EcoDharma Doula
The in-breath – Indoor Air Quality Monitoring
January 2024
There’s so much pollution in the air now that if it weren’t for our lungs, there’d be no place to put it all.
Robert Orben
Ah, winter, in the northern hemisphere, and shelter against the storms. Cozy Padma comfort while the elements swirl outside the window. It’s the yearly in-breath. Because it is so cold outside, we tend to shut ourselves in. Air quality can suffer. Until recently, the unintended consequence of free air exchange (drafts) was a freshening of stale air. Since our antidote to drafts is heat, and heat has come from burning fossil fuels, and burning is both incomplete and accumulating air pollutants, and drafts increase our need for heat, something has to give. It should not be your health and well-being.
Let’s review some of the hazards of ignoring indoor air quality. The risks include sickness and poor health, respiratory illnesses such as coughs, irritants to the skin, eyes, and nose, headaches, dizziness, and fatigue. Respiratory diseases, heart disease, and cancer. Are we gasping for fresh air? The EPA says the air in homes and other buildings can be more seriously polluted than the outdoor air. The most at risk are children, older adults, and people with long-term (chronic) illnesses.
Most indoor air pollution comes from sources that release gases or particles. Things such as building materials and air fresheners constantly give off pollution. Other sources, such as tobacco smoke and wood-burning stoves, also cause indoor pollution and increase methane and carbon dioxide levels, contributing to climate change. Some indoor air pollutants have been around for years. But they often were weakened by outdoor air seeping into the home or indoor air seeping out. Today’s more energy- efficient homes don’t let as much outdoor air get inside.
So our problem is two-fold. First, we introduce pollutants from our lifestyle choices, which accumulate in the winter. Second, we are challenged to free ourselves from the fossil fuels used to heat our homes and hot water and cook our food in the next 25 years, when 15 years would be preferable.
I often hear, ‘The problems are so big, and I can do nothing that will make any difference.’ It turns out that mindful awareness about where we spend considerable time will make a difference. And paying attention at home immediately benefits you and your most loved ones. The guiding principle is that we need to stop burning carbon everywhere. So let’s do this.
So, where do the indoor air pollutants come from?
Typical pollutants of concern include Combustion byproducts such as carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and environmental tobacco smoke. Substances of natural origin such as Radon, pet dander, and mold. Biological agents such as molds. Pesticides, lead, and asbestos. Ozone (from some air cleaners). Various volatile organic compounds from a variety of products and materials.
Most pollutants affecting indoor air quality come from sources inside buildings, although some originate outdoors. Combustion sources in indoor settings, including tobacco, wood and coal heating and cooking appliances, and fireplaces, can release harmful combustion byproducts such as carbon monoxide and particulate matter directly into the indoor environment. Cleaning supplies, paints, insecticides, and other commonly used products introduce chemicals into the indoor air, including volatile organic compounds. Building materials are also potential sources, whether through degrading materials (e.g., asbestos fibers released from building insulation) or new materials (e.g., chemical off-gassing from pressed wood products). Other substances in indoor air, such as Radon, mold, and pet dander, are of natural origin.
The outdoor sources of indoor air pollution include outdoor air pollutants that can enter buildings through open doors, open windows, ventilation systems, and cracks in structures. For example, harmful smoke from chimneys can re-enter homes to pollute the air and other homes in a neighborhood. Some pollutants come indoors through building foundations. For instance, radon forms in the ground as naturally occurring uranium in rocks and soils decays. The Radon can then enter buildings through cracks or gaps in structures. In areas with contaminated groundwater or soils, volatile chemicals can enter buildings through the same process. Volatile chemicals in water supplies can also enter indoor air when building occupants use the water (e.g., during showering and cooking). Finally, when people enter buildings, they can inadvertently bring in soil and dust on their shoes and clothing from the outdoors, along with pollutants that adhere to those particles.
In addition, several other factors affect indoor air quality, including the air exchange rate, outdoor climate, weather conditions, and occupant behavior. The air exchange rate with the outdoors is essential in determining indoor air pollutant concentrations. The air exchange rate is affected by the design, construction, and operating parameters of buildings. It is ultimately a function of infiltration (air that flows into structures through openings, joints, and cracks in walls, floors, and ceilings and around windows and doors), natural ventilation (air that flows through opened windows and doors), and mechanical ventilation (air that is forced indoors or vented outdoors by ventilation devices, such as fans or air handling systems). Outdoor climate, weather conditions, and occupant behavior can also affect indoor air quality. Weather conditions influence whether building occupants keep windows open or closed and whether they operate air conditioners, humidifiers, or heaters, all of which can affect indoor air quality. Certain climatic conditions can increase the potential for indoor moisture and mold growth if not controlled by adequate ventilation or air conditioning.
