"We ended up burying 100 ft of 12” pipe 6 foot deep to provide fresh air."
Wait, isn't this a radon concern? Pulling air from soil as the only means of fresh air?
My concern over this came after I did quite a bit of air sealing and then afterwards was running all of the bathroom fans, clothes dryer(air only), and the furnace had already been running 3 hours(recovering from deep setback on a -10 degree F day), when walking around the house and looking for spots that were leaking air the only spots I found air coming in was through joints in the foundation which were about 6 feet under grade. This bothered me enough to send in for a basement radon test, waiting for the results still.
Usually there is enough infiltration or ventilation to make this into a non-issue but a sealed house without ventilation(like mine) pulling its infiltration through the basement and then eventually making its way around the house bothered me since radon is patchy. If it turns out there is any concern over radon, I'll mitigate it with an efficient ventilator but I don't see the need for nearly as much ventilation as some people suggest. Even a quarter of an air change worth of air in a house seems to be enough for me on a daily basis. Instead I read about 1/4 of a houses air being exchanged, not sure how that is necessary or how a homeowner in the north wouldn't go broke in January.
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