If you’ve been following this blog at all you know that should do whatever you can to clean the air in your home.  A significant portion of the things that threaten your health in your home are floating around in the air – chemicals off gassing from household products, and viruses expelled from sick people coughing or sneezing.  A lot of this stuff can affect you before it ever has a chance to go through the ductwork, so the only way to make sure these things don’t impact your health is to filter the air in your home.

Announcing…

The Christmas Air Purifier Blowout Sale

Until Christmas, you can get our apartment sized air purifier on sale for only $499. Make sure the air in your home is safe for your family to breathe. There are a lot of air purifiers out there, but as with most things there is a huge variety of price quality, and features. At Merola, we only carry the best, most advanced air purifiers there are.

The most advanced air purifier on the market the XS04 protects your health in 6 ways –

• A pre-filter to trap larger particles
• A HEPA filter that will catch 99% of particles down to 0.3 microns (a human hair at it’s thinnest is about 40 microns)
• Activated carbon to absorb volatile organic compounds (the chemicals that are wafting throughout your home)
• A UV light that destroys organic compounds (a chemical/bacteria/virus killer)
• A photocatalyst that also destroys organic compounds (another virus/chemical/bacteria killer)
• A source of negative ions to make you feel better and make your air smell fresher

So hurry up and get one while you can.  Call us at 737-4242 or stop by at 570 Bryne Drive in Barrie, Ontario to take advantage of this great deal!

As winter starts to come on here in Ontario there is less opportunity to air out your home by opening the window.  In a month or so it will be off limits until sometime in April, most likely.  Indoor air can get pretty stale in the meantime.  Many people will choose one of the two cheaper alternatives to “freshen” their indoor air – air fresheners, or Febreeze.

But are these really good alternatives to get better air?

Let’s look at air fresheners first.  Almost all are made up of varying concentrations of four basic ingredients: formaldehyde, petroleum distillates, p- dichlorobenzene, and aerosol propellants.  Formaldehyde is a known carcinogen and is used as a preservative, in fact, it is embalming fluid.  It is in most manufactured goods these days and is one of the bigger threats to your health, as it can reach significant concentrations in the home from the off-gassing of consumer products.   And that begs the questions: why would anyone knowingly add more?

Next come petroleum distillates.  There are a variety of these found in most air fresheners and are used for a variety of reasons. Some are used for fragrance, others to destroy odours.  But the fact of the matter is that if you wouldn’t recommend people go around sniffing gas (which is a petroleum distillate) you probably shouldn’t use air freshener.  Now, the degree of toxicity will vary per compound, but I think it’s say to say you should avoid breathing volatile organic compounds (VOCs), no matter what they are.

P-dichlorobenzene gets special mention due to its’ ubiquitous use.  It is used to control odour, and while it officially hasn’t been classed as a known carcinogen…it is.  It has been banned in many public workplaces in the states, as it should be, being the bastard offspring off mustard gas and benzene (that’s not how you make it, but if you added those two together, theoretically, you’d get dichlorobenzene). But hey, it controls mold and mildew…not by being extremely toxic though, by talking gently to them and making them see the error of their ways. Seriously though, if it kills those things, what do you think it does to you?

Propellants are basically pressurized gases that force the fragrances out once you release them.  This seems innocuous enough, except that they are usually things like propane, butane, dimethyl ether, and other organic compounds that are carcinogens.  Though they may not be officially recognized as such just yet.

If you know a bit about chemistry you may have noticed some common traits among the chemicals listed.  If not, I’ll point them out here:

• They are all organic compounds (meaning carbon based)
• They are all fairly volatile (they vapourize easily)
• They are all carcinogenic (they all cause cancer)
• They are lipophilic (they are soluble in fat, not water, and hence are very difficult to excrete)

The last point needs a bit more explanation. Many people are familiar with the term “bio-accumulation,” which means that certain chemicals, once trapped in a living body, simply move up the food chain as one organism eats the one below it.  This is because any particular animal in the chain can’t get rid of it, and hence just stores it in its’ fat. That means these chemicals are lipophilic.  Continuing on, all that air freshener you’ve smelled over the years is stored somewhere in you.

Now that we’ve gone over this, would you use one in your home?

If your home has odour problems, you have to find out the root cause and address it.  While this may be considerably more expensive upfront, it will be dwarfed by medical costs and decreased quality of life later on. There truly are no quick fix magic bullets.

Still putting off cleaning your ducts? Here are a few more reasons why you need to get on the ball.

Reason 5 – You Gross Your Guests Out

Remember when you were a kid and went over to some new friends’ house and when the door opened you were blasted in the face with noxious gas? And how on every subsequent visit you opened the door, moved aside to let the initial wave blow past you, steeled yourself, and went in? Are you sure that isn’t your house now? Stop making your guests wonder if their relationship with you is worth breathing all that dank air. House stank is never alright.

