When someone can stand in his living room and shrug off record-setting heat waves and extreme winters with equal indif­fer­ence, maybe that is because there is some­thing going on in the walls. In resi­den­tial venti­lation systems, rotary heat exchangers are respon­sible for ensuring that the incoming air has the right temper­a­ture. “

The right thing in summer and winter: air flows through the moving rotary heat exchanger. The storage medium is alter­nately cooled and heated to give the air that gets indoors the right temper­a­ture. (Product photo: Systemair)

Air from outdoors is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. The fans force the air, and also the exhaust, through the rotor. And heat exchange takes place because of the rotor’s rota­tion,” explains Nerijus Lapackas, head of engi­neering at Systemair.

Systemair, which employs more than 5,000 people, produces more than 23,000 venti­lation units annu­ally at its factory in Ukmergė, Lithuania. Half of them go to Norway and the rest reach the market through big distri­b­u­tion centers in Sweden and Germany. The engi­neers at Systemair put a lot of energy into making sure their prod­ucts consume little of it, and they volun­tarily have them certi­fied by Eurovent, an industry asso­ci­a­tion. “We place great value on quality, service and coop­er­a­tion with our suppliers,” says Lapackas.

No more complaints

There were quality prob­lems four years ago. “The rotor drive was no good. We got quite a few complaints,” says Lapackas. Besides, Systemair wanted to set itself apart from its competi­tors better. “We wanted to distin­guish ourselves by making the rotor speed adjustable,” adds Lapackas.

So Systemair decided to use rotor drives and fans from ebm-papst in its resi­den­tial venti­lation units. After adjust­ments to Systemair’s require­ments, for example regarding speed, for about two years now a VDC-3-49.15 drive with inte­grated elec­tronics keeps the rotor running for more than 70,000 hours. “That was the best deci­sion,” says Lapackas. Since then there have been no complaints at all. “Now we can also control the effi­ciency of heat recovery and the mois­ture transfer, and there’s also the lower energy consump­tion,”

summa­rizes Lapackas, who has much more than just a shrug for the new drives, finding them: “Just perfect, perfect, perfect.”