks about ventilation currently in print.

With due respect to all other authors, those written by Hassam Awbi,
David Etheridge and Mats Sandberg immediately spring to mind. Many
aspects of ventilation are dealt with in the standard building services
engineering textbooks. Although the bias tends to be towards mechanical
ventilation. The one feature about all these sources is that there is little if
any dedicated coverage of the ventilation of dwellings. This is most sur-
prising, given that dwellings form such a large proportion of the UK's
building stock. A c o m m o n view is that ventilating houses is not compli-
cated, and therefore there is no real point in getting too interested in the
subject. This view is not consistent with the current state of the housing
stock with respect to the incidence of condensation problems. We still
have not got it right. Mainland Europe does not suffer from problems to
the same extent as the UK. Climate differences are but part of the answer.
This would suggest that the whole issue is rather more complicated t h a n
some people would have us believe.
It was a major surprise to me that n o b o d y had bothered to write a text-
book about domestic ventilation, aimed at a wide range of readers. I feel
that such a book is long overdue.
Whilst there is currently no main textbook, there are m a n y diverse
sources of information about domestic ventilation. These range from
Building Research Establishment reports and Digests t h r o u g h to research
reports by a range of other organisations. There are elements of useful
information within n u m e r o u s other publications such as the CIBSE
Guides. Given the implications for occupant health of inadequate venti-
lation, it comes as no surprise that some material can be located within
the vast a m o u n t s of paper published within the e n v i r o n m e n t a l health
sector. The majority of this information is very well written, and can be
cited directly in a book of this nature with little by way of c o m m e n t . The
frustrating thing is that all this information has never been collated and
x Foreword

cross-referenced in anything other format save that of the literature

review of research theses - hardly what is required for general use. This
book intends to remedy this problem. However, its scope goes beyond
that of a mere literature search. I have been involved in several pieces of
research related to domestic ventilation over the past 22 years. These range
from the development of air m o v e m e n t measurement techniques to the
monitoring of the performance of ventilation systems. This research will
be cited within the book as appropriate. In several areas, for example with
respect to the debate about the merits of passive stack ventilation versus
mechanical ventilation, the findings will hopefully be of great interest to
the reader.