Is the Air in Your Home FRESH?

Here’s a fact about your HVAC system: Most of them recycle the same indoor air over and over, instead of taking fresh air from outside. So, what can you do to ensure that your air is fresh?

Yep, you may have thought your system was grabbing fresh air from outside constantly, but actually, the spent air is returned and recycled again and again!

Let’s look at a few different types of systems and see whether they’re pulling in outdoor air, or circulating indoor air:

• Window-mounted A/C:

   You might have expected that, since a window A/C unit has both interior and exterior grilles, that it was pulling in fresh air from outside. Not the case! Instead, the interior grilles pull in air from INSIDE, let it pass over the cooling coils, and then spit it back to the indoors again. 

The reason a window A/C has outdoor grilles at all, then, is to help lower the temperature of the hot coils…NOT to bring outdoor air into your house. Can you believe it?

• Terminal heat pump:

   (the type of unit you see under the window in hotels) This works the same way as a window A/C unit, except that the indoor air passes over heating coils in winter, not cooling coils. But you’re still not getting any outdoor air in the room!

(So that’s why hotel room air is always so stale and stuffy!)

• Forced air HVAC system:

   This is most likely the system you have, and what you’re wondering about. When your registers are blowing hot or cool air, is that fresh air from outside?

Unfortunately, usually not. It’s the same indoor air cycling over and over!

It seems we’ve pretty much made our point that most homes do not have a system that pulls in outdoor air, even though that’s what most people believe.

“Great,” you say. “So the air in my house is stuffy and dusty and dirty. How do I CLEAN it, then?”

In our opinion, the best way to clean up your air (especially in the winter when you don’t want to crack a window) is with an air purification system that REALLY WORKS.

What we mean by that is, yes, an air filter is meant to catch the dust and the bacteria from indoor air that gets recycled over and over again.

However, if you think about it…How is an air filter supposed to catch microscopic bacteria and viruses? It really can’t. If only there was another way to kill off viruses and bacteria that accumulate in your home, the more times the same air is cycled through…

Luckily, there is! The solution isn’t to open a window (which could actually let more microbes in). The solution is a more advanced technological breakthrough…the REME HALO^® in-duct air purifier!

This unit is installed in your ducts and uses UV – yes, ultraviolet – germicidal technology that penetrates right into the cell wall of bacteria and viruses to kill them.

Yes, it sounds a little mean…But we’re not trying to be pacifists when it comes to the cold and flu!

Interested in learning more about our state-of-the-art UV germicidal lamps? Contact us, call us at [csad_phone], or visit this page. 

At Air Specialist, we’re a breath of fresh air!