A short YouTube video by Aaron Hartman, MD offering four practical steps to improve home air quality and reduce health risks: (1) address crawl spaces (encapsulation preferred; mitigation/humidity reduction if encapsulation not possible), (2) use HEPA filtration in each room (laminar flow requires a unit per room), (3) add filtration and UV light at the air handler to prevent it becoming a contamination source, and (4) control indoor humidity. The transcript also mentions specific consumer HEPA brands (Levoit or Winnex) and claims that "30% of all your air in your house comes from your crawl space." A longer "healthy home guide" on the speaker's website is referenced for detailed, room-by-room instructions.
Questions this video answers
30%
Chapters
What are some major things you can do if your house is potentially making you sick? That can remediate some of the things causing that your house might be making you sick. First thing you have to think about is crawl spaces. 30% of all your air in your house comes from your crawl space. And if the air is dirty, musty, moldy, filled full of bacteria, then you basically will be breathing in your house. So one of the things people typically do is encapsulate their crawl space. If that's not possible to do, there are things you can do this for. To remediate to minimize humidity in the space, put a humidifier there. But really ideally you would not have a crawl space. And if you have one, you would encapsulate it. The second thing you want to do is look at filtration in each individual room in your house. So one of the things with HEPA filtration is it follows the rules of laminar flow, which means you need a unit in each room to actually filter the air. Having like something on your air handler by itself does not actually filter there out and does not improve the quality of air in your house air conditioner's condition. In order to actually clean your air, you need a HEPA filter in the image room. And levoit or Winnex are some reasonable true HEPA filters you can actually try that can help with that. The next thing is on your air handler itself putting some kind of filtration system that actually minimizes the risk for your air handler becoming a source. Now all this thing is detailed out on our healthy home guide that we actually have on our website. So if you want to get that, that actually walks you through every room in your house, it can actually guide you and direct you and what you should do with your crawl space, air handlers, etc, but the basic thing is going to be put a filter before the air handler and then some kind of UV light on the coils that prevents the condensation of the corals from causing bacteria and growth. So the big things are controlling your crawl space hyper filtration in your individual rooms. And last but not least, the air handler itself. Now a fourth thing, if you're trying to make sure you use as much thing as possible, is control the humidity with your house. That gets a little more complicated. But again we have a whole guide that walks with that on our website. So hopefully this information was helpful. If you want to learn more about how to make your house house home clean, healthy, look at our website. Talk to you later.
