My experience with a small ductless ERV alternative
I’ve benefited from all of the good info and ideas here and thought I ‘d share my experience with a ductless ERV I installed a few months ago in case helpful for someone else.
I’m renting a small house while planning to build my house this year, and I made the foolish decision to purchase a CO2 monitor. This meant I could no longer live in ignorant bliss.
I wanted a simpler ERV install than the WhisperComfort units (since I’m renting the house) and I didn’t like the reverse cycle design of some of the point ERVs like the Sonos, but I finally found simple wall mounted ERV units with proper separate air flows on AliExpress. When I realized one of them, the Broad AirPro FF 100, was also for sale on Amazon and the company has a New Jersey office, I picked one up.
One additional benefit that sold me on this unit is that it also has a built in HEPA filter. I live in central Oregon and really need this when there are wild fires in the region. I swapped in a cheap MERV 11 filter for now, but will put the HEPA back in when needed.
The Broad ERV was easy to install using an available window has performed very well for me through the winter. Even on one of the middle fan speed settings it has been able to knock the CO2 level in my kids’ shared bedroom down from ~1400 to under 800 every night. I do use a small helper fan to route some of the fresh air blowing down a central hallway into their bedroom.
I’m surprised point ERVs like this one aren’t more common in the US but maybe that will change as more people get a look at their air quality.
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That’s really interesting. How is the noise level?
Very interesting. can you post more pics of the core and the external vent?
Regarding noise level, the decibel values for the 4 fan/CFM speeds are in one of the images I posted. But subjectively, I'd say the lowest mode is almost silent, the 2nd level is very quiet, 3rd is noticeable fan noise when in the same room, and highest is a pretty loud fan sound. The plastic used is surprisingly thick and has a foam layer on the inside which I'm sure reduces the noise level.
Regarding a pics of the core and external vent, here those are. Not much to see for the core, but there's a youtube video on installing the unit which may have more detail. The core is described a "nano polymer membrane" with pores that are too small to allow cross contamination between the air streams.
Thanks for posting. I'd never seen this unit before.
Do you happen to know whether the airflow volumes listed in the table you posted are the combined total of intake and exhaust? Or for example in sleep mode is it producing 30 m^3/hr IN AND 30 m^3/hr OUT.
It is interesting unit. The air flow works out to 17 CFM on low and 60 CFM on high which is likely the balanced flow across the core based on the size of the core and wattage used. The 70% efficiency is probably based on one of the lower air flows so on high would be quite a bit less. It looks like they have integrated a cross-counter flow strategy which is nice to see in a core that looks to have pretty low resistance.
They have used a decently large HEPA filter as well to deal with higher resistance.
The Panasonic spot ERV in contrast has a much, much smaller core and is not very efficient at cold temps..as in 50%. It also has very basic dust filtering with max 30 CFM on the fresh air supply.
I’d assume just one fan in the unit, correct? It is ECM as well?
There are two fans in the unit, an exhaust fan and a fresh air fan, so that it stays balanced I believe.
Parts diagram from the manual attached.
@aunsafe2015, The airflow chart is for the fresh air in.
Not sure how much this helps, but this graphic from their installation video shows the two fans and the resulting airstreams through the unit.
Looks like a nicely engineered unit :-)