As winter melts away and flowers begin to emerge from the frozen soil, spring brings with it an opportunity to start anew. It is a time of year in which the Western world engages in a mass effort of tidying their personal spaces. This is called spring cleaning. As clutter is removed from lawns and the insides of homes are cleared and renovated, all this causes quite a stir in regards to air quality inside the home. Imagine clearing an attic that hasn’t been touched in a decade.
Pulling stuff out to dispose of it can churn some real nasty stuff into the air. This is why spring is the perfect time to replace the air and furnace filters in your home. This is not only for resale value of the home but also protecting the health of current residents.
From sawing and sanding to sweeping and dusting, each of these home improvement projects carries up dust and other particles into the air. This includes everyday house dust, hair, feathers, pollen, fragments of insects, mold dust, asbestos, or other malicious particles. While you shouldn’t breathe this in yourself this goes doubly true for your kids or young ones. Breathing in harmful particles is detrimental to developing lungs and dispelling this from your living space is imminent. Here is a great article on the Environmental Protection Agency website with more information.
Have a pet or two? What isn’t attached to a pet’s fur or feet is probably waiting to get tracked in the next time that pet makes a trip outside. Dander, hair, dirt… The list goes on with animals, but that’s just part of being a pet owner. For those with allergies, special air filters can be purchased to limit pet-caused allergens.
After undergoing a major cleaning or renovation project within the home, replace your air filters. For a good analogy of an air filter’s purpose, look no further than a car air filter.
A car’s air filter is used to purify the air that goes through your engine and keep debris and particles from damaging the internal components of it. A home or furnace air filter filters dust and dirt so that you don’t breathe it and damage your internal organs. Simple, right? Well, just like a car’s air filter a home’s air filters go bad after a while too, making it necessary to replace them after every 3 months.
Having clean air circulating throughout the house is crucial. According to the EPA, indoor pollution ranks in the top five environmental dangers. It also states that indoor air pollution is up to five times higher than pollution levels outdoors. Part of the reason is that homes are built different.
Sealing a house so that cold drafts cannot enter during winter and heated air is limited during summer causes adverse externalities. Air cannot enter the house but it is also difficult for air to exit a house. Particles are thus trapped within the house and make breathing them in inevitable. Help alleviate these problems by replacing your home’s air filters, furnace filters, humidifiers, and entire house filters. The first step to cleaner air is to acquire the product(s) created to clean that air.
