When considering the overall indoor air quality of your home, many people will overlook laundry room ventilation. For the most part homes will have ventilation fans in the kitchen and bathrooms – which is a good thing, the laundry room however is almost always overlooked. Let take a look at components in the laundry room.

In homes that have a dedicated laundry room, they are typically isolated without any windows and very poor natural ventilation. The washing machine itself might not be a direct source of contamination but the laundry detergent and fabric softener are. For the most part these cleaners are stored in the same room and without ventilation, they can decrease the indoor air quality of the room causing you to breath them in while doing the laundry. A second component of the washer is it produces wet clothing. While most of the time this is going to be transferred to the dryer, it will increase the humidity level of the room. Without proper ventilation that extra humidity can lead to mildew or mold. The other major appliance in the room is the dryer. Whether you have a gas or electric dryer will have different impacts on the air quality. In a perfect world any contaminates from the dryer will be exhausted out the ducting from the dryer. Unfortunately, most systems are not perfect and a least a little bit of contaminates in the form of gas, lint and so forth are going to enter the room. Having proper laundry room ventilation will greatly reduce the risks to you.

We have covered the major appliances but in a good number of laundry rooms there are also some not so thought about items like a sink. Many times, the laundry room utility sink is used to dispose of items that you wouldn’t want to use the kitchen sink for. These can include paint clean-up, rags used for cleaning and other items that could contain chemicals that are being released into the room during the cleaning process. The laundry room can also be a storage place for household cleaners, bug sprays and so forth. All of these need to be ventilated out of the home.

Laundry room ventilation is something that definitely needs more attention given to it. The good news is that in general, a very small and inexpensive exhaust fan will be more than enough to properly ventilate the room and provide very good indoor air quality. To view Air King’s line of exhaust fans, visit airkinglimited.com.

Fighting VOCs

If you are reading this post, you probably either have a little bit of an understanding of what VOCs are or at least are interested in finding out why we need to be fighting VOCs. VOC stands for Volatile Organic Compounds. Volatile is not a word generally used in the everyday language and it sounds a little scary. Let's first understand what a VOC is.

Volatile Organic Compounds are all around us in many of the products we use. The most common use is in paint products as well as cleaners. VOCs dilute or dissolve other ingredients in those products to make them more effective. Paint is probably one of the most recognized ones but VOC are also used in items like mattresses and building materials as flame-retardants. A common alternative name for VOCs is off-gas. This happens because VOCs have a high vapor pressure that allows them to evaporate easily. For instance when paint is put on a surface it immediately start to off-gas as part of the drying and curing process, that is what you are smelling. With paint, this off-gas is a byproduct but with items like perfumes and fragrances, the off-gas is part of the design. It is what allows them to “smell” nice for longer periods of time.

Why do we need to be fighting VOCs as the title of this article suggest? Part of the off-gas process means that the “bad” stuff is entering into the air that we are breathing. This can cause minor symptoms like coughing or eye irritation but can also escalate to things like headaches, decreased lung function or a metal fog and in extreme case even more serious health issues.

Now that we have most of the bad news out of the way we can turn our attention to fighting VOCs. The first step is to try and reduce your exposure to VOCs by looking a little closer at the products you are using. Here are a few tips on what you can do:

1. Look for paint that is VOC free or at least low VOC. While these are still going to have some VOCs (even the VOC free ones – sorry), they will be greatly reduced from the standard paints.
2. Look for fragrant-free cleaners and especially laundry detergent. Have you ever gone into your laundry room and been “hit” with the smell of flowers or fragrance – that is your cleaners and/or detergents off-gassing their VOCs into the air. This is usually intensified in a laundry room due to the fact that it is a smaller and typically enclosed room.
3. Avoid items that come in the form of an aerosol. VOCs are detrimental due to them being able to easily enter the airflow. Aerosols by nature put product into the airflow. Aerosols also typically have some type of product like formaldehyde or some of the other nasty chemicals in them.

