My name is Brian, or I'm, the vice president and license holder and co-founder of Kalos services. We're a air conditioning and home performance company out of Clermont Florida and one thing that we've found over the years is that a lot of homeowners end up making decisions when they need to versus when they want to. And the reason for this video series is to help get you prepared to make good decisions for your home, moving forward to set you up for success because there's a lot of different factors in your home and today we're focusing on the home health aspect. But there's also energy efficiency, comfort and the longevity of your home and the systems within your home.

So today, though, we're gon na focus on some quick tips and things you should know about home health, and so that way you can make the best decisions for you and your family all right. So one of the first things you're gon na notice on the quiz. It talks about the storage of cleaners in your home, and one really big factor that we're gon na talk a little bit more about here in a second is VOCs: that's volatile organic compounds and a good way to think of VOCs. Is it's really anything that you can smell in your home? It can be considered a vo C, but these are compounds that come off of the materials in your home, the flooring, the paint, the furniture, the bedding things like that, and - and there are also things like cleaners and the cleaners that we use are very important, but Also, a restorer, our cleaners are important, especially the more harsh chemical cleaners like bleach and chlorine.

Those are very dangerous gases and we don't want them to be inside of our home. So as much as possible, I suggest keeping cleaners stored separate from the home. If you have any sort of a structure, that's separate from the home, that's ideal, especially the harsh ones, and then the second option would be destroy them in the garage. We really don't like to see cleaners stored inside the home, especially where there's a chance that they might spill and might cause a hazardous situation.

I think a lot of us don't think in terms of you know typical cleaners being hazardous, but many of them. If you read the labels, they can actually be quite hazardous and it makes good sense to keep them away from where your family could be anyway. You wouldn't want a pet or a child to get into them, maybe spill them, maybe ingest them, and that can cause all sorts of health issues. So my number one tip is to store chemical cleaners in areas that are outside of your home and and in areas that are more difficult for pets and children to access.

My number two thing that I'm gon na suggest is that you make sure first off we're just gon na mention smoke alarms. This is more general safety, but making sure that you have your batteries change regularly in your smoke. Alarms, I suggest, using you, know, high quality batteries, maybe lithium-ion batteries that are gon na last longer, so you don't have to change them as often, but that's one thing, that's very important is making sure that they function and making sure that the batteries are changed when They're supposed to but there's another detector that I see is just as important as the smoke detector, and that is the carbon monoxide detector. This is especially important if you have any gas fired appliances in your home.

So if your home has a gas water, heater or a gas range or a gas dryer or definitely a gas furnace, that would be a reason why you would definitely need a ul listed carbon monoxide detector in your home and generally, where you place them, would be In locations around those appliances that, where you're catching it as quickly as possible, but here's something that a lot of people don't know is that the UL rated, the ones that you're required to have in your home by code. If your home has gas appliances, the UL raided carb monoxide detectors, they only start two alarm at very high levels of CEO. So if it's only been exposed for a short period of time, you have to get up to 400 parts per million of co2 monoxide before they will start to alarm and that's a very dangerous condition and, and it can cause health issues before the alarm even goes Off so my suggestion would be to not only use a regular ul listed carbon monoxide CO detector, but also to use a low level CO detector. There's a company called defender that makes a really good quality, low level.

Co detector. You can purchase it online. You can also get it through us, but it's a really nice device that helps make sure that you don't have low levels of carbon monoxide in your house, which has been proven to cause respiratory issues. Things like asthma have been shown to be exacerbated by low levels of carbon monoxide.

You just want to make sure that that's not in your home, because carbon monoxide has no odor. It has no taste. You can't tell that it's in the air there's no indication you'll. Just notice that you'll start to feel drowsy you'll start to have a headaches.

