Ways to Boost Your Home’s Indoor Air Quality in Winter

Ways to Boost Your Home’s Indoor Air Quality in Winter

Southern California isn’t known for its brutal, bone-rattling winters. In fact, for many days during the season we won’t need to turn on our heating systems at all to stay warm. If a home has good insulation in its walls and attic and the doors and windows remain shut, it often traps enough heat indoors to keep a home comfortable during mildly cold days.

But you trap more than heat when you have your house sealed off from the outside like that: you also trap air. Over the season, the concentration of contaminants in your home’s air will start to grow, coming from a variety of indoor sources like paint, hobby and personal care products, building materials, and pets.

You don’t need to fling open your doors and windows on cold days and make your home energy inefficient, however, to enjoy better air. There are installations that will help you boost your home’s air quality:

• Air filters: This is the most common method to remove pollutants from circulating through a residential HVAC system. Mechanical air filters trap particles in a mesh of fibers as the particles attempt to move through them. If an air filter is matched to the HVAC system so it doesn’t impede airflow, it should be able to remove most pollutant 0.3 microns or larger in size.
• UV air purifiers: There are a number of pollutants in the air that will move right through standard air filters. Organic contaminants, which include mold spores, viruses, and bacteria, are difficult to stop when you are using mechanical filters. UV air purifiers, which use ultraviolet lamps to kill microbes, are an effective tool against these harmful pollutants.
• Whole-house humidifiers: Dry air is one of the more common winter problems in Southern California, and using your heating system often makes the issue worse. A whole-house humidifier will help balance your indoor humidity.

Russell’s Heating & Air Conditioning offers indoor air quality installations in Redlands, CA. Call us today for more details.