Ventilation is the removal of stale indoor air from a building and its replacement with fresh outside air. There’s less call for this in your standard cloakroom toilet under the stairs at home, but you’ll find in bath and shower rooms, particularly in new builds, that ventilation is required to pass building regulations.
There are three main reasons why ventilation is required in the washing space:
- Providing outside air for breathing. We need fresh air to circulate so we can breathe. Naturally, if the room were airtight, we would soon use up the oxygen circulating within it.
- Diluting and removing airborne pollutants and odours. As odours are released into the room, they contaminate the air. Without recirculating the inside air, odours and other airborne pollutants will accumulate, which can pose a health concern.
- Controlling excess humidity. This is perhaps one of the most important reasons to ensure you have adequate ventilation in your commercial wash space. As water vapour from toilets, cisterns, running taps, urinals, showers, and baths enters the room, the moisture in the air can cause damp and mould. This, in turn, can become a health hazard.
Looking After Your Toilet Interior
Damp can build up in washrooms without adequate ventilation, but it’s worth considering how moisture in the air can condense on mirrors, making them unusable. Condensation sitting on porous surfaces can weaken them, and on the floor, it could become a slip hazard. Humidity and ventilation control are paramount for effective washroom maintenance, but they can also make your washroom easier to look after and clean on a day-to-day basis.
Getting the Right Ventilation for Your Washroom
To determine the ventilation needed for your washroom, several factors come into play. For example, full-height, floor-to-ceiling cubicles will need individual extraction. The cubic space of the room also needs to be worked out, as well as the number of toilets and hand basins. For exact ventilation performance requirements, please see Document F of Building Regulations, but as a rule of thumb, for a 10m2 office washroom containing three toilets and two hand basins, you’ll need an extractor fan that will operate on at least 18litres per second, referring to the amount of moist air passed through the extractor.
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