Overall, we concluded that this surface reservoir allows smoke VOCs to linger indoors, meaning that people are exposed to them not just during the major smoke event but also long after.
Why worry about VOCs?
Smoke VOCs include well-known carcinogens, and high levels of exposure can induce respiratory and health problems.
While smoke VOC concentrations in our test house decreased with time, they remained persistently elevated above normal levels.
Given that VOC concentrations from other sources, such as cooking and cleaning, can already be high enough in homes to harm health, this additional long-term exposure source from smoke could be important. Further toxicology studies will be needed to determine the significance of its health effects.
How to clean up when smoke gets in
So, what can you do to remove these lingering smoke gases?
We found that air purifiers can remove only some of the VOCs that are in the air—they can’t clean the VOCs on your floors or in your walls. They also work only when they’re running, and even then, air purifiers don’t work particularly well to reduce VOCs.
Opening windows to ventilate will clean the air, if it isn’t smoggy or smoky outside. But as soon as we closed windows and doors, smoke VOCs started to bleed off the surface reservoirs and into the air again, resulting in an elevated, near-constant concentration.
We realized that to permanently remove those smoke VOCs, we had to physically remove them from surfaces.
The good news is that cleaning surfaces by vacuuming, dusting, and mopping with a commercial, nonbleach solution did the trick. While some remediation companies may do this surface cleaning for you after extreme exposures, surface cleaning after any smoke event—like Canadian wildfire smoke drifting into homes in 2023— should effectively and permanently reduce smoke VOC levels indoors.
Of course, we could reach only a certain number of surfaces—it’s hard to vacuum the ceiling! That meant that surface cleaning improved but didn’t eliminate smoke VOC levels in the house. But our study at least provides a path forward for cleaning indoor spaces affected by air pollutants, whether from wildfires, chemical spills, or other events.
With wildfires becoming more frequent, surface cleaning can be an easy, cheap, and effective way to improve indoor air quality.
Delphine Farmer, Professor of Chemistry, Colorado State University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.