You’re sneezing… a lot. Your best friends, the cats, dogs, hamsters etc that call your house home, don’t help, especially for the smell. Allergy season is right around the corner and you know your days will be filled with coughing, more sneezing and sore throats. Shoot, you might even just resign to take allergy meds every day for the rest of forever.
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Shaking your inhaler, you realize that the sun is staying out longer, birds are starting to chirp, and the tension in your chest is getting harder and harder to breathe through. Taking a deep breath of your medicine, you understand that as you get older, the pollen and contagions in the air are just going to make your asthma worse. Is there a way to have relief, even if it is just while at home, where you don’t have to rely on your inhaler?
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Another Doctor's visit complete with more antibiotics. Getting sick all the time is just part of your life. You’re used to dealing with multiple respiratory illnesses a year. Honestly, you don’t know the last time you felt healthy, or even any sort of relief from the frequent infections. When you get home, you turn on the telly and get comfortable, out of breath you flip through the channels. What was that? Flipping back to the channel you flew by, you hear a commercial describing what seems like a too good to be true story of a family who experienced insane relief from monthly hospital visits all because of some filter. Interested, you go out on a limb and call the number on the screen.
Indoor air quality.
What goes through your head when you hear those three words? Do you think of illnesses? Smells? Dust? Well, indoor air quality consists of those and much more. Indoor air quality (IAQ) is defined as the air quality within and around buildings and structures (1). Poor IAQ is associated with asthma, some respiratory diseases, heart disease and cancer (1). What constitutes bad IAQ? I’m glad you asked.
Fuel-burning combustion appliances, tobacco products, building materials and furnishings as diverse as: deteriorated asbestos-containing insulation, newly installed flooring, upholstery or carpet, cabinetry or furniture made of certain pressed wood products, products for household cleaning and maintenance, personal care, or hobbies, central heating and cooling systems and humidification devices, excess moisture, outdoor sources such as: radon, pesticides, outdoor air pollution (1), dander from pets, candles, and more all attribute to bad IAQ.
Yes, that was one extremely long run-on sentence full of information, but if allll of that contributes to air that is historically 2-5x more polluted than outside air (2), then what are some solutions? Believe it or not, just opening a window and letting in some of that outside air will help, but for those with allergies, that can be just as hindering as home air pollutants. What options do you have that not only get rid of smells, many illness causing bacteria, and stops the recirculation of any irritants that may get through a normal filter?
Diamond offers a few different levels of IAQ improvement, let's have a crash course in all things IAQ. Over the next few weeks, we will be going over different types of IAQ products and their benefits.