Indoor air quality is going to be a hot topic this year and every year for at least a decade as we figure out what is healthy for us and what is not healthy. We take a dive into air quality and some of those things you are bringing into your home and what they can do to your health. It could be that new couch or flooring that could be causing health issues inside your home.

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[00:00:29] Eric Goranson: Senior on the show, cause that's really boring radio, but remodeling contractors are running into it. And now they're forced to install an ERV because they've done enough work on the house to go ahead and put that in. And it could be a 1922 craftsman home that has it doesn't matter

[00:00:47] Eric Goranson: it comes to remodeling and renovating your home.

[00:00:51] Intro: we've got you covered. This is around the house.

[00:01:09] Caroline Blazovsky: Hello, Eric. How

[00:01:11] Eric Goranson: Good God, we're going to talk about a subject that was requested by some of our listeners out there today. We're talking about formaldehyde in our homes. One it's naturally occurring. So that's a challenge. And two, it can be in building materials. It can be in glues. And in my opinion, I think the more stuff that you get that's imported the higher, the chance you have of it sliding through the grasps of the formaldehyde police in ending up in your home.

[00:02:13] Caroline Blazovsky: But when you combined everything together in a new build or new construction or. That's when it gets a dicey, it's not actually really okay anymore. And you can re re easily reach a level that's unacceptable and unhealthy.

[00:02:42] Eric Goranson: So you'll see something that says stamped carb. Now the problem is, as we all know, is that you can order anything overseas and have them stamp a box. It's his carb compliance. So that is not the be all end all just because you read it on the label. [00:03:00]

[00:03:02] Caroline Blazovsky: that gets into, if you're buying a lot of product overseas, they tend to not have regulations.

[00:03:35] Caroline Blazovsky: And it's also bad from a consumer standpoint, being medicine.

[00:03:59] Eric Goranson: It's green, it's [00:04:00] renewable. But the problem is is they go out there. . It's beautiful. It's green. It's great for the environment. Uh, it's grass. We all love grass. Uh, here's the thing, I mean, Amen. We all love grass. Uh, you know, here's the thing, when it comes down to it, what they do is they get the big backhoe or a bunch of dudes and they go out there and they dig a big hole in the jungle and they fill it up with formaldehyde.

[00:04:53] Eric Goranson: Right? All that little kind of black spots when it gets that way, when it's, when it's drying, it's just naturally gets a [00:05:00] little bit of mold on it. Well, that is what they use to get the color. And to keep the mold from growing on it, you know? And so it's a preservative, so they dip it in that and then it goes off to be manufactured.

[00:05:36] Eric Goranson: Hmm.

[00:05:57] Caroline Blazovsky: It's something that just keeps going. Have you seen that out [00:06:00] in

[00:06:18] Eric Goranson: They grow out there to grow back up and that way in the spring, they're popping back out again in the late fall. If you go around the area that you want to control the bamboo with a flat-bladed shovel and cut down about six or eight inches in the ground, all the way around that and cut those off that bamboo will stay in that area.

[00:06:52] Caroline Blazovsky: Because it can be useful. I mean, it's really nice. It's like a thick, if you want a barrier between houses, it grows so nice and thick. And, but it just, [00:07:00] if you don't monitor it, it can literally take over your whole yard a matter of a very short duration of time.

[00:07:15] Eric Goranson: You got to really spend some time at the species of bamboo you're going to do because snow and wind likes to break it off and bend it over. So it can look from gorgeous to ugly pretty quickly, but pay attention. I mean, there's hundreds and hundreds of varieties of bamboo out there. Uh, when I did bamboo a number of years ago at one of my houses, cause I needed that barrier that needed to be a natural barrier.

[00:07:52] Caroline Blazovsky: So lots of kinds of bamboo thing. So either way the bamboos could be good or bad, but the [00:08:00] formaldehyde that they bathe it in is no.

[00:08:19] Caroline Blazovsky: I think it's very hot.

[00:08:30] Eric Goranson: So this was, you know, sheesh, 18 years ago, you know, and what happened was, is the little pads on the bottom of the dining room chair, the kids moving in and out actually made like quarter inch D you know, danced into this three quarter inch. And there was no fixing that you couldn't have sanded it down to fix it.

