How to Keep the Air in Your Home Clean This Winter

Winter is the time of the year usually associated with allergies, asthma, and other respiratory illnesses because this is when the pollen count rises. Having said that, your home’s indoor air can also suffer from degraded quality during the winter.

Four Seasons Air Specialists is your trusted HVAC company in Lino Lakes MN that can help you ensure a clean, healthy indoor air throughout your home.

How Winter Affects Your Indoor Air

It’s pretty normal for any homeowner to keep their home as closed off as possible from the outside during this season. That’s because proper insulation and sealing around the doors and windows, ensures less heat escaping from your home. By keeping the heated air on the inside, you can stay warm much easier, causing you to minimize your furnace usage.

Unfortunately, because of the insulation, fresh air doesn’t circulate through your home. In reality, there are more contaminants that arise from inside the house, rather than the pollens and dust from outdoors. These pollutants include household chemicals, pet dander, dust mites, formaldehyde, and volatile organic compounds found in household items such as carpet and paint. When contained inside the home, these contaminants pose a great danger not only to your comfort,but more importantly, to your health.

How to Effectively Fight Indoor Pollutants

Humidify Your Home

Winter air can cause you to have cracked skin and lips, runny nose, etc. While most people think that it is the warm air from your furnace that’s causing these problems, but the dryness of the air actually comes from the outside.

When the outside temperature reaches the freezing point, the air gets very dry. Regardless of how insulated your home may be, that cold air will still find its way indoors. Too much dry air can cause problems that go beyond dry skin. Your immune system depends on the mucus in your nose to catch germs before they get into your body. According to studies, low humidity levels make flu viruses more infectious, while a relative humidity level of around 40 percent lowers their ability to develop.

A humidifier is a device that adds moisture to the air and reduces the dryness of your skin, lips, nose, and throat.

Have Your Ducts Cleaned

Since opening your windows to increase ventilation during the winter is not an option, the best thing you can do to prevent the spread of pollutants is by keeping your house clean. Open the HVAC vents and returns and make sure they are absolutely clean. For a more rigorous cleaning of your ductwork, schedule a duct cleaning with your preferred HVAC contractor. A full duct cleaning is done by HVAC professionals who use special tools and equipment to clean your air ducts thoroughly.

Invest in an Air Purification System

Air purifiers are an effective way to clean the air. Also an investment in your health, air purifiers can help with allergies, awful smells, snoring and more.

Air purifiers use fine strainers that filter particles from circulating air. As air flows into the air purifier, the finer the filter used, the smaller the particles it traps. The more times the air passes through the high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filter, the cleaner the air becomes. HEPA filters are guaranteed to trap 99.97% of airborne particles larger than 0.3 microns.

Most whole-home purification systems can eliminate up to 95 percent of particles from the air. Over 90 percent of bacteria and airborne chemicals that are produced by decomposing organic matter can be eliminated from the air with a central air purifier. Air purification systems are installed as part of the home’s heating and cooling system, giving you efficient, silent, and advanced air filtration without using any wall or floor space.

In addition, central air purifiers can also prolong the life of your heating and cooling system by reducing the presence of dust and other airborne particles throughout the system. A cleaner HVAC system results in better efficiency and greater endurance.

Ask the Air Purification Experts

You don’t have to go through the problem of dealing with poor indoor air quality this winter. For more information, call Four Seasons Air Specialists. We are your reliable Centerville heating and air conditioning contractor that offers an array of products engineered to clean the air that circulates throughout your home.