YOUR HOME MAY BE AN 'ESOSPHERE' HOT SPOT.

What is in the air inside your home?--more than you think. Cooking, cleaning, and other routine household activities generate significant levels of volatile and particulate chemicals inside the average home, leading to indoor air quality levels on par with a polluted major city, maintain researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

What is more, airborne chemicals that originate inside a house do not stay there. Volatile organic compounds from products such as shampoo, perfume, and cleaning solutions eventually escape outside and contribute to ozone and fine particle formation, making up an even greater source of global atmospheric air pollution than cars and trucks do.

"Homes have never been considered an important source of outdoor air pollution, and the moment is right to start exploring that," says Marina Vance, assistant professor of mechanical engineering. 'We wanted to know: how do basic activities like cooking and cleaning change the chemistry of a house?"

Vance co-led the collaborative HOMEChem field campaign, which used advanced sensors and cameras to monitor the indoor air quality of a 1,200-square-foot manufactured home. Over the course of a month, Vance and her colleagues conducted a variety of daily household activities, including cooking a full Thanksgiving dinner.

To her team's surprise, the measured indoor concentrations were high enough that its sensitive instruments needed to be recalibrated almost immediately. "Even the simple act of making toast raised particle levels far higher than expected. We had to go adjust many of the...