Your Home vs. Allergy Season—We Can Help You Win!

March 8th, 2021
sprinkler-in-spring

This is a big title fight—one held in many homes each spring. It’s allergy season taking on the air quality in a house, and the losers can be anyone in the house who suffers from even mild allergies and asthma. This can be a miserable time of the year for these people, and with many trapped indoors this year, there isn’t much chance to get away from the concentration of allergens and asthma triggers that build up indoors.

But if your home has to duel it out with allergy season each year, you don’t have to fight the battle alone. We can help you! 

The allergy season dilemma

Let’s get to know the enemy. Why does “allergy season” happen at all? 

When the weather starts to warm up, it causes a spring bloom. The warmer weather is pleasant—who doesn’t like it when the cold starts to ebb?—and the flora sure looks pretty. But the bloom of plants and the warmer temperatures causes a release of pollen into the air, where it thrives. This pollen isn’t just from flowers. Ragweed, trees, and grass are major sources of allergens in the air. Mold spores are common as well during spring, and these are big allergy triggers. If your house has pets, they also start to shed fur at this time and that puts more dander into the air. 

As the pollen count rises in the air, it leads to many seasonal allergy problems, such as runny noses, sneezing, congestion, raspy breathing, itchy eyes and skin, and a general feeling of “ickiness.” Hay fever (allergic rhinitis) is the most common allergic reaction during the season. 

Staying inside isn’t much protection

“Wait, I’m staying indoors most of the time because of COVID-19. Why should I have problems with spring allergies?” 

It sounds sensible, right? But your home isn’t the fortress against outside air you may think it is. Pollen travels—that’s the point of pollen as a plant reproductive strategy. You only have to go for a short walk outside or open up the windows for fresh air and you’ll let the allergens inside, where they’ll circulate through your HVAC system. 

How we can help

Now, don’t despair. You don’t have to find a way to seal up your house entirely and give up those healthy walks that are necessary during the pandemic so you don’t go stir crazy. We can help you enjoy better air quality with IAQ solutions that trap or zap the most common allergens of the season. Air filtration systems can remove the larger particles, and to handle smaller ones we can find an air purifier in Ceres, CA that targets the specific seasonal allergens that bother your house. For example, a UV air purifier targets mold spores and bacteria, which are huge troubles for people with asthma and allergies. 

Spring hasn’t officially started, but it’s almost here—as is the warmer weather that will cause the pollen count to skyrocket. Now is the time to prepare your home and family with indoor air quality services. Speak to our experts today and we’ll see what you need to make allergy season as sniffle and sneeze-free as possible. 

Greenhart serves Modesto, CA with great indoor air quality services. Let us help you “Live Green, Save Green!”

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“Why Is My Furnace Blowing Cold Air?”

March 1st, 2021
woman-wearing-parka-and-sipping-from-mug-on-couch

With cooler temperatures lingering a bit longer this year, the last thing you need in your home is a malfunctioning furnace. So if yours is all of the sudden blowing out cold air, this is of course a big problem.

There are a number of reasons that this might be happening. We’ll dive into that below, so keep reading! But please do not try to diagnose or fix your furnace yourself. You could wind up with more problems rather than less and a pretty big headache. Instead, call our professionals if you suspect any of the following issues, or if nothing you do will resolve the cold air coming out of your room vents.

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How You Can Benefit From a Tankless Water Heater

February 22nd, 2021
tankless-water-heater

The standard water heater found in most homes is known as a storage water heater or a tank water heater. You’re familiar with this kind of system since one of them is probably handling your hot water needs at this moment: it uses a large tank to store water, which is kept heated for whenever a tap comes on in the house to request hot water.

There is another option to heat water for your house, however, and you might be considering one for your next water heater install. It’s a tankless water heater. The technology of tankless water heaters has been around for more than a century, but not until the last few decades have they reached the point where they’re immensely beneficial for homes. More and more people are choosing to go tankless for the hot water supply in their homes. 

Why? Tankless water heaters offer several great advantages:

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Signs That Your Tank Water Heater Needs Repair

February 15th, 2021
technician-working-on-water-heater-tank

It doesn’t matter what season it is or what the temperature is outside—there is one heating system in your home that you will always need to work flawlessly. The water heater! We can see how this system would be easy to take for granted. It’s easy to just rely on the fact that we’ll always have hot water coming from the taps whenever we need it in our homes.

But when you think about the amount of strain that your water heater undergoes—after all it works 365 days a year—you can probably understand that you can’t expect the system to work 100% free from problems forever. There will come a point that you might need to have your water heater professionally repaired. It helps to know what the warning signs are so you know when to give our team a call! Read on to learn what they are.

