Air Quality for Your Pets : Allergies aren’t the sole domain of humans. It’s also possible for dogs and cats to develop allergies to things like pollen, grass, mold and fleas. Special pet turf can protect your little friend from grass allergies. If your pet has any nagging unexplained health issues such as rashes, excess scratching and watery discharge around the eyes, the topic of allergies is definitely something you’ll want to discuss with your veterinarian. Although there are certainly medications that can help to alleviate your pet’s symptoms, the most effective thing that you can do to help a pet with allergies is to minimize the pet’s exposure to the things that trigger those allergies.
So, how do you reduce or eliminate allergy triggers in your home? The answer is simple, although the execution requires a bit of work. The answer is that you need to improve the air quality in your home by keeping the environment as clean as you possibly can. That’s going to improve life significantly for your pet, and it’s also going to make your life more pleasant if you happen to have some nagging environmental sensitivities of your own. Remember – clean air is healthy air. Here’s how to make the air in your home healthier for your pet.
What Can You Do to Improve Air Quality for Your Pets?
Use a Vacuum With a HEPA Filter
The best way to maintain the highest possible air quality in your home isn’t by buying a gadget, although gadgets can certainly help. Before you spend your money on an expensive piece of hardware for cleaning your home’s air, you should make sure that you have the best possible tool for cleaning the floor and other surfaces because that’s where the majority of the allergens will collect.
Keeping your home’s surfaces as free of allergens as possible isn’t just a matter of vacuuming the floor and dusting the tables; it’s also a matter of cleaning the furniture cushions, vacuuming under the furniture and cleaning all of the corners and tight spaces that you normally skip due to the inconvenience of cleaning those areas. Remember that if you always skip the hard-to-reach areas when you clean your home, then a lot of what you’re doing is simply pushing allergens into those areas.
If you have a pet with allergies, buying a vacuum with a HEPA filter is one of the best investments that you can make. Having a high-quality air filter in your vacuum is essential because the air that travels through the vacuum has to end up somewhere. The air that leaves the vacuum’s exhaust has to be clean. If your vacuum isn’t trapping allergens with a filter, then you’re basically spreading those allergens around your home every time you vacuum.
Quit Smoking
Cigarette smoking is the absolute worst thing that you can do for the air quality in your home – and if you do smoke, it’s important to consider the reality that your smoking habit isn’t just harming your own health; it’s also harming your pet’s health because secondhand smoke affects animals just as much as it does humans. Smoking destroys the air quality in your home, and it also helps to increase the accumulation of dust, pollen and other allergens. That’s because the residual nicotine and tar are very sticky. They stick to your home’s surfaces, and allergens stick to them.
Quitting is the best thing that you can do for your home’s air quality and for the health of your pet. If you can’t quit, at least go outside to smoke. Alternatively, buy a vaping device from a company like Simply E Liquid. Tens of millions of people worldwide have quit smoking with the help of vaping, and many of those people had tried and failed to quit using traditional nicotine replacement.
Buy a Good Air Filter
You can vacuum and dust your house every day, but it’s virtually impossible to rid the home of every single airborne allergen – and the fact is that you probably don’t have the time and energy to vacuum and dust daily anyway. In between your cleaning sessions, you need something that can take some of the load off of your back – and that something is an air filter.
There are two types of air filters that you can use to improve air quality in your home. The first type is a whole-home air filter, and the second type is a portable filter. A whole-home filter is installed directly into the ductwork of your home’s heating and air-conditioning system. It’s an extremely effective way to filter your home’s air, but the hardware and installation can cost thousands of dollars. A portable air filter, on the other hand, can really only filter the air in one room efficiently – but it’ll cost hundreds of dollars rather than thousands. Still, you’ll notice a difference in your home’s air quality even with a portable air filter as long as it’s a good one.
A good air filter usually has three stages that work as follows.
- A coarse filter increases the life of the more expensive filter stages by trapping coarse dust before it can enter the filtration system.
- An activated charcoal filter traps gaseous molecules, improving the smell of the air and minimizing the concentration of volatile organic compounds.
- A HEPA filter traps solid particles as small as 0.3 microns, which includes contaminants such as dust, pollen, mold spores and some bacteria and viruses. This is the filter stage that makes the biggest difference for allergy sufferers.
Clean or Replace Animal Furniture Regularly
If your pet has a bed or another favorite spot where he or she enjoys lounging – and you suspect that your pet might have a sensitivity to outdoor allergens – then you should consider the fact that those allergens will collect on the pet furniture after each time the animal goes outside. It’s not a bad idea to replace your pet’s bed regularly. Pets can become very attached to their furniture, though – so if that’s not an option, you can steam clean and vacuum your existing pet bed as part of your usual cleaning routine. That’ll help to minimize allergens and keep your pet breathing freely.
