Spring Cleaning and Indoor Air Quality
Spring is the perfect time of year for things to start fresh, and for many families, that means starting with a fresh, clean home. The warmer temperatures and pleasant breezes of a South Carolina spring allow us to open our windows and air out the winter’s accumulation of dust and dirt. At the end of the job, the house feels cleaner than ever.
But is it really? Does your spring cleaning leave the house as sparkling as you think it does, or are there hidden areas of dust that linger even after you’ve vacuumed under the couch and wiped down the baseboards? More than likely, there is plenty of dust you’re not seeing, and it can cause real problems for not just your clean home but for your family’s health.
Find the Hidden Dust
The first dust we clean is what we see accumulated on furniture, appliances, door frames, window sills, and so on. Those are the easy targets at cleanup time, but it takes cleaning everything to get a good handle on dust and improve indoor air quality.
Get into your entertainment center. Have you cleaned behind the DVD player or DVR? Pull out your refrigerator and see how much dust is on the vents outside the fans, and do the same with your desktop computer. Scoot out furniture that hasn’t moved in a long time, like china cabinets and even the family piano. You will find dust in every single one of those areas–and more.
Clearing Vents
Replace all the filters in your HVAC system, and take a moment to vacuum their installation points to get any nearby dust. Check the vents; they’re a very common location for the dust to build up. Remove them and vacuum as far as you can into the ductwork.
Another very common place for dust to accumulate is near the return registers. That’s because dust becomes airborne and gets pulled toward the return, then settles to the floor if the system kicks off before the dust enters the register. Dirt and other contaminants will collect just feet or inches from the filter that would have caught them.
Dirt in the Deep Ducts
Your HVAC system could also be hiding all kinds of filth, from pet dander to molds. South Carolina’s temperate climate also means that we have a wide range of temperatures and humidity levels, triggering pollen production from grass, flowers, and trees, often at unpredictable times of the year. A warm spell at Christmas is fun, but it also creates air quality problems that will hang around even longer than your shopping bills.
That means that no spring cleaning is complete until you have given the system a thorough inspection, and that’s where Waldrop Plumbing – Heating – Air comes in.
Fight Back Against Dirt
A residential heating and cooling system is a large and complex group of interacting parts. Scattered throughout it are countless locations where dust and allergens can accumulate, and there is only so much that a homeowner is able to do to clean it up.
We know that, and that’s why we focus so much on indoor air quality. When we install a HEPA filtration system to remove allergens from your system, you’ll see an immediate improvement in your home’s air quality. Instead of simply circulating dirty air through the house, our filters will remove even the most persistent and troublesome smoke, dirt, mold, and dust from the air. The result is home climate control that is free of dirty buildup and doesn’t aggravate allergies and asthma.
A new HEPA filtration system will create clean air for your clean home. If that sounds like your kind of spring cleaning, call Waldrop Plumbing – Heating – Air today at (864) 536-0887.
