How Long Holiday Cooking Smells Actually Stay In Your House With Congested People Inside
Ninety minutes after the last dish comes off, more than half of what you smell is still airborne. Run that against the air exchange rate a sealed winter house actually achieves, and ninety percent clearance lands closer to six and a half hours, or about three with a vented hood going. Almost no homeowner guidance does that arithmetic, and almost all of it assumes you can smell the problem. A cook with a stuffy nose cannot, because nasal blockage stops odor molecules from reaching the receptors at the top of the nasal cavity. The math is what lets you ventilate on a clock instead of a guess. TL;DR Holiday cooking smells do not clear when the stove goes off. In a typical closed-up winter house, roughly half of the gas-phase cooking compounds are still in the air two hours later, and it takes about six and a half hours to clear ninety percent of them. Running a vented range hood cuts every one of those windows roughly in half. Anyone in the house with a stuffy nose cannot smell how lo...