Landlords should understand simple ways to reduce air pollution in order to maintain tenant safety and satisfaction. At best, air pollutants can give your tenants mild nuisances, like sore throats. But many other times, they can cause diseases and even cancer. If you don’t want to be hit with a lawsuit or guilty conscience, you must do your due diligence to keep your property habitable. Let’s get into the most important solutions to air pollution.
How to Get Rid of Pollutants in Your Property
Here, the property managers in Baltimore will break down how exactly you can remove various pollutants from your property.
How to Get Rid of VOC:
To banish VOCs, the following air pollution solutions are a must. Take notes on these crucial tips.
- Avoid Harsh Chemicals: One huge thing you can do is stop using cleaners with harsh chemicals. If you must use them, you should open the windows.
- Use Natural Materials: Buy mattresses and furnishings with natural materials when possible.
- Get Rid of Contaminated Dust: Use a vacuum cleaner or air purifier with a HEPA filter, especially if vulnerable pregnant people or children are in your property. Or, use a damp mop on hard surfaces so you don’t stir up any dust.
Removing Mold:
These solutions to air pollution can help you remove mold before it spreads all over your property. Here they are:
Inspect Your Property: Look at all the corners of your property, even the less open and accessible spots, for any visible mold. You might even want to have a professional take care of this. Then, use a test kit to detect any mold that might be invisible, yet still present.
Remove the Mold: Use water, detergent, or disinfectants to sanitize the mold-covered surfaces. If safe, do this yourself. If not, leave it to the pros. Always do your removal with protective equipment, like an N95 mask, goggles, and gloves.
Prevent a Comeback: To ensure mold doesn’t come back, reduce your indoor humidity from 30% to 60%. You can accomplish this with improved ventilation and dehumidifiers. As a rule of thumb, you should actively recognize and prevent repairs for your rental property to avoid these issues in the future.
Getting Asbestos Out:
Hire a Professional: You cannot visually spot whether a material has asbestos or not. Furthermore, even if it is labeled, jostling the material can cause it to shed toxic fibers. So, you should have a licensed, qualified professional test and treat the materials for asbestos.
Removing Radon:
If you need to remove all the radon in your property ASAP, it’s possible. Here’s how to do just that.
Test Your Property: Get a test online or at a hardware store. These usually make you put a detector in your basement or first floor. If the test detects levels of 4 picocuries or more per liter, you need to expel these gases.
Hire a Professional: You’ll need to choose your professional based on your property’s foundation type. They may have to do various fixes like sealing cracks within your property, putting pipes through your floor, or venting out the gas.
Retest Your Property: Finally, retest your property a month after the repairs are complete to ensure the whole space is safe to inhabit.
Eliminate Carbon Monoxide:
Carbon monoxide removal is a life-or-death matter. So, be sure to keep these air pollution solutions in mind.
- Install Carbon Monoxide Detectors: It’s essential to install a carbon monoxide detector at all levels of your property. This is especially important to implement right outside places people sleep in.
- Get Interconnected Detectors: If possible, get an electrician to install interconnected detectors. This way, when issues arise, all detectors will be alerted at once.
- Have Gas and Oil-Powered Facilities Checked: Always hire professionals to check and maintain any facilities on your property that use gas or oil.
- Have Ventilation Checked: Have professionals ensure your property has the ventilation necessary to remove carbon monoxide.
- Prevention: Ban tenants from heating their units with gas ranges. Prevent them from using camp stoves or generators indoors.
Take Away Lead:
Pay attention to the following steps to get rid of lead. These solutions to air pollution will protect vulnerable people in your property.
- Test Your Property: Pros should test the paint of properties built or renovated before 1978. They also should examine other surfaces for the metal.
- Get the Lead Removed: Hire a contractor to handle these sensitive materials for you.
- Do Encapsulation: If you have a pro paint over lead paint with a specialized primer, this can hide lead from exposure to the elements. This can be a more economical fix than removing all the paint from scratch.
- Check Your Water: Whether or not you have an older property, your community’s land may still hold traces of lead, so all property owners should get their water supply tested by a lab. Home tests can have errors, so we don’t recommend them.
Understanding Pollutants: 101
Here, we’ll cover the who, what, and how questions you might have about pollutants. After all, you can’t use solutions to air pollution if you don’t know what they are in the first place.
Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)
If you implement new furniture on your property or utilize potent chemical cleaners, you may need to get rid of VOCs.
What VOCs Are: Volatile organic compounds are gases released from sources like couches, carpets, paint, cleaning products, refrigerants, pesticides, aerosols, and air fresheners.
How VOCs Affect You: VOCs can be throat, nose, and eye irritants. Additionally, they can cause headaches, nausea, and dizziness. Even worse, some compounds can damage internal organs or even cause cancer.
How VOCs Enter You: VOCs emit gases in the air and become absorbed into particles of dust on floors or other surfaces. When something shakes up that dust, it goes up into the air you breathe.
Mold
Anyone who has a damp property is at risk of mold, whether it’s caused by high humidity, leaky roofs or basements, or other common causes.
What Mold Is: Mold is a minuscule fungus whose airborne spores can grow and spread on nearly all damp surfaces.
How Mold Affects You: Some mold causes skin rashes, flu-like symptoms, eye irritation, lung irritation, and other health issues.
How Mold Enters You: You can find mold in damp areas of your property, like bathrooms and the basement. It also can lurk in carpets, rugs, ceilings, walls, cabinets, attics, and any nooks where there is a lot of moisture. This happens especially often after natural disasters. Most importantly, it can enter your air ducts, which means spores will spread all around your property’s air circulation system.
Asbestos
People whose properties were built before or around 1980 could have asbestos in their unit’s building materials, especially insulation ones.
- What Asbestos Is: Asbestos is a fiber used to insulate various home facilities, like heating ducks or roof tiles.
- How Asbestos Affects You: Decades after you inhale asbestos fibers, they can cause a cancer called mesothelioma, as well as a lung disease called asbestosis.
- How Asbestos Enters You: You can be exposed to asbestos through the very materials that make up your property. For instance, some textured ceilings, hot water and steam pipe coatings, roofing and siding shingles, and vinyl sheet flooring backing can contain these fibers.
Radon
People whose properties haven’t been tested for radon or have failed to address positive tests adequately.
- What Radon Is: Radon is a deadly, radioactive gas. It radiates from soil, water, and rocks, and then leaches into buildings.
- How Radon Affects You: Just behind smoking, it takes the place of the second biggest cause of lung cancer in the US.
- How Radon Enters You: Radon can trickle in through your property’s cracks, holes, sumps, drains, and well water. Every state in the US can have it.
Carbon Monoxide
Those with faulty stoves, furnaces, or other facilities that run on gas, propane, or heating oil are at risk for carbon monoxide. So are people who don’t use exhaust fans with their gas stoves.
What Carbon Monoxide Is: Carbon monoxide is gas produced when you burn wood, charcoal, and fossil fuels. You cannot smell or see it.
How Carbon Monoxide Affects You: When exposed to elevated levels of carbon monoxide, your blood can lose the ability to carry sufficient oxygen. You can experience headaches, nausea, disorientation, sleepiness, and struggle to breathe.
How Carbon Monoxide Enters You: If sources of ventilation malfunction, or your appliances do, it can release high levels of carbon monoxide. Furthermore, you can enter the danger zone when you use appliances intended for outdoor use, like charcoal grills or generators, anywhere indoors. This even includes garages.
Lead
Anyone whose community is run by lead water pipes at any point is in danger. Also, those with properties built before 1986 or painted before 1978 should be alert.
What Lead Is: Lead is a heavy metal and neurotoxin that used to be used frequently in paint and plumbing supplies.
How Lead Affects You: Children exposed to lead in your property can face lower IQs, nerve problems, developmental struggles, and behavioral issues. Furthermore, if your pregnant tenants are exposed, they could miscarry or have their baby prematurely.
How Lead Enters You: Lead can enter you through lead paint particles, nearby soil, or in water from old, corroded pipes.
Let Us Handle Air Pollution Solutions for You
As we showed above, all people can experience adverse health outcomes from pollutants. Some pollutants can disrupt the central nervous system or cause cancer. As a property owner, you must know how to reduce air pollution when issues arise.
If you don’t want to bear the heavy responsibility of implementing solutions to air pollution, we can help. Our property managers can handle inspection coordination, home repair coordination, and other facets of pollution removal. And that’s only one of the areas we address. We can shoulder other facets of being a landlord, like rent collection, tenant screening, and other laborious tasks. Contact us today to make your landlord responsibilities less of a burden.
