Five Tips for Eliminating Winter Odors

During the winter months, staying warm is the name of the game. Your furnace produces warm air that you depend on for health and comfort, but this air eventually cools and some even escapes due to air leaks and other problems with your home. Most people do everything they can to keep that expensive warm air inside their home where it belongs, and that means keeping doors and windows shut, sealing off leaks, and preventing any unwanted air transfer with the atmosphere outside.

However, this method of saving energy also contributes to severely reduced air quality, including a sharp rise in odors found throughout your home. You might not realize it, but the added air circulation during the warmer months out of the year helps freshen your home and eliminate these odors that tend to build up as the days and weeks go by during winter. While most people want to get rid of these odors and make their home more welcoming, nobody wants to have to open their doors and windows and allow some of that expensive heat to escape. And you might not have to, either—here are five valuable tips that can help you avoid nasty odors in your home as well as save energy and stay warmer during winter.

Avoid Cooking Odor-Heavy Foods

Perhaps the greatest contributor to household odors is cooking. Preparing food can be a wonderful, multi-sensory experience for your eyes, your ears, and your nose. However, the smells of preparing food don’t often disappear quickly. In fact, in some cases they can linger for hours or even days. These odor particles can become engrained in fabric materials throughout your home, such as window treatments, carpets, rugs, or towels. You might be able to mask these odors, but eventually they will accumulate to the point where you’ll need to clean those fabric features thoroughly, or replace them entirely.

Clean Regularly

Cleaning your home can help you greatly reduce the impact of odors. This means cleaning dishes immediately after use, disposing of trash outside and not leaving it to spoil indoors, and regularly dusting or wiping down surfaces all throughout your house. We have already talked about how odor particles can become engrained in your fabrics, but they can also come to rest on solid surfaces as well. It’s definitely in your best interests to keep everything tidy.

Cleaning can also mean more than just your home—it can also mean yourself. Bathing regularly and focusing on eliminating body odor can go a long way toward reducing odors, particularly with so many people spending so much time at home these days due to remote work. Likewise, with the weather getting colder, more and more people are turning to home workout equipment in order to stay fit and healthy, but that also means an increase in household odors. We recommend doing any workouts in rooms you either use infrequently, or in an area isolated from the rest of your home, such as in a garage.

Avoid Activities That Kick Up Dust

While regular cleaning can help keep dust and odor levels down, certain activities kick up this dust in your home and contribute to odors proliferating throughout your home. One example, somewhat ironically, is vacuuming. While vacuuming helps you keep your home clean, it also kicks up a fair amount of dust that is embedded deep into your carpet. This actively contributes to your air quality decreasing and can kick up a lot of the odors that may have become hidden deep within. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t clean your carpet. We just recommend vacuuming a little less often, and making sure that you change your vacuum bag and ensure your filter is clean when you do. The more your vacuum can contain, the less your air quality will suffer.

Change Your Air Filter

Changing out the air filter on your HVAC system will greatly help with reducing your indoor air quality problems. As your air filter fills up with dirt and debris, it loses its ability to strain out air from your home. Likewise, the debris that is pulled through your filter also contributes to odors in your home, making things even worse than you may have thought. If the air coming from your air conditioner smells musty or like it may contain a high amount of dust content, then you might want to consider changing out your air filter sometime soon. This will also improve your HVAC system’s energy efficiency as well!

Install a Fresh Air Ventilator

A fresh air ventilator is a piece of HVAC equipment that fills your home with fresh air without sacrificing on heat. These systems pull fresh air in from outside and warm it up by exchanging the heat from air inside your home. The air from inside, now colder, is then ejected outside. This constant cycle replaces the air inside your home, which may have grown stale and full of odors, with fresher air from outside, keeping you healthy without sacrificing on energy costs.

If you want to learn more about improving your ventilation, call A-TEMP Heating, Cooling & Electrical at 617-221-5899 today!