Keeping your indoor air quality fresh in your Pooler, GA home can be a challenge. For health reasons, it’s important to avoid unhealthy routines that harm your home’s indoor air quality. Here are four habits that can damage the indoor air quality in your home.
Bad IAQ Habit #1: Smoking Inside
When you smoke a cigarette, you release more than 7,000 chemicals into the surrounding space. Those chemicals can enter your home, travel throughout your rooms and lodge themselves in your lungs. In addition to tar, cigarettes contain nicotine, lead, acetone, methanol, toluene and more.
Besides damaging your indoor air quality, cigarette smoke embeds itself in your furniture and walls, causing an odor that’s hard to erase. If you have smokers in your household, ask them to smoke outside.
Bad IAQ Habit #2: Not Changing Your HVAC’s Filter Frequently
Your HVAC filter has an important job. It captures dust, certain pollutants and pet dander that’s floating around your home.
However, if you have a clogged filter, it can no longer do its job. This means that all the allergens and dust swirling in the air is going into your lungs instead.
A clogged filter also prevents fresh air from circulating in your home, creating a stagnant, polluted space. Not only does this result in poor indoor air quality, but it also can contribute to health issues for your family members. Remember to schedule annual maintenance for your HVAC system and change your filters frequently to avoid damaging your indoor air quality.
Bad IAQ Habit #3: Painting at Home
Whether you’re remodeling a room in your home or you’re a painter working on an art project, the chemicals in paint are harmful to your health. Paints often contain volatile organic compounds (VOC) that can cause health problems when you inhale them.
When paint dries indoors, the VOC levels may be 1,000 times higher than the VOC levels outdoors. Symptoms from high VOC levels are usually headaches, nausea, eye irritations and throat issues.
Contact our team at Byrd Heating and Air Conditioning if you need an indoor air quality evaluation. We can also suggest ways to improve the indoor air quality in your home. We provide comprehensive cooling and heating services as well.
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