Source · category
Heating
Also: residential heating, space heating, home heating, heating season
Keeping a dwelling warm, considered as an indoor air question. Every heating choice sets three things at once: whether combustion happens in the room, how much the building is ventilated while it is cold, and how warm and dry the surfaces are.
Where it comes from indoors
Heating shapes indoor air more than any other household activity, and mostly through its side effects rather than its emissions.
Where the heat comes from combustion inside the room — an unvented heater, a stove, an open fire — the room receives the combustion products directly, for hours at a time. Where it comes from a flued appliance or from electricity, the room receives nothing, and a flued appliance may still draw air out of the dwelling as it burns, which pulls soil gas in through the floor.
The indirect effects apply whatever the fuel. Windows stay shut, so ventilation falls in exactly the season when indoor sources are strongest. Warm air holds more water than cold, and the moisture it carries condenses on the coldest surface in the dwelling — which is how a heating pattern, not a leak, produces dampness in an unheated corner.
What the studies report
| Linked to | Effect | Population | Study design | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) | difference 58 | households · dwelling | measurement of indoor NO2, CO, formaldehyde and acetaldehyde in 344 homes in four Canadian cities in winter and summer, with mixed models and general linear models relating concentrations to sources and housing characteristics, city-specific and pooled | F-0660 Sun Associations between residential fossil fuel combustion and … (2025) | machine |
Each row is one Finding — a sentence as printed in one study, recorded with its page in the Coridum Knowledge Base. Follow the Finding number for the exact wording and the citation. Checked says who verified the row: machine means every automatic check passed and the surrounding text was read; person means someone read the sentence in the document. Rows are re-checked by a person over time. The studies are curated in the Coridum Knowledge Base; the reading of them together is a Claim, shown separately.
Identifiers
- MeSH
- D006361
Cite this page
Coridum Research. Heating. Coridum Knowledge G-0195, 16 September 2026. https://coridum.com/k/G-0195/