Indoor Air Quality Testing

Every year, Americans take a keener interest in climate change and the environment outside their front doors. However, this interest doesn’t seem to stretch to their own homes or businesses. Are you aware of the air quality in your home or business? Is the air quality in your home or business good or bad? Thankfully, you can find out with indoor air quality testing from First Call Response.

When you partner with us, a trained professional will be with you in no time. Using residential air quality testing and commercial air quality testing, it’s possible to identify potential environmental issues in your home or business property. Although you can’t see it, indoor air pollution often generates smells and can affect the health of all those inside a building.

Of course, poor indoor air quality also affects the well-being and comfort of workers or inhabitants inside the property. After a long day at work, you just want to come home to your safe haven – not a property with poor air quality, musty odors, and other problems. Depending on the type of building in question, you’ll find connections between poor indoor air quality and sick building syndrome, poor learning in schools, and lowered productivity.

Sometimes, domestic air quality testing highlights gases in the environment – this includes radon, carbon monoxide, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Elsewhere, the problem might be microbial contaminants, particulates, or other problems.

If you want to perform household air quality testing or commercial air quality testing, feel free to reach out to our excellent team today.

 

Different Pollutant Types

What sort of pollutants could be in your home? The truth is that your home could have three different pollutants affecting the air quality in your home. The good news is that we can test for all three using special techniques and equipment.

Chemical Pollutants

Firstly, chemical pollutants include the VOCs we mentioned earlier; these are volatile organic compounds. While you might think that anything with the word ‘organic’ in the name is good, examples such as formaldehyde suggest otherwise. Elsewhere, you could also have radon and lead in your home – two more damaging chemical pollutants.

Biological Pollutants

Here, we’re looking at things like dust mites, mold, dander, bacteria, and pollen. As you may know, mold is a nightmare for many business owners and homeowners. As well as not looking very pretty, mold can affect the health of workers and inhabitants. What’s more, it spreads quickly around the property and causes a musty odor. In other words, you want to get rid of biological pollutants such as mold as quickly as possible.

Combustion Pollutants

Finally, this is where potentially dangerous pollutants come in such as tobacco smoke and carbon monoxide. Often, we see people getting confused between combustion pollutants and chemical pollutants. Essentially, combustion can cause the VOCs and the other chemical pollutants we described earlier.

As mentioned previously, First Call Response is your friend for all these pollutants. With indoor air quality testing, you quickly build a picture of the air in your home or business property. We’ll collect air samples and samples from building surfaces while monitoring the people who spend the most time in the building. Furthermore, we have advanced technology to model the airflow through the building. Suddenly, this could highlight potential issues and reasons as to why your air quality is so poor.

Biological Pollutants

In the next section of this guide, we want to break down the three major types of pollutants that may exist inside your home. For starters, biological pollutants since they’re common for many owners of properties. Whether due to poor airflow, dampness, or another problem, biological pollutants may seem like small problems, but they quickly impact air quality.

some people in the property suffer from excessive coughing, watery eyes, shortness of breath, sneezing, and dizziness? Do these symptoms arise in people who don’t normally experience them? If so, your building could be the problem, whether a home or a business property. Biological pollutants such as mold cause all these problems.

During the testing process, we should ideally have an idea of potential problems – generally, this is better than going into a property and blind testing everything. With even a shortlist of potential contaminants, we can run the relevant tests and identify the problem.

Should you jump straight to household air quality testing? Well, it depends on what you have already tried to alleviate potential problems. For instance, those experiencing symptoms or dealing with a particular smell can try to clean carpets, furniture, and curtains while also looking for signs of mold and other biological pollutants. If you’ve taken preventative measures and can’t seem to shake the problem, this is the time to reach out to our amazing team.

Even if you haven’t identified the problem, we still recommend getting in touch because we may be able to help. With our experience and advanced equipment, we can potentially focus our testing on specific problems and then go from here.

Mold is a common problem in modern homes because they’re almost built too well – they retain the heat too well and this doesn’t allow for enough airflow to prevent moisture. Especially around windows, you might find a buildup of mold. However, other common problems include house dust mites because they can live in bedding, mattresses, carpets, furniture, and other soft materials.

Elsewhere, biological pollutants can include pollen – the bane of the lives of many Americans each year. If you have hay fever, you may constantly battle itching eyes, watery eyes, sneezing, coughing, and other symptoms.

 

Chemical Pollutants

VOCs

Essentially, VOCs are organic compounds that have a volatile nature (simple, right?). While some organic chemicals exist inside natural things, others are artificial. The fact that surprises most homeowners is that some products can release organic compounds even when they aren’t being used.

