New Zealand’s most advanced heat recovery and ventilation system, Intelivent, is now available and installed by The Heating Company, and Carters building supplies throughout New Zealand.
Intelivent’s unique heat exchanger captures, filters and redistributes an incredible 90% of heat generated in the home that would otherwise be lost through venting stale, used air.
Intelivent’s micro-processor (mini-computer) processes information from up to eight temperature and humidity sensors around the home. With six automated settings, it then automatically controls variable speed fans to distribute air from the heat exchanger to rooms to create an even, ambient temperature throughout the home. The controller will ensure there are at least eight complete air changes in the home every 24 hours—as recommended by the World Health Organisation.
A simple to navigate, touch key control panel allows the user to see environment and temperature levels around the home—and set the desired temperature for the home—day or night, winter or summer.
For the cost of running a light bulb, the Intelivent system creates a drier, healthier home. By regularly filtering and changing out the air—Intelivent is truly a breath of fresh air that removes moisture, odours, air bourne pollutants and carbon dioxide. With Intelivent, incoming air is passively dehumidified increasing comfort and reducing mould or mildew.
Intelivent will also helps save on energy costs. By recovering and recycling heat, an Intelivent system considerably reduces the amount of power required to heat the home.
To minimise heat loss when redistributing the recovered heat, Intelivent has developed the highest grade ducting available in New Zealand. Rated R2 by the NZ Building code, this ducting is exclusively available for Intelivent systems and ensures an effective redistribution of warm air throughout the dwelling that is up to 3 times better than competing systems
The high quality fans are inline ball bearing models requiring no lubrication. They are factory balanced for minimal vibration and a quiet operation.
Intelivent can be easily installed into existing or new homes with ceiling cavities by The Heating Company. Prior to installation, a Heating Company consultant visits the home to review the current heating methods so the maximum benefits from an Intelivent system can be gained.
Coming with a three-year warranty, installation usually takes just one day and home owners notice the improvement immediately.
June 10, 2010 at 4:24 pm
Re. the heat recovery,
From my findings it is incredible to state 90% savings on normally lost heat, thru other stated systems.
The air ducting must be 150mm dia, insulated, in short runs with smooth preferably solid ducting. I am currently researching information on the best Heat recovery system worldwide and its becoming there is no ultimate with all claims but I do know it is the way of the future Sealed up homes having high insulation values with a heat recovery unit ticking over 24/7- Passiv haus technology. I’m sold on it.
Still not so sure about steam from the bathroom given condensation (rain out caused when a 2 degree temp drop occurs from source to exhaust water droplets then form) within the ducting – seems a problem waiting to happen. Any thoughts
Stew
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June 14, 2010 at 12:31 pm
Hi Stew, thanks for your message.
You seem to have done a fair amount of research and it’s great you’re sharing some of your findings and questions with us all.
Many ratings around heat savings are taken from the incoming and outgoing variances at a heat exchanger only – as you have alluded to the ducting and in this case duct run length have implications around recovered heat making it back into the living envelope of a building.
With all the marketing out there it’s very hard to distinguish the real points of difference, however I hope the following sheds some light.
What you have possibly concluded is that for sensible heat recovery a counterflow (99%) heat exchanger (as in Intelivent) has a higher maximum efficiency than crossflow (75%). We are hoping in NZ we can get to a point where the same calculation is used by all players to give a fair evaluation and a comparative measure to the public wanting to make an informed decision. As a step towards this we have had our HX independently evaluated by ITL.
Your points around ducting are perhaps more pertinent to this performance point above. In an ideal situation (as with Passiv haus – as it approaches the whole building in its engineering design). Straight Rigid Ducting prefitted within the insulated living envelope, offers the least heat loss and least energy required to move air throughout the building. We can offer various services to achieve this within the process of designing a house or building.
In older NZ homes the design of many houses means that the most suitable place for the ducting is in the roof cavity and thereby often outside the insulated living envelope. (This is where European/US designed systems fall short – as they don’t often allow for this). This means that having a super efficient HX is not good enough, and the ducting insulation becomes significantly important. In almost all cases we are aware of, the highest level of duct insulation that is used by various HX systems is R0.6 rated – with Intelivent the standard is R2.0. In practical terms, tests have shown us that competing systems are losing 1degree of heat every ~3meters of ducting while with Intelivent in the same conditions, 1 degree was lost every ~8.75m.
We think it’s no good having a great Heat Exchanger and marketing this (single) feature when you’re losing heaps more heat out the duct runs.
With EC forward thinking architectural designs (and engineered approaches like Passiv Haus) more care and consideration can be applied to ducting positions, and so fitting rigid ducts within the envelope is more possible. However it is still often more expensive than using flexible ducting, while as rigid ducting offers the best airflow, it is more expensive (should you need insulated versions) to purchase, and install than flexi ducting.
It’s really a cost proposition, and we have been working towards making this type of technology affordable for the average kiwi (as well as the EC purest). Having said that were passionate about the area HX ventilation and energy conservation and enjoy working with others that share this interest – so can custom design and engineer a system that fits a particular application and that can include rigid or flexi ducting to work towards desired outcomes, and fit constraining budgets.
As for Ducting the wet areas of the house (kitchen and bathroom) we feel that in NZ climate and conditions that doing this through a ventilation system may offer more issues than benefits – in existing house stock specifically.
However in newly designed homes the proposition is more tenable as you often have universal heating and thus less cool room impact from the wet areas chilling the heat going to the heat exchanger. Generally speaking however we support separate exhaust ventilation for these areas, to reduce “potential” issues and maintenance to the ventilation system thereby required by venting these areas (excessive moisture, lint, cooking fat).
Often they are warm only some of the time – and if cool (e.g. southern side of the building) they are essentially cooling any other reject air before it gets to the HX.
There are many points to discuss here (but we are possibly running out of words for the word count)
Hope some of this helps and good luck with your projects… if you’re in need of more information of a technical nature visit http://www.intelivent.co.nz and send the engineers an email. Or sales information our team at the heating company will be ready to help http://www.hotwire.co.nz .
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