You'll start to have other respiratory issues, and those are your first indications and many times we don't attribute that to carbon monoxide. So there are many many cases where people are having health symptoms that could be attributed to carbon monoxide, but they don't have detect in their homes to catch it before it causes a problem with somebody's health. It's especially important, if you have children or elderly in your home, car monoxide has been shown to have a huge impact on those on both sides of the age spectrum. One thing I want to be clear about is that CO and co2 are two completely different gases.

Co is carbon monoxide and is dangerous and poisonous co2 is something that we exhale all the time. So if you're familiar with plants and humans - and you know, plants and animals and how that works, we breathe in oxygen and we exhale carbon dioxide in the plants they bring in carbon dioxide and they release oxygen. So it's sort of a circle of life, sort of thing and in general, carbon dioxide levels are not generally dangerous and Moore's most circumstances. The carbon dioxide can lead to some health issues if the concentrations are allowed to build up, and this happens, especially in some modern structures that aren't allowed to breathe.

Like older structures used to we build buildings more and more tightly. The windows are more tight. The doors are more tight, the whole structure is more tight, and so, when a building has pets and humans in it that are exhaling this carbon dioxide, we can get high concentrations of carbon dioxide, not nearly as dangerous as carbon monoxide. So car Co is much more dangerous than co2.

We should be breathing in no Co in an ideal world. Co2 is part of nature and part of what we breathe all the time and that's natural. But as we occupy a space, we can have higher levels of co2 and that's something that's worth paying attention to and there's some strategies you can use to reduce co2 levels in the home through specialized ventilation, which is something that we're going to talk about in some Future videos, it's important to know that you can track the levels of co2 as well as other particulates in your air, and you can use a good quality air quality monitor to do this. There's several different brands on the market.

You can look at several reviews online. My friend, Nate Adams has done a really great review on this. Their monitor that I have in our home is called a foo bot and it's a it's a good kind of entry-level air monitor that will give you some readouts on particulates in your air and also volatile organic compounds, including it gives an approximation of co2 which can Be very helpful and you having a sense of what's going on inside your home and whether or not you potentially have dangerous conditions, but keep in mind that a lot of those monitors do not have carbon-monoxide that CEO, that really dangerous stuff. And that's where you're gon na want to have both a ul rated CEO monitor as well as considered getting a low-level CL monitor as well.

In addition to your indoor air quality, monitor the foo BOTS nice, because it reports to an app on your phone. In fact, you can even often tell when somebody's cooking supper or something difference going on inside the house, because you'll see particulate levels and vo sea levels start to spike inside the home, which is kind of neat another factor when it comes to particulates. Inside of the home, it's actually a couple, but one that you may not think about is the type of vacuum cleaner that you use a lot of different brands on the market. I don't particularly have a single favorite, but I do like using a bagged vacuum cleaner and the reason is simple: it's just easier to remove all the dirt from the house with a good quality bagged vacuum cleaner.

Actually, the one we and use in our house is a Hoover platinum and we like it. It does a nice job but think about the type of vacuum cleaner that you use how clean it is, whether if it has filters whether or not those filters are staying clean, a lot of times vacuum cleaners end up being neglected and what happens is is that They bring in that dust and dirt and they end up venting it back out into the space, and that can cause a lot of respiratory irritants when you're, vacuuming or cleaning your floors. You want to make sure that that stuff is being stored away, especially since some recent studies have shown that soil, that's on certain types of flooring, that flooring can give off chemicals into the soil that sits on the sits on the floor, and it can actually make That that dust, that was on the floor quite toxic to humans. So so you want to make sure that when you are vacuuming that up that it's staying inside the vacuum cleaner that you're able to take it out and dispose of it safely.

When we start to talk about particulates that are in the air things that float around in the air, there's a couple things that come up in sort of the the fancy circles. We talk a lot about. You know larger particles, the the pm10 versus the PM, 2.5 particles. Really.

