[Greenbuilding] Stale Air

[Stephen Collette]

Interesting. So as a culture, we define stale air and instead of building tolerance to the whole thing, we build an industry to mask it. I suppose in the old days all those powdered wigs and such were the same sort of approach to the odour of the body (as an odour goes) by the powder industry. hmm. What's fascinating though is that we have less issues of body odour, more of chemical odours in our homes, and except for the occasional gym bag left unattended, odours are less and less of an issue within homes, that typically have little actual cooking done in them (clients here, folks, I know we are all die hards here on this list, growing, cooking and preserving food), but as the houses get bigger and the populations in them get smaller, we are ventilating more than ever to resolve this "stale air" which had we not hermetically sealed ourselves into our homes and actually opened windows and aired the place out, may not in fact be as important with respect to the unmeasurable level of staleness.

Fascinating.

Stephen

Stephen Collette BBEC, LEED AP, BSSO
Your Healthy House - Indoor Environmental Testing & Building Consulting
http://www.yourhealthyhouse.ca
stephen at yourhealthyhouse.ca
705.652.5159








On 2010-12-13, at 9:58 AM, greenbuilding-request at lists.bioenergylists.org wrote:

> From: jfstraube <jfstraube at gmail.com>
> 
> ASHRAE standards have historically been set based on early research around odour: it is human smells that set the ventilation rates. Depending on culture and time, these rates have, under ASHRAE's guidelines, varied from about 3 cfm to 30 cfm of fresh air per person.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bioenergylists.org/pipermail/greenbuilding_lists.bioenergylists.org/attachments/20101213/0e1f6d3d/attachment.html>