3 Tips for Maintaining a Healthy Indoor Air Quality
We can live without food, water, sleep, and shelter for a few days even in moderately harsh conditions, but we cannot survive for five minutes without air. Even the near impossible feats pulled off by divers underwater were only possible because they already had air in their lungs. Suffice to say that air is, by far, the most important basic requirement for us to survive.
Therefore, is it really surprising that air quality is also the most important aspect of maintaining healthy indoor environments? Stay with us as we share five proven tips for improving and maintaining healthy air quality in your own home.
Ensure Proper Ventilation
Most modern homes have a heating ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) system nowadays, so ensuring ventilation should technically not be a problem. However, it can become a problem if the HVAC system has clogged filters and/or ducts in need of cleaning.
Check every few weeks to make sure that the ducts and filters are working in the way that they should. Also, schedule maintenance visits periodically because there’s only so much we can detect without the right training or knowledge to do so.
Install a Smart Thermostat
Even before we get to the main function of a smart thermostat, the small device’s unique role in ensuring ventilation must be mentioned. The Sensei smart thermostat tracks a HVAC system’s efficiency and sends quick alerts to registered users if it detects that a filter change is due, or when the ducts have not been cleaned in sync with the maintenance schedule. This will not only save you the trouble of checking the ducts and filters manually, but those alerts will also make sure that the indoor air quality never drops due to a clogged ventilation system.
Don’t Let High/Low Humidity Persist
There’s not much we can do about external weather conditions, but we can certainly control indoor weather. High humidity during the summer months can help mold, bacteria, and dust mites grow at an exponential rate. At the same time, humidity cannot be allowed to dip to low either, because that can lead to dry itchy eyes, lips, skin, nose, and throat.
The solution is simple enough because your HVAC system probably has a humidifying feature already. Just in case it does not, you may want to invest in a humidifier as all HVACs at least have a dehumidifying setting. Once again, you will find a smart thermostat to be of immense help.
They are designed to auto adjust indoor humidity via your HVAC system. When not in auto setting, or in case something isn’t functioning the way it should, your smart thermostat will send you notifications as soon as the humidity starts to rise too high or drop too low.
Do not smoke inside, even if you live alone. Smoking itself is a bad idea but smoking inside can make pretty much every step you may have taken to keep the indoor air clean, effectively invalid. This should be common sense, but habits have a way of overriding common sense unfortunately.
