5 Tips for How To Improve Indoor Air Quality

The air you breathe inside your home has a significant impact on your health. All of the dust, mold, chemicals, and other pollutants that contaminate your air can make you sick and cause asthma attacks. Fortunately, there are some simple steps that you can take to make the air in your home cleaner. Here are 6 tips on how to improve your indoor air quality:

1. Use an Air Purifier

Obviously, if you want to purify your breathing air, an air purifier is useful. It can help you breathe better in whatever room you’re in at the time. Of course, this method isn’t a perfect solution unless you have an air purifier in multiple rooms. That’s because air from unpurified rooms can leak into the room and overtax the purifier and possibly negate its effect. If you truly want improved indoor air quality, you should really combine an air purifier with other air quality improvement methods.

2. Have Regular HVAC Maintenance Done

Just like your air ducts, air conditioners and heaters tend to collect pollutants over time. Since these units pull air directly from the outside, they’re much more likely to pull in pollutants that have even worse effects on your breathing. These include radon, lead dust, carbon monoxide, pollen, and other air pollution.

To some extent, air conditioners and heaters are designed to filter out these pollutants. A secondary defense is your air filters. However, if your units and filters collect too many of these pollutants, their filtration efficiency will be reduced, and more contaminants will get into your breathing air.

It’s best to get AC maintenance in Fort Worth every 6 months – before you turn your A/C on in the spring and before you turn your heater on in the fall. Your HVAC technician can change your air filters for you and examine if your A/C or heater is due for a cleaning. With this regular maintenance, you won’t have to worry about all of the pollutants from outside having a negative impact on your indoor air quality.

3. Keep your Humidity Level Low

If your home’s humidity is too high, it makes your house a great breeding ground for mold and mildew. When these are allowed to grow in your home, they contaminate your breathing air. This is an especially common issue for high humidity areas such as Texas.

It’s best to keep your humidity level at around 30%-50%. If your HVAC system isn’t great about maintaining your home’s humidity level, you may want to use a dehumidifier. This system will help you avoid the damage to your home and your lungs that mold and mildew can cause.

4. Regularly Clean your Floors

Most people don’t like cleaning the floors. However, your floors are where most of the dust and pollutants that enter your home tend to settle. Regular vacuuming and mopping will clean these contaminants off your floors and help prevent you from breathing in a lot of dust, chemicals, pollen, and other pollutants.

5. Use an Outdoor Floor Mat

It may surprise you just how effective an outdoor floor mat is at improving your indoor air quality. Just like your home’s floors, the ground outside tends to collect a lot of pollutants, which you then pick up with your shoes. Chemicals, lead, pollen, and other contaminants will tend to collect on the bottom of your shoes, and a quick wipe of your shoes before you enter your home will clean a lot of these off.

If you’re looking for HVAC maintenance in order to improve your indoor air quality, contact Comfort Masters Heating & Air Conditioning. Our Fort Worth heating and cooling technicians can perform thorough HVAC unit cleanings and other maintenance tasks to make your systems more efficient and improve the air you breathe.