The Benefits of Controlling Your Indoor Air Quality

Poor indoor air quality can lead to severe health issues. You don’t want your home to be a source of illness. Start monitoring your home’s air quality today.

If you are like the average American, you spend more than 90% of your time indoors. This means that you are breathing indoor air for a significant portion of your life, and it is vitally important that you consider and monitor the quality of that air. Have you been experiencing persistent headaches, congestion or fatigue? Many of these symptoms could be caused by your home’s indoor air quality (IAQ).

How Does IAQ Affect Your Health?

Living in a home with poor IAQ can have severe and persistent effects on your health. Some of the short-term health effects include:

• Fatigue
• Persistent headaches
• Upper respiratory congestion
• Dizziness
• Irritation of eyes, throat and nose

In addition to these milder but persistent symptoms, poor IAQ can also have a severe long-term impact on your health. Exposure to certain pollutants can lead to respiratory disease, heart disease and even certain types of cancer. Poor IAQ is not simply a nuisance, it can become a legitimate health hazard.

What Controls Your IAQ?

There are many elements that affect your home’s IAQ, most importantly the performance of your HVAC system. The purpose of your HVAC system is to control your IAQ, but its performance can be inhibited by various elements, including microbial growth and moisture. Heat and humidity increase the probability of dust particles and other pollutants becoming trapped in your HVAC system and spread throughout your home. In order to prevent this, you need to ensure that your HVAC system is performing optimally.

Maintain Your HVAC System

There are a few simple steps you can take to ensure that your HVAC system is performing well and maintaining a healthy indoor air quality:

• Clean your HVAC system regularly
• Replace your HVAC filter every month
• Install an ultraviolet light in your HVAC system

Install an IAQ Monitoring System

While it is important to ensure that your HVAC system is performing optimally, it is equally important to monitor your IAQ regularly. There are a variety of software systems that have been designed to continuously monitor your home’s IAQ. These systems are able to monitor the temperature and humidity of your home as well as the presence of air pollutants and noxious gases.

These systems not only monitor the key elements of IAQ, they also set standards for each of these elements. This means that when an imbalance is detected, these systems trigger your HVAC heating or cooling systems in order to maintain your home’s optimum IAQ.
Maintaining your home’s IAQ can seem like a huge responsibility, but our team at Brody Pennell is here to do that work for you. Call us today to schedule an evaluation of your home’s HVAC system and start enjoying the benefits of breathing pure air!