All About Indoor Air Quality

You've probably heard talk about Indoor Air Quality, but what is it, and why do people keep talking about it? Indoor Air Quality is a major contributing factor to the overall health and safety of your facility. Indoor Air Quality is used to describe the level of cleanliness of the air being circulated throughout your building. 

Indoor Air Quality and Associated Health Risks

Indoor Air Quality refers to the quality of air in and around buildings. Poor air quality is linked to increased rates of communicable illnesses and reduced productivity in workplaces, schools, and homes. Poor air quality can cause irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat. Polluted air can also cause long-term respiratory illnesses.  

Poor ventilation and bad indoor air increase the potential of an outbreak within your workplace, should one of your employees be unknowingly infected with a virus.

Deterioration of indoor air quality can be brought on by poor ventilation, reduced air circulation, contaminated air filtration, wet or dirty carpeting, and improper building materials. 

What Can Summit Do to Improve Indoor Air Quality?

We offer a few services aimed at improving Indoor Air Quality in our customer’s facilities. We create cleaning plans that include frequent high and low focused dusting, routine carpet cleaning, as well as using biodegradable, non-toxic chemicals as a part of our cleaning services. 

Keeping dust at a minimum in a busy building is an important first step to maintaining healthy air. Dust is comprised of dead skin, dirt, pollen, allergens, and harmful pathogens that accumulate naturally over time. We include high and low dusting in our cleaning plans on a weekly basis, or more if necessary. Our cleaning programs focus attention on vents, high corners, desk areas, and baseboards working from top to bottom and getting everything in between. 

Carpet care is another essential solution to improve indoor air for our customers. Daily vacuuming for area rugs and carpeting in your facility removes dust, dirt, and food debris which can, with time, begin to create, and retain foul odors. We focus on daily vacuuming with HEPA filtered vacuums and regular deep carpet cleaning to maintain carpeting.  Frequent vacuuming removes large amounts of dust that settles into your carpets preventing them from harming your carpet and being kicked up and recirculated into your air supply. 

The chemicals your cleaning company is using could actually be doing more harm than good. Chemicals containing Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) and other harsh chemicals have been linked to the onset of various respiratory diseases. We use non-toxic chemicals as a part of our cleaning services. Our chemical product partners help us employ environmentally sustainable and healthier cleaning processes for all of our customers. 

Ventilation, Filtration, and Purification for Office Air

We can’t help you with this one, but checking your air filters and making sure your ventilation system is working properly can save you a lot of time, money, and office hardship. 

Poor ventilation causes air to stagnate in your building, which is where problems begin to arise. Stale air carries dust, bacteria, and airborne pathogens that can cause infectious diseases to spread rapidly throughout your facility. Poor indoor air is a major issue for manufacturing facilities, particularly those that produce metal or plastic products.  

Air ventilation is meant to replace your polluted indoor air with fresh outdoor air and keep a fresh circulation of air in your facility. Replacing your indoor air with fresh outdoor air has not only positive effects on office health, but can also boost mood, and improve productivity. 

If your office is having a rash of cold, flu, or even Covid-19 cases you may need to look at your filtration system as well. Your air filter may be old and ineffective in catching dust particles and viral pathogens that cause harm to the people below. 

Air purifiers can help clean the air in small rooms and in larger numbers improve air quality throughout an entire building. How air purifiers work is similar but critically different from an air filtration system. While air filters simply remove potentially harmful pollutants from the air and essentially store them, air purifiers go an extra step. Air purifiers take the first step of taking in and filtering air, but where air purifiers differ from air filters is that they actually clean, purify, and sanitize the air that goes through it. 

There are a few downsides to using air purifiers. First, air purifiers are less effective in large spaces, requiring larger (louder) models or a multitude of smaller ones. Second, air purifiers are expensive, a small, high-quality purifier starts at $200. Finally, air purifiers are not the end all be all and are best used in conjunction with air filtration, proper ventilation, and regular cleaning. Air purifiers are better served as an insurance policy protecting your indoor air quality than the engine maintaining it. 

Indoor Air Quality is Critical and Summit is Ready to Help

We’re ready to get started toward a healthy, and frankly, better smelling, and more livable building. Poor indoor air quality aids and abets pervasive odors and makes your building uncomfortable and unproductive. Improving Indoor air quality in a facility takes a lot of work and is much more easily managed than fixed. 

https://www.lung.org/clean-air/at-home/indoor-air-pollutants/cleaning-supplies-household-chem