The article doesn't seem to have immediate actionable recommendation, and is mainly a brick in a wall that can lead (or not) to better design decisions.
One unclear point for example is what happens with the deposited toxins, how hard is it to clean them? are they transferred by touch?
The more we study it, the more we learn how harmful the air inside our homes is.
That's why fresh air is key. Crack a window or two open. Buy an air monitor that monitors CO2 (good proxy for overall freshness), VOCs (sometimes these build up much faster than CO2), and PM2.5.
If CO2 or VOCs are high, open windows more. If PM2.5 is high and coming from outdoors, turn on an air filter.
Yes, this means your heating and cooling bill will be a bit higher. But for your health and concentration, it's worth it.
Every home should have a heat recovery ventilation system. It gives you fresh outside air in the whole home, but filtered to remove PM2.5 and without the inefficiency.
> Yes, this means your heating and cooling bill will be a bit higher.
Not even necessarily. People these days are accustomed to keeping their homes at comfortable T-shirt temps even in the dead of winter, but if you dress appropriately for the season you can drop your indoor temperatures 20F or more from what people normally set the thermostat to while still maintaining a safe margin to keep your pipes from freezing.
Not good news, it's just better to know, than to not know. These sponges don't take chemicals out of our environment, they trap it and slowly release it where we would need cleanness. These chemicals would have gone away a long time ago, but the sponges kept them there.
Additionally why this is not good news, these materials were not supposed to be sponges to begin with. So, it's like discovering a bad side effect. Again, better to know than to not know, but it's not what one would call good news.
> The findings suggest that regular ventilation alone may be insufficient to remove many indoor contaminants. Physical cleaning activities such as vacuuming, mopping and dusting are necessary to effectively remove compounds with high partition coefficients from surface reservoirs.
Yup. Indoor smoker homes are the worst because cleaning alone is often not enough. Cheap landlords just slap a coat of paint on to hide the visible stain, better landlords use nicotine blocker paint that's pretty expensive... but that's only good for moderate smoke. Decent ones run a few ozone generators for a few weeks while no one and no thing is inside, with the added danger that the decomposition products are toxic on their own and the ozone might damage the electrical wiring.
The only actually reasonably safe way to deal with a heavily smoke laden home is to rip out everything where the smoke has seeped into. For the Americans here, that may mean a complete teardown as the cardboard, insulation and even framing wood will be soaked in smoke residue; Europeans have it a bit better because for us, it's usually enough to remove the plaster but leave the brick/concrete walls alone.
Homes that have been affected by fire are often written off for the same reason, even if the fire itself didn't blaze in the home (say, a lower apartment burned off). The smoke seeps everywhere, especially in older buildings where doors aren't airtight or you got bathroom/kitchen exhaust vents without backflow prevention, and fire smoke is orders of magnitude worse in its effect than cigarette smoke - cigarettes are at least plant based materials, household fire smoke is riddled with stuff like dioxine (from plastics) and other highly toxic combustion products.
I'm asking myself if building a DIY setup or buying something like Airthings Wave Plus will actually track these compounds at decent accuracy - and if anyone here has gone down this rabbit hole for family health?
From what I've gathered, consumer devices hit acceptable accuracy for CO2/temp/humidity but PM2.5 is hit-or-miss, and VOC readings are more "relative change indicators" than absolute values..
DIY with Home Assistant is more work/fun yes but again only gets similar accuracy AFAIK (with potentially better automation)..
Isn't this obvious? I don't know, maybe there are some details of this study that are are scientifically useful, but as a news it's pointless?
Yeah, make sure to get a lot of ventilation, but that doesn't require any study. Even without any any pollutants, indoor air will have a bad quality. And your body deals with minor amount of bad stuff just fine.
Having moved into a home previously owned by a chain smoker ten years prior, I have no problem believing this. We've had to run ozonators in rooms repeatedly to finally get the smell out.
This is why your plastic ketchup bottle still smells like ketchup after washing it multiple times - at a microscopic level, plastics essentially look like uncooked ramen/instant noodles, basically a big tangle of polymer chains which act like a sponge.
Now, consider what happens when you wash that plastic with a cocktail of chemicals in your dishwasher...
Obviously very hard/dense plastics (melamine comes to mind) are less prone to this
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 41.0 ms ] threadOne unclear point for example is what happens with the deposited toxins, how hard is it to clean them? are they transferred by touch?
That's why fresh air is key. Crack a window or two open. Buy an air monitor that monitors CO2 (good proxy for overall freshness), VOCs (sometimes these build up much faster than CO2), and PM2.5.
If CO2 or VOCs are high, open windows more. If PM2.5 is high and coming from outdoors, turn on an air filter.
Yes, this means your heating and cooling bill will be a bit higher. But for your health and concentration, it's worth it.
Not even necessarily. People these days are accustomed to keeping their homes at comfortable T-shirt temps even in the dead of winter, but if you dress appropriately for the season you can drop your indoor temperatures 20F or more from what people normally set the thermostat to while still maintaining a safe margin to keep your pipes from freezing.
Additionally why this is not good news, these materials were not supposed to be sponges to begin with. So, it's like discovering a bad side effect. Again, better to know than to not know, but it's not what one would call good news.
Sometimes old heads...
Yup. Indoor smoker homes are the worst because cleaning alone is often not enough. Cheap landlords just slap a coat of paint on to hide the visible stain, better landlords use nicotine blocker paint that's pretty expensive... but that's only good for moderate smoke. Decent ones run a few ozone generators for a few weeks while no one and no thing is inside, with the added danger that the decomposition products are toxic on their own and the ozone might damage the electrical wiring.
The only actually reasonably safe way to deal with a heavily smoke laden home is to rip out everything where the smoke has seeped into. For the Americans here, that may mean a complete teardown as the cardboard, insulation and even framing wood will be soaked in smoke residue; Europeans have it a bit better because for us, it's usually enough to remove the plaster but leave the brick/concrete walls alone.
Homes that have been affected by fire are often written off for the same reason, even if the fire itself didn't blaze in the home (say, a lower apartment burned off). The smoke seeps everywhere, especially in older buildings where doors aren't airtight or you got bathroom/kitchen exhaust vents without backflow prevention, and fire smoke is orders of magnitude worse in its effect than cigarette smoke - cigarettes are at least plant based materials, household fire smoke is riddled with stuff like dioxine (from plastics) and other highly toxic combustion products.
Smaller space, but easier to get fresh air into.
From what I've gathered, consumer devices hit acceptable accuracy for CO2/temp/humidity but PM2.5 is hit-or-miss, and VOC readings are more "relative change indicators" than absolute values..
DIY with Home Assistant is more work/fun yes but again only gets similar accuracy AFAIK (with potentially better automation)..
Yeah, make sure to get a lot of ventilation, but that doesn't require any study. Even without any any pollutants, indoor air will have a bad quality. And your body deals with minor amount of bad stuff just fine.
Now, consider what happens when you wash that plastic with a cocktail of chemicals in your dishwasher...
Obviously very hard/dense plastics (melamine comes to mind) are less prone to this