There are few things that deal more damage to a rental home’s interior than cigarette smoke. This explains why smoking is usually prohibited inside or anywhere on the property of rental homes. A lot of Rolesville property owners make sure of this by including a clause in their lease documents that specify the ban on smoking.
Should vaping be prohibited as well? As a substitute for smoking tobacco, people have gone to e-cigarettes. Over the past few years, e-cigarette usage has sharply increased. A lot of people view vaping as a recreational activity and even a way to quit smoking altogether. This is a common view since vaping is generally considered to be safe— or at least less harmful to a person’s health.
Despite the hype, vaping isn’t harmless at all. The e-cigarettes and other vaping devices produce clouds of vapor that leave a filmy residue on anything they touch. Your walls, floors, and furniture could have this residue stuck to them. Consider this: anywhere that air can reach, vapor can, too. Every open space inside the home is a place it can reach. This includes inside air vents and ductwork, where problems could go unnoticed for long periods of time.
The reason that vapor brings about so much trouble is that it isn’t water, but glycerin. It doesn’t evaporate into the air like water vapor does, even though it looks a lot like it. In fact, it is a bit oily. The emissions from an e-cigarette are more comparable to aerosol gas than water vapor. It consists of particles that are formed out of chemicals, flavoring, and preservatives. When these particles touch any surface, they attach themselves to it. As more and more particles build up, they create a thick film which is both difficult and expensive to clean up.
When the film gets on hard surfaces like mirrors or windows, they can be wiped down relatively easily. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case with other areas like carpets, painted surfaces, and ductwork. For surfaces like these, cleaning the filmy residue that vaping leaves is both costly and time-consuming and may permanently ruin some items.
For example, the vapor particles might stick to fabrics and carpets. Since they can’t be washed off with water, you may need to get professional cleaning many times in a year. Another challenge would be painted walls because of their porous nature. Each pore is an opening where vapor particles can settle in. Textured walls are even worse. The sticky film builds upon them more rapidly. You would need to scrub the walls frequently, but the scrubbing itself could damage the paint.
With the risk of so much damage to your Rolesville rental home’s interiors, it would be wise to prohibit the use of e-cigarettes along with other forms of smoking. At Real Property Management Raleigh, we perform regular property evaluations to check for signs of vaping inside your rental homes. We want to make sure that the value of your investment is protected, so we make it our business to ensure better lease compliance. We do this by having our expert property managers to monitor your properties carefully. If you have any questions, contact us online or call us directly at 919-481-0008.
We are pledged to the letter and spirit of U.S. policy for the achievement of equal housing opportunity throughout the Nation. See Equal Housing Opportunity Statement for more information.
