Healthy House Institute's blog

Part 15 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: I can’t tolerate the artificial fragrances in laundry products. Are there any healthier options?

Answer: There are a number of fragrance-free products, and they’re also often available at health-food stores or co-op groceries.

If you live in or near a large city, look in the telephone directory under Chemical Suppliers. There should be companies listed that sell all kinds of nasty industrial chemicals. However, they also often sell unscented borax, or unscented washing soda (sometimes called sal soda, or sodium sesquicarbonate)—both of which can be used in the laundry. You may need to purchase 50-100# bags, but buying in bulk is considerably cheaper per pound than buying in small quantities. Sometimes, adding a cup of white vinegar to the wash water can help remove odors.

You may run into another problem with artificial fragrances if you’re shopping for a new washer or dryer. That’s because many manufacturers put scented samples of detergent or fabric softener inside new machines at the factory. If you can’t get a company to ship an appliance without free samples, your best solution is to remove the offending products from the washer or dryer immediately. Then, run the washer (without clothes) several times with unscented borax, baking soda, or white vinegar until the odor dissipates. Likewise, run the empty dryer on its highest temperature setting until all the perfume odors are gone. If your utility room has a window, keep it open during the entire “decontamination” period.

Question: How important is it to use unscented cleaning products and cosmetics, and natural-fiber clothing?

Answer: Scents and perfumes very often trigger reactions in chemically sensitive people and they bother many individuals with conventional allergies. We feel it’s very important to use unscented products throughout your home. Because fragrances are formulated to spread and cling, they can quickly saturate an entire house and be difficult to remove.

Scented cosmetics can be especially problematic for sensitive people because they’re applied directly to the skin. Your clothing is also in direct contact with your skin. We’ve found that untreated natural-fiber clothing (cotton, wool, linen, ramie, hemp, etc.) is a good option because it outgases no synthetic odors. And, we choose only those items that can be easily cleaned at home with unscented laundry products.

Question: The house we just moved into smells perfumy. What can I do to remove the odor?

Part 14 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: We’re getting ready to move into our new healthy house. Do you have any additional advice?

Answer: Congratulations! By using healthy building materials and installing a ventilation system, you now have a healthy structure. However, you must realize that what you put inside your house is just as important as how you built it. We’ve heard of cases where healthy houses were filled with unhealthy furnishings and maintained with unhealthy cleaning products. The result was poor indoor air quality. Fortunately, there are plenty of healthy products out there that can be substituted for all the unhealthy ones. Lynn Bower's book, The Healthy Household, goes into interiors in considerable depth, but the following questions and answers cover the highlights.

Question: Antique furniture was made before particleboard and other synthetic materials became popular, so it’s healthy, right?

Answer: Not necessarily, old furniture can be contaminated with musty smells, tobacco smoke, pesticides, and perfume odors—all things that affect air quality. Some pieces are actually moldy. If an antique piece has been refinished recently, it may be bothersome because of a noxious stripper that was used, or because of an oil-based stain or finish.

We have an antique oak desk that belonged to John’s great grandmother. Over the years it picked up a wide variety of odors, and it was too bothersome to bring it into our healthy house. We thought about stripping the finish off ourselves (3M has a low-tox product that’s widely available called Safest Stripper), but decided to take it to a commercial stripper. They had more powerful stripping chemicals, the correct safety equipment, and they knew where to properly dispose of the spent stripper and old finish. Once it was stripped, it didn’t have the original odors, but it did smell of stripper. So, we put it in the garage and let it air out for a couple of months. Once it was aired out, we finished it with a water-based urethane floor finish. It’s now odor free and sitting in our entry hall.

Question: I think outgassing from some of my new upholstered furniture is affecting my health. Any suggestions?

Part 13 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: How healthy are most kitchen cabinets?

Answer: As a rule, the majority of new cabinets—kitchen, bath, etc.—are quite unhealthy. This is because manufacturers all use man-made wood products—hardboard, particle board, and plywood—which contain a potent urea-formaldehyde glue. Even expensive cabinets are made with these materials, and they outgas formaldehyde for years. Although the doors and drawer fronts may be made of solid wood, the end panels, backs, shelves, drawer bottoms, and drawer sides are made of noxious wood products. They can have an attractive thin wood veneer on the surface, but it does little to block formaldehyde. Some manufacturers claim they make their cabinets out of “solid wood,” but they’re playing games with definitions. If you ask if they use plywood, they’ll answer, "Yes, that plywood is solid wood."

When man-made wood products have a plastic or vinyl surfacing, it can block some of the emissions, but almost never enough for sensitive people to tolerate new cabinets. This is because in commercially made cabinets, the plastic or vinyl surfacing rarely covers all the edges, and it often has holes drilled in it for shelf supports.

While the cabinet materials are bad enough, the clear finishes used are often worse. Most manufactures use a urea-formaldehyde clear finish that is one of the strongest formaldehyde emitters found in houses. The good news is that it’s so powerful, it’s usually done outgassing after 4-6 months. After that, you’ve still got the formaldehyde in the plywood, particle board, and hardboard to contend with.

