The contractor has agreed to use only materials to which I don’t react. That means before the building permit is granted I need to identify all of the materials to be used, so there will be no delays once construction begins.
The most challenging materials so far have been adhesives and sealants. To test them I do a preliminary screening by reading their Material Safety Data Sheets and eliminating any product that uses chemicals on the construction industry’s Red List of toxic materials. After using applied kinesiology to do a muscle test, I open the product to do a sniff test, smearing a bit on a piece of brown paper. If there is a detectible odor I count down the days until I smell nothing. Then I put the paper in a glass jar and place the jar in a place where the sun will warm it, allowing any remaining fumes to fill the jar. I place my ExTech meter in the jar to get readings for both formaldehyde and total VOC (volatile organic compounds) levels. I am aiming for formaldehyde levels that are under 0.1 ppm and total VOC levels that are under 1.0 ppm.
In this jar is a smear of Safecoat Almighty, which took 16 days to offgas and had a detectible odor when I opened the jar. Total VOCs never dropped below 1.9 ppm. But EcoBond Pet Safe, an adhesive that took only three days to offgas, came closer with a total VOC level of 1.4 ppm, so EcoBond will be my general purpose adhesive.
Additional note: Retail air quality meters are not very precise. But using the same meter to test various materials gave me an idea of how the materials compared to each other and the general range in which they fell.