Greening my House

The two major greenhouse gasses affecting climate change are carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. CO2 is bad enough, but it turns out that methane is 20 times more effective at reflecting heat than CO2. Obviously, we want to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, but what we really want to watch out for is that methane.

My new contribution to reducing methane is this: I have decided to stop eating burritos. That way, those nasty critters that live in my gut won’t be using the beans to produce any methane that I will have to “emit” as quietly and anonymously as I can. Plus, my wife will thank me for improving the quality of the air in the house.

Okay, just kidding! Who could live without good burritos? I guess I’ll have to find a different way to reduce methane.

Well, this past weekend, we redid our deck, and we found a way to do just that.

It turns out that there are two ways you can harm the environment while redoing your deck. The first is by using harsh chemicals to remove the previous coating, and the second is by putting on another layer of harsh coating that can off-gas. With both ways, you emit chemicals called VOCs that have deleterious effects on the environment.

Solvents and Off-Gassing

What are VOCs, you ask? Well, it has nothing to do with burritos. VOCs are volatile organic compounds. There are various definitions of which chemicals are classified as VOCs, but the import point is that many chemicals turn into gas under normal pressure and temperature, and these gasses can help create ground-level ozone (a pollutant that is regularly part of smog) and prevent methane from breaking down into less harmful gasses, thereby multiplying its effect. It also turns out that many of the VOC gasses themselves are toxic, carcinogenic, or otherwise bad for you. VOCs are often considered as one of the leading causes of sick building syndrome, which is where people feel sick in certain buildings, especially office buildings, because of the poor air quality in that building.

So if we emit VOCs into the atmosphere, we can not only make ourselves sick, and we can prevent harmful methane that is already in the atmosphere from breaking down into things that are less harmful (mainly CO2).

Emitting VOCs

So how do we emit VOCs? There are many sources of VOCs. Some of them are natural, like trees and plants. Many of the bad ones are man-made, however. Things that are manufactured often emit them. “New car smell” for example is full of VOCs. Yes, it smells nice in your car because it means the car is new, but really it is bad for you, and it is bad for the environment.

What other man-made sources of VOCs are there?

• New carpets
• Paints, varnishes, urethanes, wood sealers, paint thinners
• Dry cleaning solvents
• Petroleum products
• Plastics
• Photocopier toner
• Tobacco smoke

That’s not an exhaustive list, but you may have noted “solvents” and “wood sealer” on the list above — these are part of the two ways I mentioned above that we can harm the environment while redoing our deck.

Which brings us back to the deck.

Stacking the Deck in our Favour

When choosing a sealer, one important thing to look for is the VOC statement on the side of the can. This statement is often expressed as a number of grams of VOC per liter of liquid.

• < 500 g/L – relatively high VOC content
• < 275 g/L – medium
• < 100 g/L – low
• 0 g/L – bingo!

The EPA defines maximum acceptable grams of VOCs per liter, but obviously, lower is better. States can put even stricter regulations on VOCs.

There are a few sealers out there that have zero VOCs. Here is a list of a few of them:

1. ZeroVOC – http://www.zerovoc.com/
2. Acri-soy – http://www.ecoprocote.com/Acri-Soy-Penetrating-Clear-Sealer-s/91.htm
3. Safecoat – http://www.afmsafecoat.com/

There are many more, but unfortunately, our local Home Depot does not carry any of them, so I had to choose the lowest VOC coating I could find. If I had more time and done more research, I would have been able to find these coatings for sale somewhere locally.

Eventually, we found one with less than 100g per liter of VOCs. This is not perfect, but at least it is better than the other coatings we could find.

To clean and prepare the deck, we decided to use no solvents or cleaners at all. Instead, we rented a 2000 psi power washer, which blasted away all the gunk and grime with high pressure instead. That thing is amazing! The grime and mold just washed away with a single swish of the nozzle. We also washed our plastic deck chairs and our concrete walk-way in the front before giving this miracle machine back to the rental place.

Unfortunately, the rental place did not have a high-pressure electric version of the power washer, so we had to rent one that ran on gasoline. The gas engine was pretty small, similar to the size of a lawnmower engine, so we only ended up using about a half to 3/4 of a gallon of gasoline to clean the whole deck, the chairs, and the concrete.

The next day, once the deck was mostly dry, we painted with the sealer. The sealer was water-based anyways, so it did not matter if the wood was completely dry yet.

The pictures attached to the right of this blog show the “before” and “after” pictures of the deck. It turned out well and looks really nice now! It’s like we have a whole new deck, and we didn’t have to completely ruin the environment to get it.

We could have done better, and next time we will know. Use a non-VOC sealer, and look around to find an electric power washer. Hopefully by the time we need to redo the deck again 5 years from now, we will have solar panels installed on the roof, and even the power washer will be free of emissions!