Question: Can’t I just coat problem cabinets with a sealant to make them safe?

Part 12 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: Why don’t you like certain types of carpeting?

Answer: Some carpets are high emitters of VOCs. Choose low-VOC types.

Question: What’s the best kind of carpet to buy?

Answer: Look for those rated by the Carpet and Rug Institute's Green Label Program. Otherwise, the best advice we can give is to look for a product with as little odor as possible. It’ll help to take someone along with you who has a good sense of smell when you go shopping for carpet and padding. This is imperfect advice because some of the chemicals outgassed don’t have an odor. If you can’t find a low-odor carpet, you can roll it out in an uncontaminated garage and let it air out there before you bring it indoors for installation. Furthermore, you should install the carpet with tack strips rather than an adhesive.

Many people believe natural-fiber carpets are inherently healthier. Sometimes they are, but that’s not always the case. Natural fibers are often chemically dyed or treated and wool carpet is routinely treated with mothproofing chemicals. Actually, some 100%-nylon carpets are less bothersome than some natural carpets. Whatever kind of carpet you choose, we highly recommend using a central vacuum cleaner to maintain it.

Area rugs may offer advantages over carpet. First of all, you can often find them locally made of cotton or other natural fibers at reasonable prices. Some may even been dyed using natural plant dyes. If they have any odor when new, they can usually be laundered in a washing machine or hung outdoors until odor-free. As a result, they're much easier to keep clean than wall-to-wall carpet. If a larger area rug won’t fit in your washing machine, you can take it outdoors and beat it over a line—but be sure and wear a good dust mask.

Question: Wood floors are always a healthy flooring choice, right?

Part 11 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: I’ve heard that plaster is a healthy material. What are its advantages and disadvantages?

Answer: You buy plaster as a powder, mix it with water, then apply it to a surface where it hardens. Once completely cured, the plaster is very inert and rock-like. Although most people can’t detect any odor after a few days, a few sensitive people have said that they’re bothered by a slight odor for a month or so.

In the past, 2-3 coats of plaster were commonly applied on top of thin strips of wood lath. In some commercial applications it’s still applied in a similar manner, but it’s usually put over to metal lath instead of wood. However, the most common way to use plaster today involves skimming one or two thin coats over a gypsum-board material. The gypsum board has a blue paper face, so it’s usually called blueboard.

Most of the time, plaster walls are painted. For sensitive people who are bothered by paint, plaster has the advantage of being hard, durable, and scrubbable enough that you can actually leave it unpainted. While most plaster is white, it can sometimes be tinted (before its applied) with the same kinds of mineral pigments that bricklayers use in mortar.

As far as drawbacks, plaster is more brittle than drywall and, if it ever cracks, it’ll no longer be airtight. Plaster costs more than drywall, primarily because of the skilled labor required. In some parts of the country, plaster is widely used. But, in other areas, it’s been totally replaced with drywall.

Question: What makes drywall different from plaster?

Part 10 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: Won’t a good air filter remove all the pollution in my house?

Answer: In most cases, filtration isn’t the single answer, but it can be part of the answer. To have good indoor air quality, you first need to apply the three Healthy-House Design Principles of eliminate, separate, and ventilate. Once that’s been done, the indoor air should be pretty good, and you can use a filter to remove any minor pollutants that are left. A good filter is not a substitute for ventilation because filters can’t remove moisture from the air and they can’t supply oxygen.

If you want to try and use filtration to clean up the air in a problem house, you’ll need a very powerful system that will filter the air several times an hour. This will be expensive, breezy, and noisy, and it won’t be as effective as applying the three healthy-house design principles first.

If you decide to use a filter, there are three ways to do so. First, you can use a portable room-sized filter unit. There are a number of companies that offer these free-standing units.

Portable filters work best in a single room, with the door closed, and the filter left running continuously. Second, for whole-house filtration, you can let the fan on your forced-air furnace or central air conditioner run continuously so its filter will remove pollutants passing through the system. Third, you can use a filter with a general ventilation system to filter the incoming air—air that isn’t always as clean as we’d like it to be. In some cases, it can make sense to combine a forced-air heating/cooling system with a ventilation system. That way, one filter (and one set of ducts) can serve both systems

Question: My furnace already has a filter. Isn’t that good enough?

Part 9 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: Exactly what is ventilation anyway?

Answer: Simply put, ventilation is the exchange of air in a house. In other words, it means bringing in fresh air and expelling stale, polluted, moisture-laden air.

Question: My attic is vented, so my house is adequately ventilated, right?

Answer: Actually, no. Attic ventilation is for attics, and crawl-space ventilation is for crawl spaces. What we’re talking about is ventilation for the living space, because that’s where people are.

We’re often asked about ceiling fans. They’re designed to circulate air within a room—not to exchange the indoor and outdoor air. So, they aren’t considered ventilation fans. They may help make you feel comfortable, but they don’t remove pollutants or moisture from the house.

Question: Why is ventilating houses so important?

