Air quality inside house often worse than what’s outside
Watch for symptoms associated with sick home or sick building
As we move into the colder months and spend more time indoors, it’s worth considering our indoor air quality, which can often be worse than outdoor air quality.
One contributing factor to poor indoor air quality is off-gassing from VOCS — or volatile organic compounds — from materials such as carpets, or the glues used to make cabinetry, says Eric Andreasen, senior vice-president of marketing and sales at Adera Development Corp.
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 says indoor air quality can be considerably worse than outdoor air quality, says Kevin Hart, founder and CEO of TZOA, the B.c.-based developer of Canada’s first and only all-in-one smart home air-filtration solution.
“I meet all sorts of people who have problems when they get to their house or when they get to work,” he says.
“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.”
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 ...
“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.
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.”