> The findings suggest that regular ventilation alone may be insufficient to remove many indoor contaminants. Physical cleaning activities such as vacuuming, mopping and dusting are necessary to effectively remove compounds with high partition coefficients from surface reservoirs.

Yup. Indoor smoker homes are the worst because cleaning alone is often not enough. Cheap landlords just slap a coat of paint on to hide the visible stain, better landlords use nicotine blocker paint that's pretty expensive... but that's only good for moderate smoke. Decent ones run a few ozone generators for a few weeks while no one and no thing is inside, with the added danger that the decomposition products are toxic on their own and the ozone might damage the electrical wiring.

The only actually reasonably safe way to deal with a heavily smoke laden home is to rip out everything where the smoke has seeped into. For the Americans here, that may mean a complete teardown as the cardboard, insulation and even framing wood will be soaked in smoke residue; Europeans have it a bit better because for us, it's usually enough to remove the plaster but leave the brick/concrete walls alone.

Homes that have been affected by fire are often written off for the same reason, even if the fire itself didn't blaze in the home (say, a lower apartment burned off). The smoke seeps everywhere, especially in older buildings where doors aren't airtight or you got bathroom/kitchen exhaust vents without backflow prevention, and fire smoke is orders of magnitude worse in its effect than cigarette smoke - cigarettes are at least plant based materials, household fire smoke is riddled with stuff like dioxine (from plastics) and other highly toxic combustion products.

This is also one of the saddest aspects of retro computing.

Most listings fail to mention whether previous owners were smokers, and most sellers either aren't sensitive to and/or haven't experienced the off-gassing that occurs once devices warm up through actual use.

So this is actually the main reason I'm thrilled about the MiSTer project and the growing number and variety of FPGA-based clones being released today.

This sounds similar to what happens in cars that have been smoked in, but there are even more soft surfaces, nooks and crannies in a car.

Smaller space, but easier to get fresh air into.