The quality of the air inside your Las Vegas, NV home is important for your health as well as the comfort of your residence. In the winter months, we often close our windows and doors to keep the chill of winter out. This can cause a high concentration of contaminants, such as dust, mold spores, and volatile organic compounds. Proper ventilation is key to boosting your indoor air quality. Let’s look at some ways to properly ventilate your home in winter.
Utilizing Heat Recovery Ventilators
If your furnace runs frequently during the winter months to keep your home warm and comfortable, you may benefit from a heat recovery ventilator. This equipment uses heat from your outgoing air to warm the air brought in from the outdoors. This is accomplished with a heat exchanger core and two different fans. This pairs heating and ventilation into one efficient process. In many cases, a heat recovery ventilator can get back over 85% of the heat coming from the air in your home. When it’s equipped with a filter of some sort, contaminants are trapped.
Opening Up Your Windows and Doors
This isn’t an exceptionally efficient option, especially during the winter months, but it is another option. If you can set aside 5 to 10 minutes each day to crack open a few windows or doors to let fresh air inside, you can open windows on each side of the house to create a cross breeze to air out your home quickly and effectively.
Using Whole-House Air Filtration
Different whole-house air purification and air filtration equipment can be installed onto your HVAC system. This equipment will remove particulate matter from the air circulating through your ductwork and home. If your filtration equipment uses high-efficiency particulate air filters, or HEPA for short, they can remove as much as 99.97% of the contaminants in your air. This can include the removal of viruses and bacteria in some cases.
Most homeowners are familiar with portable filtration equipment. However, these models don’t address enough square footage at one time. While this equipment doesn’t ventilate air to the outdoors, filtration allows you to control your IAQ when temperatures outside are very chilly.
Cleaning and Organizing Your Home
If you have a lot of clutter around your home, this provides more surface area for dust and contaminants to settle on. It can make it more difficult to ventilate your home as well. Having many items in your home can prevent air from flowing freely through your residence. Decluttering can help reduce the amount of dust circulating and keep your air cleaner and fresher.
Using Exhaust Fans
Exhaust fans are typically installed in the bathrooms and kitchens of a home. When you run these fans, the air is removed from the interior of your home and exhausted outside. This allows for a transfer of cleaner and healthier air to the inside. It’s especially important to run these fans when you’re doing anything that raises the humidity in your home, such as cooking and bathing. Humid air can hold more particulate matter, decreasing your indoor air quality substantially.
Utilize Ceiling Fans
If you have ceiling fans in your living spaces, run them frequently to keep the air circulating. This will make other ventilation options more effective, such as exhaust fans. In the winter months, keep your fans set in a clockwise direction to create an updraft. You can switch the direction they operate in the summer to create a downdraft and keep your home feeling cooler, which reduces the strain on your AC.
Turning to Houseplants for Help
Not only do houseplants do a great job of beautifying the home, but they can also improve your indoor air quality. Varieties such as the snake plant, English ivy, dragon tree, and spider plant are just some of the options for boosting indoor air quality that are also easy to take care of.
Keeping Up With Routine Maintenance and Inspections
Ideally, you will schedule an annual appointment with our team each year. This provides us with the opportunity to inspect your HVAC equipment as well as any ventilation systems that you have in place. We will make sure that everything is running efficiently and is free of issues. If we need to make minor repairs, this often eliminates catastrophic problems later that could greatly affect the quality of your indoor air.
Upgrading to a Smart Thermostat
Not only do smart thermostats provide convenience when heating and cooling your home, but they can help you properly ventilate your home and boost indoor air quality. Thermostats allow you to control the temperature of your interior, but smart units can sometimes detect when you are airing out your home. This will shut down the use of your furnace temporarily so it’s not running too much throughout the ventilation process. If your equipment starts turning on and off frequently to accommodate a shift in airflow and temperature, this could lead to system strain, more frequent repairs, and a shortened HVAC system lifespan.
Consider Other Areas of the Home
In addition to your HVAC system and ventilation equipment, don’t forget to have things like your fireplace and wood-burning stove inspected. If there are issues with these units, they can prevent the exhaust of unhealthy air from your home and decrease your indoor air quality. It’s best to schedule a professional inspection before the start of winter.
The Use of Air Scrubbers
Air scrubbers are a bit different than a typical whole-house air purifier. These scrubbers remove particulate matter from the air as well as the surfaces in your home. Not only does an air scrubber remove allergens, but it can also cut back on the prevalence of odors and gases. They are ideal if you have someone living in your home who deals with asthma or another chronic respiratory condition like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Air will flow through your scrubber through an intake fan in your HVAC system. There are usually multiple filters that will “scrub” the air of any contaminants. Some models use additional technology like UV-C light to kill microbes and pathogens. Ionized oxidants are released as well to neutralize any of the contaminants that are left in your air before they circulate back into your home through your ductwork and out your vents and registers. This is a much more efficient option for improving indoor air quality than a stand-alone air purification device. It’s a substantial investment, however. We can let you know if there are any incentives or rebates available that can help you offset the cost of an air scrubber in your home.
If you would like assistance with upgrading the ventilation in your home to boost indoor air quality, reach out to our team here at Polar Air & Heating, Inc.. In addition to ventilation, we also install whole-house purification equipment, humidity control devices, and exhaust fans. We also install, repair, and maintain heating and cooling equipment, take on new construction projects, and offer commercial services to the Las Vegas area.
Contact Polar Air & Heating, Inc. today for ventilation assistance in Las Vegas.
