The importance of clean indoor air

The qual­ity of indoor air has a great influ­ence on people’s well-being with­in their own four walls. Poor, in oth­er words pol­luted air, can cause head­aches, itch­ing eyes or oth­er aller­gic reac­tions. But how can res­id­ents improve the indoor cli­mate?

Tip 1: Proper ventilation

The cli­mate inside your rooms can be improved by vari­ous meas­ures, for example by air­ing your home briefly and intensely at reg­u­lar inter­vals. In rooms with a high mois­ture level such as kit­chens and bath­rooms, one win­dow should always be open or at least tilted while cook­ing or tak­ing a shower. This is an effect­ive way of pre­vent­ing excess­ive amounts of indoor humid­ity.

Tip 2: Proper heating

Just as import­ant – espe­cially in the cold winter months – is prop­er heat­ing. The tem­per­at­ure in less fre­quently used rooms should be reduced dur­ing this sea­son. But the radi­at­ors should nev­er be turned off com­pletely. Heat­ing up freez­ing cold rooms is bad for your indoor cli­mate and even­tu­ally costs more energy than keep­ing the heat­ing tem­per­at­ure at a con­stant level.

Tip 3: Houseplants

Anoth­er effect­ive meas­ure to improve the qual­ity of indoor air is to dec­or­ate the rooms with house­plants such as Ficus ben­jamina (weep­ing fig) or Fat­sia japon­ica (also known as Japan­ese aralia). They can fil­ter out the harm­ful gas form­al­de­hyde con­tained in many mater­i­als used for interi­or dec­or­a­tion. These include for instance chip­boards, car­pets and fur­niture of all kinds. The fol­low­ing rule applies to the clean­ing effect of plants: The lar­ger they are and the more leaves they have, the more form­al­de­hyde they can absorb via their sto­mata.