Air is invisible. You don’t see it floating throughout your house. You can’t spot it coming toward you as you breathe it in or flowing away from you when you exhale. It’s just there. You know it’s there. You don’t need to see air to believe it. As long as you’re breathing, you know that it hasn’t gone anywhere. But the problem is that it is easy to forget about something you can’t see. You take it for granted. And that is why many people live in homes with poor indoor air quality. But you need to be careful about indoor air quality and take it seriously. Learn how to improve indoor air quality with the help of our blog.
The Importance of Indoor Air Quality
You might be thinking that the indoor air quality in your home is already fine. You do not feel like putting any extra effort into it, and you don’t think it’s important anyhow. Unfortunately, that’s not true. If you do not take care of your home and make sure to do your best to enhance air quality, you will suffer negative consequences for your health. Poor indoor air quality is the culprit behind many respiratory problems, including lung infections. Bad air can also exacerbate existing asthma and allergy symptoms. Do you want to avoid these problems? Then you need to learn how to improve indoor air quality.
4 Tips On How to Improve Indoor Air Quality
Hopefully, you are prepared to take your home’s air quality seriously. Our four expert tips will help keep you and your family members safe and healthy. Check them out below.
1. Change Your Air Filters
With so many things to do around the home, sometimes people forget to change their air filters. But changing your air filters is an important step to keeping the air in your space clean and free of pollutants. We recommend changing your filters every three months. However, if you have a lot of pets and allergens in the home, it may be better to change them out every 45 days. The choice is yours. Just make sure that you do not wait longer than three months to replace them.
2. Pick the Right MERV Rating For Your Home’s Air Filters
MERV (minimum efficiency reporting value) ratings tell you how good an air filter is at trapping pollutants. Filters low on the scale only filter out pollen and dust mites. Filters higher on the scale filter out mold, dust, bacteria, and tobacco smoke. Ratings go from one to 20. It is important to choose something high enough on the scale to protect your indoor air quality but low enough not to restrict the airflow of your residential HVAC system. Typically, you want to stick with a rating of between five and eight. Anything higher is more suited to commercial use.
3. Get Regular Air Duct Cleanings
You likely do basic housekeeping like dusting, sweeping, and vacuuming. It is easy to remember to clean visible areas in your home. After all, you can’t help but notice the thin veil of dust on your shelves and the ever-increasing piles of dirt and crumbs on the floor. But your air ducts are not visible, so cleaning them might not ever occur to you. But dust and other pollutants build up in your ducts the same way that they do around other areas of your home. That is why you should hire a professional to clean your ducts every two to four years. This will help improve indoor air quality and ensure you are not harboring any harmful substances like mold in your HVAC system.
4. Get More Fresh Air In Your Home
It can be helpful to bring some outdoor air indoors to improve indoor air quality. The best way to do this is by opening your windows and doors on warmer days for at least a few minutes, which allows air to circulate throughout your home. If your kitchen and bathroom fans are routed outside, you may also try running throughout the day to pull indoor air pollutants from the air and push them outside.
We Know How to Improve Indoor Air Quality!
We hope our blog on how to improve indoor air quality has been helpful to you. If you want to maintain your HVAC system and keep you and your family healthy, putting effort into making sure the air in your home is safe to breathe is essential. But not everyone feels equipped to take care of their systems on their own. If that’s the case, go with a company that knows how to improve indoor air quality like Air Duct Cleaning Experts. Contact our team today for high-quality services!