Answer: Nearly all homes contain building materials, furnishings, decorating items, and cleaning products that outgas pollutants into the indoor air. Ventilation can dilute the concentration of those pollutants. But, even if totally inert, safe alternatives are used, there’s one pollution source that can’t be eliminated—people. Because of normal, everyday human metabolism, we all release various gases such as carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, methane, etc. If allowed to build up indoors, these can make a house odorous and uncomfortable. Plus, we all need a supply of fresh air indoors to replace the oxygen that gets used up.

If you have an unhealthy house (one built, maintained, and furnished with unhealthy materials), you’ll probably need a powerful (and expensive) ventilation system to dilute the concentration of all the indoor pollutants. But if you have a healthy house, the ventilation system’s primary job will be to dilute the metabolic pollutants released by the occupants—so it doesn’t need to be as powerful. In other words, most houses need ventilation systems, but healthy houses often get by with less powerful, inexpensive ones.

Question: Can’t a house breathe naturally—like people do?

Part 8 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: Why don’t you like fireplaces or gas ranges?

Answer: Actually, we don’t like most fuel-burning appliances—fireplaces, wood stoves, gas ranges, oil furnaces, space heaters, water heaters, boilers, etc. Many people think the reason we don’t like them has to do with fuel leaks. While oil or gas leaks certainly can pollute a house, we’re much more concerned with poor chimney function. Whenever you burn something, you have combustion by-products with which to contend. And, it isn’t healthy to have any combustion by-products indoors. The worst offenders are unvented appliances because they have no chimney whatsoever, and they dump combustion by-products directly into the indoor air.

You might think that if a fuel-burning device is connected to a chimney, the situation would be better. Well, in many cases it is—but in many cases it isn’t. You see, chimneys don’t always function correctly. The combustion by-products (which are warm) rise up through a chimney because warm air rises. You can actually measure a slight upward pressure (called a draft) inside a chimney. Problems occur when there's a negative pressure (that wants to pull in) within the living space that’s greater than the draft pressure (that wants to push up and out). If that’s the case, air can come down the chimney, and the combustion by-products can’t go up. When this occurs, they spill into the living space.

If there's a complete reversal of flow in a chimney (downward), it’s called backdrafting, and all the combustion by-products enter the house. In many cases, the draft is only partially affected, and some combustion by-products go up the chimney while some enter the living space. This situation is called spillage.

Backdrafting and spillage are actually quite common. In some houses they’re regular occurrences. For example, we’ve all smelled wood smoke indoors—smoke that should’ve gone up the chimney. Experts estimate that 50-80% of chimneys have the potential to malfunction.

Part 7 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: What are electromagnetic fields?

Answer: Electromagnetic fields, or EMFs for short, are invisible areas of energy. There are actually many different kinds. EMFs can be found around gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared radiation, and radio waves. However, the kind most people are concerned about are the EMFs surrounding electrical wiring and appliances.

Anything that uses electricity will be surrounded with electromagnetic fields, of which there are two types—magnetic fields and electric fields. Just plugging something in will cause it have an electric field around it, but it must be operating (current must be flowing) to have a magnetic field.

Most researchers believe that electric fields are relatively benign, and that health effects are more likely to be related to magnetic fields. Magnetic fields are measured in units called milliGauss (mG), but there aren’t any well-established guidelines as to how much is too much. Still, it’s believed by most researchers that you should stay away from long-term exposures above 3 mG.

Question: Can electrical appliances and the wiring inside my walls make me sick?

Answer: In most cases, probably not—but there are certainly situations where you should be concerned. The most common health effect researchers are looking into is cancer, but the evidence is often conflicting. In electrical occupations (electricians, linemen, etc.), some forms of cancer are seen more often than in workers who aren’t routinely around high-strength fields. And, some studies have found leukemia more often in people who live near high-voltage power lines.

Part 6 of our 15-part Q&A series on all aspects of green building from the publishers of HealthyHouseInstitute.com. Click here for the introductory post and furthur details.

Question: Should I use metal or plastic water pipes in my new house?

Answer: Plastic water mains are now widely used by utilities, and they’re also common in many new houses. They tend to be easier and less expensive to install than metal pipes. Many plastic pipes use both a toxic solvent-based cleaner and cement to fuse the pipe and fittings together. While these are very noxious, they’re so volatile that they outgas quickly—usually within a few hours—if there’s plenty of extra ventilation.

When water moves through new plastic plumbing lines, many sensitive people report a plastic-like taste. This occurs if contaminants are being released into the water, either from the pipe itself or from the cleaner or glue.

While you can’t do much about what your water utility uses for underground water mains, we prefer to use copper for supply lines inside houses. In the past, lead-based solder was common. But today, Federal regulations forbid the use of lead in plumbing solders. Galvanized-steel piping is also relatively inert, but it’s usually more expensive than copper.

Drain pipes are bigger in diameter, making copper drains expensive. Therefore, we often recommend using plastic for these. The plastic really doesn’t outgas very much into the air. But to minimize outgassing, we buy the pipe and fittings early in the construction process and let them air out before they're installed. Then, when the cleaner and glue are used, we stay away for a while and provide extra ventilation until everything has aired out.