Air Quality in Your Home
(Happy Hiller) Your home is your sanctuary from the world. You work hard to keep it clean and spend thousands of dollars decorating and furnishing it to create a welcoming and comfortable environment. However, despite your best efforts, there’s one aspect of creating a healthy home that’s often overlooked - the air quality.
When it comes to poor air quality, we immediately think about vehicular and industrial emissions and the pollutants we find outside the home. But unfortunately, there are also plenty of contaminants to worry about inside the home too. They include:
● Dust
● Smoke
● Pet dander
● Lead
● Radon
● Fire retardants
● Volatile organic compounds (VOCs)
These pollutants reduce the quality of the air and trigger conditions such as allergies, asthma, and more serious respiratory diseases. That’s why it’s so crucial that you’re aware of the simple steps you can take to clean up the air in your home.
Turn your HVAC system into an air cleaning machine
Your HVAC system plays an essential part in warming and cooling the air in your home, but what many homeowners don’t know is that with a little fine-tuning, it can purify the air, too.
All HVAC systems use filters to remove particles from the air in your home, but they don’t often do enough. Even high-quality air filters cannot trap particles that are smaller than 5 microns in size. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, airborne particles that are 2.5 microns or smaller are considered hazardous. That’s because they can easily be absorbed into the bloodstream. So what’s the solution?
Some HVAC repair and maintenance providers offer additional cleaning and filtration services to filter out those harmful fine particles, kill germs and remove gases and fumes from the air in your home. The result is an HVAC system that reduces asthma and allergies and improves the quality of your air.
Use your cooker hood and extractor fan
They might be noisy and frankly quite annoying, but switching on your cooker hood and extractor fan while cooking can greatly improve the quality of the air in your home. They remove oil and other contaminants that evaporate into the air while cooking and remove other air pollutants produced by gas and electric burners.
Ideally, you will have an extracting cooker hood, which sends the dirty air out of your home through the roof. If you have a recirculating hood, which filters the air before recirculating it into your kitchen, then you should open the windows or use a nearby exhaust fan as well.
Keep the floors clean
We know that sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day, but if you want to boost the air quality in your home, cleaning the floors regularly will lead to big improvements. Allergens such as dust, chemicals, and VOCs circulate in the air and eventually settle on the floor. Without regular vacuuming and mopping, that’s where they’ll stay, ready to be picked up by a draft and recirculated once again.
You don’t see the dust with carpeted floors, which can be both a blessing and a curse. In terms of the air quality in your home, it can mean that your carpets aren’t cleaned as regularly as they should be. If you have hard floors, then vacuuming and mopping are essential. When mopping, use a small amount of a gentle, pH-neutral cleaning product to avoid introducing more contaminants into the air.
Introduce some plants
Plants not only look lovely indoors, but they also play a vital role in improving the quality of the air. Cast your minds back to science class, and you may remember that plants turn carbon dioxide in the air into oxygen. However, they do much more than that. They also absorb many common household pollutants such as benzene, formaldehyde, toluene, and trichloroethylene, to name but a few. The result is a healthier home environment.
Use low VOC paints
When painting your home, you should leave your windows and doors open to aid ventilation and let the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the paint disperse. However, even several months after painting, you may not know that long after that new paint smell has gone, trace amounts of harmful gases are still being released. That can include highly toxic chemicals such as acetaldehyde and formaldehyde. That’s why you should always use low VOC paints and never store open paint containers indoors.
Make your health a priority
And there you have it, five simple changes that you can make to improve the air quality in your home and reduce the level of hazardous materials in your home when completing remodeling projects.