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Addressing Indoor Air Quality With An Attached Garage

Your home’s attached garage gives you a convenient place to store your vehicle along with various tools, fuels, solvents and other chemicals. Your attached garage may seem completely separate from your house, but dirty air can be drawn into your home and negatively impact indoor air quality. For this reason, you need to understand the different pollutants being generated in your garage, how they get into your home, and how to stop this from happening.

Garage Pollutants

Cars are the biggest culprits of dirty garage air. The exhaust they give off can accumulate in the space even if the overhead garage door is hanging wide open. Plus, when you park your car in the garage, the engine and its fluids give off fumes as they cool down, which then build up in the garage.

There are secondary sources of pollution as well. Equipment such as the lawn mower and edging tool give off emissions when you use them. Paints, stains and solvents, as well as herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, emit harmful fumes into the air as well.

How Pollutants Get In

Despite at least one layer of drywall and insulation between the attached garage and your home, indoor air quality can still be impacted by pollutants generated in the garage. Dirty garage air can be drawn through tiny cracks in the wall or places where plumbing or wiring enters the home. Often, when the air inside the home has a lower pressure than air in the garage, which is common, the dirty fumes will actively seep into the home.

How to Stop It

The most effective way to keep your indoor air quality unaffected by the attached garage is to lower the pressure in the garage. This way, if air travels in any direction, it’s from your house to the garage and not the other way around. This is accomplished by installing an exhaust fan in the garage. Not only does this decrease the pressure, it also draws pollutants outside. Another strategy, improving the seal in the wall between your home and garage, will help keep your indoor air clean while preventing energy loss.

For more information about making indoor air quality healthier for you and your family, please contact Donald P. Dick Air Conditioning in Fresno.

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.

Donald P Dick Air Conditioning services the greater Fresno area in California. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!     

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