Buildings are on the news as making their tenants sick and it's referred to as sick building syndrome. Individual homes are linked in allergies and asthma. Can it happen to your home and what can you do to prevent it or correct it if you are already the proud owner of a house that is making you sick. Today you can do something about the problem.
The increasing cases of sick building syndrome are due to the way houses and buildings are built to conserve energy. Stop air movement in and out of the home and you reduce the energy required to heat and cool the house. After you seal the house up, central cooling and heating systems maintain livable temperatures and humidity levels within the home by re-circulation of the same air and pollutants day after day. Dust, bacteria, viruses, mold, fungus, mildew and gases circulate through the building. The dust can come from skin, hair, clothes or just come off shoes when we walk in and out. The mildew, fungus and molds can come in along with the dust or we can grow our own in the HVAC system. The gases are volatile organic compounds that are given off by dyes, paints, varnishes and adhesives used in modern building materials.
The most important step in filter improvement is to make sure that all the air that goes through the electric air handler or gas furnace is filtered. If your HVAC system is pulling air through cracks in the duct system or return air chase, it pulls the contaminates along with it. Have your service technician check to verify that all the return air to a system is pulled through the filter system. This is a good time for your service technician to verify that the filter system is sized large enough for proper operation of the system. Visit Nu-Way for a full line of furnace filters and air conditioning air filters for both residential and commercial air riltration systems.
Filters come in different efficiencies that are measured in the percentage of arrestance of particles. Simply stated, what amount and size of particles do they stop? The higher the percentage, the smaller the particle the filter will stop. The other factor that must be considered is the resistance to air flow, or will this super filter let enough air through to allow my system to function properly?