A second step in fighting VOCs it to look to the ventilation of your home. Having a well ventilated home is essential to having a better living environment. VOCs as well as other contaminates are going to build up in you home. That is part of living. Having a plan in place like a ventilation system and a way to bring fresh air into the home will great reduce your risks and exposure. Even opening a window while cleaning if you can is a great way to help your indoor air quality. Many home are already equipped with exhaust fans in their bathrooms and kitchen. This is great and they should be utilized. More and more homes are now also utilizing a continuous running exhaust fan in a central location of the home. It is actually part of the building code. The goal is to exhaust as much as possible out and then bring fresh air in to dilute anything that remains. Most would agree that these methods make sense and many practice them, here is where a lot of homeowners lose a little sight. For many homes the largest source of VOC’s is typically located in the laundry room. As we mentioned above these rooms are usually small and enclosed so the amount of VOCs that build-up is significant. Adding a small exhaust fan that vents to the outdoors in these rooms can have a tremendous effect on lowering the amount of VOCs in the room.

While we would like to suggest avoiding VOCs all together, that is almost impossible to do in our currently living environment. VOCs in some form or fashion are all around us. Doing what you can to limit your exposure to them is step one, improving your indoor air quality with ventilation and fresh air is step two.

For more information about the indoor air quality of your home and how you can improve it, please read through the many articles we have written over the years. Visit airkinglimited.com for information regarding Air King exhaust fan and fresh air intake solutions.

Ventilation for Your Laundry Room? YES!

The laundry room can sometimes be a forgotten area of the home when it comes to Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). Most of the IAQ focus when it comes to ventilation is on the kitchen and bathrooms and rightfully so. However, the laundry room can be a large source of contaminants in your home. Let’s take a closer look at the laundry room.

If we are calling it a laundry room, then by name laundry is being done there which means there is a washer and in most cases a dryer. That means there are chemicals in the room. Off-gassing of cleaning detergents have a negative effect on your IAQ. Have you ever gone into the laundry room and had a smell of chemicals. They might even smell somewhat good – like flowers. Unless you are also growing flowers in your laundry room, that smell is the off-gassing of the cleaning detergents. Then there are the machines themselves. With higher rate spin cycle washers and especially with dryers, their normal operation is going to produce heat and humidity. This can lead to an uncomfortable area to be in temperature-wise and the extra humidity in the room can lead to mold and mildew growth.

So far we have only talked about the washer and dryer in the room. In many homes, the laundry room doubles as a storage room for other cleaners. Many also have a utility sink for cleaning up things like paint, grease and other items that you don’t want to risk damaging the kitchen sink to clean. These just add to the amount of off-gassing happening. Another issue is that typically the laundry room is a smaller room so all these factors are concentrated in a small space.

After all that I am sure you are excitingly looking forward to the next time you need to do the laundry or even just walking through the room. Okay, maybe not. The good news is there are some things you can do to lessen your exposure to these contaminants.

1.     Install and utilize a ventilation fan. This is your best option. This will take contaminates and remove them from the home. You may want to consider a two-speed fan. Two-speed fans run continuously at a very low speed, then at a higher speed when the room is occupied. The low speed would help eliminate any off-gassing from chemicals being stored in the room then the high speed would take care of when laundry is actually being done. You can also look at models that have motion sensors that switch from low to high automatically based on if the room is being used or not. If a two-speed fan is a bit much for you, even a small inexpensive single speed fan will make a world of difference in eliminating contaminates.

2.     Open a window or an outside door. This can also be effective but has its limitations. An open door or window will help when the room is being used but unless you keep it open all the time, any off-gassing will stay in the room until the next time the door or window is opened. This is also not an ideal solution if you live in areas of extreme heat or cold.

3.     Keep the door to the laundry room open. This is the least effective method but is better than nothing – maybe. By keeping the laundry room door open to the rest of the home it will disperse the contaminates. The issue, however, is that it is dispersing them into possibly your main living area, which is not a good situation. If the rest of your home is properly ventilated, it will lessen the effects.

To learn more about Air King’s ventilation solutions, visit www.airkinglimited.com.