It’s extremely important to me that I keep a clean and healthy home.
- I live in an area where the weather extremes rarely allow opening a window.
For most of the year, we keep the house sealed tight and run either the furnace or the air conditioner. The outdoor temperature swings from the high eighties to the negative twenties. It’s very possible for all sorts of contaminants to get trapped inside and continually circulated. This puts my family at risk. There are sources of allergens in every room. Cooking, pesticides, personal hygiene products and the family dog all contribute to problems with indoor air quality. There can potentially be bacteria, mold, spores, dust, dander and VOCs floating in our breathing air. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, most people spend ninety percent of their time indoors. I know that dusting, vacuuming and wiping down surfaces with antibacterial products isn’t enough. I need to be proactive. I make sure to replace air filters in the furnace and air conditioner every month. I have enrolled in a maintenance program with a local HVAC contractor that includes two service calls per year. A licensed technician handles the upkeep of the furnace in the fall and takes care of the necessary cleaning, adjustment and testing of the air conditioner in the spring. This not only promotes system reliability and efficiency but ensures cleaner air flowing from the vents. I’ve also invested in an air purifier. The air quality add-on is installed into the ductwork. It captures contaminants much smaller than a grain of salt as the air passes through. It also uses positive and negative ions to kill pathogens and cause particles to climb together and be more easily filtered out. The air purifier improves the health of the air quality throughout the whole house.