Tips for producing a good, healthy climate in your own four walls

People spend around 90 per cent of their time indoors. It is there­fore all the more import­ant to pay spe­cial atten­tion to the oxy­gen con­tent and humid­ity of the air. Our expert gives tips on how to pro­duce a healthy indoor cli­mate with the help of good vent­il­a­tion and care­ful product selec­tion

Tip 1: Check your ventilation habits, air the rooms three times a day

Observe for a few days when, how long and how often you vent­il­ate the rooms dur­ing the day. The nor­mal activ­it­ies of every­day life such as cook­ing, shower­ing and dry­ing laun­dry load the indoor air with mois­ture, odors and emis­sions. Dur­ing sleep, we need around 280 to 300 liters of air per hour. When exer­cising full power on the exer­cise bike, air con­sump­tion may increase to 3600 to 4000 liters. This is why we need fresh air! In any case, it is essen­tial to com­pletely replace the air inside the rooms sev­er­al times a day. The best way to do this is by shock- or cross- vent­il­a­tion. Air­ing the rooms for ten minutes three times a day should be suf­fi­cient for most house­holds. If there is too little vent­il­a­tion, the CO₂ con­tent will quickly reach an alarm­ing level, which may cause head­aches, con­cen­tra­tion prob­lems, tired­ness and poor sleep. When adding the emis­sions from cigar­ettes, burn­ing candles, build­ing mater­i­als, fur­niture sur­faces and clean­ing agents, it is obvi­ous that there is an increased risk of devel­op­ing asthma or aller­gies over time.

Tip 2: Control the humidity, heat sufficiently in winter

Reg­u­lar and thor­ough air­ing of the rooms helps to keep the air humid­ity at a health-com­pat­ible level. It is a well-known fact that people release a lot of mois­ture into the room. But dur­ing the cold winter sea­son, the air is too dry in many areas, which may irrit­ate the res­pir­at­ory tract. This is why heat­ing is so import­ant in addi­tion to vent­il­a­tion: Warm air can absorb much more mois­ture than cold air. Please keep in mind that overly eco­nom­ic­al heat­ing pro­motes the devel­op­ment of cold wall sur­faces with the res­ult­ing risk of mold growth.

Tip 3: Check the option of controlled ventilation

The clas­sic way to bring fresh air into your own four walls is through shock vent­il­a­tion. This meth­od is par­tic­u­larly effect­ive when fully open­ing oppos­ite win­dows to pro­duce a draft. How­ever, this approach requires a good deal of dis­cip­line. Mod­ern build­ings are often equipped with cent­ral vent­il­a­tion sys­tems. They draw in fresh air from out­side, pass it through fine dust and pol­len fil­ters and release it to the inside. At the same time, they extract stale air with a high mois­ture con­tent, espe­cially from bath­room and kit­chen, and trans­port it to the out­side. Thanks to the built-in fil­ters, pol­lut­ants are kept out­side – on con­di­tion that the fil­ters are main­tained and replaced at reg­u­lar inter­vals. With con­trolled vent­il­a­tion sys­tems, a heat exchanger recov­ers 80 to 90 per cent of the heat from the exhaust air and returns it to the sup­ply air. This min­im­izes heat losses and saves a lot of energy.