Installing ERV - Panasonic Intelli-Balance 100 Energy Recovery Ventilator in ICF home DIY

welcome back to lake lott build my name is john and today's episode is going to be an erv which is an energy recovery ventilation [Music] so let's get started i'll show you what i have purchased and then we'll go downstairs and i'll show you what i have done so far this is the box that it came in and the per the one that i picked out is made by panasonic and so this particular one is uh goes up to 100 cfm and it is rated for about the size of the house that i have which i am at i'd say around 1900 square feet so let's talk about the panasonic erv so this is the fv10ve2 which is rated for climate that is not super cold because it doesn't get super cold here like if i was up in north dakota or anything like that um it gets down to probably i think the last few nights it's been around maybe 10 12 degrees and so but in the you know in the summer it'll get close to 100 degrees here so this is the one that i've picked right now i can show you outside it is cold and we have some snow left on the ground we are in the middle of winter here and there is the lake sure is still pretty so anyway let's go downstairs and i'll show you what i have done so far okay first thing we're going to go over is the duct work coming into the house the second thing we'll do is the transfer of the air through the box through the erv and then the last thing i'll go over is the duct work on the outs going to the house and from the house so first of all let's talk about the duct work from outside to the actual unit i chose the insulated piping here the reason i've chosen insulated piping is that i have unconditioned air which could be either super cold or super hot it could be really humid and it could be not humid right so you have a difference from outside to inside you can get condensation on the piping and there could be different problems that can occur from when you're bringing outside air into the to the unit before it gets there and that is the reason i have insulated now the next thing we're going to go over is the actual unit itself what i have here is at the bottom left is outside air unconditioned that comes through first stop is the filter this is a very very high filter which will pull out any of the pollutants or anything or say pollen whatever it could be right that's in your area the next stop is through the heat exchanger and i will call this magic what happens in here is magic because i don't know exactly how it works but the air then leaves on this side and goes to that's the supply for the fresh air that goes into the house now the air that comes back out will be in this pipe here goes through here gets pulled through here in this way and then goes out the pipe going to the hou leaving the house and so you have your cross here and that's where you have the heat exchange and the humidity exchange so that the air that is coming into the house is matched to the air leaving the house so that you're not bringing in super dry air or super wet air or super cold air or super warm air right it could be it tries to match pretty close to the temperature and the humidity that is already in the house but the only thing that's there that it's doing is that it's cleaning it if you have maybe uh co2 or radon or vocs or whatever or just humidity from running your washing machine or your shower it's pulling that out and matching it from the outside and so therefore you have these exchanges of clean air into your house so it's consistently constantly i should say cleaning the air that is in your house and it's very important with a house that's icf that you do this because this house is so airtight and so that's why it's so important to make sure that you that you clean the air that's going in here here we are at the controls the first one is how often that it will run when it's on and so right now you can start for every let's say for every hour this thing will start at 10 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes 50 50 60 right now you can have an override which will be these wires here so let's say i'm going to take a shower well uh what i have is a control wire which is right here and that's an override and you'll have the button you'll have a button right here and that button will have a timer uh 20 minutes 40 minutes 60 minutes and you just tell it how many how long so when you hit that button it overrides this guy and comes on and will come on long enough for whatever that timer is so if that was a switch and you left it on it would just stay on continuous but all my switching will be timers okay the top one is the the supply air so it's going to be this one here right it comes through and it's going to be this motor that was back here so how much air is being pumped into the house and then the next one is how much air is going to be pulled out of the house which will be right here that motor that was right here and so you can start off by as little as 50 cfm all the way up to 100 cfm so for me i'm going to start with them both at 100 and then we'll try to do some balancing to see how it works but i bought this thing for it to run right i want to make sure that we are pulling out the most air and we're bringing in the most air that we can and so that is the reason why i'm going to have those start those because i can always back it down the other controller that i'll have will be this one right here so each bathroom has a controller right now what we're also thinking about is what if i'm upstairs cooking right and i turn on my big exhaust fan up here and i'm cooking i'm pulling a vacuum on the house right so where is this air going to be made up well i have another control here so that i can hit it so if i'm saying i'm over here cooking right and i turn on my big exhaust fan i can reach over here hit that button and then that allows those vents to open and start bringing air and so this guy might be pulling a vacuum and my supply might be pulling a little bit more but it has the avenues to bring fresh air into the house so older houses there was enough gaps and everything from either siding or if you don't have spray foam around your doors everything just kind of kind of you know i would say it like uh the house breathed right and so you didn't have these problems if you turn your exhaust fan that it was going to be pulling air but now houses now have gotten so tight that you really have to figure out if i'm going to pull air out of the house there where is it going to make up the air so let's go back downstairs and show you a couple more items okay so next thing we're going to talk about is this piping i found this piping online um some people hard pipe the whole thing into the house right so you'll have straight pieces and curved pieces right and and all those pieces all hooked together i chose to do what i would call a hybrid and i'll show you here in just a second as we'll go over to the other side so you can see some better piping so let's go over there okay let's get down here and i'll show you the tubing that i bought and the the camp uh the company is called ac infiniti and this is four inch um