Why You Need to Properly Ventilate Your Craft Room

Few things are as rewarding as crafting. Spending hours at a time in your craft room, making fun new things for yourself and others, always brings a smile to your face. But it can also be dangerous, if you’re not careful. That’s why it’s essential to ensure your craft room has proper ventilation.

Craft VOCs

When crafting, you work with all sorts of different chemicals, from paints to glues to solvents and more. These crafting materials are called VOCs – Volatile Organic Chemicals – and they’re harmful to your respiratory system.

The fumes from VOCs accumulate in the room, rising up to the ceiling and remaining long after the smell has dissipated. Every time you inhale these chemicals, they cause damage. In the short term, that can include coughing, dizziness, headaches, and throat burning. In the long term, it can cause more permanent damage to your respiratory system.

What to Do

There are a few steps you can take to minimize your VOC exposure risk. Know what chemicals you’re using and see if there are other, less harmful options out there. And keep children and pets out of the crafting room, as they’re more susceptible to the harmful chemical effects.

But your most important defense is ventilation. Make sure your craft room has a window to let in clean, fresh air, and multiple vents and registers to help air circulate. You might also invest in a whole-house air purifier, which can clean your air more effectively than your regular HVAC system, eliminating harmful VOCs.

It’s also important to have a fan in the room: the bigger, the better. Place it behind you as you work, and the window in front of you, so it blows the harmful fumes away from you and outside.

If your crafting includes things like woodworking or silk screening, you may need more extreme measures. Talk to your HVAC technician to design a craft room ventilation system that keeps you safe.

To learn about ventilation in other rooms of the house, contact us at Rinaldi’s Energy Solutions. We provide quality HVAC solutions to Orlando and the surrounding area.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Orlando, Florida and surrounding areas about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).