How to Improve Your Home’s Ventilation

With the recent trend in energy efficiency, many homeowners are focused on making their homes airtight in order to prevent heat loss. While this could lower your energy bills, it eliminates all natural ventilation from the home.

This may sound like no big deal, but ventilation is extremely important, especially if your home suffers from indoor air pollution (hint: it probably does). Read below to learn why adequate ventilation is necessary, and what you can do to improve yours.

Why ventilation is important…

The average person breathes nearly 3,000 gallons of air every day. Good ventilation removes harmful pollutants and ensures this air is clean. Other benefits of ventilation include:

• Remove unwanted smells. Unpleasant odors will disperse quicker with sufficient ventilation.
• Control humidity levels. Maintaining ideal humidity levels is important for comfort.
• Reduce the risk of mold growth. Mold can have detrimental effects on our health and homes.
• Improve indoor air quality. Indoor air can be up to ten times more polluted than outdoor air.

How to improve your ventilation…

Luckily, there are many ways that homeowners can improve ventilation. Here are a few ways to let your home breathe:

• Open your windows when weather permits. This is the easiest and most effective way to instantly improve ventilation in your home.
• Run your exhaust fan after every shower. This is especially important for controlling humidity levels.
• Leave your interior doors open. Leave doors open in between rooms to promote airflow, but keep closet and pantry doors shut.
• Make use of pedestal and ceiling fans. Ideally, ceiling fan blades should rotate clockwise during the colder months, and counterclockwise during the summertime.
• Install a ventilation system in your home. These can be exhaust-only, supply-only, or balanced systems.

It’s important to note that if you have a home ventilation system, you want to ensure that your air ducts are clean. Otherwise, pollutants such as dust, dirt, pet dander, and mold could easily circulate throughout your home.

GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration offers professional air duct cleaning services to homes and businesses across Long Island. If you live in Nassau County or Suffolk County, contact us online to get started with a free estimate, or call (631) 940-8100.

Safe Substitutes for Dangerous Cleaning Products

We use store-bought solutions to sterilize and polish nearly every surface in our homes, but have you ever stopped to think about what’s inside that bottle?  Despite being advertised as “cleaning” products, nearly all commercial cleaners contain harmful chemicals.

These chemicals pose a major threat to the health of your family and the environment, even those misleadingly labeled as “all natural”. Luckily, there are ways to clean your home without the use of these poisonous products.

These homemade cleaning solutions are every bit as effective as your favorite brands; the only difference is the lack of toxins...

Instead of air fresheners…

Grab several jars and fill them halfway with baking soda. Add a few drops of your favorite scented oils to each jar. Poke some holes in the lids and place them throughout your home to absorb unpleasant smells. If you are looking for a quick way to overpower strong bathroom odors, just light a match.

Instead of laundry detergent…

You don’t need a fancy liquid detergent to clean your clothes, just ask your grandparents. Instead, mix together one cup of grated bar soap, one cup of washing soda, and one cup of Borax powder. Add in one tablespoon of this solution the next time you load your washer and voila – fresh laundry that smells amazing.

For your all-purpose cleaner…

Combine ½ cup white vinegar with 2 tablespoons of baking soda. Add a few drops of your favorite essential oil (for smell) and mix with warm water in a spray bottle. This simple, easy-to-make cleaning solution can be used anywhere in the home, including your countertops, floors, kitchen, and bathroom.

GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration knows a thing or two about safe, healthy cleaning. As Long Island’s #1 specialty cleaning service, all of our products and procedures are 100% eco-friendly.

Our services include air duct cleaning, dryer vent cleaning, crawl space and attic cleaning, mold removal, and water damage restoration. If you live in Nassau County or Suffolk County, call (631) 940-8100 to get started with a free estimate.

About Our Specialty Cleaning Services | GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration

GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration is a Long Island-based specialty cleaning service. We dare to clean what most homeowners forget about and other companies won’t touch. Read below to learn more about our services.

Air Duct Cleaning

Air ducts can harbor all kinds of contaminants, such as dust, dirt, pollen, pet dander, mold, and more. Once these particles enter your air ducts, they can use them as a transportation system to circulate throughout your entire home. Our professional air duct cleaning services will remove these contaminants from your ducts, improving both energy efficiency and air quality.

