Sometimes you need to vent!

​At Freesia Gardens we had been running our foyer ventilation system 24×7.

When I first moved into the building I thought the sound we heard in the foyer was air conditioning. Later I would realise that there wasn’t any “common air conditioning.” What we had was a fan motor which continually circulated air through the ground floor lobby and each of the lift bays, to prevent the musty smell developing which you sometimes get in older unit blocks.

The plan to save energy here was to put it on a timer so that it only operated between 8am and 7pm at night. This was a simple job for our sparky to identify which circuit it was on in our switch room and purchase a timer which we can even reset ourselves.

However, the 15 year old ventilation fan motor was rusty as it hadn’t been maintained and serviced. After a couple of weeks of being turned on and off, the fan motor itself shorted out.

This gave us the opportunity to get a brand new 3-speed foyer ventilation motor. We decided to set it to the slowest speed permanently as that was providing enough ventilation for the building. A new fan motor will actually use less energy than a fan motor which is over 10 years old as there is less resistance in the motor.
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We were also surprised at how cost-effective it was to replace a foyer ventilation motor. If we had known, we would have done this at the same time as putting the timer on the ventilation fan.

Brent Clark,
CEO, Wattblock