How The Indoor Air Quality Landscape Has Changed
How The Indoor Air Quality Landscape Has Changed
Since 2020, there has been a clear shift in how Americans spend time inside their homes. COVID changed our perspective on indoor air quality—but not in the way many people expected. While the pandemic brought respiratory health to the forefront, the most significant long-term change has been the mainstream adoption of working from home.
Our homes are no longer just where we sleep and unwind. They’ve taken on a hybrid role as both living space and workplace. In a situation where you spend most of your time indoors, there is no real reprieve from the dust, allergens, and contaminants that exist in the home—and that daily living continuously generates.
At the same time, homes themselves have changed. Modern construction emphasizes energy efficiency, tighter building envelopes, and reduced air leakage. While these advancements have many benefits, they also mean that the air inside our homes is exchanged less frequently than in previous generations.
As our time indoors has increased, the quality of the indoor environment has become more important than ever. What was once a place we occupied primarily in the evenings and on weekends has become the place where many of us work, eat, exercise, relax, and sleep.
When our clients talk to us about indoor air quality, they often focus on specific moments. They tell us about spring allergies, a basement that seems to trigger symptoms, or a particularly dusty room that makes them uncomfortable. But when you’re spending 10, 12, or even 24 hours a day indoors, indoor air quality stops being an occasional concern and becomes a constant part of daily life.
Respiratory triggers are no longer intermittent when you’re breathing and re-breathing the same air day after day. They become the static background of your existence, and over time, so do the symptoms. The challenge is that many people never connect those symptoms back to the environment around them.
Instead, symptoms are often treated as isolated events. A doctor’s appointment is made, a prescription is written, and symptoms improve. A few months later, allergy season arrives, a cold moves through the household, or congestion returns. Another appointment is scheduled, symptoms are treated again, and the cycle repeats.
After enough repetitions, many people simply assume that feeling tired, congested, or uncomfortable is just “the way it is” without ever examining the place where they spend nearly 95% of their time.
Solutions Crafted to Address the Source
We know the air we breathe has a lot of things in it, and unfortunately many of these can contribute to respiratory discomfort when exposure is constant and cumulative.
Dust is the most common respiratory trigger in the home. Part of the complication here is that many people falsely equate dust with a cosmetic nuisance alone, and not necessarily a driver of respiratory symptoms. What we refer to as dust is actually a mixture of everything that accumulates inside a home. It may contain pollen, pet dander, textile fibers, dead skin cells, dust mite waste, dirt, and even finely ground insect fragments.
These materials settle into carpets, upholstery, area rugs, mattresses, and other soft surfaces. When they are disturbed by normal everyday activity, the particles are released back into the air you breathe. For sensitive individuals, repeated exposure can contribute to respiratory symptoms and even trigger asthma attacks.
The challenge is that exposure occurs gradually and continuously, making the culprit extremely easy to overlook.
PCRS addresses dust through removal, not relocation. Professional carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, and duct cleaning all help reduce the contaminant load within the indoor environment. For homes with ongoing indoor air quality concerns, we recommend looking beyond what’s visible. It’s not just dust—it’s a harbor for contaminants.
Mold is a massive contributor to poor indoor air quality. Like dust, people often conflate mold with what you can see. “If I can’t see mold then I must not have a mold problem” is a common misconception. In many cases, mold is the trigger you may never see at all.
Mold is a naturally occurring part of our environment, and mold spores are present both indoors and outdoors. Visible growth, staining, and musty odors can be obvious indicators, but in many cases mold develops in places you can’t see.
It grows behind walls, under flooring, inside crawl spaces and basements, or in damp building materials after a water loss, for example.
As mold colonies grow, they release spores into the indoor environment. This can be a major issue for sensitive individuals. One of the reasons mold is so problematic is that the symptoms it can trigger often mirror seasonal allergies, and may be attributed to them instead.
Mold itself is also a symptom of a larger issue: moisture.
Without excess moisture, mold struggles to grow—but in the wet, dark places in your home, mold thrives.
PCRS begins site evaluation by identifying and addressing the moisture conditions that allow mold to grow in the first place. Ventilation and dehumidification are essential to arresting mold growth. Whether the source is a past plumbing or appliance leak, a water intrusion event, or elevated basement humidity levels, moisture must be controlled if there is any hope of addressing poor indoor air quality.
If mold has colonized to the point where it is visible, our IICRC-trained technicians remove affected materials, clean impacted areas, and help reduce the spread of contamination through the home by containing our work area during remediation.
Most importantly, we focus on correcting the conditions in the home rather than simply treating what is visible.
PM2.5 and PM10 are particles you will never see—and have a significant impact on respiratory health.
Not all dust is created equal and scientists measure airborne particles by size. The two most commonly discussed categories, PM2.5 and PM10, refer to particles 2.5 microns and 10 microns and smaller. For perspective, a human hair is roughly 70 microns in diameter, so these contaminants are extremely small and impossible to see.
PM2.5 and PM10 are generated by cooking, cleaning, and normal daily activities. What makes them notable is that, once airborne, these particles can remain suspended for long periods of time, allowing them to circulate throughout the home and be repeatedly inhaled.
Larger particles can be trapped in the nose, throat, and upper respiratory tract. PM2.5, however, travels deeper into the lungs. Research has shown that the smallest particles may cross the lung barrier and enter the bloodstream.
While you may never see these particles, once exposed, the body recognizes them as an irritant and initiates an inflammatory response. The symptoms that follow often resemble seasonal allergies or common respiratory illnesses, which can lead to misattribution.
The Whole Home Approach
Indoor air quality rarely comes down to a single source or single fix. It’s the accumulation of things that may not seem connected at first until you look deeper.
As experts in our industry we understand that every home is different and requires unique solutions for you and your family. When you approach cleaning this way, it becomes less about chasing individual problems and more about understanding how the whole home behaves together and how the various components interact over time.
This is the lens PCRS has always looked through. Treating the home and the air within as interconnected parts of a building’s ecosystem. Whether it’s deep cleaning soft surfaces, managing hidden moisture conditions with solutions like the SuperDry dehumidifier, utilizing the most up to date remediation and mitigation techniques, or adding supporting air filtration systems like the Aspen Air Purifier, we are equipped to address all of the above.
