Why Washroom Ventilation is Important

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:

1. Providing outside air for breathing. We need fresh air to circulate in order to breathe. Naturally, if the room was airtight, then we would soon use up the oxygen circulating within.

2. Diluting and removing airborne pollutants and odours. As odours are released into the room they contaminate the air. With no recirculation of the inside air, those odours and other airborne pollutants will sit, which can pose a health concern.

3. Controlling excess humidity. This is perhaps one of the most important reasons why you’ll want to ensure you have adequate ventilation in your commercial wash space. As water vapour begins to enter the room from toilets, condensation on cisterns, running taps, urinals, showers and baths, the moisture in the air can cause damp and mould. This, in turn, can become a health hazard.

Looking after your interior

We’ve spoken about how damp can grow in washrooms without adequate ventilation, but it’s worth considering how moisture in the air can condensate onto mirrors, making them unusable. Condensation sitting on porous surfaces will cause them to weaken, and on the floor, condensation could become a slip hazard. Humidity and ventilation control is paramount to effective washroom maintenance but can make your washroom easier to look after and clean on a day-to-day basis.

Getting the right ventilation for your washroom

In order to work out the ventilation needed for your washroom many things come into play. For example, full-height cubicles will need individual extraction. The cubic space of the room also needs to be worked out as well as how many toilets and hand basins are in the space too. 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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