Garage Emissions Could Be Degrading Your Indoor Air Quality -- Here's How

You probably spend a vast majority of your time indoors, especially now that the weather has turned cold. For this reason, indoor air quality plays a big role on your health and comfort. There are many sources of pollution that can mar the quality of the air you breathe in your home, but one that has recently surfaced is automotive exhaust from vehicles parked in the garage.

When you start your car, even with the garage door wide open, higher concentrations of pollutants such as carbon dioxide can enter your home. Then, upon returning home in your car, turning off the vehicle, and closing the garage door, various chemicals are slowly emitted from the engine and its fluids as it cools down. Here’s a quick guide to help you keep harmful vehicle-producing pollutants from entering your home.

• Seal the garage ceiling and walls that are adjacent to the house. If the garage has drywall, remove it and seal the interior spaces. Replace the drywall and finish it with drywall compound and caulk all visible cracks and joints.
• Install an exhaust vent. A bathroom fan is good enough for the job. When the fan is operating, it creates a negative pressure within the garage so air can’t move from the garage to the slightly higher pressured home. The limited electrical cost needed to operate an efficient fan is quite worth the vast improvement this method can have on indoor air quality.
• Take furnaces, water heaters and other mechanical systems out of the garage. Placement of these systems in the garage increases the likelihood that polluted air will be pulled from the garage into the house.

These tips are important to improve indoor air quality if you use your garage to store vehicles or other major chemicals. For more information about keeping indoor air quality at the level you want, please contact Paschal Heat, Air & Geothermalabout questions involving your northwest Arkansas home. Our knowledgeable technicians are happy to answer questions and offer their expert advice.

Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).  For more information about indoor air quality and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.

Paschal Heating, Air & Geothermal services Northwest Arkansas. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!