Prescription for a Healthy Home

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Unknown to most of us, the air inside our homes is often more polluted than the air outside. You come home from work, put your feet up on the couch and breathe deeply. It’s good to be home. Gone are the exhaust fumes that filled your lungs as you walked the city streets. Gone is that fresh paint odor you had to breathe in all day while your office is being renovated. And finally, you can stop sneezing every time the air conditioning turns on. Because, after all, this is your home. It’s clean, and therefore it’s healthy. Or, is it? Odds are the answer is no. The simple fact is that most of our homes are full of air that has the potential to make us sick. In fact, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that mounting scientific evidence shows that the air inside our homes is often more polluted than that outside. Whether it’s off-gassing from paint, furniture or mattresses or mold spores from a wet basement, chances your home could be making you sick. Heating and Cooling System If your home had a pulse, the furnace would be its heart. All those ducts and vents that circulate air throughout your home work much like your own circulatory system. And if you have leaks in your ducts, or if they are clogged up with dust or mold, that’s going to affect the health of your entire home. Your forced air heating system works by sucking air through return vents that run through your house, heating it and then blowing that air back into your home. The return vents have filters that keep out the dust, allergens, mold spores and carpet fibers that you don’t want in your air. But the problem is that when your furnace kicks on, it sucks air not just through the filtered vent but also through all the leaky points in your ductwork. “In a brand-new house, you are looking at probably around 30 to 40 percent leakage,” which means that roughly a third of the air being blown through your system is unfiltered, says Alan Finkel, CEO of Los Angeles-based Green Life Guru, a home inspection firm. “In a house that was built 20, 30, 40 years ago, it is 60 percent.” If you have problems you are unaware of—such as mildew and mold in the crawl space, asbestos lingering in the attic or feces from mice or cockroaches—those particles are being sent unfiltered into your ambient air. Sealing off these leaks in your heating and cooling system can help reduce your risk of cancer, allergies and asthma. Cleaning your ducts is also an option to consider, especially in new construction. “I would say in 95 percent of the new construction that I look at, the entire duct system is completely filthy before people ever move in,” says Jeffrey C. May, author of My House is Killing Me (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001) and certified indoor air quality professional (CIAQP). “The ducts are full of sawdust and drywall dust. And then when the cold damp air and the moisture get into the system during the air conditioning cycle, everything gets moldy.”

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