Cigarette smoke is one of the most damaging things to a rental home’s interior. For this reason, most Dickinson property owners add a smoking ban clause in their lease documents. The clause usually bans smoking inside the house or anywhere on the property of their rental homes.
Some people would then ask: What about vaping? The use of e-cigarettes as a substitute for smoking tobacco has greatly increased over the past few years. Many people think of vaping as a safe activity you can do for fun. Others even think of it as a way to quit smoking altogether since vaping is generally considered to be less harmful to a person’s health.
Despite the hype around vaping, it has proven to be far from harmless. The clouds of vapor that e-cigarettes and other vaping devices produce leave a filmy residue on anything they touch. The residue could stick to walls, floors, and furniture. Here is something to think about: Both air and vapor are gas. This means that the places inside the home that air can reach, vapor can, too. This includes inside air vents and ductwork. This makes things complicated as problems in these areas could go undetected for months or even years.
The reason that vapor causes so much trouble is that it isn’t made from water. The vapor is actually 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 like aerosol gas than water vapor. It consists of particles that are made up of chemicals, flavoring, and preservatives. These particles cling to any surface it comes in contact with. After some time, as these particles build up, they create a thick film that is difficult— and expensive— to get rid of.
While it is relatively easy to wipe down the film off of hard surfaces like windows and mirrors, that is not the case for other surfaces such as 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. Now, 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 the painted walls because they are porous and vapor particles could easily get into every pore and stay there. The more texture there is on your walls, the faster the sticky film can build upon them. 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 Dickinson 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 Prestige, we execute 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. For more information, contact us online or call us directly at 281-532-5455.
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.
