If you or someone in your family suffers from a condition like asthma, you know how important indoor air quality can be. Winters in Dover, DE lead to dry air – enhancing the chances of an asthma attack – while spring and summer bring high humidity and increased pollen count that can be just as bad. Your home should be a haven from those kinds of irritants, and with the installation of the right indoor air quality products. We’re provided a list of several below that you may want to consider.
Atlantic Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, Inc. Blog: Archive for the ‘Indoor Air Quality’ Category
Indoor Air Quality Products Make for a Healthier Home
Monday, January 11th, 2016Energy Recovery Ventilators Improve Your Home’s Efficiency
Monday, November 16th, 2015With winter on the way in Dover, DE, homeowners needs to consider every option in keeping their houses as energy efficient as possible. The better your home can retain its warm air – or cool air in the summertime – the more money you save on monthly energy bills and the less strain you put your heater and air conditioner under. There’s plenty of simple steps to improve your home’s energy efficiency, but one you might not have considered is an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) placed in your attic. We’re provided a quick outline of how it all works.
Ventilation without Loss of Temperature
The central purpose of an energy recovery ventilator is to swap out the stale air in your home with fresh air from outside, without losing the warmth (or coolness) your heater or air conditioner have worked so hard to provide. This is true year ‘round, but bears especial importance in the winter, when we shut out homes up tight to retain the heat. All of that stale air can force your heater to work harder to do its job – lowering humidity to unacceptable levels and forming a breeding ground for germs and bacteria to circulate endlessly. An ERV fixes that by linking two vents – one blowing fresh air in and the other blowing stale air out – to a heat exchanger in your attic. The air doesn’t co-mingle, but the heat exchanger pulls the heat out of the outgoing air and into the ingoing air.
What You Can Expect
As a result of this exchange, your air is refreshed and yet your household temperature remains the same. Even better the load on your heating system is reduced considerably, which means it doesn’t need to run as long to retain the warm temperatures in your home. Your monthly rates go down and your system doesn’t suffer from as much of a risk of a breakdown.
Atlantic Refrigeration and Air Conditioning, Inc. installs and services energy recovery ventilators.
Why Do I Need a Humidifier This Winter?
Monday, October 5th, 2015Fall has come to Dover, DE and winter won’t be far behind. You may have noticed that the air gets much drier in the winter than in the summer, and that can have a huge impact on your home comfort levels. A whole-house humidifier may be the solution, elevating relative humidity levels and helping your home stay cozy. A qualified technician can install such a system in your home, but you may be asking why you need. Allow us to spell out the answers below.
Why Do I Need a UV Air Purifier?
Monday, September 7th, 2015If your family has recently added a newborn baby, you might have heard about UV air purifiers to elevate the level of cleanliness in your Dover, DE home. The same holds true for family members with asthma or similar lung conditions, or for elderly family members. Like newborns, they may have a decreased immune system, leaving them more vulnerable to colds, viruses and other infections. A UV air purifier makes a stalwart line of defense, and even if your family members are all healthy as horses, the system can be a good investment. How do they work and why would you need one? We’ve provided a quick outline below.
How Does Relative Humidity Affect Home Comfort?
Monday, August 31st, 2015We live in Dover, DE, which means we’re no strangers to high humidity in the summer and low humidity in the winter. They can have a huge effect on your indoor air quality, almost as much as your air conditioner or heater. Indeed extreme humidity levels on both ends of the scale can force your HVAC system to work harder than it should, and increase the chances of a breakdown in the future. How does relative humidity affect home comfort? We’ve provided a quick breakdown below.
3 Ways to Improve Indoor Air Quality
Monday, July 13th, 2015No one likes to breathe dusty dirty air, and high humidity levels can create a gross clammy feeling in your home, as well as making the air feel warmer than it actually is. Dry air can cause your skin to itch and give you a nasty shock with static electricity, while germs and bacteria can spread illness and disease through your home. All of these are issues of indoor air quality, and while homeowners in Dover, DE, often focus on raising or lowering the temperature with their HAVC systems, IAQ can has just as much of an impact on the comfort of your household. The good news is that there are ways to improve your indoor air quality with the help of a professional technician. We’ve listed three of them below. Which one works best for you depends on your specific needs.
What Is a UV Air Purifier?
Monday, April 13th, 2015The air filter in your HVAC system probably does a good job of eliminating a large percentage of the most common particles found in homes and businesses. However, it may not be so effective at filtering out a number of the most dangerous pollutants, which are often too small for the common filter. This includes living microorganisms such as mold spores, bacteria, and viruses. A UV air purifier provides additional protection against such biological pollutants in order to prevent illness and ease allergies.
Why Speak with a Professional Prior to Your Air Purifier Installation?
Friday, March 13th, 2015If you need to remove polluting particles from circulating through your home’s air, one of the best methods is to have an air purifier integrated into the HVAC system. Air purifiers work in different ways: the two most common are electronic air cleaners that use ionization to draw contaminating particles out of the air, and UV air purifiers that bathe the air passing through the ductwork with ultraviolet radiation that destroys bacteria, viruses, mold spores, and other biological hazards.
