Written by: Emily Joswiak • June 2, 2022• Home

How To Prevent VOC Off-Gassing in Your Home

Is your home safe from high levels of VOC off-gasses? Learn more about VOCs in your home, their effects, and how to minimize the rate of off-gassing.

Did you know that various items within your home reduce your indoor air quality? From your floors to your walls, volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, occur from a range of places, filling your rooms with toxic gases and poor air quality. VOCs leach into the air through a process called off-gassing. The high-grade or chemical-based products used in manufacturing evaporate over time. Too much VOC exposure affects people in different ways, including breathing difficulties, irritations, and heightened allergies. Although off-gassing is hard to fully avoid since chemicals play a huge role in many different products, there are ways to prevent overexposure. Here are a couple of tips on how to prevent VOC off-gassing in your home.

Control Humidity Levels

There are many reasons why high humidity levels negatively affect your health, including increasing the production of VOC off-gas. In high heat and humidity levels, the harsh chemicals in manufactured products, wall paints, and other items and building materials evaporate into a gas and release toxic airborne particles. Heat and warm room temperatures speed up the off-gassing process. Like with many chemical reactions, adding heat stimulates the chemicals into a reactive process, allowing them to change form and create new substances. Controlling your indoor humidity levels minimizes off-gassing and allows proper air ventilation to circulate and filter through your rooms.

Use Natural Cleaning Products

Have you ever felt light-headed after using a cleaning spray? It’s partially due to the VOC off-gases released from your cleaning product’s chemical solution. Many popular high-grade cleaning supplies use strong chemicals to clean and sanitize effectively. However, those same chemicals release VOC off-gasses. Opting for natural or homemade cleaning solutions reduces off-gases since they eliminate the use of strong chemicals. As a general rule of thumb, the easier it is to read the list of ingredients, the fewer chemicals and toxins they include.

Purchase Used Furnishings

New furnishings are a major culprit in generating off-gasses. From adhesives to stains and synthetic fibers, many furniture pieces include exposed components or contain industrial chemicals. Over time, the off-gases decline as most of the chemicals from manufacturing deplete. Purchasing secondhand furniture decreases the overall rate of off-gases in your home. They already have released most of their toxic fumes and contain very little chemical residue.

Avoid or Remove Wall-to-Wall Carpeting

Another main offender of off-gassing is wall-to-wall carpeting. The synthetic fibers that cover the main surface of carpets require an industrialized chemical reaction in order to come into existence. These chemicals create VOC off-gasses as they react to their new surroundings. Similarly, the adhesive used to install and bind the carpet also includes VOCs that release off-gas over time. Switching out entire floor carpets minimizes off-gassing in your home, and it also reduces other toxins that arise from the dust and other toxins that get trapped between the fibers of carpets.

Preventing VOC off-gassing in your home includes minimizing the number of chemicals or chemical-exposed products. Although you can’t one hundred percent avoid them, you can still reduce their occurrence. With fewer VOC off-gases in your home, the better your indoor air quality and the safer your home becomes.

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Last modified: June 6, 2022