Keeping That Renovation Air Healthy

renovation time is also a great time to tackle some of the air quality problems that your home might be suffering from. If the job you’re planning is a major one, it might not cost all that much more to take on some of the other air quality issues while you’re at it. What you need to do to improve the air quality in the house will depend on how old your home is. Damp basements, for example, are a problem that can heighten health problems that already exist and houses built within the last twenty years usually have some kind of mechanical ventilation system to provide the home with fresh air.

If you’ve got a health problem in your home that’s a result of the air quality, there are generally a few ways that you can deal with it.

The first and best way to deal with any source of contamination is to eliminate it. This could mean going as far as even replacing that old furnace with a newer high efficiency model. As well, getting rid of that moisture problem in parts of the house might be as simple as installing a better flooring product and getting rid of that old damp carpeting. Making the healthy renovation decision could also mean you avoid certain kinds of materials in the renovation since they pose a particular health risk.

Of course if you can’t get rid of the offending material, you might want to at least separate it from the rest of your home. Here’s an example. If you’ve really grown fond of that particle board wall unit, you might want to seal all the unfinished surfaces with plastic laminate or several coats of another kind of sealer. As well, if pollen makes you allergic as does other kinds of outdoor pollutants, it’s a good idea to make sure that the outside air can’t get into your place by installing an effective filter on the air intake for you ventilation system.

You can also try the approach where you seal off a heavily used area or one room where there’s a lot of traffic with a strategy of tight air sealing and a separate source if ventilation. Any of the strategies to make the air in your home healthier should of course include ventilation. While smaller units like a bathroom fan and the units in your range hoods help, for really effective air exchanges in the home, you need a balanced ventilation system. This means that you need to have a system where fresh air is brought from the outside to offset the air that you vent inside.

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