Breathe Easy With These Air Quality Enhancement Tips

The following contribution is from another author.

Your home has many roles to fulfill. Alongside the tasks of keeping you safe, warm, comfortable,  and protected from the elements, it should also be helping you better maintain your well-being. This is why it’s such a shame that so many people allow their homes to do the exact opposite by living with low air quality. Here, we’re going to look at the importance of air quality in the home, why it matters, and what you can do about it.

Why it matters

Air quality is important. After all, we need to breathe air to live. However, if the quality of the air is low due to a high presence of things like dust, pollen, other allergens, or irritants, then it can begin to have a lot of adverse effects. It can exacerbate or even play a causal role in asthma and asthma symptoms. It can irritate the eyes and the throat, it can lead to headaches, nausea, and general fatigue. Low air quality can be a genuine health risk, not to mention having a big impact on the quality of life in your home. If you feel like your home feels stale, not as clean as it should be, even after cleaning it, or you live with any respiratory conditions or allergies, the following tips can help you.

Maintain your HVAC

The heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in your home play a huge role in the overall air quality. These are what play the primary role in keeping the rooms well-aired. However, over time, these systems can grow less efficient. What’s more, they can become plugged up with dust, which causes the filters to eventually stop working. When that happens, they can effectively start spreading dust around the home and become breeding spots for mold, both of which aren’t going to help the air quality at all. As such, working teams such as HVAC Services, Inc. is crucial. Yearly maintenance of your HVAC system can prevent these problems from occurring in the first place.

Mind your boundaries

Your windows and doors will also, of course, play a significant role in the air quality and airflow of the home. To that end, you should make sure that you keep the windows in each room open for at least fifteen minutes a day. However, otherwise, when it’s raining or the pollen count is high, you might want to avoid it. In fact, older windows can result in worse air quality due to air leaks and poor insulation, so an update with the help of a Renewal by Andersen window replacement might be worth considering. Old windows are also highly energy inefficient, not to mention a security risk, so you shouldn’t let them linger too often.

Watch what you clean with

The air quality in your home gets worse when pollutants, irritants, and allergens are introduced into the air. However, not all of these come from outside. Some of them you may very well be introducing in your home, yourself, even if you’re not aware of it. Many homeowners are already aware of how caustic bleach can be, but it’s not just bleach. The chemicals in many common cleaning product brands can be riskier than you think, especially if the rooms they are used in aren’t allowed to air out. If you’re worried about asthma or allergy risks, you might want to consider going for natural cleaning products, which not only tend to be better for your health but also for the environment as well.

Keep the home condensation-free

Condensation is another one of the problems that can worsen air quality in the home. Humid air tends to be worse for your breathing, but it also leads to the growth of mold.  If you notice that you have mold, then get in touch with a mold remediation company as soon as possible to address the issue. Humid air provides other issues, too. What’s more, damp surfaces tend to be sticky, attracting more dust, which also worsens air quality. Some of the tips above, such as ensuring good ventilation, especially in your bathrooms, can help you keep the home free of condensation. However, with condensation, the best advice you can receive is to really keep an eye out for it and to wipe it away when you see it. You can also use a dehumidifier to keep the air in the home drier.

Sooner or later, the problem of low air quality will affect your quality of life if it hasn’t already. You might not always notice these effects, but they are there. As such, it’s important to take the tips above to heart and make sure that you’re keeping your home safe, secure, and healthy.