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Commercial · Dog Daycares, Kennels & Grooming SalonsDog Daycare, Kennel & Grooming Salon HVAC
Dog daycare, kennel and grooming salon HVAC is a ventilation job first: the smell that greets customers at reception is ammonia and damp-dog air that the system is recirculating instead of exhausting. Design guidance for animal housing commonly calls for 10 to 15 air changes an hour in the rooms where dogs are kept, exhausted outdoors, with no air returned from play rooms or kennels to the front of the building. We design, install and service that ventilation along with the cooling, heating and dehumidification behind it.
Odour control is a pressure question before it is a filter question. Air should move one way through the building: in at reception, through the play rooms, and out through exhaust grilles in the kennel, potty and wash areas, so the dirtiest room is always the most negative. Exhaust pickups belong low on the wall, because urine sits on the floor and dogs breathe at floor height. Carbon filters and air fresheners in a recirculating system only mask what a correctly placed exhaust fan removes.
Most daycares open in a plaza or industrial unit built for retail or storage, with one rooftop unit and one return grille for the whole space. That layout mixes every room's air and delivers it to the front desk. The rebuild separates zones: reception on its own supply with no shared return, animal rooms with high outdoor-air rates and dedicated exhaust, and replacement air tempered so the play floor is not drafty in January. An energy recovery ventilator keeps the heating bill for all that outdoor air manageable, as long as it is a plate-core unit that keeps the exhaust and supply streams apart.
Water is the second problem. Wash bays, mopped and hosed floors, and high-velocity grooming dryers blowing water off coats put moisture into the air all day, and summer humidity off Lake Ontario adds more. Wet air holds odour, feeds mould in drywall and rusts galvanized duct at the seams, so grooming and wash exhaust is run in aluminum or stainless steel, sloped to drain, and the cooling equipment is selected to dehumidify. Grooming rooms also need more cooling than their size suggests, because every dryer is a heater.
Hair is the maintenance problem. It mats return grilles and filters in weeks, then gets past them and felts the cooling coil, which ices up and drips through the ceiling. Filters in these buildings run on a monthly schedule, with an inexpensive pleated filter you can afford to throw away often. If you also run a clinic, the surgical and isolation side is covered on our veterinary clinic HVAC page; everything else we service is listed under commercial HVAC.
Equipment we install and service
Roof or wall fans that pull air from kennels, potty areas, wash bays and grooming rooms and discharge it outdoors, away from your own intake and from neighbouring units. They run whenever dogs are in the building. A failed fan shows up as smell at reception by the next morning, so belts, bearings and motors get checked on a schedule; see commercial exhaust fan repair.
Brings in outdoor air and recovers heat from the exhaust stream through a fixed plate, so the two airstreams never mix. Rotary-wheel units carry a small amount of exhaust air back to the supply side, which is the wrong trade in a kennel. The exhaust side needs its own filter ahead of the core or hair will blind it.
The packaged unit that heats and cools the play floor and reception zones. We select it with staged or variable-speed cooling and a coil that stays cold long enough to condense water. A filter rack that accepts 50 mm or 100 mm pleated filters holds far more hair than a 25 mm slot.
A ducted dehumidifier for buildings where cooling alone cannot keep up with wash-down and dryers, plus corrosion-resistant exhaust duct from the wet rooms. Drains are trapped and left accessible, because hair finds every condensate line.
What goes wrong in these buildings
- Customers smell the kennels the second they open the front door.
- The groomers' room is a sauna by noon with three dryers going.
- We change filters and two weeks later they are a grey felt mat again.
- Water dripped through the ceiling tiles and the tech said the coil was frozen solid behind a layer of hair.
- The unit next door complained to the landlord about smell coming through the wall.
- The air conditioning quit on a 32°C day with a full play floor.
How it works
We measure supply, return and exhaust in each room, check which way air moves through every doorway with a smoke pencil, and read humidity in the wash and grooming areas. The result is a one-page airflow plan showing which rooms are positive, which are negative and where the smell is travelling.
Exhaust and zone separation come first, replacement air second, cooling and dehumidification third, and each stage is quoted in writing as its own line. Price follows the number of animal rooms, the exhaust airflow, roof access and how much of the existing ductwork can stay, so we quote after a site visit. Figures for common repairs are on the pricing page.
Monthly filter changes, regular checks on exhaust fans and drains, and a coil cleaning every spring before the cooling season. Staff can do the filter changes between our visits if the rack is easy to reach, and we set it up that way. A cooling failure with dogs in the building is an emergency: call (647) 801-1252 or contact us.
Common questions
How many air changes per hour does a dog daycare need?
Design guidance for animal housing commonly lands at 10 to 15 air changes an hour in rooms where dogs are kept; the code minimum for your permit is worked out by your designer from the occupancy and floor area. What matters as much as the rate is the path: outdoor air in, across the room, and out through exhaust, without passing through another room on the way. A lower rate with a clean path beats a high rate that recirculates.
Should a kennel use an HRV or an ERV?
Either can work if the core is a fixed plate that keeps exhaust and incoming air in separate passages. Avoid rotary enthalpy wheels, which transfer a little exhaust air and odour to the supply. For air drawn from wash bays and grooming rooms we lean toward a sensible-only plate core or straight exhaust, because very wet, hairy air is hard on a moisture-transfer core. Whatever the unit, filter the exhaust before it reaches the core.
Why does the building smell even though we clean constantly?
Because cleaning adds water, and the ventilation is recirculating it. A single return grille pulls kennel air into the rooftop unit and sends it to every room, reception included. Check for three things: a return grille in an animal room, an exhaust fan that is off or seized, and a tissue held at the kennel door that blows toward reception. Any one of them means air is moving the wrong way.
How often do filters need changing with dogs in the building?
Monthly as a starting point, and every two to three weeks in shedding season on a busy play floor. Use an inexpensive MERV 8 pleated filter and change it often; a high-MERV filter clogs with hair long before its fine media does any good. Deep-pleat racks last longer between changes. If nobody on staff wants the job, our commercial filter change service can take it on.
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One licensed team for installs, maintenance contracts and 2 AM calls.