When a customer is considering the purchase of a new HVAC system for their home or business, they are often most concerned with the comfort and energy savings their new system will provide compared to its predecessor. While both of these elements are important to the satisfaction gained from the shiny new box in the basement, a third element can be just as satisfying and beneficial and is often overlooked. Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is currently one of the most talked about topics in the HVAC industry and has come under many new regulations with the most recent editions of the ASHRAE Guidelines and Commercial Building Codes. By answering a few simple questions, it quickly becomes obvious that improving the IAQ of a building using proper filtration, ventilation and humidity control can have a significant impact on the overall health and satisfaction of a building’s occupants:
- Do members of your family get sick more often in the summer or winter?
- Have you ever seen the bacteria and viruses that cause colds and flu floating in the air in your home?
- When one member of your family gets sick, are the rest soon to follow?
- Does anyone in the family suffer from allergies, asthma or any other respiratory condition?
Humidity Control
The human body produces a film of mucus in each person’s respiratory system to help catch and filter the bacteria and viruses you inhale but can’t see. As the temperature outside drops in the fall and winter months, so does the moisture content of the air. If there are no means to control the humidity in your home or office, your body is subjected to drier than ideal air, inhibiting the body’s natural defense mechanism from properly functioning. Add this to the fact that the winter months are when runny noses, air born bacteria and viruses are at their highest, and its quite obvious that humidity control is an important issue when it comes to your overall health.
Filtration
Indoor filtration products have come a long way from the 1″ media filters that come standard with a new furnace and are readily available at the big box stores. What most people don’t understand is that you don’t get sick from the dog hair and dust that comes out of their couch cushions, which is about all these filters will catch. People get sick from the microbial contaminants you can’t see that are present throughout your entire home. Filters are rated by their MERV (Minium Efficiency Reporting Value) value and have ratings from 1 to 16, with 16 being the best/most efficient. Installing a high efficiency filter as part of your whole home HVAC system can effectively remove up to >98% of the air borne contaminants from the air your breath and prevent many of the “bugs” from ever entering your air stream.
Ventilation
Proper ventilation and fresh air supply in a building is vital in maintaining the overall IAQ. Strict fresh air and ventilation requirements are enforced by code officials for commercial buildings, so why wouldn’t this be an important topic for homeowners as well? Without occasionally removing a percentage of the air in a home and replacing it with fresh air, the same stale air is continuously being circulated throughout the house. When one member of your family gets sick, the others often follow which can in part be attributed to breathing in the same air they just breathed out. Older, leaky homes aren’t quite as susceptible to this since ventilation occurs naturally with infiltration through leaky doors, windows and other small cracks in the perimeter, however in newly constructed “tight” homes it is often necessary to introduce fresh air with the use of an HRV (Heat Recovery Ventilator) system. A few cfm (cubic feet per minute) of fresh air introduced into a home can go a long way in keeping your family healthy by introducing fresh, breathable air for its occupants.
Conclusion
There are millions of articles and research (5,460,000 when Googling “IAQ) regarding the importance of indoor air quality for residential and commercial buildings in addition to the few points made in this article. Not only can improving the indoor air quality of your home keep everyone in your home or business healthier, but it can save you money on unused sick days, doctor bills, medicine, health insurance premiums, etc. Comfort Control provides, installs, stocks replacement parts and services a variety of Lennox Healthy Climate Solutions and AprilAire products to help improve IAQ for our customers. One of our comfort specialists would be be happy to discuss the particular needs of your home or business if you’d like to help improve the overall health of your buildings’ occupants and pick the system best for you.
