Designing healthy homes
One contributing factor to poor indoor air quality is off-gassing from VOCS
As we move into the colder months and spend more time indoors, it’s worth considering our indoor air quality, which the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says can be two to five times worse than outdoor air quality.
One contributing factor to poor indoor air quality is offgassing from VOCS — or volatile organic compounds — from materials like carpets, or the glues used to make cabinetry, says Eric Andreasen, senior vicepresident of marketing and sales at Vancouver’s Adera Development.
Andreasen says that when people are shopping for materials for their homes, asking for low-voc options is key.
“We use carpets that are manufactured with low VOCS, and products that have low VOC glues in them,” he says.
Adera has specialized in building multi-family homes for the past 50 years, using materials such as their trademarked Smartwood, he says.
“Wood is a healthier kind of choice than concrete. It’s warmer, it’s lighter, it doesn’t have certain dusts that come off concrete that affect the air quality of your home’s interior,” he says.
The World Health Organization, like the U.S. EPA, says indoor air quality can be considerably worse than outdoor air quality, says Kevin Hart, founder and CEO of Gastown-based company TZOA.
“I meet all sorts of people who have problems when they get to their house or when they get to work. They immediately get sick, they get headaches, sore throats, dry eyes, they can’t think properly, they can’t sleep properly; and those are all symptoms of a sick building or sick home,” he says.
Hart says that throwing open the windows to let fresh air circulate through your home may seem like an obvious solution, but is something people often avoid for a variety of reasons.
“Often, they don’t know that that’s a good thing to do, and maybe they’re close to a roadway or some other source of pollution, and probably the largest reason people wouldn’t open their window is that the temperature outside is different from the temperature they’ve established inside, so it’s not going to be good for comfort or energy efficiency,” he says.
Environmental changes are also having an impact on how we’re heating and cooling our homes, says Hart, with an uptick in the number of air conditioners being installed in B.C. over the past two to three years, which he attributes to global warming.
“If you look at Vancouver, maybe 20 per cent of homes now have air conditioning, and if you go up to Kelowna, about 80 per cent of homes have air conditioning,” he says.
Hart says he recently read an article on the problem of climate change and air conditioning systems, which said that as the planet warms up, more people will use air conditioning, which, with their CO2 emissions, will contribute to climate change.
Hart’s company just released an air-purification system called Haven, which links a home’s heating and cooling system, monitors levels of indoor air pollution through sensor technology, and through a series of filters installed throughout the house, is said to reduce “up to 90 per cent of airborne pollutants.”
Hart says the Haven system will tell you if there is a problem “and if you don’t have a problem, it will tell you.”