Indoor Air Quality Math

We bet you didn’t know Indoor Air Quality Math was a thing? In this post we are going to take a look at some of the numbers involved with IAQ.

5X

The air inside your home can be up to 5 times more polluted than the air outside. Build up of contaminates from cooking, cleaning, laundry as well as everyday living can build up quickly inside a home. People breathing creates CO2 which has a negative impact on the IAQ of the home. What should we do to combat this? The answer is to move the bad air out and replace it with fresh air. This can be done in many ways. Simply opening a window can be effective but is hard to control. The best solution is to have properly installed exhaust fans removing the air inside the home, then some type of air intake to bring fresh air into the home. Solutions like the Air King QFAM have an optional MERV16 air filter that can remove almost all particles that would enter the home. Just a quick note, in case of active wildfires or other significant pollutants in the air, it is not recommended that an air intake system be used.

85%

85% of Americans don’t realize the air in their homes poses a possible health hazard. This comes from the American Lung Association. Much like what we discussed in the above paragraph. Build up of contaminates, especially cleaning chemicals can create a hazardous environment.

50%

Up to 50% of airborne contaminates come from the cooking surface in the kitchen. Cooking is one of the largest contributors to bad indoor air quality. The normal cooking process creates all kinds of contaminates. That’s before we let those eggs cook a little too long! If those contaminates are not exhausted out of the home we can end up breathing them in. The best solution is utilizing a range hood that vents to the outside and is sized for your specific cooking surface. The Air King ECQ series has an added feature of a continuous, barely audible low speed – click to learn more.

20 minutes

The exhaust fans in your bathrooms should run for a minimum of 20 minutes after the room has been used. Just because you are done in the bathroom doesn’t mean all the contaminates are. They can continue to linger for much longer. In higher moister situations, using an exhaust fan with a humidity control, like the Air King E130SH ensures that all the moister is exhausted before shutting off.

So you see, indoor air quality math gives us some simple insight into what we can do to improve our living environment. To learn more, read through our other post on Indoor Air Quality or visit the Air King website.