Saturday, October 22, 2011
Kya deLongchamps continues with her 12-week series on improving your house. This week she asks is your home making you sick and, if so, what you can do about it
OPEN the front door of any show-house and what do you first notice? It’s that lovely shoulder-lifting ‘new’ smell. It’s hard to describe, but we all know it. It says clean, taut, immaculate, highly desirable. It’s amazing that a breath of fresh air has become indistinguishable from the chemical cocktail that’s jetting from those aerosol cans.
What you might not realise is that much of that perfume is provided by a stew of airborne gases leaking from the paint, furnishings and flooring as the new materials heavy with chemical ingredients settle into their new surroundings. When you make home improvements, put some thought into just your purchases.
Choose low-VOC (Volatile Organic Compounds) paint and non-vinyl wallpaper. All paint (bar natural varieties) contains carbon-based compounds termed VOCs. Solvent-based gloss is alive with VOCs, including a range of performance ingredients from formaldehyde to Toluene.
Look out for low-VOC emulsions (1% or less in Crown Earthbalance, for example) or stretch to zero-VOC products. Natural paint suppliers include Biochrome.ie, Healthbuild.ie (Aura), EcoFriendlyPaints.ie, and stonewarestudios.com (Earthborn).
Use solid wood. Medium-density fibreboard (MDF) is a wonder product. It’s cheap, engineered to be stable and using waste wood as its base. The trouble is the binders holding MDF together, which include formaldehyde.
Choose formaldehyde-free MDF (Medite, available at jpcorry.com) or E1-grade MDF boards with a finish in varnish or paint.
Wood flooring will always outstrip carpet for cleanliness. A good vacuum with HEPA filtrations is your greatest defence against allergens.
When you carry most soft furnishings into your home, chemical finishers and fire-retardants are masked with a fabric whiff. Get any plastic coverings off and air the room until any smell evaporates. Investment buys include organic or unbleached cotton, wool, hemp and linen, which tend to have their original colour or feature natural dyes.
There is a wide range of air-purifying machines you can install for regular or temporary use. Bionaire is available in many DIY outlets with the HEPA filtration, static electric dust collectors, carbon filtration and ionisers to tackle standard air home pollution problems. Online suppliers include cleanair.ie, heavenfresh.ie and orca-air.ie. Plants also take chemicals from the air. Choose Areca or the butterfly palm.
WiFi at home. Is it safe?
- WiFi, is the local area network or WLAN used by your computers to connect by wire-free radio frequencies. It’s been around our homes for around five or six years now and has proved popular for setting up, for example, internet connectivity for several computers without trailing wiring everywhere.
- It’s a form of electromagnetic frequency (EMF) and despite having 100,000 times less microwaves than a microwave oven, it has raised some health concerns. WiFi operates in the 2.4 GHz range, a relatively high frequency compared to, say, a cell phone or a traditional radio set.
- The router bringing your internet connection into the house is on 24/7, but as you’re not holding it to your head, its influence on your body and the amount of microwave reaching the body is currently thought to be negligible. Where the signal does get close, and some would say too close for comfort, is with a lap-top computer, something easily solved by using a dedicated lap desk on your knees.
- The effects of EMF (dubbed electro-smog) present all around our homes leeching from electric blankets to tap-touch lighting and cordless phones are as yet unproven, but easily reduced by choosing non-EMF emitting products and turning off those you do have (at the plug) when they are not in use.
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