Indoor air comfort has other aspects besides the heating and cooling provided by your home’s HVAC equipment. Your living area’s humidity can impact your comfort and health, as well as the amount of indoor pollution present. While a basic furnace and A/C system will keep your Twin Cities area home warm or cool, the inserted air filters may not provide enough filtration for your particular needs. An additional air cleaner setup with more aggressive, specialized filtration may be desired to obtain a higher level of indoor air purity.
There are several types of air cleaners that may be installed in your home to augment the basic filtration in your HVAC system, including the following:
- Mechanical air filters, including high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) units, which are capable of trapping more than 99 percent of all air particles 0.3 micrometers and larger.
- Electrostatic air filters, which use an electric charge to attract contaminants, either collecting them on internal plates or causing them to fall onto any available room surface.
- Activated carbon filters, used to remove odors, volatile organic compounds and other non-particulate indoor pollution.
- Germicidal air cleaner units that utilize ultraviolet lights to kill molds, bacteria and viruses.
- Ozone generators, which are often used for cleaning air of smoke and odors caused by mold, mildew, cooking and pets.
Portable air cleaner equipment can be installed on a room-to-room basis, or permanent systems can be installed in conjunction with your home’s HVAC system to serve the entire house. Regardless of which method is used, it’s important to remember to conduct proper maintenance of the system, which includes regular air filter changes. Base-level furnace filters, which may only cost a dollar or two to replace but are limited in the size of particulates they are capable of trapping, may need to be replaced as often as once a month. Usually, it’s well worth the expense to pay a few dollars more for a higher-efficiency pleated filter, which has air quality benefits as well as keeping dust and dirt out of your equipment.
For more information on the best ways to improve your home’s indoor air quality, please contact us here at Marsh Heating & Air Conditioning. We’ve been serving Twin Cities area residents with their home air comfort needs for nearly 40 years.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about air cleaners and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
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