If you do put doors on yours, most homes need a louvered or vented door. Your appliances create heat and humidity while in use, and it needs a place to escape from the small room.
Air is essential to proper combustion and that is why proper utility room ventilation is essential to make a furnace, boiler, or water heater work properly and safely.
The dryer pumps a lot of air. If you intend to run it with the doors closed, they should be louvred or vented to an extent appropriate to allow sufficient air-flow.
Any new kitchen, bathroom (or shower room), utility room or toilet should be provided with a means of extract ventilation to reduce condensation and remove smells.
Muddy footprints, paw prints and piles of dirty clothes are not what your kitchen is for. That's why any utility room you build should (wherever possible) feature an external door. Then, when your kids, or whoever else for that matter, come traipsing in they can take off their dirty clothes, shoes, etc.
Cut the Noise: One reason many people want a door on the laundry room is to decrease the sound of the noisy machines. Especially with older machines, the motors and sloshing clothes can be annoying. And if it's near a living room, bedroom, or nursery, it may limit the time of day that you can wash clothes.
Doors leading from the property into the garage must be fire doors for safety reasons, protecting the entire property should a fire erupt in the garage. Other areas to consider installing fire doors are kitchens, downstairs landings/hallways and utility rooms.
As well as housing appliances such as the washing machine and tumble dryer, a utility room often doubles up as a feeding and sleeping space for pets, as well as additional storage for everything from cleaning equipment and supplies, to shoes, coats, sports kits and gardening gear.
Although local building codes require moderate amounts of laundry room ventilation, taking a few extra measures to improve this space is often essential.
With insufficient ventilation, warm air lingers in summer, which can lead to overheating and the need for more cooling. In winter, a lack of ventilation can allow cold air to enter, requiring more heating. This results in a higher energy consumption for both heating and cooling, and consequently higher energy bills.
Cons of Louvered Closet Doors
Reduced Sound Insulation: Louvered doors offer less soundproofing, which may not be ideal for closets near noisy areas. Limited Security: While they can keep items out of sight, they offer little to no security in terms of barring access to the closet contents.
Regardless of what color door you prefer, louvered doors are a great option when you have bedrooms, bathrooms, laundry rooms, pantries, and other smaller spaces that could use a little more ventilation.
If your Condenser Dryer is installed in a closet, make sure the doors are open during use to increase air flow. If the door must remain closed when drying, the door must have louvers and have at least 60 square inches of open area to permit sufficient air flow.
You don't need a vented laundry room door if the space is set up properly. Because washers and dryers create a lot of humidity, ventilation is a consideration. Louvered laundry room doors provide this easily, with open slats in the door to allow air to flow out as needed.
Ventilation. Ideally, a utility room will have a window to assist ventilation and bring natural light in, but this may not be possible, for example in a garage. Heat and moisture from washing and drying clothes needs to be tackled to prevent dampness and mould.
Standard Size for Closet and Utility Doors
Utility and closet doors usually have tighter passages that standard doors. In houses built before 1990's the doors could be as narrow as 18 inches. Newer comes usually have a width of 30 inches and a standard high of 96” inches.
Not less than 0.5 cfm per square foot (0.0025 m3/s × m2) of machinery room area or 20 cfm (0.009 m3/s) per person. A volume required to limit the room temperature rise to 18°F (10°C) taking into account the ambient heating effect of all machinery in the room.
Do Washer Dryers Need a Vent? In short, no they do not require a vent.
The garage, boiler room, basement, pantry or laundry room should, however, be designed and furnished in a practical way and isolated from the remaining interiors. This is why it is so important to choose good quality technical doors, matching the character of the given space.
A utility room is generally the area where laundry is done, and is the descendant of the scullery. Utility room is more commonly used in British English, while North American English generally refer to this room as a laundry room, except in the American Southeast.
Something as simple as installing a sink can take your utility from a space to do washing and store things, to a room that can function as an extension to your kitchen space.
Not only are these fumes dangerous to breathe, but they can also accumulate inside a sealed room and amass to explosive levels. Installing a vented door for utility rooms lowers the likelihood of this happening. There is also the additional concern about radiant heat put off by a furnace.
If it is a new clean utility room, then it must be 1-hour fire-rated and be protected with sprinklers.
Typically, habitable rooms provide the living accommodation of the dwelling. They include living room, dining room, study, home office, conservatory and bedrooms. They exclude the bathroom, WC, utility room, storeroom, circulation space and kitchen (unless it provides space for dining).