You may not know it, but your home’s indoor air can get much more polluted than outdoor — up to nearly 100 times as polluted, in fact. Considering how much time most Americans spend inside their homes, maintaining the quality of your home’s indoor air isn’t something to be taken lightly.
Luckily for you, the air conditioning repair, installation, and replacement experts at Integrity Home Solutions have a few tips to share with Tampa homeowners like yourself to improve and maintain indoor air quality. If you’re tired of the sniffles, sneezes, and breathing issues that come from poor indoor air quality, then read on! We’ll share with you the best ways to protect the physical well-being of you and your loved ones by improving your home’s indoor air.
5 Ways to Improve Your Home’s Indoor Air Quality
No one wants to jeopardize their health or quality of life — maintaining the air quality inside your home is one of the easiest and most effective ways to ensure you and your family stay comfortable and healthy inside, year-round.
Improving and maintaining the quality of your indoor air is, thankfully, a pretty simple and straightforward process. Check out the five most effective ways to improve air quality in your home that the professionals at Integrity Home Solutions have put together for you:
Regularly Change Your Air Filters
Arguably the easiest way to take care of your home’s indoor air is by simply changing your air filters on a regular basis. Air filters do a good job of trapping pollutants inside your home and keeping your indoor air quality high, but they can only do so much before they need you to replace them.
More often than not, the team at Integrity Home Solutions meets with homeowners who choose to use inexpensive air filters, only to forget to replace them down the road. Inexpensive air filters get clogged and become inefficient much more quickly than high-efficiency air filters that stop nearly all harmful particulates in their tracks. This means that you need to replace inexpensive filters way more often than higher-efficiency filters which, although more expensive upfront, can save you plenty of money in the long run since they don’t need to be changed as often.
Stop Using Air Fresheners
Although it may seem counterintuitive at first, ditching your air fresheners is actually a great way to improve your home’s indoor air quality. The less you tend to use air fresheners, the easier it’ll be for you and your family to breathe comfortably inside.
So, why ditch the air fresheners, you may ask? The answer is simple: air fresheners and common synthetic fragrances expel a ton of toxic particulates whenever you spray them. Those particulates often get trapped in the air inside your home, and they directly affect your home’s indoor air quality. It’s true that air fresheners, scented detergents, and candles tend to smell pretty good, but the more often you use them, the more toxic chemicals you’re getting trapped inside your home’s air.
If you don’t want to give up fresh-smelling scents in your home altogether, you can still opt for alternative solutions: essential oils and all-natural candles made from materials like beeswax are great options to freshen up your indoor air without reducing your air quality with toxins.
Switch Out Your Mattresses And Pillow Covers
Another simple and cheap way to start improving your indoor air quality is to replace your mattresses and pillow covers. Considering you spend a good chunk of your life asleep in your bed, you owe it to yourself to use mattress and pillow covers that do a good job of standing up to allergens like dust mites, which can cause runny noses and breathing problems.
Consider replacing your mattress and pillow covers with products that are organically produced and free of pesticides and toxins. Additionally, we recommend that you invest in pillow covers and mattresses that are hypoallergenic. Research has shown that bedrooms in most homes get exposed to some of the highest amounts of toxins, so it’s important that the place you snooze in is as free of chemicals and pollutants as possible.
Use Green Cleaning Products More Often
Our list wouldn’t be complete without recommending you a way to give your house a good cleaning. One of the best steps to do just that is by cleaning your home regularly with green cleaning products. Green cleaning products, which are basically just cleaning products that don’t emit harsh toxins, tend to be pretty cheap and are just as effective at cleaning your home as their non-green counterparts.
The team at Integrity Home Services recommends that you choose from some of the following products if you’re interested in using natural cleaning essentials: baking soda, washing soda, soap flakes, oil sap, vinegar, and borax.
Use Low Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) Products
Volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, are present in plenty of common household products you probably have laying around: cooking spray, hairspray, and aerosol deodorant are just a few that come to mind.
VOCs not only negatively impact your indoor air quality, but they also cause health issues such as headaches, respiratory issues, earaches, and more serious problems like damage to your liver and, in some cases, even cancer.
Now that springtime is here, it’s as good a time as ever for homeowners in Tampa to take the proper steps toward improving their indoor air quality. Although we’ve laid out the best ways to improve and maintain your home’s indoor air, it also never hurts to have your indoor air quality taken care of by qualified professionals. At Integrity home solutions, we provide products and services necessary to give your air quality the boost it needs. Give us a call today at (813) 590-7979 to learn more about how we can help!