OK, it has taken me 900 words to impress upon you the causes and conditions for our air quality dilemma. One way to look at the situation is to ask yourself: burning Fossil Fuels will end, so I want to control how and when that happens to me, or do I wish to leave it to the system to collapse?
Now, we can move onto the Path of Freshening our Stale Air. Let us start with a principle to guide our Path of Air Freshening. That principle is:
“That which is measured improves.”
Though I am sorely tempted, we won’t go into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. I’ve seen various versions and attributions to different people. Some versions of it include:
- Pearson’s Law: “That which is measured improves. That which is measured and reported improves exponentially.” –Karl Pearson
- “When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.” –Thomas S. Monson.
- And where I first heard it: “What’s measured improves” –Peter Drucker
The measurement allows us to use Nature’s simple strategy of using Feedback loops. In her book What Would Nature Do, Ruth DeFries describes feedback loops:
Effective circuit breakers are the golden secret for any complex system—whether a financial market, human body, civilization, or planet—to regulate itself, rein in volatility, and persist over the long term. A complex system’s potential for unpredictable and erratic behavior is too great to leave to chance. On a much longer timescale and with far more significant consequences than financial markets, circuit breakers have evolved through geologic time to make our planet conducive to life and life viable on the planet. Human civilization ignores these finely honed circuit breakers at its peril.
A feedback loop can be described as a system in which the outputs of a system are fed back in as inputs and prompt new cycles. A feedback loop allows for feedback and self-correction and adjusts its operation according to differences between the actual and the desired or optimal output. A feedback loop can be used to improve a product, process, etc., by collecting and reacting to users’ comments or anticipating future application of the learning outcomes. Our path is Air Quality as a feedback loop.
Measuring Air Quality, the monitoring in this meandering narrative’s title, can be as simple as becoming mindfully aware of the consequences of our lifestyle choices.
Let’s talk about monitoring as a feedback loop. We all have gone on diets, right? Did you use a scale to measure your progress? As the weight went down, did your behavior adapt to increasing the frequency of getting on the scale and seeing a lower number? Freshening our air quality without a monitor is like dieting without a scale.
Measuring air is more complicated than body mass. Depending on where you are, you may have external requirements: you may be in a radon-inducing location, or smoke from wildfires may visit you. Depending on your arc of decarbonization, you may have reduced levels of common indoor air pollutants: you may be using a gas stove to cook your food. No matter where you are, you will have pollutants coming from the products your house is made of, new materials you introduce into the house, and cleaning products you use. The good news is that Indoor Air Quality monitors are available in many configurations addressing what it is you are interested in. Smoke detectors, or monoxide detectors, are the most common. We all know about the results of hoses in exhaust pipes or heads in unlit ovens, right? Modern monitors allow you to monitor multiple gases remotely from your smartphone. I recommend a monitor that measures particulate matter (PM), volatile organic compounds (VOC), carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), Nitrous Oxides (NOx), and Ozone (O3), and temperature and humidity. If you are in a high Radon location (try https://radonmap.com), monitoring Radon is recommended.
Where we would like to be is if air quality worsens, you can figure out where the culprit is coming from. We would like you to know if firing up your stove creates dangerous levels of air pollutants (it’s how unhealthy, not if); we would like you to be able to turn on the hood vent or open a window. If anything is measuring abnormally, we want to let you know so you can adjust your life. For instance, if the monoxide skyrockets every time your furnace goes off, you probably have a combustion mixture problem that can be addressed. Eventually, you will realize that the fossil-fueled services in your home or work are not your friends (and they never were). We recognize that cheap energy prices masked sloppy home construction, that energy is no longer affordable, and that the drafts in the house masked the indoor air pollution.
So the Fruition? There are so many positive outcomes from indoor air quality monitoring that it would take another 900 words to enumerate them all (and I may have already overstayed my welcome). The top thing is mindful awareness of the consequences of the life choices we make from moment to moment and the ability to adjust them to increase our happiness and longevity.
Why wouldn’t we do this?
Becoming a warrior means that we can look directly at ourselves, see the nature of our cowardly mind, and step out of it. We can trade our small-minded struggle for security for a much vaster vision, one of fearlessness, openness, and genuine heroism. That doesn’t happen all at once. It is a gradual process.
From “The Superhuman Life of Gesar of Ling” in The Collected Works of Chogyam Trungpa, Volume Eight, page 409.
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David Takahashi
326 29th Street
Boulder CO 80305
Hic Svnt Dracones Location/Time Zone: Boulder, CO/ Mountain