Kelly: (00:06 )
Welcome to buildings and beyond

Robb: (00:09 )
The podcast that explores how we can create a more sustainable built environment

Kelly: (00:13 )
by focusing on efficiency, accessibility and health.

Robb: (00:18 )
I’m Robb Aldrich.

Kelly: (00:19 )
And I’m Kelly Westby.

Kelly: (00:24 )
I am so glad you have decided to tune in to buildings and beyond this week because this applies to basically everyone. If you ever cook in your home, I think you’ll find this interesting. We are actually going to take a page from the Simon Sinex book and we are starting with why.

Iain: (00:42 )
They should care because the idea is that when you cook, it’s basically one of the activities that you do that emits the most contaminants into, into your home and by contaminants- there are some pretty straightforward ones. Like there’s lots of water vapor when you’re cooking and if you don’t wanna have condensation on your windows in the winter for example, or you don’t want to make your house get too humid, so you might get some mold growth. Do you want to control the humidity levels in it? It’s a good idea to vent the moisture from cooking to outside. Then you have to think about odors. And of course, you know, some odors are good when, when you’re cooking, right? The, the odor is what makes you know, home cooking worthwhile sometimes and what’s make makes food tastes nice and everything. But if you’ve been frying fish one day, maybe you don’t want the smell of fried fish in your house for the next few days. And the last thing is more from a health perspective, which is that aside from the moisture and odor issues there are contaminants admitted when you cook that can actually impact your health. One of the primary ones is small particles and they come from either the burning of natural gas if you’re using a gas cooktop, or the cooking process itself. And then there are things like oxides of nitrogen that also are emitted from from gas burners. And those contaminants are ones that if they get to a high enough concentration can have some health impacts. So there’s a good health reason for venting most of those things to outside. And so it’s a combination of you want to control moisture in your home, you want to control odors in your home, and there’s a health impact also. And I’m not saying that you shouldnt cook. I personally love cooking and everybody should cook. I think a home cooked meal is probably the healthiest way to feed yourself, but we should do it with an awareness that it’s a good idea to control what we do when we’re cooking. And effectively the best way to do it is to vent some of these things to outside. So that’s the rationale for why you would vent a kitchen ever. And if you’ve ever been in a commercial kitchen, you’ll se