Reason 4 – You Spend Most of Your Time Indoors

As Canadians, we spend an average of 90% of our time indoors, according to the CMHC. Now that winter is almost upon us again, I’d guess that we spend more than 90% generally. This means that all winter you are breathing whatever air is in your home.  And this may not seem bad, but…

Reason 3 – Your Air is Filthy

The saying is “Out of sight, out of mind”, and that certainly is true of air. Sometimes when the sun is shining brightly through the window you can see some of the bigger particles floating around, but by and large they are innocuous. The other stuff – mould spores, dust mites & their poop, and chemicals are rife in the home. Depending on where you get your estimates from, indoor air is 10-100 times more polluted than outdoor air. So get an air purifier.  Yeah, that’s not really related to ducts, but we sell those too J

Reason 2 – Your Lungs Are Vulnerable

Of all the ways in which foreign objects can enter your body, your lungs present the easiest barrier to entry. They were made to absorb, and they do their job well…perhaps a little too well for the modern environment. There are only cilia and mucous to protect your sensitive alveoli, and if you smoke (even occasionally), your cilia are gone. It’s funny how much fuss people put into safeguarding their food and drink, considering the digestive tract is designed to handle pretty much whatever physical or chemical matter it comes across.  Yet the exact opposite is true of air. People don’t care that much, but your lungs are more susceptible.

Reason 1 – Air is the #1 Thing We Consume

Over the course of the day, you consume roughly 35 pounds of air, far outpacing your consumption of food and drink combined.  Considering how people are so fussy about food it’s unlikely any given trio can’t decide on a kind of pizza to order, don’t you think that same kind of concern should be extended to our biggest consumable? It should, especially given points 2 & 4.

And that’s about that folks.  If you have any ideas for future post topics please let me know.

The main thrust of this blog is to educate people on how to keep their indoor environment as clean as possible.  For the most part, we advocate a 2 step system; get your ducts cleaned and get an air purifier. These are good steps, but there are others you can do as well.

First, you must keep the humidity in the house under 50%. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times before, but it is imperative. At this concentration it is dry enough to prevent spores from germinating, but also wet enough that you don’t wake up with a sore throat and a bloody nose.  The easiest way to do this is to get a portable dehumidifier and put it in the basement.

Another thing you can do is to minimize soft surfaces in the home. Over the years your carpets, drapes, and upholstery slowly but surely accumulate dust, dust mites, and all sorts of other things that make the home feel stuffy. First get rid of the carpets. These are usually the worst offenders, as they cover the greatest area and also release whatever they hold when people kick them up.  Drapes are of less concern, and couches…well, I’m not really a fan of leather but it is the best surface for cleaning purposes.

An article I read today brought up a point I’d never heard, but it seems to make sense. Apparently masonry products offer a high degree of protection against indoor mould problems.  Now, there aren’t too many people out there who would choose to have interior walls made of bricks, but if you kept the walls in the basement cement it may have a beneficial effect on the indoor air in your home.

Lastly, make sure any water from your roof is properly channeled away from your home, as a wet foundation in perfect for all sorts of little creatures to build colonies. This also includes making sure the ground around your home slopes away from it.

That’s about it for now. Not all of these things are easy or cheap, but health is something most people don’t think about until it’s too late. You never really can do too much to protect what you have, in terms of improving the environment in which you live.

If people have heard of ozone, it usually has something do to with that hole over one of the poles, or something like that.  And while atmospheric ozone does prevent us all from getting crispier when we go outside, ground level ozone is a serious concern.

Ya’ll ready for some chemistry? I knew you were. Anyway, ozone is an incredibly strong oxidizer, meaning it craves electrons like junkies crave smack, and will take them from whatever it bumps into.  That may not sound like much, but sharing electrons is how molecules are made, and once those electrons are gone, so is whatever was using them before – be it viruses, bacteria, mould, etc…This makes it a very effective cleansing agent, and it is promoted as such.

The Structure of Ozone

Source: http://www.lenntech.com/ozone/ozone-properties.htm

The problem is that ozone is also very stable.  It has a half life of 12 hours, meaning whatever concentration you start out with you’ll have half left 12 hours later, and half of that in 12 more hours and so on until it eventually peters out.

During that time it is very likely to make it down your throat and wreak havoc there and your nose and lungs, and is one reason why it’s classified as a pollutant at ground level.  Yet ozone generators have been available for years as a way to purify the air in your home. Here’s what Health Canada has to say about ozone:

A risk evaluation by Health Canada on ozone generators in January 1999, concluded that ozone generators pose a risk to the health and safety of the public. The direct and purposeful introduction of ozone into occupied indoor environments is unacceptable and therefore should be avoided. Health Canada is concerned with the adverse health effects that may result from the deliberate exposure of the public to ozone from air cleaners that intentionally generate ozone gas (ozone generators). Ozone is an irritant gas that can cause coughs, chest discomfort, and irritation of the nose, throat, and trachea. Health Canada has received complaints from consumers of respiratory problems when using an ozone generator.

Source: http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/cps-spc/house-domes/electron/cleaners-air-purificateurs-eng.php

There’s no one out there who doesn’t want to live in a clean environment, but this is not the way to go. Ozone does smell nice, but it will attack your internal membranes.  Meaning you won’t smell anything after a while…ever.  Not to mention that in ozone generators there is no filtration, so particles settle out of the air only to be kicked up again the next time you walk over them.

What you need is an air purifier with physical and chemical filtration.  And you need your ducts cleaned. No matter what you do to clean the air in your home if your ducts are filthy it will still be that old crappy air coming out the next time the furnace is on.

So call us.