Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

news.uci.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 114 posts

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#31

Post by encom »

coder543 wrote: post #28
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an apartment in Washington DC. Opening a window reduces CO2 and VOCs. An ERV is great if you can afford it, but cracking the window is still quite reasonable.

CO2 and VOCs, but what about PM2.5 and PM10? What about pollen? What about humidity control? Cracking a window is also costly, since it directly raises your heating and cooling bills. It's just an "invisible" cost that's easy for some people to ignore since it's hard to directly measure. An ERV pays for itself over time, so it's more a question of whether you can afford to just crack a window? Living in an apartment…

Don't leave your windows open all the time. Open them for 5-10 minutes at least once a day. Heating air is cheap, it's heating all the other mass in your home that's hard, so don't let it cool down.

If you live somewhere uninhabitable like Texas, change heating for cooling.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#32

Post by coder543 »

encom wrote: post #31
coder543 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO2 and VOCs, but what about PM2.5 and PM10? What about pollen? What about humidity control? Cracking a window is also costly, since it directly raises your heating and cooling bills. It's just an "invisible" cost that's easy for some people to ignore since it's hard to directly measure. An ERV pays for itself over time, so it's more a question of whether you can afford to just crack a window? Living in an apartment…

Don't leave your windows open all the time. Open them for 5-10 minutes at least once a day. Heating air is cheap, it's heating all the other mass in your home that's hard, so don't let it cool down. If you live somewhere uninhabitable like Texas, change heating for cooling.

> Heating air is cheap, it's heating all the other mass in your home that's hard

Is the air cheap to heat? Even if it were, that still wouldn't solve the other issues that were mentioned.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#33

Post by coder543 »

azornathogron wrote: post #30
coder543 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outside air isn’t a panacea. There is often plenty of pollution right outside your window unless you live on an idyllic beachfront property. The humidity level outside is also rarely what you want in your home, whether it is too high or too low. Much better than cracking a window is the use of ERVs (energy recovery ventilators) and air filters on the incoming air. An ERV is a fairly simple device that exchanges air w…

> Any modern home build likely has an ERV as part of the design Sounds very country dependent. I really doubt it's true here in the UK. But then, UK housing is just garbage all around unless you build something custom and put a lot of money and attention into it.

> Sounds very country dependent.

Yes, I meant in the US. Apologies for not making that clearer. I don't think ERVs are uncommon in new construction outside the US, but I don't know as much about that.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#34

Post by zephyrthenoble »

coder543 wrote: post #28
Hnrobert42 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in an apartment in Washington DC. Opening a window reduces CO2 and VOCs. An ERV is great if you can afford it, but cracking the window is still quite reasonable.

CO2 and VOCs, but what about PM2.5 and PM10? What about pollen? What about humidity control? Cracking a window is also costly, since it directly raises your heating and cooling bills. It's just an "invisible" cost that's easy for some people to ignore since it's hard to directly measure. An ERV pays for itself over time, so it's more a question of whether you can afford to just crack a window? Living in an apartment…

I live in the DC area and whenever I hear people say "just crack a window" I think, that brings in all of the pollen I'm allergic to in all seasons except winter, plus humidity and 95 f degree heat if it's the summer... I' be been looking into getting an ERV for a while.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#35

Post by [deleted] »

hylaride wrote: post #27
2rsf wrote: post #2

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?

Well, it's a classic research paper. They're essentially only supposed to report findings. If you live in a house with central HVAC, a decent, regularly replaced filter will help a lot (make sure to only use full blown HEPPA filters if your furnace supports it otherwise you'll have all sorts of airflow issues). Otherwise you can buy air purifiers. The study measured smoke (cigarette and wildfire) as well as insectici…

[deleted]

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#36

Post by jbd0 »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

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 c…

I built a window vent with a variable-speed computer fan and an esp8266 that communicates with a CO2 monitor and raises the speed when the CO2 gets too high. I have a very fine mesh on the window screen that's designed to filter out pollen and dust. It works really well. I usually only turn it on at night, because that's when my wife and I are both in the room and the CO2 can really build up.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#37

Post by nobodyandproud »

crazygringo wrote: post #3

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 c…

Good advice on the CO2 monitor. Cheap and surprisingly effective. I haven't considered the VOC--any recommendations?

As an aside, I open up my window, but sometimes smokers decide to take a break outside and...well. Other times, I have neighbors barbecuing.

If I don't shut the windows quickly I've just replaced stale and somewhat harmful air with oxygenated and definitely harmful air.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#38

Post by mschuster91 »

> 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.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#39

Post by twothamendment »

nobodyandproud wrote: post #37
crazygringo wrote: post #3

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 c…

Good advice on the CO2 monitor. Cheap and surprisingly effective. I haven't considered the VOC--any recommendations? As an aside, I open up my window, but sometimes smokers decide to take a break outside and...well. Other times, I have neighbors barbecuing. If I don't shut the windows quickly I've just replaced stale and somewhat harmful air with oxygenated and definitely harmful air.

I've been using the Awair Element for years. It helped me decide to install an air exchanger an to swap the gas range with induction. Bonus, it has a local API for pulling data.

I have a purple air sensor outside. One day I'll get around to making the air exchanger smart enough to turn off when the smoke from fires makes the air outside worse than inside, it turn off the air exchanger when inside air is good enough, etc.

Re: Permeable materials in homes act as sponges for harmful chemicals: study

#40

Post by musha68k »

mschuster91 wrote: post #38

> 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 th…

This is also one of the saddest aspects of retro computing.

Most listings fail to mention whether previous owners were smokers, and most sellers either aren't sensitive to and/or haven't experienced the off-gassing that occurs once devices warm up through actual use.

So this is actually the main reason I'm thrilled about the MiSTer project and the growing number and variety of FPGA-based clones being released today.

Post reply on HN