What if you knew that there was a zombie somewhere in your house?  And, to make things worse, the zombie is invisible?  How would you feel about that?  It’s not a big, lumbering, ugly looking zombie that you could shoot or beat with a stick or axe.  Oh, no.  It is really, really small – about three hundredth of the width  of a human hair.  So small that it can climb down through your nose and mouth, slide down your throat, and take up residence in the alveoli of your lungs.  Would that make you wash your hands and stay away from people and things that might be transporting that zombie?

But you do have to stay in your house.  So there you are: stuck at home. It’s just an innocent box of air, isn’t it?  The fact is that a lot of less vicious zombies are already in your house because you put them there!

Air Sprays (aka Air Fresheners)

Now you’re stuck in your house with a bunch of people – breathing, burping, and cooking stuff.  As the ads on TV tell us: our houses smell like sweaty socks.  They also tell us to spray stuff around that masks the odors with these cute graphics showing how the smells magically disappear.

The household deodorant business rakes in about $10.4 billion per year.  These “fresheners” contain masses of toxic chemical zombies including benzene, xylene, phenol, naphthalene, and formaldehyde.  Many of these chemicals are listed as hazardous under federal laws.  It would be better to open some windows or run the ventilation systems to dilute the pollution with fresh, outside air rather than add more pollutants.

Chemistry is the significant magical element that happens in the kitchen when we cook.  We are surrounded by particulates and chemicals that float around in the air.  It’s like living in an invisible chemistry lab.  As the chemicals naturally blend together, other compounds are created.  These compounds blend with each other and morph into other chemicals.  You don’t want to blend bleach and ammonia. for example.  In fact, if you clean a surface with one chemical, it’s a good idea to continue cleaning it with the same chemical rather than inadvertently combine chemicals.  We should leave that to chemists.

So if your house is stinky, don’t spray more stuff around.  Turn on your exhaust fans and open a window.

Take a look at the Six Classes approach for the substitution of one chemical for another.  Another extremely interesting resource is a project called HOMEchem where extensive research was done on some test houses.  If you are interested in knowing about the impact of microbes and hand sanitizers, I think you will be surprised.

Parking the car in the Living Room

Let’s say you have an attached garage either beside or beneath the house.  You put all that stuff  you don’t want in the house in the garage because you don’t want it in the house!  Spare paint, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, spare gasoline, not to mention the toxic gases from the cooling car (hear that ticking sound after you turn the car off?), all that stuff is rising up through the house.  Some basic rules to limit bad air transfer:

• Do not run the car in the garage any longer than you have to;
• Do not leave the car running to warm it up in the garage or let the kids finish watching their movie;
• Don’t run a gasoline powered generator in the garage;
• Don’t cook on a barbecue grille in the garage to stay out of the rain.

All these things can kill you, and that would be as bad or worse than any virus!

When you pull your car into the garage or start your car in the garage, you’re adding bad stuff to the air in the garage.  You might think that if you open the door to your garage, you are moving the air in the garage to the outside.  But are you?  Just because it’s a big hole, the air in the garage will still do whatever nature wants it to do.  Not what you might want it to do!

Take some sort of smoke generator like an incense stick or a candle and stand in the garage door opening and watch which way the smoke goes.  It will move back and forth and flutter around, sometimes moving in and sometimes moving out.  If you have a ‘people’ door between the house and the garage, stand in that doorway and watch where the smoke goes.  And if you really want to get into it, do the same experiment with your furnace or air conditioner running and/or your range hood or bath fans running.

Candles & Combustion

Things that burn produce carbon monoxide (along with a lot of other stuff), and carbon monoxide can be deadly.  The more burning candles, the more carbon monoxide.  It might be okay if you live in one of those medieval stone buildings that don’t have glass in the windows, but trapped in a tightly built, energy efficient house, that CO can be harmful to your health.

And then there are all the warnings that you can find on the internet about lead in candle wicks and carcinogens emitted from the burning wax. There are the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the candle scenting which are a family of chemicals which include things like formaldehyde and acetaldehyde.  They may smell nice, but that smell can be harmful.  There is a huge amount of information on the web about candles. 

It’s better to limit the number of candles you burn for atmosphere.

Carbon Monoxide

While your cruising around your house looking for invisible zombies, you might want to look at one of the best zombie detectors of all: your CO alarm.  All CO detector sensors have a limited life – 5 to 7 years.  Take your CO alarm down and look on the back and check out the date.  If it’s more than 7 years old, it should be replaced.  Low level CO alarms generally have permanent batteries that can’t be replaced.  The batteries have the same life as the sensor.

Carbon monoxide (CO) alarms are very different than carbon monoxide monitors or detectors. Older atmospherically vented water heaters, boilers, and furnaces use air drawn in from the house for the combustion process.  The waste gases should be pushed up the flue by the natural stack effect.  But if the pressures are wrong in the house, the combustion gases can be drawn back down the flue and into the house.  Those gases can be deadly and even at low levels can result in headaches and other flu-like symptoms.  It is common for a clothes dryer/ laundry room to be in close proximity to the water heater or furnace.  Clothes dryers are exhaust devices, removing air from the inside of the house and pushing it to the outside, effectively depressurizing the house or the space around the combustion appliances.

CO Alarms are not going to tell you if there is a small amount of carbon monoxide in your house.  To get Underwriter Laboratories (UL) listing, the alarms must not alarm until significant levels of CO are present.

The detector is required to not alarm before these elevated levels are reached and will remain silent and display a reading of 0 unless the user presses a button.  So, if your CO detector alarms, you must pay attention and get out of the house.  DO NOT take the batteries out of the device because it is annoying you.  People have died doing that.

CO is not the same as smoke.  It is invisible, odorless, and tasteless. You can’t see it or smell it. You can’t wave a towel at a CO alarm and expect it to stop.  It is not the same as a smoke detector.

CO detectors that actually detect and display low CO levels are available.  Because of their performance, they cannot be listed by UL.  And they are more expensive.  But what is your life and the lives of your children worth?

Remember that CO alarms are NOT CO detectors.

So if you’re going to be stuck in your house fighting invisible virus zombies by wearing gloves and masks and wiping things down like the so called cleaners after a contract murder, you might as well check out what might already be there!

 

Paul H. Raymer  – ICF

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