If the air in your house was too dry this winter, consider an indoor humidity helper called EverVent. It’s a simple moisture solution that Ottawa project designer Johan Van Hulle created in his home workshop and brought to market in just 10 months.
His story is about a need, an innovation that meets that need, and the power and opportunities that let creative individuals make products that used to require entire design teams, facilities and lots of time.
Van Hulle creates consumer and medical products for his day job, and when he and his wife, Victoria, were preparing a nursery for their first child in May 2024, he wanted to boost indoor moisture during the heating season. His solution eliminates the need to buy a humidifier and keep it running. EverVent not only puts healthful quantities of moisture in the air when needed, it also traps dust more effectively than a furnace filter alone.
“I wasn’t planning to design a product,” explains Van Hulle, “but I ended up creating a little company for EverVent that I call Platsun. I started by placing bowls of water on furnace floor vents. It helped a little, but keeping them filled was a hassle. When I looked for floor vents with built-in humidifiers, I found only one on the market and it dind’t work well. That’s when I realized I could probably design a better solution myself.”
Van Hulle’s EverVent works simply and silently. It’s a replacement floor louver that can take the place of standard ones that are part of every forced air heating system and it does two things.
First, each EverVent has a 10-ounce water reservoir that’s easy to replenish. As warm, dry heated air from the furnace passes over this water, it eagerly picks up moisture, boosting indoor humidity in that room. EverVent does something else, too. The replaceable filter that boosts evaporation rates also traps dust more effectively than any dry filter could. The filter works whether water is present or not, but moisture makes it more effective.
The speed that EverVent went from an idea to a retail product shows how the power of digital tools lets good things happen faster and more easily. The fact that one man in a home workshop designed a manufacture-ready product shows the possibilities. We need to do much more of this as a country.
“I used the same design process as in my day job: prototyping, testing, refining,” he explains. “I have a small workshop and a 3D printer, so prototyping was easy. I focused on increasing the surface area of the water to boost evaporation, as the first prototypes didn’t work fast enough.”
“With support from Invest Ottawa on the business side and help from manufacturing partners (who I have) built relationships with over the years, I was able to turn the idea into a real product at home. We’re currently testing the market selling online. It’s still early — just three months in — but the response has been very positive so far.”
Van Hulle’s story shows the kind of innovation that makes a country better, and we need much more of this in Canada. For decades, our economic output has been falling below the United States, Germany, Australia and other countries.
Our research and development spending is less than half of other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries and we’ve lagged behind the OECD median productivity growth over the last 20 years, even compared to tiny countries that have far fewer people than we do. Per capita patent filings are only one-third of U.S. numbers.
Canada used to do much better economically, and our future depends on a lot more than just waving the flag. It takes action, investment and lots of innovation like Van Hulle’s solution to dry Canadian winters. Can we turn the economic stagnation of Canada around?
