Fumes

Remember I mentioned that my mom sprung for replacing two very old windows in my house? Well, they were put in Monday. Pretty easy job, from the looks of it. Cut the seals on the old ones, push them out (one had a good go at resisting), push the new ones in, put a few screws to hold them in place, then apply sealant around the cracks. Great, wonderful, they lood good and all. The sealant smells horrible. Take new paint smell, throw in something sharp and sour, multiply by a factor of ten or more, and that's it. On Monday, I was extremely tired and out of it and didn't realize why. I'm pretty sure the sealant smell was to blame.

In fact, I woke up tired on Tuesday, likely because of the smell permeating the basement, but I was gone most of the morning and started feeling much better. When I got back, the smell nearly bowled me over. That's when I decided to get out my old ionic air purifier. It's old enough that it produces quite a bit of ozone as a by-product, but I'll take ozone over that nasty, nauseating smell any day. At any rate, only a few hours after I turned it on, the majority of the smell was gone. There's still a bit of it lingering on, so I'll leave the purifier on for a few days more, but it is SOOO much better now.

One irony, though. When Consumer Reports rated air purifiers, they basically saturated the air with nasty stuff you wouldn't want to breathe, and checked to see how much the machines got rid of. They said not to bother with the purely ionic ones: they didn't do ANYthing. This result makes me suspect their test was too artificial. This thing is eating up the odor quite nicely. And, even though ozone isn't particularly good for you, ozone also helps to break down odors. I don't know the details, but Spencer's company deals in flood/fire restorations, and one of the tools they use to get out bad smells is an ozone machine. It produces more ozone than this little thing does, but you can't be in the house while it's being used. :^)