Wood stove and health concerns

[Rearscreen]

Are pillows made of down or other fillers?

When I was that age my parents packed my brother and I into the station wagon for a trip to Florida. They packed our feather pillows. Upon arrival it was off in an ambulance as I could not breathe. I always had allergies. Come to find out it's the dander in the feathers. Some pillows have it, some don't. In my adult years I was hired to install an art installation. Hundreds of pillows. No problem for hours. Then I stacked the "bad" pillow. My eyes almost swelled shut from the allergic reaction.

 

[Coyyote]

Air quality is indeed a subject I have learned more about than I set out to learn.

4 year old daughter with congestion might be Air Quality, could be hanging out with enough other 4 year olds that there is a constant turn over in garden variety URIs, as above cold be allergies. Can be chemicals in products, the wife and got the last of our wall to wall carpet out this summer.

Divide and conquer I say.

One thing can (should be able to) do is find a local fancy-schmancy air quality monitoring station. I dunno how thick on the ground beta attenuation monitors are back east, a decent BAM unit to count particles will set somebody back $30k, but if there is one near you book mark it in your browser and keep an eye on it. What are the local (outdoor ambient) particle counts when your daughter is having a bad day?

I say this because of your population density. You got a lot of people in a pretty small area in pretty much all of NJ. If Manhattan had the same population density as Alaska there would be three people living in a log cabin at Battery Park (Anchorage) 1 person in a tent in Central Park (Fairbanks) and 2 others folks wandering around the rest of the island going to where ever the fish are running or the game is grazing. I am not sure how many orders of magnitude that is, but you got a lot of people near you burping and passing gas and running their BBQ grills and driving their cars. I am confident you got some particles to count in your outdoor ambient air.

Second is indoor ambient.

You might as well go read up on this thread: https://www.hearth.com/talk/threads/homemade-air-filters-good-indoor-air-quality-cheap.188986/

and then come back here so I can comment on what I already said without having to type the whole thing twice.

At this point I have two battles.

One is particles generated inside my house, from the geriatric cat, the wood stove, the now absent wall to wall carpet. For those, assuming good/excellent outdoor air quality, I run a single 20" box fan with a single MERV 13 (20x20) furnace filter duct taped neatly to the intake side of the box fan. I replace that filter about every six months. I used a IR thermometer to check the motor housing temperature on the box fan daily for about I dunno, my eyes were bleeding, maybe four months or so. The fan motor was constantly either the same temp as ambient air, or +1dF. I just couldn't monitor it any more after a few months. There are a few days in spring pollen season where we close the windows to let the single filter/ single fan keep the pollen inside the house knocked back, and then reopen the windows once the pollen is done.

Outdoor particles is my other battle. BRB. My nearest BAM counter is the one labelled "NCore" (broken link removed to https://dec.alaska.gov/air/air-monitoring/alaska-air-quality-real-time-data) . Right this moment the controlling variable for air quality is ( no surprise) PM2.5 wiht a measurement of 8 micrograms per cubic meter which converts to a useless AQ "Index" that means my air quality is "good". I dunno how many bureacrats went to how many meetings to come up with the dang air quality "index" but I want my tax dollars returned with interest. The index my opinion, is a stupid pointless useless distraction from good science and useful data. Micrograms per cubic meter is good science. Indexes are for people who wager on the stock market or hire dowsers to locate well water.

So anyway, outdoor particles. In the last 12 months my outdoor ambient PM2.5 count (in mcg/m3) has varied from 0-477. With outdoor counts from 0-125 mcg/m3 my single filter/ single fan array, fan speed set to low, can keep my indoor PM2.5 counts in the 0-6 range.

I'll get around to the V portion of HVAC systems next, at my house all I have for V is a courtesy fan in each of the two bathrooms, and when it is running my woodstove takes combustion air from the living space. In summertime wild fire season where the particle counts get really out of hand I can count on the EPA to be running radio ads about how important wintertime air quality is while not giving any EPA $ to hire smoke jumpers and I want the money spent on summertime radio advertisements refunded to me as well. Sorry, sore subject here. When the outdoor particle counts exceed 125 mcg/m3 I got to dust off some more sophisticated filtration to keep my indoor air quality good. I have a couple cubes that can take 3 20x20 furnace filters (MERV 13 if you recall) and a monster cabinet that holds six 20x20 filters with a 20 inch fan on that one too. When the air gets bad enough (~300 mcg/m3 and up) I will have all of those running full blast to keep my home in the "moderate" or "unhealthy for sensitive groups" ranges.