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How Can an UV Air Purifier Help My Home?

February 8th, 2021
UV-air-purifier-light

We offer several types of air purifier in Modesto, CA to help our customers improve the quality of their indoor air. Many purifiers target chemicals, smoke, molecule odors, and the insidiously common volatile organic compounds. We can help homeowners determine what pollutants are moving through their HVAC system and install the air purification system that will remove them, often up to 99%.

When it comes to dealing with the many biological pollutants that can roam through the rooms of a home, a house may need a special dedication purifier: a UV air purifier a.k.a. UV germicidal lights. These biological hazards include toxic mold spores, viruses, germs, bacteria, and many other microbes. You probably don’t need us to tell you these are undesirables—but you may need an explanation for how a UV air purifier can help you win the fight against them. 

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What’s Going On When a Heat Pump Won’t Heat

February 1st, 2021
woman-huddled-on-couch-in-hat-and-blanket

Temperatures may not get as chilly here as they do in the Midwest or Northeast, but if the last couple of weeks have been any indication, it does get cold. This means that furnaces and heat pump systems have been turning on for the first time in months recently. If you have a heat pump in your home, then it gets a lot of use… but you most recently used it in cooling mode, right? All it takes to switch it to heating mode is a quick adjustment on your thermostat.

But what if you adjust your thermostat to get heat from your heat pump, and nothing happens? Perhaps you’re still getting cooled air from the vents, or maybe the air feels like it is still room temperature. This is a clear indication that something is wrong. The problem might be something simple, or it could be more complex. Read on as we uncover what could be going on when your heat pump won’t heat.

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How Often Do I Need to Schedule Duct Cleaning?

January 25th, 2021
duct-cleaning-with-vacuum

The ducts in your house are hidden from sight, so you won’t have a good idea about how much dust, dander, lint, and other debris builds up inside them over the years. To give you an idea, a six-person home circulates on average 40 lbs. of dust through the ventilation system annually. Plenty of that will stay on the duct walls, and the more that collects, the more dust it will catch. This eventually leads to ductwork with so much build-up that it affects the energy efficiency of the HVAC system and adds to the amount of debris and allergens blown out into the air.

Professional duct cleaning will restore the ducts to near-pristine condition and help significantly to improve the HVAC system. But how often does your home need this service?

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“Is My HVAC Air Filter Protecting My Indoor Air Quality?”

January 18th, 2021
woman-leaning-back-on-couch-looking-comfortable-in-her-home

The short answer to this is, “No.”

It’s not that the standard HVAC air filter hurts your indoor air quality. In fact, it does help a little. However, it’s not doing much to protect your indoor air quality, because that is not its purpose.

The air filter that comes standard with your HVAC system is actually in place to protect the system itself. It’s placed on the intake side, where your HVAC system draws in air. This prevents the system from sucking in dirt, dust, and other debris that can build up on its components and do the system harm. While it’s a very important component, it won’t do a whole lot to protect or help your indoor air quality in a significant way.

What will, then? A whole-house air purification system.

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How High-Efficiency Furnaces Work So Well

January 11th, 2021
gas-furnace

Heating and air conditioning systems have improved their energy efficiency vastly over the past 20 years. Today, the US Department of Energy’s ENERGY STAR program certifies the most efficient of these systems, which sometimes perform at 40% greater efficiency than older models. 

The high-efficiency furnace is one of the big success stories in energy-friendly comfort. For many years, the standard efficiency of most furnaces was between 70 to 80% AFUE, meaning that 70 to 80% of the furnaces’ fuel source was converted to heat, the rest lost to exhaust. Today, there are high-efficiency furnaces that score higher than 95% AFUE. 

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“What Happened to My Water Pressure?”

January 4th, 2021
water-dripping-from-faucet

Let’s say you’ve hopped in the shower on a cold winter morning only to realize that even though it’s warm, the water coming out of the showerhead doesn’t seem to be coming out at the same force that it used to. It could just be the showerhead, right? Limescale can certainly clog things up. That may be the case, but what if your faucets aren’t that powerful either? Well, then it appears you have a drop in water pressure.

If you ever have any questions about your plumbing system or why your water pressure dropped, you can always call us. In fact, you should call us in case you can’t find out what the issue is on your own. This isn’t a problem you want to ignore since it could mean you had a pipe rupture or a major blockage somewhere in your plumbing system. Read on to learn about some steps to take if you find yourself in this predicament.

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