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| Paper Birch going gold behind the screen house. |
1) Thoroughly vacuum all of the heat vents and clean or change any air filters in your central air systems.
The dust collected on the radiators, heat vents etc over the spring and summer is now old dust and is very bad to breathe. When you turn the heat on, this dust will be lifted into the air and your windows will be shut. Try not to kick the dust up as you remove it from your environment.
Vacuuming is the best way, just make sure you know where the vacuum's air is blowing out so it don't blow across an unvacuumed floor and send dust flying. If you have a bagless vacuum, be sure to empty the bin outside and don't breathe in the dust. Wipe or rinse out the bin as dust left in there will continue to harbor mites and the population will continue to grow, resulting in that yucky vacuum cleaner smell the next time you turn it on. Don't try to cover up the smell; you will still breathe in the bad air in addition to whatever air freshener you use. Clean the bin and clean the filter.
If you have a vac with bags, know this; the bag is the filter. It's not just a place for the dirt to go. The bag is not supposed to fill with dirt. The bag filters. If you overload this filter with dirt, the smallest particles get pushed through the bag. These particles stay airborne the longest and are the most difficult for our lungs to expel. Put in a new bag, they cost about a buck or a buck and a half apiece. The whole point to having a vacuum is to draw dirty air through a filter to trap the dirt so it can be safely disposed of. The vacuum cleaner bag is the whole point of the operation.
2) Dust and vacuum thoroughly all around your bed.
Dust mites thrive in and around your bed, becoming a problem as the summer cools to autumn. They die off once the humidity level drops below 50%. Their waste also dries out and both the waste and their carcasses become airborne with the slightest riffle of breeze. The following is from an earlier post, about the life cycle of the dust mite and why you need to dust and vacuum your bedroom thoroughly while the windows are still open to the fresh air.
Dust mites are closely related to ticks and spiders, they are built to cling and burrow with pointy legs and even in death do not easily let go. They prefer to consume the dead skin of humans and animals. One gram of dust (a dollar bill weighs approx 1 gram) will house from 500 to 10,000 or more mites and each mite will produce 20 waste droppings per day. A female will produce 40 to 80 eggs in a lifetime spanning 2 to 4 months. That means they hatch, eat and poop, reproduce and die rather quickly. Dead dust mite bodies and their waste contain a protein that causes an allergic reaction and sometimes nasal polyps can be produced in otherwise non-allergic people.
There are a variety of mites that feed on dead plant material (think dried flowers), paper and glue of books. How many books do you have by your bed and how long have they been there? If it collects dust, it collects dust mites. The good news is most mites are between 3 and 10 microns in size and a vacuum cleaner with a HEPA filter will pick them up. Since they are usually attached to larger dust particles, they do not stay airborne for long; settling on the bed, bedside tables, walls and the floor. Dusting with a damp cloth and vacuuming is the best way to remove them from your environment.
Wash bedding in hot water as they cannot survive temps over 130 to 140 degrees. This is hot enough to scald your hand so follow up with a hot dryer if you don't have your hot water tank set this high. They also die off when the humidity level drops below 50%. This may account for the sniffles some of us get when the colder temps and drier air arrives in the fall/early winter. The humidity drops, they die off en masse, they get kicked up into the air as we make our beds, toss in our sleep, walk through the room or otherwise ruffle the air. We breathe them in and those proteins trigger our histamines to attack and ... we sniffle.
There will always be a host of dust mites that live entrenched in your bed pillows, sheets and mattress. The humidity level in your bed stays high enough for them to thrive because we spend enough time in bed keeping it relatively moist through our skin and breathing. Air out your blankets, pillows and comforters in the winter time by taking them outside and shaking them or hang them out in the cold, dry, purifying air (it's the dryness that is effective against them) or run them through a hot dryer for 20 minutes or so where the heat is effective. The heaviness of your older pillows is not not so much from the oils in your hair but the accumulation of the dust mite carcasses and their droppings (YUCK). They love it in there. It's suggested you buy a new pillow every couple years. You can extend the quality and life of your pillows by fluffing and sanitizing them in the dryer once a month for 20 minutes. The stuffed toys children sleep with benefit from going 20 minutes in the dryer to keep their dust mite population down. Items can be put in zip lock bags and frozen to kill mites but their little dead bodies are still in there.
3) Vacuum the walls in the entryways and along the wall-ceiling space where cobwebs collect. Late September and into October is spider season. They do their best to get inside at this time of year and are very good at it. I've been known to leave them through the end of October to add a Halloween mystique to our place but most folks aren't into that. Now is a good time to vacuum in advance of spider season.
4) This is a new trick I've recently learned.
Consider your sink and tub drains for a moment. Oils, fats and toothpaste all are semi solid at room temperature. They thicken as the temperature drops. Areas behind the walls and under the sinks are cooler than the average room temperature and the cold from the underground pipes travels along the pipes and into your home. So, it seems logical to me that cooking oils and fats, and body oils and toothpaste thickens up and sticks to the relatively cooler pipe; especially at the curve of the trap. Food particles go down the kitchen drain and hair goes down the bathroom drains and gets stuck in the muck. I'm now in the habit of pouring boiling water from the kettle down the kitchen sink when I clean up the kitchen in the evening. I believe the boiling water will keep the oils, etc from gathering. I haven't gotten into the habit of pouring boiling water down the bathroom sinks yet, but I believe it would be a good idea to do this from time to time, especially down the tub drain. Do not underestimate the amount of body oil that goes down the drain and how quickly the bath/shower water will cool, the body oils thicken and stick once the temps drop sharply this autumn/winter.
5) One more thing about toothpaste.
Toothpaste manufacturers long ago stopped including how much toothpaste to use in the directions. They started showing us commercials that (repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly) show us a huge swirl of toothpaste on a medium sized tooth brush. Visual images are retained by our brains really well. I remember when they used to put on each tube, use a pea sized amount. How much toothpaste do you use? A pea sized amount is not much toothpaste but is plenty to do the job provided you are wielding your toothbrush like the hand tool it is.
Something else lost from our common knowledge is this fact; toothpaste does not clean our teeth. The brushing and flossing action cleans our teeth and the swishing and spitting of water takes the bacteria, etc away. The toothpaste only assists the water by killing the bacteria and it has chemistry that whitens the teeth but only if the toothpaste is in contact with the teeth long enough. An over abundance of quantity does not make up for insufficient time and poor technique. The brushing and flossing cleans the teeth. A pea sized amount of toothpaste, brushed around enough to mix thoroughly with the water is plenty to coat the teeth with the antibacterial and whitening substances. Using plenty of water will keep the paste thinned enough to wash down the drain, past the trap before it starts to thicken up. Baking soda, plain and simple, also kills bacteria and whitens teeth. Don't forget to scrape or brush your tongue. Bacteria lives there, too. I am experimenting with making an antibacterial mouthwash from the herbs that grow in my garden. I'll let you know how that turns out.
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