K. So the problem with ventilation ductwork it is hard to clean poorly and likely impossible to clean well at the residential scale. I have seen commercial scale air handlers with a man door, where you can walk in there with a dust rag and get busy; but the final duct work on those, for individual rooms, not cleanable. If you got crap in your ductwork my advice is to sell your house. Go buy some place with steam radiators and opable windows.

I shall now approach the electric third rail, VOCs, with a well insulated battle axe. If you want to measure VOCs accurately you are screwed. There is a field effect transistor that actually changes its field behavior in the presence of carbon dioxide. If you have a good sized conference room, this is handy. Empty room, the HVAC system just keeps up with temperature. If 200 people show up in the next ten minutes to hear your inspirational sales speech they will be blowing off CO2, a sophisticated HVAC system can detect the CO2 and start the ventilation fans so folks don't pass out from lack of oxygen while you are banging on about fourth quarter sales goals.

If you want to know if the CO2 in your conference room is 16 or 17 parts per million, this semiconductor simply cannot provide that kind of resolution. You may have heard of MOSFETS. Metal Oxide Something Field Effect Transistor. Great idea. Less material. Lower cost. Instead of physical P-N junctions inside the transistor, the FET family generates fields in the air near the semiconductor that interact. IIRC MOSFETs started showing up in consumer amplifier circuits in the mid to late 1990s. I don't recall which are the P and N dopes in the xyzFET that changes its characteristics in the presence of CO2, or rather diminished partial pressure of oxygen because of (most of the time) increased CO2.

The bad news is some ahem, person, somewhere came up with some math to use this property to estimate VOC like formaldehyde. If you are looking at a consumer grade AQ monitor that is supposed to monitor VOCs and it costs less than $1000, someone is selling you an xyzFET and some software. When you get it home, spoof it with a gentle kiss from a CO2 fire extinguisher and see if it doesn't detect fatal levels of formaldehyde in your home. You're welcome.

To find out (in a definitive way) whether or not VOCs are a problem in your home, you have two options. One is to send away for an air flask. Follow the directions with the package, send the flask back to the supplier. They will run your air sample through a gas chromatograph machine. You get a report telling you what they found. The higher resolution you want, the more money you pay. The other option is to rent a handheld VOC detector from a local company that most likely has the words "fire and safety" in the business name. Garden State Fire and Safety. New Jersey Fire and Safety. I made these up. Keystone Fire and Safety. Something like that. One of those will have some handheld meters for rent. Retail value/ credit card deposit in the $3-5k range. Half or full day rentals local to me, with a discount for a week long rental. With one of these you can wander around your house looking to see if you have problem areas, without the accuracy of gas chromatography.

The $180 Atmotube Pro correlated fairly well with testing against BAM and GRIMM standards

http://www.aqmd.gov/docs/default-source/aq-spec/field-evaluations/atmotube-pro---field-evaluation.pdf?sfvrsn=8

This was for particulates, as you mention VOCs are another matter.

 

[crepitus]

Thanks for the reply PD. I have the meter coming in today. Limited-time deal: Air Quality Monitor BIAOLING Accurate Tester for CO2 Formaldehyde(HCHO) TVOC PM2.5/PM10 Multifunctional Air Gas Detector Real Time Data&Mean Value Recording for Home Office and Various Occasion https://a.co/d/6ES1oTg

I read your entire thread that was linked here. My plan is to monitor the inside air with the stove not running. Then fire it up and monitor.

My next step was going to be construction of that filter cube you have.

Questions
Why do I need to worry about outdoor air quality? No stations that close to me.

Do I need the cube filter or will just placing a Merv 13 on the fan be good enough?

What should I be mostly concerned about...pm2.5 pm10...ect.

Thanks again

 

[BillBurns]

Paranoia will destroy ya. I doubt that the wood stove alone is doing anything to make matters worse. Kids get sick, as we all do, and its cold and flu season, and with that comes burning wood for heat. Its a ball game I guess.

 

[crepitus]

Paranoia will destroy ya. I doubt that the wood stove alone is doing anything to make matters worse. Kids get sick, as we all do, and its cold and flu season, and with that comes burning wood for heat. Its a ball game I guess.

