With Halloween upon us, we’ve found ourselves thinking of ideas and tactics that will help us safely celebrate the holiday. While we organize our costumes and put on our masks to fight COVID-19, we often forget about the spooky air quality in our own homes. If you want to ensure the highest-quality air in your place of residence, here’s what you need to know.
Lifestyle Choices Affect Air Quality
The elephant in the room that we often fail to address is our habits and that we perform many of them indoors. When we practice certain activities within the confines of a small space, the air quality suffers dramatically.
Before we know it, we’ve started to have difficulty breathing, becoming sick has become commonplace and feeling sluggish and tired has become the new normal. If this sounds like something you’ve experienced in the past, here are some habits and chemicals that negatively impact your home’s air quality:
- Smoking
- Bleach
- Ammonia
- Gasoline fumes
- Using aerosol
- Liquid cleaners
If you know that you need these items for daily use, make sure the area is well ventilated.
Mold
Do you have a dark and damp basement where you hardly visit? If so, you may have a hotbed of mold growing right beneath your feet. Before little ghouls and gobblins flood your home, make sure to inspect that area for mold buildup or water leakage.
Carpets and soft fabrics that accumulate moisture are the breeding grounds for harmful mold and bacteria. As a rule of thumb, keep the moisture level within your basement below 60% at all times. If your circumstances permit, you may also want to consider removing unneeded fabric materials from the area, as these will become problematic in the future. Here’s a brief list of side effects you will experience if mold buildup gets out of hand:
- Dry skin
- Watery eyes
- Constant sneezing
- Mucus buildup
- Postnasal drip
- Headaches
- Memory loss
- Confusion
To put it bluntly: calling in a mold certified inspector is your best option moving forward. The skeleton in the front yard should be the scariest thing in your home this Halloween, not your air quality. Give us a call if you have any questions about what an air quality inspection entails.