It’s important that you work with professionals when you want to improve your indoor air quality. Contact Atlantic Refrigeration: we offer professional indoor air purifier installation for Middletown, DE and the surrounding areas, as well as other ways of improving the air inside homes.
The main reason that you need to talk to an indoor air quality specialist before you commit to the installation of an air purifier is that you must make sure you have the right type of purifier to address the specific issues in your home. Only a professional will be able to determine what is polluting your air and the appropriate purifier to counteract it.
For example, if the air in your home is declining because of the presence of microbacteria inside the ventilation system, an air cleaner that uses ionization will not provide help. Ionization is excellent for eliminating small particles and gas and odor molecules, such as pesticides and smoke, but it isn’t effective against organic contaminants. A professional will be able to tell if you have a microbacterial issue in your HVAC system and recommend using a UV air purifier to combat it.
A professional will also know the right size of purifier to solve the problem. A system that is too small will not clean your air effectively, and one that is too large will drain excess power.
You must also rely on professionals beyond consulting on which model to install: you must let them handle the installation itself. This is the only way you can be certain that the system is doing its job correctly.
We have the training and tools to see that your home receives the right air purifier for its needs, or whatever IAQ solution will help you receive cleaner air. For air purifier installation in Middletown, DE, trust to our professionalism.
Contact Atlantic Refrigeration when you are thinking about improving your indoor air quality in Middletown, DE or the surrounding areas.
Which Air Purification System Do I Need?
Friday, February 27th, 2015In a perfect world, you wouldn’t have to worry about the pollutants that can drag down the quality of the air in your home. This is not a perfect world, though, and if you are waiting for your indoor air quality to clean itself, we don’t suggest holding your breath. Instead, dial our number and work with one of our fine air purification technicians. Not only can we help you to choose the most appropriate air purifier for your needs, but the Milford, DE air purification professionals on our staff will ensure that you get the very best performance possible from your new equipment. Here are a few tips to consider when determining which air purification system best suits your needs, courtesy of the IAQ specialists here at Atlantic Refrigeration.
First of all, know that different air purification systems are appropriate for different air quality problems. For many homeowners, using the right mechanical air filter is all that they need in order to resolve problems with airborne pollutants. Mechanical air filters are installed into your HVAC air distribution system. As air passes through the filters, a media filter traps pollutants while letting the air pass through. In some homes, though, more specialized equipment is necessary.
Electronic air purifiers are another great way in which to remove airborne pollutants from the air in your home, but they are not passive in the manner of mechanical air filters. Instead, these systems draw air into an ionization chamber. In this chamber, the pollutants within the air are given an electric charge. They are then trapped on oppositely charged collector plates. These plates are easily removed and must be cleaned from time to time. When the air leaves the ionization chamber, it is of a much higher quality and purity than when it went in. Not all pollutants can simply be removed from the with the utilization of such techniques, though.
Biological pollutants are of much concern to homeowners, as these pollutants can have seriously negative implications for one’s health and even a home itself. Mold, viruses, and bacteria all fall into this category. These living organisms must be destroyed, not simply trapped on a filter where they can continue to reproduce. With the use of a UV air purifier, which uses small amounts of UV radiation in order to destroy such pollutants, you can protect your property and the health of everyone therein from the adverse effects of such pollutants.
Schedule your air purification services in Milford, DE with the professional indoor air quality technicians on the Atlantic Refrigeration team.
Energy Recovery Ventilators vs. Heat Recovery Ventilators
Thursday, January 22nd, 2015Homeowners who are conscious of their monthly energy spending can take just a few simple steps to keep their bills reasonable. Keeping doors and windows shut while running the heater or air conditioner is an important part of energy efficiency, as is sealing any leaks around the home and weatherization. But all this sealing and reinforcing can lead to some consequences for your family’s health.
When your home is sealed up tightly, your air conditioning and heating system won’t have to work as hard to get your home to a desirable temperature. But this also means that there is no fresh air coming into the home. We need fresh air to dilute the effects of cooking and cleaning and to allow any chemicals from the building material in our homes or other home processes to vent. That’s why many homeowners bring in a professional to install heat recovery ventilators or energy recovery ventilators. We’ll go over the difference in the following post.
Heat Recovery Ventilators
If you want fresh air in your home, you could simply crack a window, but this brings along with it undesirable temperatures. In the winter, you don’t want heat to escape from your home, and in the summer, you don’t want to let it in. A heat recovery ventilator uses fans to pull in the fresh outdoor air while exhausting the stale outside air. However, as it flows through the HRV some of the heat from the warmer air transfers to the other air stream. In other words, the heat from the incoming air stream transfers to the exiting air stream in the summer so it does not move into your home. In the winter, the heat from the outgoing air stream is transferred to the incoming fresh air.
Energy Recovery Ventilators
An energy recovery ventilator does everything that a heat recovery ventilator does, except that it is more effective at transferring moisture. The moisture in the humid air stream transfers over, so moisture can move into your home when the air is too dry and moisture moves out when it’s hot and sticky, without mixing the two airstreams.
Contact Atlantic Refrigeration to discuss your needs and decide whether energy recovery ventilators or heat recovery ventilators in Bethany Beach, DE are best for you.