Tom,
Any advice for moving forward if you bought laminate materials from Lumber Liquidators? Are there services companies that could come out and do an air quality check on my home?
John
Tom: Okay, the issue here is formaldehyde that is used in glues, it makes glues very good and very cheap.
Charlie: From China, get out.
Tom: Whatever, we used to use them here. Formaldehyde was a product that was used all through the ’60’s, 50’s, 70’s, in all the plywoods, all the furniture used to have it. There’s an out gassing time with this floor. It has to out gas, and depending on how hot it is outside, the hotter the faster it out gasses. If you live in the North and you’re in cold weather all the time, it could be built up in that house for years. If you lived in the South and you open the windows and let it get really hot in there, in fact, they actually accelerate out gassing by heating up the home, and getting the formaldehyde out as quickly as possible. That’s not practical in a house. That’s how you would get it out of a product.
It depends on how long you’ve had it in your home. If you’ve had it in your home five years or more, I’d probably just have to say that’s the way it goes. If you just put it in your home and especially if you were into a lot of pets, you like your little animals. Most importantly you have your wonderful little babies.
Charlie: The two-legged pets too.
Tom: They are so small, their lungs are small, their kidneys are small, things like that.
Charlie: They’re close to the floor.
Tom: That’s true too, but those are the ones that are going to take the biggest beating. I think it’s a shame that they’re still letting this stuff come through. We do need some controls on building products. It just shows, and here’s another thing Charlie, remember the Chinese, I hate to keep saying Chinese, but…
Charlie: That’s what it was.
Tom: I know, but the sheetrock that came form overseas.
Charlie: I remember that.
Tom: It’s not only China, there’s a lot of countries involved here.
Charlie: The pipe that came from…
Tom: The pipe that came from overseas. We had all these different things that have happened in the building industry. Even the plywood that comes from, unfortunately I’m going to say China, because it is Chinese plywood. They still sell it here in the United States, because it’s not going in the home it’s going on the outside, and it has high amounts of formaldehyde. In fact, it stinks.
Anytime you build, anytime you go and buy plywood, anytime you go to buy anything that’s glued together, you need to make sure it was made in the United States That cannot happen here under the regulations and requirements here, but it can happen overseas and be shipped here and you won’t even know it. They do it using the law to their advantage, so be very careful. Domestic plywood, domestic products.
Charlie: I hear you, but on laminate floors you can buy imported ones that don’t have that problem.
Tom: You can buy them with that sticker on there. You can buy them from…do you want go that where?
Charlie: No but I’m saying…
Tom: Yes you can.
Charlie: There are manufacturers.
Tom: You have no insurance.
Charlie: It’s not all of them, and that’s the thing, it’s a pig in a poke, you don’t know what.
Tom: I hope so, we’re not done with this yet. I hope so. Remember those are California laws, so those California laws don’t hold in Texas.
Charlie: They’re tougher than everybody else’s.
Tom: They usually start those kind of things there first. Domestic, domestic, domestic, made in America.
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