Get cleaner indoor air with these six easy steps
Categories: Healthy Habits, Healthy Home, Diet & Weight Loss
Have you ever thrown open your windows on the first warm day of spring to drink in that fresh, crisp air? You may be doing more than invigorating your senses, you're also improving the air quality in your home. Indoor air quality can be significantly poorer than the air you breathe outside because of household cleaning products, mold, dust mites and other indoor pollutants. Prevention has six simple steps you can take to breathe easier inside your home, including:- Clean your dryer's exhaust pipe every 3 to 6 months, and get ride of those dryer sheets that leave your clothes coated with chemicals.
- Put a timer on your bathroom fan and set it for 30 minutes after you shower to reduce humidity. (The timer will shut the fan off automatically, for those inevitable times you forget about it.)
- Buy a true-HEPA filter for your bedroom. Forget about desktop models (which aren't powerful enough to do any good) or even one for your living room. Chances are, you only spend an hour or so in any one room of your house during the day, but you spend 8 or more in your bedroom. Avoid ozone-producing or ionic air purifiers, which can aggravate respiratory problems.
- Change your vacuum bag when it's half full. Emptying a bagless vacuum can mean several minutes of inhaling large amounts of dust, so avoid them or wear a mask.
- Carbon monoxide is dangerous. Never run your car in your garage, and have your furnace inspected yearly.
- Visit your hardware store for an inexpensive radon test, then use it. Radon is the leading cause of lung cancer behind smoking, and is undetectable without the test.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jen 10-14-2007 @ 10:09PM
Great tips. The dryer sheets are a very good thing to get rid of, not only do they coat your clothes and bedding with chemicals, the fumes exhausted from the dryer vent can make people outside ill as well. Liquid fabric softeners also coat the clothes with chemicals so avoid them as well.
Jen
http://www.squidoo.com/safecleaning
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