While sustainability and energy efficiency often dominate the green building conversation, the issue that can have the most immediate impact on your family’s health is indoor air quality.  Green building programs seek to limit your family’s exposure to Volatile Organic Compounds, or VOCs, that exist in some building materials and furniture.  Continued exposure to these VOCs has caused health problems ranging from headaches and nausea to cancer.  Green building programs like the US Green Building Council’s LEED for Homes and LEED for New Construction encourage builders to eliminate these emissions whenever possible.

If building green comes at a slightly higher cost it is because many of these harmful chemicals are so widespread that finding products without them can be a challenge.  In fact, it is the presence of these chemicals in some products that makes them cheaper, as in wood products containing urea-formaldehyde.

Those looking to improve the indoor air quality of their current house can make several changes that will significantly reduce VOCs.

Some sources of harmful emissions in the home:

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Forced air systems are the most common heating systems in California and are used in most new construction elsewhere. They have two big advantages: they are cheap to install, and they provide heat at a moment’s notice. Having “instant-on” heat is vital for intermittent use spaces like ski cabins. Otherwise, forced air is the least energy efficient and least comfortable way of heating a typical home. Why?

Ventilation and Heat Loss

For the health and well-being of its occupants, a home must exhaust stale air and refresh it with new air drawn from outdoors. Forced air systems heat and blow this air, via ducts, throughout your house. Since new air is continually entering and leaving, you are heating the outdoors.

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According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling amounts to 46% of all energy consumed by our homes. Water heating uses another 14%. In coastal California, where extreme heat is rare and winters are mild, a properly sited, well designed passive solar home can generate its own heat and hot water, and do without air conditioning.

Historically, few homes are so well sited or built. Since our area has more heating days than cooling days, most homeowners need a heating system. What few know is that many indoor air quality problems can be by-products of forced air heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in their homes.

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Tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on more than 500 trailers in Louisiana and Mississippi showed formaldehyde levels that were five times higher than levels in a normal house. The levels in some trailers were nearly 40 times what is normal.

The CDC is saying that people living in these trailers “should move out quickly — especially children, the elderly and anyone with asthma or another chronic condition.”

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