Dryer Vent Cleaning

Did you know that clothes dryers cause more than 15,000 residential fires each year? The leading cause of these fires is lint. While cleaning off your screen before each load is a good start to preventing these fires, it is not enough. Lint can also accumulate in the exhaust vent – the windy, aluminum tube that attaches to the back of the appliance. Experts recommend having your dryer vent professionally cleaned once every year.

Attic and Crawl Space Cleaning

Crawl spaces and attics are susceptible to all kinds of problems, including excess moisture, mold growth, and pest infestations. These not only damage your home, they can compromise indoor air quality. You probably don’t want to journey into your dark, dirty crawl space to fix these problems, so let us do it for you.

Mold Removal

Mold is a toxic fungus that can grow virtually anywhere – indoors or out. High-moisture areas are the most susceptible to mold growth, including bathrooms, basements, attics, crawl spaces, and HVAC ducts. If you spot mold growing in your home, don’t attempt to remove it yourself. DIY mold removal often leads to illness and can spread mold spores around instead of eliminating them.

Water Damage Restoration

A little bit of water can cause a lot of problems. If you have recently experienced severe water damage in your home, don’t touch any wet items with your bare hands, and don’t breathe in the damp air. Instead, give GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration a call and we will restore your home to its previous condition.

GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration offers all of these services to homes and businesses across Long Island. If you live in Nassau or Suffolk County, call us at (631) 940-8100 for a free estimate.

Top Sources of Crawl Space Odors

Do you have a strange, unpleasant odor permeating through your home that you just can’t put a finger on? If your house was built atop a crawl space, that could be the source of the scent. There’s a lot of smelly stuff that could cultivate underneath your floorboards; here are some of the most common examples that we see:

Pests and their droppings

Small animals that currently live (or previously lived) in your crawl space are one of the most common sources of bad odors. Rodents, especially mice and rats, are known to infest crawl spaces and leave behind their droppings and – even worse – their carcasses.

High Humidity

We know that high humidity can make us feel uncomfortable, but it can also generate some pretty foul odors. Crawl spaces are notorious for having humidity problems, which can lead to a stale, stagnant smell that infiltrates your entire home.

Mold

Mold can grow wherever excess moisture is present, making crawl spaces a prime location. Mold not only produces a mildewy scent on its own, it can causes the wooden joists in your crawl space to decay, further adding to the smell.

Soil

If you do not have a vapor barrier installed in your crawl space, the smell could be coming from the ground itself. Soil is filled with all kinds of organic material, which can decompose over time and release odors.

Is your crawl space radiating unpleasant odors throughout your home? The crawl space cleaning experts at GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration can remove the source of the stench and leave your home smelling fresh. If you live on Long Island, call us today for a free estimate at (631) 940-8100.

About Our Water Damage Restoration Services

Water damage is a common problem for homeowners during the spring and summer seasons. Whether from external causes (damaged gutters, heavy rain) or internal (pipe burst or overflowing toilet), water can quickly rack up thousands of dollars worth of damage to your home.

That's where we come in.

GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration offers professional water damage restoration services to homes and businesses all across Long Island. Our workers use professional cleaning equipment and techniques to restore your property to its previous condition.

If you suffer from water damage in your Long Island home, keep the following tips in mind:

• DON'T breathe in damp air.
• DON'T touch wet or damaged items with your bare hands.
• DO call GreenPro immediately.

In the case of water damage, it is important to act fast in order to minimize damages. The longer water collects and accumulates, the more devastating effects it can have on your home and health. Unprotected exposure to this water can cause sneezing, wheezing, headaches, and even respiratory infections.

Once the GreenPro team arrives at your property, we will conduct the following visual survey:

1. Walking around the suspected problem area(s).
2. Walking through and to the areas of concern.
3. Viewing the area with a flashlight to highlight the suspected water damaged area.
4. Taking moisture readings of the structure such as walls, floors, and/or ceiling surfaces to detect moisture intrusion.
5. Taking temperature and relative humidity readings to determine if they fall within ASHRAE recommendations.
6. Providing an estimate for remediation by industry standards.

If you live in Nassau or Suffolk County, call GreenPro Cleaning & Restoration for all of your water damage remediation needs at (631) 940-8100.