How Do I Improve My Indoor Air Quality?
Many news stories warn us about the dangers of air pollution – but while we often talk about air quality in general, we don’t discuss indoor air quality nearly enough. Remember, you spend most of your time in your home – and the health impacts of subpar air quality can be quite devastating.
With this in mind, let’s take a look at the effects of inadequate air quality indoors, and what you can do to improve it.
What Are The Effects Of Indoor Air Quality?
If your home is riddled with air pollutants, you and your family may be at risk of developing a variety of serious health problems, such as:
- Pneumonia
- Asthma
- Cancer
- Heart disease,
- Allergic reactions
Generally, people who already have heart or respiratory conditions are generally more susceptible to health issues arising from poor indoor air quality.
So, if you’ve got seemingly unexplainable respiratory systems, your home’s air quality is a pretty likely culprit. Unfortunately, sometimes pollutants that have the capacity to wreak havoc on our immune and respiratory systems go undetected for months or even years.
Luckily, it takes a long time for the damage to your health to become irreversible – which is why you should take steps to check and improve your indoor air quality.
Reducing Pollutants
If you’re going to clean up your indoor air and maintain it at a respectable level of quality, you need to learn about some of the most common causes of pollution.
For instance, radon is a surprisingly common pollutant. It’s a radioactive natural gas that rises up from the terrain below your home, and it can cause severe health problems if it builds up in your home – such as lung cancer.
Luckily, you can easily find home test kits that check whether you’ve been exposed to unsafe levels of this gas. And if these tests reveal that the buildup or radon in your indoor air is indeed too high, the typical remedy is fixing the foundation of the house; sealing any cracks will usually prevent the gas from seeping into your living space once more.
Of course, radon isn’t something you see that often. However, there’s another pollutant that’s far more common in the average home – secondhand cigarette smoke, exhaled by other members of your household.
Practically everyone knows that cigarette smoke can cause severe health issues – most famously cancer. However, we don’t discuss thirdhand smoke nearly enough. That’s the cigarette smoke found on furniture, clothes, and other home surfaces that absorb it over time.
Naturally, the best remedy for limiting harmful cigarette smoke is just not to smoke indoors. If that’s not possible, however, various candles, filters, and other products can absorb and reduce cigarette smoke in the air around you.
Still, bear in mind that most of these products simply reduce the nicotine scent left by cigarette smoke, and they don’t actually improve your indoor air quality. Not smoking inside is the best course of action.
Watch Your Cleaning Products
One of the things people don’t consider when trying to improve their indoor air quality is the dangerous effects of certain cleaning products – especially when overused. We’re talking about:
- Various cleaning sprays
- Bleach
- Air fresheners
- Glass cleaners
In most cases, you can find nontoxic, safer alternatives that are just as effective at keeping your house clean. And while they tend to be pricier compared to the run-of-the-mill chemical cleaning supplies found in the average store, the higher price is well worth it when you consider the accompanying health benefits.
Checking Your Air Quality
So, you’re concerned about your home’s air quality – but you don’t know what you need to change specifically. In that case, you need to test your indoor air quality and figure out which pollutants are causing most of the trouble.
Generally, it’s a good idea to contact an air quality professional to perform the testing for you. It’s more expensive than doing it yourself, but it will also yield more dependable information. And when it comes to your health, you probably don’t want to work with unverified data.
On the other hand, if you decide to test your indoor air quality yourself, you can find tons of test kits on the Internet. Some of the kits test for a single (usually more dangerous) pollutant, while others give you more general results. Radon testing kits are a great example of the former.
However, many of these DIY kits aren’t as dependable as the ones used by pros. Sure, they may be useful if you check for one specific pollutant. But contacting professionals is likely the better course of action if you want a comprehensive full panel.
Plus, people who provide air quality testing services can usually help you if the results aren’t satisfactory – for instance, they also tend to provide mold removal and prevention services.