We spend a lot of time hanging out at home, especially if you work at home and/or have kids. Homes can be one of the most toxic places! We use to always keep windows shut, use toxic air fresheners and other toxic common household products that contributed to bad air quality. It is amazing what a difference a few SIMPLE changes can make in the air quality of your home. We are SO EXCITED to SHARE these tips with you!

6 Steps to Better Indoor Air Quality

1. Increase Ventilation

Opening windows throughout your home flows a breeze through your home and increases ventilation tremendously, really makes a difference!

2. Use Indoor Air Filters

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, indoor air pollutants rate among the top five environmental health risks today. Home insulation and air-tight construction contribute to poor indoor air quality. You need to either allow clean exterior air to flow into your home ventilating it and/or use an air cleaning filter system that removes indoor pollutants. WE DO BOTH! You also want to change the filter in your air conditioner unit at least every 6 months!  So many people don’t even realize this about their unit!

3. Eliminate the Source of Toxic Chemicals

Here are three areas we focused on for safer air quality in product change:

• Laundry products
• Dishwashing products
• Air fresheners

What we had read about the major pollutants and toxic chemicals that permeate the air from these three sources was enough to freak us out, and we were HAPPY to make the switch. Here is an article from Mother Earth Living on toxic laundry rooms.

These days there are several cleaning product options that are safe, here are a few we have tried:

• For our laundry products, We LOVE Meyer’s Clean Day Dryer Sheets in Lavender and laundry soap, 2X HE Ultra Liquid Detergent.  These days you can find the more natural detergents just about everywhere.
• For our kitchen, the dishwasher detergent is one of the MOST TOXIC pollutants permeating your kitchen especially when you open the hot dishwasher and the steam that comes out with the toxic fumes from the detergent, it is really BAD! This is one to switch immediately.. and this one was the hardest for us to find a product that actually cleaned our dishes and DID not leave SCUM on them! We happily settled on ECOVER Automatic Dishwasher Tablets, this product we found worked better than other natural detergents… and the ratings online reveal this superiority as well.  It does take getting use to, and we did find that we had to clean our dishes off pretty good before we put them in the dishwasher.  But the air quality improvement was worth it.  Dishwashers we view more as a sterilizer than a place to wash off all the grub.
• For our air freshening, in the past, we used Glade candles and plugins and Febreeze – oh gads! All of those are BAD! There are numerous articles about how toxic these are. The BEST way to permeate your home with fresh healthy scents is with clean essential oils, you can buy them in beeswax candles, coconut wax candles both safe and/or a diffuser that emits moisture which you can put a few drops of your high-quality essential oils in. This one is GREAT, Essential Oil Diffusing Mister!  Make sure you buy essential oils that are a high grade, pure organic, not all essentials oils are created equal. In the health blogging world, DoTerra is liked. Mountain Rose Herbs is a really GOOD online company.

4. Increase the Level of Negative Ions

What are negative ions? Well, nature gives off negative ions, which cleans the air and gives us a good well-being feeling. Computers, cell phones, TV’s electronics, etc. give off positive ions. Too many positive ions are not good. We feed our home with healthy negative ions two ways: one with Salt lamps – these are FABULOUS! They make a great night light in bedrooms and add beauty to any room. And the NatureBright SunTouch Plus Light and Ion Therapy Lamp are great for our computer work areas to shine directly on us.  These are amazing for your computer work areas. Negative ion therapy leaves you feeling rested and uplifted, a natural antidepressant.

5. Fill Your Home with Houseplants

We added so much beauty to our homes by adding these easy to manage household plants.  We selected specifically plants that are highly rated to clean air and are safe for kids and animals. These are the plants we selected:

• Dracaena
• Bromeliads
• Christmas Cactus
• Aloe Vera
• Snake Plant

Dr. Mike Okouchi is a Holistic Doctor who is well researched and who also has great information on plants that detoxify your home. Print out a list of these helpful plants and bring it to your local nursery to help make your selections. Simple as that. 

A few other things to add more high vibrations to your home are chrome wind chimes. They make such a beautiful sound. They say chrome wind chimes omit a high vibration, the same vibration the angels are.