Walk Through of the Panasonic Intelli-Balance 100 ERV

hi i'm brian with pioneer builders this channel is devoted to all things design construction operations and maintenance in this video i'm going to walk you through the panasonic intellibalance 100. this is an erv and we use this in pretty much all of our houses first i'll talk to you a little bit about what an erv is and then i'll talk you through this particular piece of equipment i hope you learned something today's a good day for this because this piece of equipment is actually going to be installed either today or tomorrow because one of our houses is having the mechanical contractor start today so this is the erv if you wanted to google it the model number is fv100 so this is a ventilating piece of equipment just a brief explanation why do we need this piece of equipment in our houses as energy codes have gotten tighter and tighter our building envelope allows less infiltration of outdoor air now as humans we're breathing all the time i've heard that it's 18 cubic feet per minute is the average person's breathing rate now a cubic foot is about the size of a basketball so just imagine breathing 18 basketballs of air every minute now imagine that you have a family of five maybe you have one dog two dogs maybe you have a cat what we're doing is we're taking in outside air our body is utilizing some of it uh we're exhaling because we have to have our building envelope so tight according to the building on or the building code we have to make sure that we're getting air that is we'll call it fresh air you might call it air that isn't stale because that's just what naturally happens now it's a good thing because it means that we'll be using less energy when we have a very tight building envelope but at the same time the human organism needs to function properly that's where an erv comes in what it ends up doing is it's taking in outside air mechanically what do we mean by mechanically it means that in the past while it was relatively passive to get our outside air in in other words you would have air basically just coming through leaks in your walls it worked in the past but we also were far less energy efficient with our homes we now have to use electricity to mechanically move air from one place to another in this case we're using a balanced ventilation system what does that mean what does balanced mean it means that while we're taking in air from the outside we're also going to be extracting air from the inside let's talk just a little bit more about how the erv works let's look at this like a book starting from the left unfortunately not like a book we'll start at the bottom of the page so to speak you can see that it's labeled outside air so this is where we would be ducted from the outside for air to be coming in on this side we would also have a duct and that says exhaust air so air would be going to the outside on the upper left as we follow the flow then we have air coming in here and i'll show you the inside in a minute and then we come across over to here and that's the supply error so top right is supply air as we come to the bottom right it says return air so the supply air is going to be distributed throughout the house there's a variety of different ways to do that and then there would be air that is stale or used up so to speak that will come in from the bottom right so looking at it from this side apologize for my little shadow there we have supplier that comes down here you'll see an enthalpy core in there i should say outside air and that's going to go and supply the house that's going to be where our lungs are going to get the air from and then there will be a duct that will bring in return air from the inside and it will be exhausted to the outside now if we think about that just for a minute we wouldn't want recycling of air so we have to have these two points on the outside of the house separated 10 feet is the number to be using there let's go ahead and look at these dials for a second as we come around and look at these dials we can see that there's a runtime dial there's a supply air cfm so we have a range of 50 to 100 and then we have exhaust air with the same thing we also have a filter reset button and a couple of leds right now this hasn't been installed and so that is still taped up not plugged in so we can adjust to have more supply we can adjust to have more extract or we can have them set for exactly the same due to the occupants we can have more supply or less supply really we want to adjust this depending on who's living within the home i won't cover everything about this fan but this is giving us a high level overview now let's go ahead and pop the hatch and see what's inside let's go ahead and walk through the air streams with the hatch lifted up again we'll start from the bottom left this is where air would come from the outside and it would pass through this filter i think this is a merv 9 you can upgrade it to a mirv 13 or you could disregard this entirely and put a filter box downstream of the unit itself maybe you would want to get some different filtration going on this big thing here is the enthalpy core so air will pass through here and while you can't see it from the position of the camera it comes behind this portion of the enthalpy core up to this fan this is the supply fan like we talked about that we can change the cfm number note 2 that this won't work unless the hatch is closed or unless you intentionally depress this guy to allow the electricity to work right now it's not installed so it doesn't really matter so we pass the airflow through here it comes up and it comes out and now it can supply the house it's filtered and it's passed through the enthalpy core now for the return side the air will pass through here and it'll hit this filter this filter isn't to protect lungs this guy is this guy is to protect the unit so it might collect things like pet hair fur that type of a thing and this airstream will also pass through the enthalpy core but the way this is designed is the actual air streams don't cross over instead heat can transfer if there's heat in the air and also latent heat or humidity so water in its vapor form can temper the air as it comes in so this airstream passes through it goes behind and now it goes out the extract air the i should say the exhaust air and that's going to go outside these guys you want to maintain a separation from so that you don't get back drafting and that's pretty much it i'm going to go ahead and unscrew this and see if we can't take out that enthalpy core and show you what that looks like now that we have the enthalpy core removed we can take a look at the inside better so you can see where that air comes through and this chamber over there at the upper left we can see another one there at the upper right and they're all separated from each other pretty marvelous work of engineering if you ask me let's look at the enthalpy core a little bit closer now that we have the enthalpy core removed let's take a close look and see what's going on here basically we want to look at the left side as air that can come through it or that's supplied to it even though in this case it's from the outside this is a supply from the inside if we look on the face of it we'll see that that is pretty well solid the way this is constructed as layer after layer after layer if we follow these through we'll see that it runs over here and would basically get blocked and the same thing so that's what's allowing that energy transfer whether it's in its latent heat form humidity whether it's actual air temperature that's what allows that transfer to take place when we look on the sides now we see again that same solid situation going on let me go ahead and turn it over now from the back side it's basically like a mirror image of what we saw before but we want to remember now that we're flipped over this is what's coming from the house and it's going to go outside here this is what's coming from outside and it's going through here notice that's pretty well solid going through there so that's basically how it works two air streams that get very close together and allow for the transfer of water molecules as well as uh the heat going through there just a couple more things again starting from the bottom left we'll look inside here i just opened that up but it's nice and spongy normally that guy would be closed electrically it would open up as we follow around then this as a reminder is the supply side and there's really nothing blocking any air from going out if you can see this i just spun the fan from in there now the extract air from the house again we're not really seeing much going on in there there's that little filter i'll see if i can get in there for you that we had talked about to capture things like pet fur and then one more time looking at the top we don't want to have any air coming in from outside when the especially when the fan's not in use so this guy is just a simple louver and there you have it that's the walkthrough of the panasonic intellibalance 100 erv i'm sure in another video i'll show it installed or i'll show you how we switch the thing when it comes to actual construction on site but at least for now i hope this gives you a nice idea about how this particular erv works it's not an hrv in the future i'll probably do a video on the difference between that so i hope you enjoyed this video again i'm brian with pioneer builders something i haven't mentioned for a while is go ahead and subscribe to this channel if you like it i try to cover a lot of things that i find interesting and maybe there's some other like-minded people out there who do as well i'm also pretty active on instagram my handle is pioneer builders inc and then my brother who works with me who you might already know might already subscribe or follow him he's tim euler at awesome framers so he's got a great youtube channel and he also is very active on instagram thanks for watching and i hope you learned something

Channel: Pioneer Builders Inc

Views: 9,315

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Id: P1I4o45Agkg

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 17 2022