Written by Pete Turner, franchise owner of MaidPro of North Phoenix.
We have a dust problem in Arizona (no kidding, we’re in the middle of a desert!). One easy way to combat dust in a home is to have clean and air filters at your intake ducts. It’s amazing how much dust they trap in a very short period of time.
Sometimes, especially in the summer, we will receive a call from a customer that came home after their cleaning only to find a dusty house. Normally I ask the customer to meet me at their house to review the cleaning. As I inspect things, it turns out that the dust is not in a layer that was missed by our cleaners, but specks on their furniture. I then ask take a look at their air handler and intake ducts. Normally I’m confronted with a dirty air filter.
Air filters are rated by how small a particle they trap and for how long they are serviceable. We recommend that our customers get a filter that is rated for three months and traps particles as small as .3 microns. This will stop most particles from circulating back into the home. Check the filter after two months to see how much dust has been trapped. If it has a layer of dust across the filter making it so you can’t see the screen, change it!
Another benefit of clean filters is energy savings. The air handler doesn’t need to work as hard to pump out heat or AC.
Check out this 3M site for more information about good indoor air quality.