[00:08:57] Caroline Blazovsky: I know, I don't know why they promote it so much. I've had the same [00:09:00] issues with clients, with it being not durable. So, but it gets as big. Like, I don't know if it's still the same, but a couple years back, like what would you say?

[00:09:12] Eric Goranson: talking about it. We were doing bamboo cabinets now. There are some groups out there. Uh, that are certified for certifying where the bamboo was and where it came from. And so you can do some research or research on that to make sure you know, the sourcing of the bamboo, and you can make sure that whatever you're getting.

[00:09:44] Intro: returns.[00:10:00]

[00:10:19] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah, we need to mention, so if you're on social media, which most people. First and foremost, Instagram, you can find us at around the house show and there's a couple knockoff Instagrams. They're not us. So make sure you're going to around the house show like us, follow us. We'd like to hear your questions, you know, type to us.

[00:10:49] Eric Goranson: Oh, yeah. Head over to around the house show over there as well. You'll see our cartoon. That's the easy way to find us.

[00:11:14] Eric Goranson: And that's that place that you can share all your home improvement projects. You have a question. I mean, we had one of our listeners here recently share up, uh, stuff that he 3d printed just to be able to use on a project as a template. So there's a lot of cool things going on there and some groundbreaking.

[00:11:35] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah. I like that idea. The 3d printer, because there's so many times that I need like a specific washer size and I just can't find it. So it'd be so cool just to 3d printed off and I don't know, make it in my basement. Go ahead.

[00:12:09] Caroline Blazovsky: You know, you've got to, if you're going to have one of these, am I really going to want to sit in an electric charging port at Wawa and wait there for an hour? I mean, I don't have time. Five minutes of gas fill up. Isn't about as much time as I have. So I don't know. I think it's got to get a little better before

[00:12:25] Eric Goranson: So I'm a west coaster. I'm going, what is a Wawa? Wawa you

[00:12:32] Eric Goranson: No, I don't know what that is. That's like,

[00:12:39] Intro: That's

[00:12:47] Eric Goranson: an we have those, but those

[00:12:50] Caroline Blazovsky: We had seven 11, like way back one you're in the retro years. Still with the big goal. Yeah.

[00:12:58] Intro: Did he still have bingo? [00:13:00]

[00:13:07] Caroline Blazovsky: See they, why, why replace seven 11? So I guess you're just not it's coming towards you.

[00:13:22] Caroline Blazovsky: remember Slurpee? They had a Slurpee machine.

[00:13:31] Eric Goranson: We've been talking formaldehyde. And you brought up something between the, in the break here. That was interesting. We were talking installation and we should, we stopped the conversation so we could have it here with you today. But installation is one of those things that I didn't really think about it until a few years ago, when companies started coming out and going, Hey, we've got this new, healthy formaldehyde free.

[00:13:57] Caroline Blazovsky: And you don't really think about it, right? Cause it's sort of like this [00:14:00] weird product. Why would it have formaldehyde? But it does. And so a lot of the companies like Johns Manville and then of course, Owens Corning, you know, they went to these lesser amounts of formaldehyde or formaldehyde.

[00:14:24] Eric Goranson: No. And it's one of those things that, um, you know, you're running into an installation. I mean, you've got air going through that house, whether you like it or not.

[00:14:56] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah, you definitely want, I think any house, if you haven't done one, [00:15:00] especially in new build, but you want to try to do a formaldehyde test and it's really a brief test. It does, you know, it's 20 minutes, you do an air sample, you hire an indoor air quality professional. You can actually do at our company, my healthy home.

[00:15:28] Caroline Blazovsky: We're looking at how much you have in. And typically houses in north America. We run really on the high side compared to Europe. So the standard that if you look at a European standard for exam, You'll see, like 20 nanograms per liter. It's something in the U S that you just can't achieve. I've never seen it in a home.

[00:16:04] Caroline Blazovsky: If you have to, if you have to.

