Air is something we all need to to live. The quality of that air can be quite important to a lot of people.

• Temperature – cold to hot
• Humidity – low to high
• Allergies – pollen, smoke, etc.
• Oxygen content – Indoor air can be quite a bit lower

People react to the various conditions differently and there are various methods that can be done to mediate the issues for themselves.

TEMPERATURE

You are going to likely need to heat and cool your home. Some places you really only need to do one of those, but many places you need to do both.

Heating

Ways to heat your home: wood, coal, space heaters, furnace: air vents/steam

Space Heaters

Space Heaters come in a variety of sorts. It’s important to note that heat is directly proportionally output from the electrical inputs. It doesn’t matter if the heater is bigger or smaller, there is a maximum that is able to be put out per electrical input. Most homes in the USA have the same max output per typical outlet. If you look on the heaters they will often say they have a max 1500 watts. See more about this in this video by Technology Connections with the title of Space Heater Nonsense.

NOTES: Size and direction and spread and such are to be considered.

WARNING: Space heaters need to be given special precautions so you don’t burn your house down. Read more here…

Cooling

Ways to cool your home: fan, air conditioner, evaporative cooler (swamp cooler), central air

Fans can help cool to some degree, but only so much. How you set them up also matters to how much cooling effect you will receive. See more here…

Air conditioners are useful and need to be installed with care so you don’t hurt yourself and so they don’t fall out of the window and hurt other people. It’s very useful to get an window air conditioner support bracket. Here is an example (Amazon) of one that seems to be working for me quite well. They are great at making sure your air conditioner is tilted just right for the condensation inside to not become a problem. It’s also useful if you have a very large window unit. The one I selected for instance holds up to 225 LBS.

If you do use air conditioner it’s important to note that the tilt is very important to make sure that the liquid condensation is not too much and not too little. Many air conditioners use the condensation for cooling. If it becomes too much it will cause mold that then will smell really awful and it will make you feel sick. It’s also important to note that most air conditioners will need to be cleaned roughly 1 time per year so you don’t have mold issues. There are a variety of instructional videos on YouTube. It’s not all that straight forward from what I have seen. Hope to find better information at some point.

An evaporative cooler may work for you if you live in a place that humidity isn’t too high. You can read more about Evaporative Coolers on Wikipedia.

Some people have been able to get a central air unit. They are not low cost but they do work very well for a lot of people. Read more about that here.

HUMIDITY

You either have too much or too little. Let’s explore the effects of having too much or too little. If you have too much humidity it can be difficult to breathe, it will seem warmer than with less, illness?, can make clothing and bedding and walls get moldy. If you have too little humidity you will have sinus issues, it will not be as warm as with a proper amount of humidity.

To get humidity lowered you will need a dehumidifier. If you have one you are going to need to empty it to make sure you can keep it running well.

To get humidity highered you will need a humidifier. There are ways to improve humidity if you do not have a humidifier but they are very intensive on energy. Those ways are boiling water, running a shower a long time, or hanging a lot of wet towels around the rooms.

If you go the boiling water route, you will need to make sure the pan does not go dry and keep being heated as this can cause really bad fumes. Also if you boil your water a lot with tap water you will get a lot of hard water deposits that are very very difficult to get out of the pan. If you do get deposits in the pan you can use a wire brush and an electric drill combination to grind it out. You can take a longer route and try to scrape it. There may also be ways to get it out using vinegar or something that would dissolve the hard water deposits.

If you are going to try to improve the humidity with a humidifier you may run into a problem. This problem being that most humidifiers have very low water capacity and they can get quite expensive very quickly. If you don’t want to refill your humidifier tank often, need a higher capacity per day, or really hate filling the tanks the way they make them most often, you can make your own humidifier quite easily to solve all of these problems. How to Make a Humidifier

ALLERGIES

Maybe you have some allergies that affect you in your living space. You can buy air purifiers to help you with this. It largely depends on how much allergens are in your living space and how much they affect you. There are different filters for different allergens. The filter I have that works well for me in 1 room with high allergens is Alen Air Purifier (Amazon). While it says it works for a 1400 SqFt room, I have it in a room that is roughly 225 SqFt because I want very clean air and there are a ton of allergens that bother me. Old houses shed like animals. It’s the walls, the ceiling, the carpet.

How does that work? Let’s talk about how dust works in homes, especially the carpet. Small dust particles are not like most objects that fall due to gravity. They are carried on the small air currents in your home and static electrical charges in the carpets and on various surfaces. You might have seen that before where small hairs and particles are floating around in a sun beam.

ADD SUNBEAM DUST IMAGE HERE

Other than inside the home, you may want a mask for outside if the air pollution where you are is very bad. Mask information goes here.

You may also be helped by some allergy pills that you don’t need a prescription for. I personally get a lot of value out of using Zyrtec (Amazon). It lasts a long time, it doesn’t make me tired, and they start acting fairly quick. There are other allergy medications of course you could check out. If you try Benedryl (issues link), it is likely to make you tired because of how it functions with biology, so please be careful if you try that. DISCLAIMER: Read the instruction and warning labels on all medications, prescribed or not prescribed.

OXYGEN CONTENT

You may not have known this, but the air inside your house and inside large buildings is not the same oxygen content as outside. If you think about it a bit that would make sense considering you are trying to not let the cool or warm air out. The only way to do that is to make sure air isn’t going out and outside air isn’t coming in. In many older buildings air is going to be exchanged because of how poorly they are sealed up. Though with the interest of having good insulation properties for new buildings, many new buildings are sealed up very well. So you will need to be able to get some of that stale air fixed up. Here is how that’s done. Here is the properties of the air inside buildings that are old, that are new, and that is outside. Here is how it makes you feel if you don’t have freshened up air inside.

Air outside also is going to vary place to place for its oxygen content. At sea level it is abc constitution. Then it lowers by x amount every y amount above sea level. It affects you in z way.

NOTES:

Add wiki links for air in general for things like outside and inside, allergies, humidity, how air conditioners work,

Add links for air pollution maps,