She's sick more often than not

 

[begreen]

She's sick more often than not

Poor dear, I'm so sorry to hear this. Is it only when the stove is going or year-round?

 

[crepitus]

Poor dear, I'm so sorry to hear this. Is it only when the stove is going or year-round?

It's on and off year round. But of course it's worse in the winter.

 

[Poindexter]

@crepitus , I think you need to pay some attention to the science grade AQ data in your area. Pick 3 or 4 of the sensors your tax dollars are paying for, in sort of a crescent around your home that starts in the south, loops around to the west, and ends up north of you. In general the winds carrying particles to your house are going to be moving from west to east.

When little girl crepitus is having a really bad day, hit those four monitoring sites and screen shot the data. Stick them all in a folder "bad day." When little girl crepitus is having a good day, hit the same four sites upwind of you, take screen shots, and stick them in a folder "good day." Once you have a couple good days and a couple bad days screen shotted, then look for correlation.

Mind you correlation does not prove causation. However, it is a place to start. You are already paying for the data. You can either access the data you bought with a bit of time, or just take wild stabs and shots in the dark.

The thing about outdoor AQ is outdoor air does end up inside your home. I don't know anything about your HVAC system, but if you can be in the home without losing consciousness you got some air turnovers, that is CO2 rich air you already breathed once going out and outdoor air with a full measure of oxygen coming in.

One cheap thing you can do is bring in some houseplants while you are trying to solve this riddle. NASA spent big big dollars researching which plants would be most beneficial in spaceships for long travel, they were looking for plants that could uptake CO2 from humans and give O2 back to the air in the space ship while requiring the least amount of volume and dirt and water and so on. All the top finishers are going to pull other pollutants out of the air as well.

Cheap, easy, quick, what is not to like about houseplants?

I don't think you need a cube until you find indoor PM2.5 counts above 125 mcg/m3. Up to there a single filter on a single fan will get the indoor counts in my home down to good/excellent in a day or two - and keep them there. I am talking about 1200sqft with one bathroom courtesy fan as the V in hVac.

Among 20 inch box fans, get the Lasko. The black fan at team orange homestore with otherwise similar performance specs is a noisy little rascal for the amount of air it moves.

If you find you legitimately have a VOC problem (I don't have one), look long and hard at the activated charcoal filter in a tube that hooks up to a bullet style fan. These are quite popular in greenhouses in states where it is legal to grow marijuana. I guess the growers don't like to smell skunk when they are relaxing on their patios after a hard day in the greenhouse. Activated charcoal filters have a finite capacity, but they can be replaced and are quite effective on a number of pollutants. It could be that the growers are looking to not introduce outdoor contaminants into the greenhouse. I am not a grower and do not know for sure. When I was reading up on active charcoal air filtration (for VOCs) I kept coming back to websites marketing to marijuana growers.

Among particles, PM2.5 is my primary concern. PM10, in the lungs of a healthy adult, will get wrapped up in some mucous and coughed out. A nuisance, and certainly a health hazard in large enough quantities, but PM10 in reasonable quantities is not the Grim Reaper riding towards you on a pale horse. PM2.5 is a problem I think, according to the preponderance of recent medical research. I have spent the last couple years of my career in health care battling a particular virus and am at least two years behind on PM2.5 research. Last I knew no one had been able to draw a straight line between PM2.5 exposure and any particular disease, but the existing evidence is quite strong. FWIW "the science of medicine" 'knew' smoking tobacco causes lung cancer in the 1920s (just ask the OR nurses going to all the lobectomies in the 1920s), but it took 50 years for research to prove why.

Without being there and traipsing around your house, given the seriousness of your child's health, it might make sense to get some baseline legitimate particle measurements and suspect VOC measurements with your consumer grade doo-hickey, then bring in some NASA houseplants, measure again, put one furnace filter on one box fan, measure again after a couple days, and then go rent a legitimate VOC tester from a fire and safety place if your kid is still sick.

If you have a whole house blower and some ductwork, I strongly encourage you, while you have the rental (legit) VOC detector, to turn off the blower, open all the windows, run some fans, take a set of readings. Then close the windows, turn the blower back on, wait a couple hours and take some more readings. You would of course take screen shots at your four upwind tax payer funded AQ monitors on that same day.

