“Achoo!”
We are all familiar with that sound, and the tickly nose and sometimes watery eyes that precede it. Often this happens while we are cleaning our homes, and the dust is stirred up by a rag or broom. While the dust alone can cause us to experience these symptoms, you probably also disturbed the dust mites sharing your home. Yes, tiny arachnids, cousins to spiders and chiggers, live among the dust in many homes. Unlike their cousins, however, they do not bite, but simply cause allergies to act up, which, of course, is bad enough.
Allergy causing dust mites are a major cause of asthma symptoms in children. They like a warm, moist environment of a
bove 70 degrees and humidity of 75 to 80 percent, typical of summers in the Greater Cleveland area. Rather than you or your family members taking medications constantly, the best way to handle these little creatures is to eliminate them from the environment.
Elimination Tactics
Two of the most common ways to help eliminate allergy causing dust mites are to keep your home as free of dust as possible, using a HEPA filter on your sweeper, and covering pillows with allergy-proof coverings. Another excellent way to eliminate them is to use a dehumidifier to keep the humidity in your home below 40 percent, which is the point at which dust mites die.
A filter with a Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value (MERV) of 11 or 12 can also be installed in your furnace or air conditioner. This will help clear the air in the entire house as long as the filter is changed on a regular basis.
For more information on making your Cleveland area home healthier and allergy-free, visit Geisel Heating, Air Conditioning & Plumbing. Their professionals will be more than happy to help you choose the products and strategies that fit your personal health needs.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Cleveland, Ohio about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about dust mites and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
For those Do it Yourselfers who would rather take control of your own indoor comfort, you can shop our online store for replacement parts, products and accessories!
Credit/Copyright Attribution: “Piotr Marcinski/Shutterstock”
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