tubing and you can clearly see it here it's for air conditioner heating and vent so those parts are the flexible duct work now the next pieces that i have are the joints now the joints i made are the solid pipe and so let's look at one of those i'll show you a t and show you what how i have this laid out on the left side here is the pipe for the air going back so that is returned so that is the suck side so what i have here is right here is my shower toilet and washing machine and so i put this one will come out of this soffit right here or i should say fascia part of it right there and so we'll be pulling the air all from this side right here and then the other pipe is the pipe that is the fresh air which is going this direction now i wanted a little more separation instead of putting it right there i've put it over here and so the pieces that i worked with or that i'm using is a little bit different than like say duct work that you would have for a standard house what i have chosen is this piece right here which is an air diffuser so this piece comes off the face of it and so you have this piece here take this guy off there we go so you cut your four inch circle right in your drywall and that slides through and then on the other side this piece comes in like that and that's what clamps on the drywall and if you want to it has screw holes and then you can run your screw through the drywall and connect into this to make that a nice rigid fitting and of course let's say um well your flexible ductwork will go right here on that and so you can either clamp it with these clamps like that right or you can do the aluminum tape which is what i chose which is this i feel that this makes one it's twofold one it makes a super airtight connection the other thing is that this tape is really sticky and it holds it all the way around uh and it did a really really good job and of course this is the face plate and the face plate just simply slides in here like that and then this guy just spins and if you can see it allows how much air to go around this guy so if you want to spin it down this way less air right or you spin it this way and then on the back side of it of course it has a little set screw in here and then you can set your set screw and then once you go in there and then it's tight so what all you have is this amount that instead of you know a big long you know your four by 10 or whatever your size of your gray that or your diffuser that will be all you have is this little circle and i'll show you one that i have well what's going on just hanging out here my floor joist all right we're up here in the catacombs i will show you how this vent works all right so this particular one is going to be supplied for my erv so that's it right there hopefully that light's not bugging you guys too bad um and so this piece has two parts so this part here is going to go up under like that this piece goes over the top like that now underneath there's some holes put screws in so that that pinches those together so put one there just like that and i'll go to the other side like that now this guy of course just slides in is just spring loaded up underneath there and that's what holds that in now we need to connect this pipe to it and now you can see why you have to be on this side because unless you want to make this hole huge to slide it up in there that would work but you have this ring right that ring has to clamp on it so you got to be on both sides of the drywall so it's a little more cumbersome but i like it it works really well okay so now i'm going to take the end of the pipe spread all this out these are nice because i can stick my hand up in here to push that around to spread it because sometimes it wants to fall on the inside i just run my finger around it push it out just like that and then i start pushing on down now some people will take a zip tie or a clamp and clamp that down which is perfectly fine but i also want to make mine air tight and so that way that the pressure the air comes through here will make sure i don't lose in the air so i'm going to get that stuck down in there just like that and then what i do is i'll tape from there out to here so that this is an airtight connection all the way around the clamp will get you pretty close except for where it goes over the wire and there might be a bleed off there but this way i know that i'm not losing any cfm so what i do i'll take little pieces of this aluminum tape and i'll start to work my way around like that and you're thinking well this tape's not going to hold anything but i can tell you this this tape is absolutely wonderful i used this and we lived in the middle east and it held up in 120 degree ambient air which me meant the air in the crawl spaces or the attic spaces was more like 180 maybe closer i don't i don't even know i didn't want to go up there i don't know what it is but it's ridiculous but we need to take care of some duct work there we use this aluminum tape and the glue was able to survive those temperatures and it doesn't move right it's not like duct tape of um or a vinyl or masking where it starts to degrade so hopefully this showed you how i put it together and then you try to pull on it and i can literally lift the drywall it's that strong so i'm going to stick it up there and now you know how i put my erv 4 inch pipe in my house the last item that i wanted to talk to you about was actually balancing the machine and so you have these connection points that are right here and that's what these little guys are for i have plugs in them now but this is uh the guide for how many um when you hook up your little meter to how much fresh air exhaust air and all these so this is how this little deal works and so for me i will have to do a little bit more research once the house is completely done and i start to tweak and these things to make sure that we're if i want to run a little positive on it or a little negative on it right now i'm leaning towards i'm probably going to want a little bit of positive on it because if i run that exhaust span upstairs like i was telling you about i want more air coming into the house than is leaving the house and so who knows we'll see how it all plays out that will wrap it up for this episode i want to thank you guys for liking and subscribing uh it's been a lot of fun reading all the comments from you guys you know some of the comments are really really good uh because they're things that i haven't thought of right um what's been really neat is some of the people that um some of the comments that i received on little nuances little tricks of how to do things so yeah you guys keep the comments coming i love reading them you know some people are some people a little nasty but you know it all goes with it but for over you know for the most part everyone has been really nice and had a lot of fun and i'm really enjoying this so you guys make sure and like and subscribe and stay tuned so we'll talk to you guys soon [Music] you

Channel: Lake Lot Build

Views: 29,722

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Id: IrZF0z8hhLY

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022