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We tend to think that the air inside our home is healthier than the air outside but it’s actually not!
Outside of the home, there’s more space and more natural filters such as trees and the weather that help with the toxins that we, humans create.
Inside our homes… well we are lacking those filters. Worse yet, we tend to keep our homes shut up tight and thus trap all the pollutants inside our homes.
There are the standard pollutants like dander and dust that we all have to deal with. There’s really no avoiding those types of things.
However, there are also pollutants like mold and chemicals off-gasing that are extra harmful to our health.
These are the reasons why you need to clean the air in your home!
Reasons Why You Need to Clean the Air in Your Home
VOC’s – Volatile Organic Compounds
This is where the chemical off-gasing comes in. Pretty much anything man-made in your home can and will off-gas; furniture, linens, floors, walls, even the paint.
Off-gasing is when a product releases the chemicals that it was made with into the air. There’s really nothing you can do to stop off-gasing with the exception of buying non-VOC products.
Candles and Air Fresheners
Yes, I know candles and air fresheners are what make your house smell warm and inviting or at the very least clean.
However, odds are that when you light that candle or freshen up the room with that can of freshener you are actually filling the room with soot and chemicals that can cause problems ranging from allergies to cancer. Shocked?
Check out the EWG’s guide to healthy cleaning to look up your favorite air fresheners. Don’t worry though, there are some great alternatives out there that are natural and won’t harm your body; in fact some even help clean the air!
Cleaning Products
Once again, we see an ironic situation. We try to clean our homes but the very product that we are using are full of chemicals that only do us harm.
Thankfully, there are natural cleaning products that you can use to clean your home and your body and likely you wallet will thank you.
Mold, Dander, and Dust
It seems obvious enough but if our indoor air is 2-5 times worse than outdoor air then it’s only logical that indoor air is what can likely trigger asthma and allergies.
We want our homes to be a place of safety but if we don’t work on cleaning our indoor air, it can be what causes us to suffer.
My family can attest to this. We used to live in a house with awful moldy windows. There wasn’t much I could do about it (old house, single-paned windows, wood frames). Ever since we moved into that house, our allergies were awful.
My oldest son was always sniffing and dealing with itchy eyes. We’ve recently moved out of that house and I’m expecting to see us all recover in the next month or so that follows.
Now before you go running for the hills determined to live outside for the rest of your life, rest assured that there are ways to clean up the air in your home!
Sometimes this means avoiding certain products and other times it means adding a few natural air purifiers to your home. We’ll be talking about what we can do to clean the air in our homes for the next month so stay tuned!
Now that you know why you need to clean the air in your home, here are the ways to clean the air in your home!
I just bought some air purifying house plants! I've been dealing with something ever since we moved into out current place so I've been trying to find ways to clean the air and start feeling better!
Hope the plants help! Do you have a mold problem in your current place? That seems to have been our issue in our last house (at least I assume so since we were fine before we moved there!) I'll be posting 10 ways to clean the air tomorrow and that should give you a few more ideas to try!