Your home’s air quality can pose serious consequences for you and your loved ones.
For this reason, it’s important that you monitor the air quality of your home. By optimizing the quality, you can increase your quality of life and start enjoying better health.
Additionally, by knowing the state of the air quality in your home, you can get started taking steps to improve it.
With this in mind, let’s first take a look at what is the importance of healthy indoor air at home and what may be causing the poor air quality in your home.
The benefits of healthy indoor air are just endless. Here are just the few of them:
- Breathing in a healthy air cleanses your lungs and help gain more energy with sharper mind
- It improves heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and overall immune system of your body
- It is a mood enhancer; you feel happy and feel positive when you breathe healthy air
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Outdoor Air vs. Indoor Air Quality
Despite of knowing all these benefits of healthy air, we all are forcing our body to breathe in a stale air – along with which it tags various health issues.
We think that air pollution is present only at outdoors (smoke, haze hanging in the air, ozone etc.) However, the truth is our inside offices, homes and time spend indoors could be more polluted than the air outside.
The healthy indoor air (which we usually think) is often more polluted as it carries lots of dirt/dust particles, fire retardants, volatile chemicals, radon, and fragrances used in cleaners.
Some of these pollutants are tracked in the home itself, whereas some arrives through furniture, new mattresses, wall paints, carpet cleaners etc.
Knowing about its possible causes can help us make the improvements at home.
What Causes Poor Air Quality in a Home?
Just because you are staying indoors, you should not think that you are safe from all the polluted air and airborne particles found outside your home.
If you’ve found the air quality in your home to be poor, it could be the result of many different scenarios.
The most common of these problems include:
Poor Ventilation: Without the proper ventilation, the air quality of your home will suffer.
Since bad air remains trapped in your home, it can’t be appropriately cycled and filtered. Over time, it will get continually worse.
Smoke: Those who smoke indoors have particularly bad home air quality.
Even if you smoke with the windows open and the air on, this smoke can creep into fabrics and other parts of your house.
Mold: Mold is one of the most common problems affecting your home’s indoor air quality. Mold can result from a variety of factors, but usually presents itself with water leaks.
Treat mold quickly, as it can be a serious health risk. Contact an expert to do so and improper treatment can cause mold to spread.
How Can You Test the Air Quality in Your Home?
In order to address the air quality of your home, you must first know what it is.
The easiest way to do this is to hire professional services. These individuals can help check and treat your home’s air quality.
If you choose to do it yourself, consider purchasing an air monitor and carbon monoxide detectors.
These will help you test the air quality inside your home and can help protect your home’s air quality in a better way.
5 Tips for How To Improve Air Quality In A Home
Now when you know about the various causes of poor air quality in your home, if you’re now looking to better the air quality of your home, you need to consider the following important tips:
1- Clean Your House
This one may come as a no-brainer. If you’ve got anything dirty lying around, the air quality of your home is going to suffer.
Unfortunately, it’s not always this straightforward. Certain smells and odors may be lingering in fabrics and furniture.
This means that you’re going to have to do a large-scale cleanup in order to get your house in order.
2- Control the Humidity
Make sure that you have appropriate levels of humidity in your home. Having too much or too little can negatively affect the air quality. It may even make it harder to breathe.
This can be done in a variety of ways. First, make sure that you’re controlling the moisture in your home.
If your humidity has seen a dramatic spike, consider the possibility that your home may be experiencing a water leak.
The best way to control the humidity of your home in dry areas is to invest in an air humidifier. These can be portable and plugged into specific rooms, or they may be whole-house humidifiers.
If you’re looking to decrease the overall humidity of your home, consider investing in a dehumidifier.
3- Don’t Allow Smoking Indoors
Smoking is injurious to health. In fact there is no safe level of secondhand smoke.
You can therefore ask smokers visiting your home to smoke outside for the sake of health of family and yours.
4- Say No To Toxic Household Products
Art and hobby supplies, cleaning agents, nail and hair products carry an increased level of VOC in home.
These elements are harmful to the health and can cause eyes or skin irritation.
Try not to encourage these kinds of purchases, especially if you have kids or an allergic person at home.
5- Do Not Let The Ideal Car Sit In The Garage
your car in a garage carries certain level of carbon monoxide which leads to various problems like nausea, weakness, and unconsciousness.
Even if the car is sitting ideally in your garage it releases chemical fumes which is again bad for your indoors and overall health.
As it pollutes the indoor air too it can easily make you and your family members sick.
Overall, to make healthy home it is foremost important to take care of your indoor air.
The most effective ways to keep your indoor air free from pollutants is keeping the things out of the home that pollutes the air such as cigarette smoke, chemicals, excess moisture, etc.
Anything junk is not tolerable especially when you have kids at home. So get rid of them and live healthy.
Eliana is a nurse by profession who loves writing online, spending time with her family and caring for seniors. She has already worked as an associate editor on various mom, baby, home appliances, kitchen and healthy living blogs. In her spare time she also enjoys drawing, reading/writing kindle eBooks and improving her skills a bit.