Air Quality in Springfield, PA

The Scoop on Indoor Air Quality in Homes

Here’s a fact that surprises many people: the quality of the air inside a home or building is often 3 to 5 times worse than the quality of the air outside. This is the opposite of what people often think it is. They think of pollution as an outdoor phenomenon. But why is indoor air quality so poor?

There are several reasons for this drop in indoor air quality. First, modern homes are built with strong insulation to make them more energy efficient. This is a great advance for saving energy and enjoying more comfortable indoor temperatures, but it has the drawback of restricting the amount of fresh air that can enter the building. Indoor contaminants become concentrated and don’t have an easy way to escape, leading to stale and pollutant filled air.

Second, there are many sources of indoor air pollutants within modern homes. Cleaning supplies, hobby products, cosmetics, paints, varnishes, pressed-wood, drywall, and more are sources of contaminants that can severely lower indoor air quality. Along with dust, lint, and dander—the standard pollutants that can make air unpleasant—homes are often filled with chemicals and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

There are ways you can reduce the number of pollutants inside your home and improve ventilation, but the most direct way is with special indoor air quality improvements. These include air purification systems, whole-house air filtration systems, improvements to the ventilation system, and UV air purifiers. Creative Comfort Solutions can offer all of these services to your home.

What’s in Your Air? Air Quality Testing Will Tell You

If you’re concerned about the quality of your air—or you’re curious about it—then you only need to contact Creative Comfort Solutions to arrange for air quality testing. We’ll discover what’s inside your home’s air and provide you with a rundown. From there, we can help you find the right type of IAQ solution.

Here are some of the pollutants most often found in residential homes:

• Dust
• Lint
• Pet dander
• Pollen
• Volatile organic compounds
• Smoke
• Dust mites
• Carbon monoxide
• Bacteria
• Mold spores
• Chemicals

These pollutants can cause everything from minor irritations to major medical complications. If you have people in your home who have allergies or suffer from asthma, many of these pollutants can cause serious health conditions. We strongly recommend having your air quality tested if anyone in your home has a respiratory condition.

However, even the healthiest people in your home can suffer from airborne pollutants. Poor indoor air quality is the cause of headaches, nausea, insomnia, and congestion. With our assistance, you can start down the path toward a much healthier life inside your home.

Air Filtration—A Great Place to Start

If you have a forced-air HVAC system, such as a furnace and air conditioner, you already have an air filter in place. But this filter isn’t helping to make your air cleaner. It protects the interior of the HVAC cabinet from dust and dirt infiltration, and it’s not powerful enough to make a difference in the air quality elsewhere. If you want to improve the quality of your home’s air, you’ll need to have a whole-house air filtration system installed. Our technicians can find the right type of filter to meet your needs and then have it installed into your ductwork.

Air filters use a mesh of fibers or other media to trap air pollutants that attempt to pass through them. Air filters come in different strengths, which is measured as MERV (Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value). The higher the MERV rating, the smaller the particles a filter can trap. Many homes benefit from having filters between 8–14 MERV.

It’s important to have professionals install your whole-house filters so you have the correct MERV rating. It’s tempting to get the most powerful filters, but a filter can be strong for your HVAC system and end up blocking the flow of air. The filters used for hospitals and industrial facilities aren’t suitable for home use! You can trust our comfort advisors to help you locate the filters that will trap the particles you want removed without putting any strain on the HVAC system.

The Power of Air Purifiers

Air purifiers are electronic devices that can remove unwanted pollutants from the air without using physical barriers. An air purifier is often a great addition to having an air filtration system. If the air filter can’t trap all the particles moving through the ventilation system, then the right air purifier will remove the smaller ones that escape the filter. An air purifier can also help a filter work better by causing particles to clump together.

There are several types of air purification systems that use different methods. One of the most common types of air purifiers uses ionization. An ionizing air purifier creates an electrical field within the ductwork. This field gives the particles passing through it either a positive or negative charge. The charged particles will clump together and fall from the air, get more easily trapped in the air filter, or get drawn down to a set of electrically charged plates on the air purifier where they can later be removed. These air purifiers can capture particles less than .1 micron in size, and if paired with the right filter will remove more than 98% of unwanted airborne pollutants.

The UV air purifier, also known as a UV germicidal light, is another popular type of air purification system. UV air purifiers use rays of ultraviolet light to destroy organic pollutants moving through the air in the HVAC system. These lights are harmless to people and pets, but they can eliminate such contaminants as viruses, mold spores, bacteria, and other microorganisms. They are also helpful at preventing the development of mold within the HVAC system in the first place.

As with air filters, you’ll want the assistance of our comfort advisors when it comes to finding the right air purifier. We can find the combination of filtration and purification for your home. We install many of the best air purification products available, which include air cleaners that combine filtration, ionization, and UV lights into an effective package.

The Benefits of Balanced Indoor Humidity

A serious problem that we often face during the winter is excessively dry air. When the air is too dry, it makes low temperatures feel even colder, and this often means having to run the heating system more frequently. Dry air also dries up sinuses, allowing for illnesses to spread quicker throughout a home. Other problems from dry air include skin, eye, and nose irritation, static electricity, and damage to wooden furnishings.

Air is considered too dry when it’s below 30% relative humidity. The best way to combat dry air is with a whole-house humidifier. You can purchase portable humidifiers, but they will only work for a small area and don’t provide precision control, so they may end up making a room too humid. With a whole house humidifier, you’ll have precise control over humidity levels indoors. Our technicians will install the humidifier into your HVAC system, where it will release water moisture through a series of pads into the air circulating through your home. You control the humidifier from a special thermostat. We recommend a relative humidity level of 45%—neither too dry nor too humid.

Your Air Ducts and Your Indoor Air Quality

Another key part of indoor air quality in a home is the ductwork of the HVAC system. Most homes use a network of ducts to transport conditioned air from the heater and air conditioner to the rooms. Because these ducts are hidden from sight, people often don’t give them much thought. Unfortunately, bad ductwork with air leaks is a leading contributor to poor indoor air quality.

Air leaks in ducts will draw in stale, musty, and moldy air from closed off parts of the home. You don’t want to breathe the air found in your attic or within your walls! These air leaks will also lead to the development of mold growth inside the ventilation system, and that can mean harmful mold spores being blown about in your air.

Our technicians are experienced with repairing damaged air ducts and sealing air leaks. Make an appointment with us to examine your air ducts to see if they need improvement. Not only will repairing the ductwork help to boost your indoor air quality, it will significantly improve the energy efficiency of the HVAC system. Up to 30% of the air moving through ductwork can be lost to air leaks—that’s a lot of heated and cooled air that ends up going nowhere, forcing the AC and heater to work harder to make up for it.

We Repair and Replace IAQ Systems

Along with installing high-quality IAQ systems, the comfort advisors at Creative Comfort Solutions offer repair and replacement services for these devices. If you’ve found that your air quality has started to decline again, just call us and we’ll see what we can do to fix the problem. If we can’t fix your air filtration system, air purification system, or whole-house humidifier, we will recommend a replacement.

We take great pride in our work, which is why we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you aren’t happy with any of the indoor air quality services that we’ve provided for you, we will do all we can to make it right. It’s important to us to have happy customers—we love to see our customers thrilled with the jobs we do for them. We are a small company, but we offer big company service, and we hold ourselves to rigid standards of quality, service, training, and professionalism. We never cut corners or use substandard materials because we believe our customers deserve nothing but the best.