If you think about it, the air in the house is like food. You take it in except that you use your nose. It then enters the lungs and is distributed by the blood to your cells.
It’s not strange for air to affect your overall health since your body uses it to function well. Clean air makes you healthy. Dirty air does the opposite.
Present environmental conditions make the air that you breathe not as pure as several centuries ago. Cars, rapid urbanization, and home appliances are some of the culprits for this.
That’s why you should test the air quality of your house from time to time. Air quality tests give you an idea about how clean the air in your house is and what you can do to make it cleaner in case it doesn’t meet health standards.
So how to test the air quality of your house? Read this post that teaches you how.
How To Test The Air Quality In Your Home?
Use A VOC Sensor
A volatile organic compound sensor (VOC Sensor) is an electronic device that measures the presence of harmful compounds indoors. It can read the levels of:
- alcohols
- aldehydes
- ketones
- benzene
- formaldehyde
- other volatile compounds
So in what situation is a VOC sensor ideal? You want to use this device to test air quality indoors if you live in a house in the middle of industrial sites, where VOCs can easily enter the house even if it has a good ventilation system.
Get A Friable Material and Send It To The Testing Lab
Use this method to know how much asbestos is present inside the house. Asbestos is a harmful compound that you can’t avoid. According to Asbestos Network, asbestos comes from your house’s:
- old floor tiles
- ceilings
- shingles
- roofing
- siding
- ducts
- pipes
- pipe cement
Forget asbestos testing kits because most don’t work well. They only show the presence of asbestos indoors, but fail to indicate the actual levels.
Getting a sample of a friable material in-house and sending it to the testing lab yields more accurate results. Though the lab may take a few days to send the results back to you, the wait is justified since you will receive lab-certified results that show you an estimate of how much asbestos is present.
Remember to wear Respiratory Protective Equipment (RPE) when sampling friable materials for asbestos testing by yourself. Also, ensure that the house is clear of other occupants. In connection, while taking the sample, you might want to dampen its source material so that micro-particles, which come from it, don’t mix with the air.
Get A Cardboard and Set The House’s Interior To 70 degrees Fahrenheit
DIY mold-testing kits are popular products for people who don’t want professionals to test their house’s air quality for mold spores. These kits do work. However, their accuracy is as unreliable as a blind archer. Why inaccurate? Allow us to explain to you how DIY mold-testing kits work.
Mold testing kits consist of a dishpan that catches mold spores in the air (if there are any) and allows them to grow. A hitch with this is that sometimes, the mold spores don’t grow on the dishpan due to environmental conditions. Thus, they make the user believe that the air is free of molds when in fact it’s not.
A more reliable method is to wet a cardboard a bit and put it somewhere inside the house with the optimal conditions for mold to grow. The process is slow but reliable nevertheless. According to CDC, cardboard is one of the materials where mold spores don’t think twice about growing on.
What’s The Best Way To Check The Indoor Air Quality Of Your House?
The best way to check the indoor air quality of your house is by getting a residential air testing service. This service provides you with the option to check your house for the presence of one harmful particle mixed in the air (e.g mold spores) or test the presence of all harmful particles.
Bad indoor air quality can lead to allergies, trigger asthma, irritate the eyes, make the inhabitants of the house dizzy, and develop health complications such as mesothelioma. Remember this just in case you feel that residential air quality testing is a waste of time and money.
