Your home in Mount Pleasant, SC, should be a comfortable refuge from the outside world. But sometimes, poor indoor air quality causes discomfort or even serious illness. Before you ask your HVAC company to help manage air quality, it’s important to understand possible indoor air quality solutions.
What’s Poor Indoor Air Quality?
Poor indoor air quality is essentially pollution inside your home. Excess dust, pet hair, dander, cigarette smoke and even certain chemicals found in plastics and furniture can all impact your air quality.
Often, the best way to know if your home’s air quality is pure is to see how you’re feeling physically. If you have itchiness or irritation in your throat, nose or eyes, it may be due to your home’s poor air quality. Coughing and sneezing are other signs, as are otherwise unexplained dry skin and/or rashes.
If you suspect that your indoor air quality could be better, don’t try to remedy it yourself. One of our highly trained HVAC professionals will be able to assess indoor air quality and recommend one or more solutions to improve it.
Air Cleaners
Cleaning indoor air and reducing humidity can go a long way toward improving air quality. If you consult with us, we might recommend an air purifier, which is usually a stand-alone unit that traps harmful particles. A purifier can trap certain bacterial and viral particles, airborne microbial, pet hair and tobacco smoke.
Indoor air purifiers are typically low-maintenance devices. They’re a good choice if you want to try a simple solution before making any major changes.
Dehumidifiers
The humid air in the South can cause issues with indoor air quality, as well. A dehumidifier will remove excess moisture from the air. Too much humidity can cause breathing issues, and it can also encourage the growth of biological contaminants.
Other Air Quality Solutions
Depending on your individual situation, your HVAC professional may recommend an alternate air quality solution. Ventilators can keep the air quality in your home good by exchanging stale and polluted indoor air for fresh air from outside.
If you decide on a ventilator, there are two types to consider. Heat recovery ventilators conserve indoor heat, while energy recovery ventilators reduce humidity.
Carbon monoxide alarms are a relatively simple way to preserve indoor air quality. While they don’t remove every type of harmful particle, they can prevent carbon monoxide poisoning.
Carbon monoxide can be lethal if there’s a large concentration of it in your home. However, even minimal exposure can cause unexplained fatigue, and moderate exposure can negatively impact vision and impair brain function.
Your HVAC professional may recommend UV lamps. These lamps aim at the coils in your cooling system in order to kill any harmful microorganisms. This might sound like a limited solution, but if microorganisms grow within your system, they can easily invade your home.
Maintaining Good IAQ
Whether your home has always had good air quality or you’ve recently worked to improve it, it’s important to make sure you maintain that quality. The easiest way to do so is to keep up with routine maintenance. You may be able to enter into a maintenance agreement to have regular preventive maintenance done at a low cost.
If you can’t have your HVAC system checked on a regular basis, you need to call in a professional at the first sign that something is amiss. Be sure to call as soon as you can if you notice any of these signs:
- Uneven or inadequate heating or cooling.
- Poor airflow.
- Rapidly cycling on and off.
- Poor humidity control.
If you believe that your home’s air quality needs improvement, our team can help. Contact Berkeley Heating & Air Conditioning so that we can assess your home and recommend effective indoor air quality solutions.
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