Healthy Indoors Magazine - USA Edition

30 | September 2019 Problematic Air Flows ©2019 Jeffrey C. May chimney. When combustion products entered the chimney, the air took the shortest route back into the living room. The real estate agent might as well have been reading in- side the chimney! She had always wondered why the win- dows in the house were open whenever she was there, and now she knew why. Fallen oil-furnace vent pipe in another house with unhealthy air May Indoor Air Investigations LLC In a third property—a very tightly constructed, three fam- ily—the hot-air furnaces were hung from the ceiling in the multi-car garage. The filter slots were open, so return air was being drawn in from the garage. When automobiles were started up, that air contained CO from the cars' ex- haust. My clients did not purchase the condo but did sug- gest that Jack Kevorkian might be interested (for those of you too young to remember, Kevorkian was notorious for his CO euthanasia plan). Ice Damming In two properties with steam boilers in the basement there were spaces around the chimney at the basement ceiling. In each case, hot air from the boiler was rising up around the chimney, flowing into the attic, and causing ice dam- ming in the winter, which can lead to paint damage and mold growth. The Sickening Dryer Hose Dryers should not be vented for great lengths through cold spaces. I inspected one house in which the dryer vent trav- B uilding and indoor-air-quality professionals should be aware of visible conditions that can lead to air- borne irritants, contaminants, and allergens. Combustion Products A woman who lived out-of-state called our office in the hopes that we could help her. She sometimes experienced headaches and dizziness when she did the laundry. Her husband suspected that she was exaggerating. When I ar- rived at the property, she was welcoming but he stood back on the staircase with his arms folded and his look icy. I figured out what the problem might be before I even got out of the car. The front of the house had a deep L-shape with a three- car garage jutting out on one side and the entranceway on the other. The mechanical room faced the "L" in the front. The room contained the washer and dryer at one end and a direct-vented boiler at the other; the boiler took its com- bustion air from the room. The combustion-air intake for the room and the di- rect-vented exhaust pipe were located about 18 inches from each other at the outside of the L, and there was a deep overhang all along the front of the house. The geom- etry of this arrangement trapped the combustion products close to the exterior wall at grade, and the products were sucked back into the room through the combustion-air in- take. When the woman did laundry when the boiler was operating, she was exposed to elevated levels of carbon monoxide (CO). The solution? Move the boiler exhaust or the combustion-air intake. In another case, a real estate agent was running an open house in a small, immaculate single family. It was an antique but had been lovingly renovated. It was a rainy day, so there was very little traffic at the open house. The real estate agent sat quietly in the living room reading a book, when suddenly she felt nauseous and dizzy. She spent the rest of the open house standing outside in the rain, taking in deep breaths. The boiler exhausted into a chimney that still had an opening for a wood stove that had probably once heated the house but that was no longer present. A loose piece of metal covered the hole. There was only one flue in the

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