Indoor Air Quality

Is Energy Efficiency more important than Indoor Air Quality?

Energy efficiency is just a term used as a goal to reduce the amount of energy that is being used to heat or cool a home. Indoor air quality is the condition of the air inside your home or office building, including the extent of pollution caused by smoking, dust, mites, mold spores, radon, and gases and chemicals from materials and appliances. So which do you think is more important energy efficiency or indoor air quality?

Popular Characteristics for Home Products

A home design trends survey was conducted and showed what the most popular characteristics for home products were. Energy efficiency was located near the top which was not a surprise because everyone today is trying to conserve as much energy as they possibly can, but surprisingly indoor air quality was near the end. There obviously has to be a problem somewhere because the quality of the air inside your home should be much equally as important as energy efficiency is. Polluted air not only affects your home but it affects your family’s health as well.

Communication Failure

The problem with indoor air quality being at the very bottom of the survey is just a communication problem. Energy Efficiency gets all of the good press and recognition because in today’s society it is all about conserving more energy, while indoor air quality usually gets mentioned in things that go wrong. When anything is said about indoor air quality it is usually bad because it involves things such as mold, carbon monoxide, dust, and so forth. The problem is that people are just seeing all of the things that have went wrong within a person’s home or office. It is time for indoor air quality to be recognized as being at least as important as energy efficiency.

What exactly is Indoor Air Quality?

Indoor air quality is the condition of the air inside your home or office. It is very important that you have good air quality inside your home or office. If your home or office has bad air quality it can cause a lot of problems within your family or anyone exposed to the air in your office. You should prepare your indoor environment properly to ensure that you have the best indoor air quality possible.

How to Achieve the Best Indoor Air Quality While Being Energy Efficient as well

When you air-seal a home you need to make sure that none of your appliances will backdraft and release carbon monoxide into the indoor air. If your home becomes air tight enough you should add mechanical ventilation to be sure that all of the polluted air is drawn from the inside of your home. The best part about indoor air quality is that you can also improve your energy efficiency while ensuring that your home has good air quality. Just by changing light bulbs properly or switching out TV boxes for better ones can save you energy while preventing pollution from being released by the old products.

Anytime you want to improve your energy efficiency, indoor air quality must be on your list as well. So many people believe that the only important thing to look for when purchasing household products is how much energy it will save them when really they should be worried about what the product is going to do to the air quality inside their home as well. It is very obvious that energy efficiency is not more important than indoor air quality but that they are equally. It is just as important to keep your family in good health by breathing good quality air inside your home, as it is to conserve energy.