[00:16:29] Eric Goranson: She'll never see it. It's going to be awesome. Generally speaking, exterior grade product. Aren't don't have to be carb certified cause that's outside. So that car braiding that you see is generally designed for interior products only within your home. So if you bring in a treated plywood or something out, that's exterior rated, you can run into problems because that can have a boatload of formaldehyde [00:17:00] in it because it doesn't have to meet the indoor standards.

[00:17:06] Caroline Blazovsky: probably tell me about this. So I would say it's like 15 years ago, people that were in the indoor air quality association and in indoor air quality consultants and groups and things like that. And I, Jen hygienists would recommend people use CDX plywood for bathroom remodels because it actually had lower formaldehyde than indoor.

[00:17:30] Eric Goranson: yeah. And it's hard to say, you know, the indoor stuff. Yeah. The indoor stuff has to meet the carb standard, but you gotta think about it. Um, usually the formaldehyde adhesives have been used of recent because they're cheap. You know, that's why, you know, and not to go back and revisit that lumber liquidators story, but that was the whole reason why they were putting carb compliant on the box and using formaldehyde it wasn't, they were being jerks.

[00:18:00] Caroline Blazovsky: you gotta remember no cheap. They were being lied to lumber liquidators here in the U S was purchasing product from China and China was lying and saying that it was carved certified. So in reality

[00:18:18] Eric Goranson: The story on, and I found out a lot of information on that. So let's talk about that just as soon as around the house

[00:18:47] Caroline Blazovsky: Yeah, well, Angelina, if you're listening to around the house

[00:18:59] Eric Goranson: welcome [00:19:00] back to around the house with Eric G and Caroline, be your source for home improvement every week. Thanks for joining us. Well, Caroline and I have been talking about formaldehyde in our home and of course naturally the whole lumber liquidators thing for about three years ago came up. And we had to go out to break, but I wanted to wrap this conversation up on this with what happened.

[00:19:41] Caroline Blazovsky: like super high.

[00:20:00] Caroline Blazovsky: Right. So Eric had some insight information, which is kind of cool about the test kits that lumber liquidators L

[00:20:24] Eric Goranson: Um, that those same factories that was making the suspected product. So as they were walking around in the factory, they turned around and said, wow, wait a minute. What's going on here? This is stamped, carb compliant. And you're putting from all the hide glue in the product and the sales person there, the main shop foreman turns around and goes, oh yeah, uh, lumber liquidators paid us to do that.

[00:21:18] Eric Goranson: You could see a hundred percent that he knew what was going on. And he got himself caught up in a whole bunch of lies. So then they sent out a bunch of, to make quote unquote things better. They sent out a ton of these. Formaldehyde test kits. I remember those well, they found out that the test kits were bad and they all were testing negative, no matter what you did.

[00:21:42] Caroline Blazovsky: if that was the fault of the company or, I mean, most air tests, like they were just inaccurate, right? The way they were testing. The reason I got involved was because they weren't. Able to sample properly, you need to do an air sample and you need to do a TBC tube. And, you know, there's some extensive things you need to do when you're testing for [00:22:00] formaldehyde.

[00:22:08] Eric Goranson: it didn't, there were suits flying everywhere, including consumers suing them. That car breeding in the high, high formaldehyde levels.

[00:22:19] Caroline Blazovsky: yeah, I remember it was such a, it seems like such a long time ago, but I remember getting complaints and everybody had a call and we had a test and people were saying, I don't feel good in my home. And then the flooring was coming back and we actually had to send planks out of the flooring to, they put it, like, imagine a big sealed.

[00:22:56] Caroline Blazovsky: And I remember the test kits particularly well that, you know, they were [00:23:00] selling something that just, wasn't going to be able to test it. You need to do an air sample and see how much is in the air. And then also test the product itself to see how much formaldehyde comes off. It's not cheap to do that. So yeah,

[00:23:14] Eric Goranson: They're just

[00:23:19] Eric Goranson: Yeah. Not going to work and they were giving them out. So I think that's probably what saved them from getting sued on that is they weren't charging for them. They're like here, it was like candy at the parade. They were just thrown out to people here. Take this, take that, Hey, go test it here.

