Remember your mother asking you if you were "born in a barn"? Because every time you came into the house you left the door wide open? The expression hasn't aged well, as old barns don't hold a candle to modern hog and turkey barns. Our point? your Mom was right, and you need to keep your doors shut.
When New Standard is installing new ventilation equipment or helping get a new barn setup, it is always part of our training to educate farmers on keeping rooms as sealed as possible. Keeping hallway doors propped open breaks this seal and are often the biggest offender. Keeping these doors open has an adverse effect on the ventilation of a room.
Recently we were able to capture this data in visual form thanks to our Fusion control panel. Check out this image, and let us explain what happened so you can prevent this in your barn.
In this example, the door was only open for a few minutes. It only takes five to seven minutes for things to get out of wack.
In the graph above, the blue line represents actual room temperature, the blue solid represents the exhaust fan, and the yellow at the bottom is the Inlet position. Within the graph, before the spike, we can see that the ventilation is running at a fairly consistent level. Then someone props open a hallway door.
At this point, the room is no longer drawing in fresh air through the inlets but is pulling warm air from the hallway. Like water, the air takes the path of least resistance, and in this case, the hallway's warm air is causing our temperature to rise in the room.
As the temperature rises, the fan speed and Inlet position also increase. Once the door is closed after the temperature and ventilation have increased, we suddenly see a sharp drop. At this point we would be drafting the animals due to the increased ventilation because of the temperature rise from having the door open.
As mentioned, some side effects of merely leaving the hallway door open for 5 minutes can be drafting the animals with cold air and unnecessary ventilation changes that can take a while to adjust to normal fully.
The solution to these issues is simple, make sure that the door closes behind you, just like Mom would expect.