Worried About Having a Bad Duct Cleaning Experience?Defending Your Home From Dust Mites
Dust Mites and Allergies in the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach Areas of FL
Many people do not fully understand how dust mites could be living in their air ducts, carpet, and bed, or the way they complicate allergies. Common household dust is the home to microscopic dust mites. A dust mites diet consists of particles of hair, food, and skin that drift about your house as dust. Know to allergists as HDM, dust mites true name is dermatophagoides farinae. Dust mites can cause or greatly aggravate asthma. Dust mites have to stages in their life cycle, the larval stage with 6 legs, and the adult stage with 8 legs. Individual dust mites live only around 19-30 days each. Since the females are responsible for laying eggs, they live longer than the males, up to 60 days.
You do not have to worry about being bitten by dust mites. Cells of human skin that are shed are the main food of dust mites. An average human sheds from 0.3 to 0.45 Kg (0.5 to 1 lbs) of skin each year, which makes for a lot of mite food. Due to the moisture as a result from people sleeping (perspiration and saliva), dust mites often live in beds and bedding. The big problem with dust mites is that they are a huge source of allergens and can cause rhinitis, conjunctivitis, dermatitis, and asthma. Mite droppings have been found to contain DerP1, an enzyme that has been shown to complicate allergies.
Dust mites prefer humidity, and because of that not many live in your air duct system. Air ducts do trap more skin, hair, and fecal matter particles than anything else in your house. Duct systems then use a fan to move these dust particles all over your house. Because they are always moving air around, the dust mites never have to look far for food.
The below suggestions will help reduce dust mites:
- Consider buying a HEPA filtered vacuum as cleaning your rugs with one will make a big difference.
- All surfaces of your home should be dusted at least weekly.
- Sanitizing household fabrics like carpets and bedding will help a lot.
- You can have your carpets replaced with vinyl or hardwood.
- Switch to buying allergen proof bedding products.
- Freeze your kids plush toys to kill any mites living in them.
- Finally, try to keep the humidity of your house below 70%.
No one thing is going to completely remove dust mites from your home, but following the above instructions will help considerably.
Well, that concludes our dust mites article. Hopefully you have a better grasp of what the procedure involves and what you might look to in an duct cleaning company. Since most air duct cleaning companies also clean dryer vents, you might want to read our dryer vent cleaning tips article as well. Having your dryer vent cleaned while the technicians are already at your home cleaning your air ducts, will save you money.
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