What you need to know is that we want to catch a lot of the particles that are in the air, the things that are actually on the smaller range and that 2.5 range are often the more dangerous particles in general. We don't want a lot of particles in our air, although I do want to mention that it's important that we recognize that having it perfectly pristine air is not possible. Nor is this something that you would really want and we'll talk more about this in future episodes where we talk about asthma and immunities, but you don't want perfectly perfectly clean air. That's not even really possible, it's not practical.

It's not what we're shooting for, but we are shooting for, is to keep the concentrations of contaminants at a level that our indoor environment very much replicates. What fresh air looks like on the outside? So not smoggy dirty city air? But if you imagine the you know, the air inside your house should be nice like it is at the beach or up in the mountains, where it's nice and clean. That doesn't mean that the air and the beach and the mountains are free of all contaminants, but it means that the contaminants that are there, they're mixing they're there you're you're exposed to a greater variety of things in the air and the things that are in the Air are more naturally occurring inside of our home environments. We tend to be exposed to a lot of chemicals, to a lot of danders from pets and from our own skin to a lot of potentially pollens and things that can happen because we have landscapes around our homes that, in some cases, can even be an irritant.

So, depending on your particular condition, you may be more focused on danders and pollens, especially if you have allergies, those sorts of things, whereas everybody wants to keep things like viruses and bacteria, especially the harmful ones at bay inside the home. So the first strategy that you that you use to deal with particulates is just having good air filtration, and the first step is to change your air filters regularly. A lot of people will focus on the data tags on filters that you buy at the big-box stores and they'll say things like you know, change every three months or whatever. That is completely arbitrary.

It depends on how much soil you have in your air and how much your air conditioning runs. How often you're going to need to change the filtration in your home. So my suggestion is: buy good quality filters. There's a lot of additional suggestions that I need to make here, but I would say start with a good quality.

Solid merv, 8 pleated filter is a good filter for most people's homes and then change them regularly, but even better than that is to go with filtration systems that have greater surface area and higher Merv levels. Merv just tells you what level how small the particles are that are caught and the higher the better when it comes to Merv, but there's other factors you have to think about. You can't put super dense filters in an air conditioner, otherwise you can starve the equipment. So it's really takes somebody who understands both air conditioning equipment and indoor air quality to make the best suggestions of what filters you're gon na want for your home, and so the best thing that you can do is just do your best to find a good filter And then to change it regularly, I suggest changing it once a month.

You can't change them too often, and so, if you change them once a month at least you know that you are catching the maximum number of particles possible. The final thing we're going to talk about today is kitchen and bath ventilation, and these are two things that are agreed upon in every corner of the indoor air quality community that when you're cooking, you want to be exhausting that moisture that you know from that boiling Pot of water or whatever you know the stove oven, whatever you're cooking and then also there's a lot of chemicals created in cooking meats, especially that can be pretty toxic and some of them are known carcinogens. So we want to exhaust that outside of the home, many homes are fitted with recirculating kitchen ventilation, which just takes that smoke runs it through a very thin carbon filter and then dumps it straight back into the space which not only adds that humidity to the space Which isn't a good thing, but it also adds all those contaminants back into the space. The same thing is true with bathroom ventilation, you don't have quite the contaminant levels, but the moisture is not good.

We want to get that out of the house, so making sure that you run bath fans at the appropriate times until that space is dried out and then shutting it off is important and that's we're using some bath ventilation. Strategies that have internal humidity sensing can be very helpful in optimizing, the operation of your bath ventilation and then, finally, on the air conditioning side, it's good to have regular maintenance done. I can tell you from experience having run my own company for many years and also having worked as an educator and another very large company, and also you know, doing free education for the industry at large that most companies do not do a really good job of Cleaning the air conditioning equipment - and that is a very important piece of not only the efficiency and the longevity of the equipment, but also your indoor air quality. So that's something you're definitely going to want to know more about and we're going to talk about that in future episodes.

So thanks for watching this quick introduction to indoor air quality and healthy home living, hopefully you found it helpful and we hope to see you in the next video.