[00:23:40] Caroline Blazovsky: my mind that had episodes like that. So we had that with the Chinese drywall. That was like the same type of like, oh my gosh, people were like panicked about it. And then we had people who were, it was just like deteriorating, all their copper and, and it was putting off all these gasses and it was predominantly in the south.

[00:24:19] Caroline Blazovsky: Cause it was big. It was a big production,

[00:24:49] Eric Goranson: And if you think about that, If copper's getting chewed up. I wouldn't want that in my lungs. I'll be honest. I mean, if it's eaten a hole in that, that's not good. They tore, [00:25:00] there were developments that they went in through, moved everybody out, bought the homes back and ran a bulldozer through the whole thing and hauled the development out to the landfill.

[00:25:13] Caroline Blazovsky: this is a good topic to just kind of touch on, you know, you can be really conscious about what's going on in your home and try to pick the best product. But at the end of the day, there can also be product defects. And Eric and I talked about, I had an issue in my home with.

[00:25:45] Caroline Blazovsky: Just engulfed my house.

[00:25:51] Caroline Blazovsky: sugar. I think there's actual some kind of sugar resin in the, when they make it now because of the formaldehyde free. So when they're making something more natural, they're going to be [00:26:00] using natural compounds, but anything can go wrong when they manufacture these things.

[00:26:20] Caroline Blazovsky: And what do you do when you've got it in your house and you got to get it out.

[00:26:38] Eric Goranson: Right. And that smoker was in there. And so all the walls have that gummy, you know, nasty tare, sticky wall surface. Everything's kind of got that smokers, tooth yellow to it. That can have more formaldehyde that all of your horrible imported materials you bring in all at [00:27:00] once, just from tobacco smoke

[00:27:10] Caroline Blazovsky: But typically you have to, and, and Eric's right. You have to do a wipe. So when we're sampling for nicotine, for example, you actually have to wipe the surface because you can't capture it in an air sample and that gets all adhered to your walls. And, you know, it's, it's smokers are in nasty. It's very nasty.

[00:27:41] Caroline Blazovsky: of people linked to use this fabric wall. Now they do like a foam over the wall, and then they do like a suede material.

[00:28:05] Intro: have it.

[00:28:14] Intro: returns.

[00:28:56] Eric Goranson: already command from even novels down and [00:29:00] you're listening to around the house with Eric

[00:29:08] Intro: Welcome

[00:29:29] Eric Goranson: And now all of a sudden that we've got homes like built like a freaking Fort and all tightened up. Now everything's just kind of. Well, it's all trapped inside the house

[00:29:50] Caroline Blazovsky: Manufactured products were cheaper to make and could be used. And so we started using more synthetic flooring and things like that.

[00:30:09] Eric Goranson: So, you know, that stuff tends to, they come in and finish it. So the VOC and stuff will be super high and then it just aired out quickly. And as it dried, it kind of just went away. Cause it was just such a simple product. And now you've got all these crazy. Finishes and stuff that are on staff, that some of it is actually, if you go to work on it inside your house can be fairly toxic.

[00:30:49] Intro: Like silica

[00:31:06] Caroline Blazovsky: You know, my house is 20 years old. Why do I have a lot of silica in the air? And what happens is it gets trapped in your forced hot air ducks, for example, right? We have HVAC systems. Now, back in the day, we used to have a lot of steam boilers. We had water baseboard systems, uh, less of this. We had more convection and less of this forced hot air.

[00:31:40] Eric Goranson: And yeah, all it takes is for you to be doing like a little bathroom project where you're your stone fabricators out there in the garage, under the cover of the garage, cutting out the rest of the stone, cutout for your sink and polishing it or cutting it to length outside.

[00:32:23] Eric Goranson: So you have less.

[00:32:43] Caroline Blazovsky: But with residential, we don't do that. We're typically built under negative. The air that we do bring in kind of pulls in from cracks and crevices within the building structure. And it gets sucked in, right. And we don't have additional air flow coming in to add to that to sort of dilute it. So the [00:33:00] key is one you could put on an ERV system or have fresh air coming in, open your windows that will help dilute the chemicals.

