Indoor air cleanup has ‘huge impact'
May 5, 2010
Paul Dalby
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Moving house can be stressful at the best of times but Lynn Pike's new home was almost the death of her.
An asthma suffer in denial, Pike got the wake-up call after she and her husband moved into a pleasant two-storey home on a quiet, tree-lined street in Oakville.
“I had a bad cold one day and it just got progressively worse into the evening to the point that I knew I was in trouble,” she recalled. “I actually stopped breathing and my husband had to call 911 for an ambulance to rush me to hospital. I actually had to be resuscitated.”
Pike, 42, says it's only when “life beats you over the head to get your attention” that she started to think seriously about the air quality in her home that helped to trigger the near-fatal attack.
It's a hard lesson that many asthma suffers are now learning for the first time. As the Ontario Lung Association points out, Canadians spent as much as 90 per cent of their lives indoors — often in buildings that are virtually airtight because of energy conservation codes.
And what gets trapped indoors over many months makes up a veritable checklist of potential triggers for asthmas, according to Dr. Sharon Dell, a prominent pediatric respirologist at the Hospital for Sick Children.
In a study of air quality in 60 homes in Toronto, Dell and her team not only measured pollutants in the air, they actually emptied the homeowners' vacuum cleaners to get the lowdown.
“In the vacuums, we found dust and dust mites, pet dander, droppings from rodents and cockroaches, as well as fungus and moulds,” she said. “This helped us to get a picture of what had been happening in these houses for the past six months.”
Dell said that many people are still “very ignorant about home maintenance” but they are much more interested now in improving air quality than 20 years ago.
That was certainly the motivation for Pike and her husband, Paul, 43, to set about rebuilding their own house into a healthy environment, right from the basement to the rooftop.
With advice and tips from the Ontario Lung Association's healthy home website (www.yourhealthyhome.ca), they planned their strategy. “It was everything from cheap and cheerful to the big-ticket items and we did as much of the work ourselves as possible to keep the cost down,” she said.
The most ambitious DIY project was to remove all the carpeting in the house and replace it with prefinished hardwood flooring. Today the only carpeting is on the stairs for safety reasons.
“We chose prefinished hardwood so we wouldn't have the gases when the floors were being stained,” Pike said. “Dust and dust mites are one of my big triggers so this was an important change in the house.”
Other measures chosen by the Pikes ranged from quick fixes to expensive appliances, including:
• Replacing curtains on windows with blinds and shutters because they're easier to clean.
• Setting a dehumidifier in the basement to come on automatically whenever humidity levels soar, which creates a breeding ground for mould.
• Buying leather upholstered chairs for every room because they don't hold dust and are easy to clean.
• Buying a new LG Allergiene washing machine that removes up to 95 per cent of mites, dust, pet dander out of laundry.
• Installing new specially designed furnace filters that trap mould and other allergy triggers every three months.
• Adding a vent above the stove to pump cooking fumes outside the house and clean the air in the kitchen;
• Installing a central vacuum system that vents out to the main container in the garage. When it's being emptied, the dust stays outdoors.
• Buying a new electric stove with sealed wipe-easy elements for quick cleanups. No oven cleaner sprays are allowed in this house.
• Replacing a wood-burning stove in the family room with a gas-burning fireplace.
• Using low-emission paint for freshening up the walls and trim.
• Rethinking pets: when the aging family dog died, it was replaced by a goldfish.
Has this draconian makeover done the trick? “I used to be constantly sneezing and blowing my nose and having to use my Ventolin inhaler more than I should,” Pike said.
“These changes have made a huge impact on my quality of life,” she said. “If you can reduce your meds, as I have done, by improving your environment, then it's all for the better.”
The Pikes have another incentive to maintain and improve their healthy home standards: the eldest of their two sons, 13-year-old Kyle, suffers from allergies. “The cleaner air in our home benefits all of us,” she said.
Healthier cars
Tune up, don’t tune out. That’s the message from air quality expert Brian Stocks for the nine million motorists in Ontario who can help asthma sufferers breathe a little easier this summer.
“We are promoting responsible driving habits to lessen the impact of the car on air quality,” said Stocks, air quality manager for the http://www.on.lung.ca/Ontario Lung AssociationEND.
The Lung Association was one of the groups that campaign for the province to introduce the http://www.ene.gov.on.ca/en/air/driveclean/Drive CleanEND emission-testing program. Now Stocks thinks that individual vehicle owners can do even more individually to help clean up the airwaves.
“The cost of keeping your car tuned up comes back to you in reduced costs for fuel, that’s the payoff,” he said. “It’s just a matter of getting into the habit.”
Spearheading the Lung Association’s campaign this year will be an upcoming new website with tips for making a healthy car, styled on the association’s highly successful healthy home website.
“There’s really no rocket science to this,” Stocks said. “As the warm weather comes, we are ripe for smog conditions.”
“You only have to drive through the GTA and see that massive amount of congestion with cars and trucks in huge volumes,” he pointed out. “It gives some sense of the added burden on air quality.”
Stocks argues that if even a percentage of the millions of vehicles on the roads of this province were properly tuned, you would be able to taste the difference in air quality in the GTA and other large urban centres.
He lists some simple tips to make your car healthier and less of a drag on air quality:
Keeping the vehicle well-tuned;
Check the emission system regularly;
Driving at posted speed limits because speeding does increase fuel consumption;
Do not idle your car because emissions are high when the engine is idling. If you are going to stop for more than a minute or two, shut the engine off.
If you’re going out on errands, try to combine your trips and get them all done at once.
Whenever possible, leave the car at home and use public transport or sign on for car-pooling.
Make sure your tires are properly inflated. If they are over or underinflated they can increase the drag on the vehicle and waste fuel.
Paul Dalby