Another thing you could do, on a school holiday, is send your child to someplace with known good air quality (not Bejing or Fairbanks) for a couple weeks and see how she does. The windward Antilles should be inexpensive in summer months, Dominica, Guadalupe and etcetera, though Christmas break is high season for all of the Caribbean. Perhaps Banff or Winnipeg? Maybe Calgary or Saskatoon?

Inside your home, if the woodstove is correctly installed, you should have no degradation of indoor AQ unless the loading door is open to add more fuel. You might have some exhaust ingress as someone, I think @Ashful , mentioned earlier in thread. I haven't had that problem. Besides having the loading door of the wood stove open to degrade indoor air quality, look at molds and fungus from the basement/ crawl space migrating into the living space, duct work, carpeting, and pets. I am convinced wall to wall carpeting is the modern equivalent of dirt floors. If all of those check out fine (unlikely) and your (daughter's) problem isn't outdoor AQ, you could next look at moisture/mold in the insulation of the walls, but this one is an expensive (and lengthy) item to fix.

While you are on this mission you might as well test for Radon. Frankly, your 4 yo is not old enough to be suffering from Radon, but while you are addressing this you might as well be sure you don't leave a Radon issue unresolved.

 

[peakbagger]

One quick thing, does the OP have natural gas or propane appliances?. Lots of research is that children in homes with unvented gas appliances have far more likely incidences of asthma. These appliances put out sub micron particles of soot 24/7 if they have pilot and obviously while being used. When houses were leaky, it was less of an issue but many homes are now tightly sealed up and only newer home have air to air heat exchanger to bring in theoretically fresh outdoor air.

Poor local air quality is an issue, usually for the poor as industrial facilities tend to be located in poorer areas. For woodburners, one person with an outdoor wood boiler can ruin air quality for hundreds if not thousands of feet around that one wood boiler. In my case when a neighbor did an illegal install, my smoke detector in my attic was going off until a combination of fixes reduced the problem. In areas prone to temperature inversions, wood burning in general can be issue. In VT, many of the towns and schools are in valleys subject to inversions. Thirty or 40 years ago the prices of fuel to heat the schools was steep and VT wanted to encourage "green" heat, so they shoveled money at schools to put in wood chip heating systems. Many were built but no one really looked at the local air quality impact. Eventually they did and found that PM 2.5 had gone up in many of those areas to the point where they were reaching "non-attainment" status meaning there was enough of it in the air that it could be health problem. They didnt do much with the existing boilers although many schools switched to preprocessed higher grade chips (our friends from Tarm USA in southern NH has a plant to make these) while new boilers have to have air emission controls installed. VT is now throwing shade at biomass in general for not being renewable enough and I think the subsidies have run out.

 

[Poindexter]

Another idea with a good particle counter and a good particle sniffer in hand is first open a bunch of windows, run fans, and look for the indoor counts to match the taxpayer funded outdoor counts pretty well.

Close up the windows, wait a couple or three hours, sniff around again to see what the carpet and crawlspace is emitting - then turn the whole house blower back on to see what is coming out of the ductwork.

 

[crepitus]

Thanks for all the help and ideas. Right now I don't think the air quality is too bad and she's still hacking away. Went to the Dr today. Here are the reading I have. Fyi we have bbhw heat but are ducted for ac

 

[EbS-P]

Here is what mine says no stove for a week. I have had two units side by side when measurements are low, they varied by up to 50%. Take it outside for an hour. Then compare. Watch for relative changes in the readings not actual values.

Any cooking recently?

 

[BillBurns]

Wow, this like Science Class! Outside air is probably cleaner. but depends where you live. Maybe your kid has COPD? Sorry to hear that you cant narrow it down. Any new pets, like a cat? Some people are allergic to them or just pet dander. Just a thought.

 

[TradEddie]

Paranoia will destroy ya. I doubt that the wood stove alone is doing anything to make matters worse. Kids get sick, as we all do, and its cold and flu season, and with that comes burning wood for heat. Its a ball game I guess.

I'm with this guy! A properly running wood stove is extremely unlikely to be the direct cause of any of your daughter's symptoms, and not likely to be the indirect cause (mold, ash) either.