[00:33:08] Eric Goranson: for just a second, what is an ERV system? Let's, let's break it down for the people, for the listeners who don't know what ERV.

[00:33:27] Caroline Blazovsky: Right. So talk about, if you're going to bring in fresh air from the outside and you live in a really humid climate, what would that do to the inside of your.

[00:33:55] Eric Goranson: And I'm like, oh, Oh, my

[00:33:59] Caroline Blazovsky: that was that [00:34:00] Florida. That sounds like a Floridian,

[00:34:14] Caroline Blazovsky: So, I mean, this there's so many topics right here, but to talk about this person that's living in Florida. Think about Florida right now, they've been getting cold spells, like it's pretty cold. And so when it's 60 degrees in Florida, that block, most of the houses are built with cement down there. So that gets really, really cold.

[00:34:42] Eric Goranson: That makes sense. Cause I saw a couple of weeks ago they were having that. That, uh, what do they call it?

[00:34:51] Caroline Blazovsky: It's exactly what happened. That block got cold on a couple nights of low temps, maybe in the fifties, forties, which is atypical for Florida. They don't build for that temperature [00:35:00] there. And so that block old, and then they got a nice day where the sun came out and it was, you know, 80 plus or maybe 78 and it just sweat.

[00:35:15] Eric Goranson: And why does it get cold? Because I'm going to Florida. Right? That's why the whole thing happened a few weeks ago. I'm like, I'm going to the beach and the sun and I'm gonna go to the beach. And then it was like, oh, it's going to be 35 in Orlando.

[00:35:31] Caroline Blazovsky: So, yeah. Temperature changes, not so good for a house, but for ventilation. You know, what can you do to improve your air quality with formaldehyde? So we talk about EVs and HRVs cause they bring in fresh air from the outside. But the problem is that your outside air has to be pretty decent.

[00:35:59] Eric Goranson: That's the thing. And [00:36:00] ventilation is so key and it's one of those things, especially when you get into like the 1990s to early 2000 homes, we just didn't understand it well enough.

[00:36:14] Caroline Blazovsky: because they're so tight. You know, we went to a lot of the OSB product, which has a lot of those glues. Eric talks about how, you know, they don't breathe. Like when you put a house made out of glue, it's just super, super tight and the moisture can't get out.

[00:36:35] Eric Goranson: arrow. There are still states in the United States. That bathroom fans, if there's a working window or kitchen fans, you know, your vent hood is not required because they have a kitchen window that operates.

[00:36:59] Caroline Blazovsky: [00:37:00] not there states like Delaware. My dad's not required to have. Uh, kitchen poet or any kind of exhaust first kitchen that's in Delaware. I mean, it's not like, you know, it's not where like looking at it and saying, okay, well it's in the middle of, you know, maybe the Midwest or somewhere where they're maybe not near a metropolitan city in, Delaware's very close to New York or

[00:37:27] Eric Goranson: It, uh, there are no. Exceptions for a hood. You can't have it. Re-circulating it has to vent outside period. And now in Washington state, they've made it where if you do a decent sized kitchen model or you hit this numerical factor, and I'm not going to get into the codes of one state here on the show, cause that's really boring radio, but remodeling contractors are running into it.

[00:38:01] Intro: Interesting.

[00:38:10] Eric Goranson: So it's very interesting. So make sure that you're checking in with your local building codes on that stuff, because I think that's something you're going to see sweeping across the nation as we get those things. And

[00:38:27] Caroline Blazovsky: Right? The more you can exhaust that air out, replace that new air with thresher air, that's all better. Right? So making sure those are all working is important. Bathroom fan. Kitchen hoods. Um, where else can you put an exhaust

[00:38:50] Eric Goranson: That's the other thing is you want to control where that air is coming through and conditioner, right? Hey Caroline. You know what that sound is? That is the sound of it's time to go. Thanks for coming on the show today, [00:39:00] everybody and having a great time with us today. I'm Eric G and I'm Caroline

[00:39:06] Intro: You've been listening to around the house. .