Question from tatyana05
We had just moved out of a rental apartment that had a big mold problem. I thought we had finally fixed our living situation (we have two small children) but just found out that our next door neighbor in the new rental apartment, a nice old lady, paints on porcelain china as a hobby and has a kiln that she burns once a week for about 3 hours.
She let me look at the kiln and it looked pretty small but had no ventilation system with it. It is located in the far room of her apartment. She claims that there is no smell when she burns it and she has been doing it for 20 years but I am still worried that we went from one toxic problem to another.
I read online that when you burn glazes in kilns it creates toxic fumes that can stay on the walls, floors, etc. We are not in that same apartment of course but I am still worried because of the kids that the fumes could spread to our apartment. The lady often keeps her apartment door open.
I was thinking of doing a lead test on the walls and floors of our apartment because one of the chemicals that can vaporize in the kiln is lead! Not sure what is a good test kit for that…
If anyone has any thoughts on how to test if it is safe to stay in our apartment, or had any experience with that please write! My husband is very much against moving again, but he was also against moving out of the moldy apartment… He says I will find a problem no matter where we move… Luckily we only signed a 6-months lease. Toxic fumes from kilns is one thing I didn’t know to look out for when looking for a rental!
Thanks in advance for any ideas!
Debra’s Answer
There’s a whole discussion about this at http://www.potters.org/subject04714.htm/. The consensus is that kilns MUST be vented. Note that most of the potters on this discussion have their kilns in garages, basements, or out buildings, and not in living quarters.
The two questions here are:
Air can transfer from her unit to yours through the building ventilation system, through cracks in the walls, through open doors or windows.
I would insist that she vent her kiln, for her own safety as well as yours and then make sure the vented air isn’t getting into your unit.
I just want to comment that this post really reminded me of the necessity of looking at the entire lifecycle of a product and the toxic exposures involved. My minimum requirement for an acceptable product is that the end-use product that I encounter as a consumer be not toxic to my own body, perhaps because protecting my own health from direct toxic exposure was my first concern many years ago. Pottery is a wonderful material, nontoxic if unleaded glazes are used, and historical–making pottery is an ancient. But clearly there are some toxics released into the air, at least when modern techniques are used. And those toxic fumes get into the air where we can breathe them, even if not directly. Of course, they would dissipate in the vast ocean of air, but we know all too well that air pollutants can build up in the air even at the amounts we presently create in manufacturing. Sounds like the manufacturing needs to be cleaned up, even if the end product is safe.
It does seem to me that if, for example, a lead-free glaze is used, the kiln would not release lead fumes.
