Ventilation maintenance in Brussels

Central Brussels mixes 19th-century town houses, interwar apartment blocks and recent homes created from conversions. These three building types raise entirely different ventilation questions: former chimney flues repurposed as extract ducts in the older stock, shared risers in apartment buildings, heat-recovery systems in new dwellings.

Inside the Pentagon, from the Sablon to the Marolles, a large share of the flats came from splitting up old town houses. Bathroom extraction there frequently joins a former smoke flue, shared or not with the floor above, while the kitchen vents onto the inner courtyard. Finding out where the extracted air actually goes is the first step, well before any talk of cleaning.

Laeken, Neder-Over-Heembeek and Haren look different: terraced houses from the 1930s to the 1960s, housing estates from the 1990s onwards and, more recently, entire new districts around Tour et Taxis and the canal, delivered with a heat-recovery unit per apartment. In those buildings the installed units are often Zehnder, Renson or Brink, and it is the heat exchanger you need to open to judge the real state of the system.

Access matters as much as the technical side. We cover every postcode in the centre, for private owners and managing agents alike, and the technician phones ahead before arriving. In a building with a shared riser, a visit coordinated with the caretaker or the manager avoids treating a single flat with no lasting effect on the neighbours. A key left with the caretaker or an entrance code is usually enough to reach the plant room without detours.

For residents of the centre who work during the day, weekday evenings and weekend slots can be booked online, with a report sent to you after each visit. Those who prefer daytime will also find weekday afternoons in the diary.