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.
