Consider hiring Integrity Home Evaluation Services for your indoor air quality testing. This ensures you and your family are protected.
Your home’s air quality has as much to do with comfort as it does your health. You may not be able to see them, but indoor air pollutants exist, and they are all around you. Harmful chemicals and toxic agents can spread throughout the air in your home and begin to impact your health. And because it’s often invisible, you may not have considered testing for it.
The causes of indoor air pollution vary from region to region, house to house, and even room to room. Contaminated air trickles in from the outside, but it also comes up from various indoor air sources like construction materials, consumer products, mold, insects, and pets. Some air pollutants are especially harmful to children, the elderly, and those with underlying health problems.
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Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted as gases from certain solids or liquids. VOCs include a variety of chemicals, some of which may have short and long-term adverse health effects. Concentrations of many VOCs are consistently higher indoors (up to ten times higher) than outdoors. VOCs are emitted by a wide array of products numbering in the thousands.
Organic chemicals are widely used as ingredients in household products. Paints, varnishes and wax all contain organic solvents, as do many cleaning, disinfecting, cosmetic, degreasing and hobby products. Fuels are made up of organic chemicals. All of these products can release organic compounds while you are using them, and, to some degree, when they are stored.
Some organics can cause damage to liver, kidney and central nervous system. Many of these VOCs are known to cause cancer.
Not all VOCs have all these health effects, though many have several.
Formaldehyde is a colorless, flammable, strong-smelling (pickle-like odor) chemical that is present both indoors and outdoors (occurring naturally). Formaldehyde is volatile, and will readily convert to a gas from a solid or liquid state. It is released into the air from many products inside the home.
When an item gives off formaldehyde, it is released into the air through a process called off-gassing. High humidity and high temperatures can speed up and increase the release of formaldehyde from products and surfaces. In some spaces such as manufacturing and commercial buildings, formaldehyde vapors may reach dangerously high concentrations.
Indoor levels of formaldehyde should be as low as possible, assuming that you cannot get indoor levels below background amounts (outdoor levels). According to research from the California Environmental Protection Agency (2004), levels of formaldehyde in conventional homes average about 20 ppb, while levels in manufactured homes the average is about 40 ppb.
Symptomatic irritations can occur with low levels of formaldehyde exposure, especially in people who are sensitive to the chemical compound.
Integrity Home Evaluation Services, LLC is the premier home inspection company in Ohio, serving the neighborhoods of Akron, Aurora, Hudson, Kent, Streetsboro, Solon, and Twinsburg.
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