Whether released when in use or when stored, the main suspects of this nature are as follows:

 

• Wood preservatives
• Disinfectants
• Cleaners
• Paints
• Dry-cleaned clothing

Elsewhere, you might also find VOCs in office equipment, building materials, furnishings, and craft materials. What’s the issue? Well, long-term exposure to VOCs has several side effects on your health. For example, some VOCs can damage the liver, kidney, or even the central nervous system. In the short term, you may experience fatigue, dizziness, eye irritation, loss of coordination, respiratory tract irritation, nausea, or allergic reactions.

Although there are some home kits that you can get for VOCs, we recommend a professional service. Even if your home kit goes off to a professional lab, you may not get accurate results if the collection itself isn’t done correctly. With a trained technician, you can be sure of accurate results for your home or business.

Lead

As well as VOCs, the field of chemical pollutants includes lead, radon, and formaldehyde. Way back in Roman times, people would build water systems with lead. Now, many hundreds of years later, scientists believe that deaths could have been much lower if they didn’t use lead so much (they would also make pots and pans from the material). As the 19th century came to a close, scientists recognized the harmful impact of lead.

While lead has been mostly removed from society these days, you can still get exposed to the harmful material through cracked, peeling, chipping lead paint. As soon as lead paint starts to experience some damage, the risk of dangerous exposure increases. When the chemical is airborne, we can swallow the particles and breathe them in.

Unfortunately, one of the biggest dangers of lead is that it affects many of the important functions and systems in the human body. In mild cases, it causes damage to the kidneys, central nervous system, brain, and blood cells. In serious cases, people have suffered convulsions, been forced into a coma, and even died.

When children are exposed to lead, it can affect their mental and physical development too. Some children exposed to lead have been forced to lead their lives with a shorter attention span and lower IQ just because of this dangerous chemical.

If you have lead paint, don’t ever try to remove it yourself. Instead, call a professional service to use the right equipment and disposal methods. Furthermore, call First Call Response for domestic air quality testing in your commercial or residential property. Experts recommend contacting a professional service if you’re also in one of the following three categories:

• You have children in your home
• Your property was built before 1978 (the year in which laws were introduced to prevent lead usage)
• You live/work near a large roadway where leaded gasoline and exhaust fumes could have affected your soil and property

 

Radon

The third chemical pollutant we want to discuss is radon because this is now the second most common cause of lung cancer in this country. Although we don’t realize it, radon actually comes up into homes through holes and cracks in the foundation. According to experts, around one in fifteen homes could have higher radon levels than recommended in the United States – therefore, it’s a serious problem.

Considering radon can damage the lungs and the surrounding tissues, it’s important to have your home tested for radon (assuming your home is situated below the third floor). As well as home kits, contact First Call Response for peace of mind that your property is safe for family, friends, colleagues, visitors, guests, and more.

Combustion Pollutants

One of the most common combustion pollutants is ETS (environmental tobacco smoke) and it originates from cigars, cigarettes, and pipes. While the smoker inhales the smoke at one end, it also emits from the other end and travels around the property. With over 4,000 compounds in a cigarette, it does untold damage to the smoker and all those around them. According to recent reports, as many as 40 of the compounds are carcinogens. We said that radon was the second-biggest cause of lung cancer, and this is because smoking is the biggest.

Even when parents try to limit their smoking to when children aren’t around, it’s almost impossible to keep them away from this pollutant when they live inside the same property. With this in mind, reach out to our team for the best residential air quality testing around. Of course, you also need to think about your smoking habits if you want to keep your property safe in the long term.

The second common combustion pollutant comes in the form of carbon monoxide (CO). Not only is this gas colorless, but it’s also generally odorless which is why an alarm is one of the best ways to identify carbon monoxide in your property. When untreated, CO can cause a lack of consciousness and even death from poisoning. Just some of the things around your property that can generate CO include woodstoves, space heaters, gas stoves, and fireplaces.

If low levels are in your home, this can cause fatigue, headaches, weakness, dizziness, confusion, and nausea. Due to these symptoms, people exposed to CO often think they have food poisoning or even the flu.

 

First Call Response

Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean that you can’t smell it in the home. Even if you can’t smell anything, you could have issues with the quality of your home’s air. If you have any concerns, please feel free to contact the passionate team at First Call Response. We can tell you all about our commercial air quality testing and residential air quality testing. We’ll explain how it works, how we can help your property, and the best routes forward based on what you tell us.

Indoor air quality is critical to good health and wellbeing, so why risk anything less this year? With household air quality testing, you can either take the first steps toward resolving the problem or have peace of mind that everything is fine. To improve air quality, we can use source control, filtration, ventilation, and other techniques. We can also provide advice on keeping the air quality high throughout your property. Act today!