The broad "air quality" can be correlated with long term health, but less easy to attribute as a cause of acute symptoms in any one person. You could do everything to remove 99.9% of the issues, but if that last 0.1% is what's actually causing the problem, you'll achieve nothing. First, it's perfectly normal for small kids to have a cold 6-10 times each year, and for adults, about half that. Secondly, there are so many things that can cause allergies or other reactions. My life changed when I finaly figured out I'm allergic to tannin in tea! I get a dermatitis from deodorant, and if I use cortisone cream to relieve that dermatitis, I'm allergic to an ingredient in the cream! I also get reactions to some kinds of scented candles and air fresheners. It took a long time to figure all those out, and that's what you may need to do. Start with the big ones, dust, pets, pillows, laundry detergents. Get a good filter on your HVAC system. Personally I think that humidifiers do more harm (condensation and mold) than good, but YMMV.

TE

 

[Ashful]

I grew up with allergy-induced and cold-induced asthma, enough to put me in the hospital roughly once per year, and still suffer more than most with respiratory after-effects to any regular winter cold. So I feel for the OP, this is a familiar situation. If it's any consolation, it's probably bothering you more than the kid, as they just don't know any different. At least that's how it was for me, I really didn't let it slow me down... which probably explains some of the yearly hospitalizations.

A few things I learned over the years:

1. The effects are cumulative, with a weeks-long time constant. In other words, short-term exposure to an irritant is much more tolerable if there was no associated longer-term exposure. Likewise, if you've been exposed to a low-level irritant for days prior, any small acute exposure can push you way over the edge.

2. Carpet is your enemy. I've torn every square inch of carpet out of every house I've ever owned.

3. Cleanliness is key. One of the few luxuries I have always allowed is a cleaning crew that comes thru our house every week or two, never longer. They handle the wiping down of floors, baseboards, window sills, the stuff you just don't get to frequently enough on your own. Cost of this can be managed by still doing basic cleaning yourself.

4. Keeping house sealed up during peak allergy season(s) is key, although not directly related to your apparent winter-time issues.

5. Pets are a problem, owing to point 1 above. We had a big lab/shepherd mix growing up, and while I wasn't so allergic to her for us to realize she was a problem, after she passed all of my issues went mostly away. It's that base level irritant provided by living with a dog, which made every shorter-term exposure so much worse.

 

[Ashful]

Oh, one other:

6. Medication is your friend. Your child will learn to sense their symptoms much better over time, and even pre-emptively medicate to avoid issues. Any self-aware life-long sufferer can tell you whether the congestion they're feeling at this moment will be better resolved by steroid (inflammation), expectorant (viscosity), or decongestant. This takes time to develop, but these three mechanisms are to be used together with varying frequency to manage symptoms, and prevent initially mild symptoms from progressing to secondary infections. Don't be afraid of inhaled steroids for temporary usage, they're really just "topical", albeit topical on your nasal passages or airway.

Speaking of which, does she suffer from eczema? If so, your allergist and dermatologist should both be aware. There is a strong link between asthma and eczema, not yet realized when I was a child, but now often treated together.

 

[Poindexter]

Also, dogs and cats tend to roll around in the grass (and other outdoor items) and bring those items (pollen and etcetera) into the home whether or not little girl crepitus is allergic to the actual dog or cat.

On balance I think some kind of pet is good for both kids and adults, but an indoor pet might be desirable in this circumstance without better supporting data.

 

[Ashful]

I was just re-reading my last two posts. That item 1 is always the killer, for me. My life is about managing long-term exposure, so I can go play farmer on weekends, and not end up killing myself. I can do things that, as a child would've put me into complete asthmatic attic, as long as I go into it without being pre-sensitized, and shower after. Find the irritants within your home and eliminate them, so that when an acute high-level irritant comes along, you're not already standing close to the cliff.

Of course, I'm making assumptions that the problem is somehow related to allergies. I think it's a reasonable assumption, but we don't have any good proof it's not something completely unrelated.

 

[30WCF]

Do you have an OAK installed? That may resolve some of the concerns about outside air seeping in.

 

[BKVP]

Air Sensor Toolbox | US EPA

The toolbox provides information on tthe performance, evaluation and use of air sensor technology to improve accuracy and data interpretation that can benefit citizen scientists, researchers, and developers.

www.epa.gov

 

[FPX Dude]

Hope you figure it out, for me it was all those plug-in Febreeze air fresheners, they are horrible and nothing but chemicals in the air you breathe.