Italian Tendancies

[flidaisairmid]

Day two of the wall washing/dejunking/clean everything madness.I am amazed that our home , heated by natural gas, is COATED in an oily, dirty,black dust and crud film. I have lived in places that were heated with an oil burning furnace in my lifetime, and after a season of heating in this fashion it becomes essential to do a big spring cleaning/

Comments

[gigglingwizard]

I am amazed that our home , heated by natural gas, is COATED in an oily, dirty,black dust and crud film.

Be alarmed. Be very alarmed. The surprising thing isn't that your home is in this state from burning natural gas. It's that you're home is in that state from burning natural gas and you're still alive. I'd really, strongly suspect that this grime is coming from something other than you furnace. Has someone been burning candles? Cooking with the stove turned up a bit too high? Deep-frying? Could it be possible it's pollution from outside? What's your furnace air filter look like? If the furnace is in the basement, how clean is your basement?

See, in a gas furnace, all the emissions go through the heat exchanger (something like a radiator) and up the flue pipe to the outdoors. None of the emissions ever enter the house itself, because the CO and CO2 would poison you just as surely as if you were piping car exhaust into your living room.

To prevent this, but not have all the heat go up the flue, it first passes through something like the heat excanger. The big fan in your furnace sucks air from the room through the filter, and blows it over the outside of the heat exchanger. The heat transfers from the hot gasses inside the exchanger to the air outside it by conducting through the metal. The air and the emissions never mix.

...unless there's a hole in the heat exchanger, and that does happen. I'd think you'd be noticing headaches and nausea and such long before you saw actual soot on the walls, though. Gas is pretty clean burning (though the same can't be said of wire insulation or whatever else might be getting burned by leaking hot gasses), so it would take a while for it to be visible on your walls. You might wanna have someone take a look at that.

No telling what it might actually be. I lived in one house where the sewer pipe, which is supposed to vent out the roof, actually vented into the attic. Fortunately, the attic was drafty enough it never blew up.

[flidaisairmid]

I bet it is from auto exaust. We live at the intersection of two very busy roads, and every tree on the property has this mold/fungal growth that is a result of auto pollutants. We live in a big box building with 48 other apartments, and the vents in the hallways are coated with that same substance. Putting these three together it is the most logical conclusion. Every fall there is an outside crew that comes in and does an inspection and annual tune up sort of deal on the heating unit, and all the individual units have CO2 detectors. None of them have gone off, which also sort of lends credence to the auto pollution theory. How busy are the roads ? there is a traffic light at the intersection, and it is not uncommon to sit and wait 10-15 minutes for a break in traffic in order to get out on the road. One day while waiting for a package the boy and I counted 200 cars passing our entrance in 10 minutes. Thanks for helping me analyze this one. Not much that can be done about it but move it seems.