If you notice dust on the floor or on shelving and you vacuum regularly, guess what? That’s where it came from. Your vacuum!
If you don’t own a vacuum, and live nowhere near dusty environments, chances are it’s not dust. Actually it might be surface mould. To test, wipe it down. If it doesn’t form into a cloud of particles, you may have surface mould and you should get rid of indoor mould.
How Did Dust Get in My Home?
Well, you know it came from your vacuum cleaner, but how? Inside your vacuum cleaner is a bag that sits in the centre of the canister. At the top of that canister, is a pre filter and maybe or maybe not a HEPA filter. Here is a picture of what I’m talking about:
Either your bag or pre filter or HEPA are porous – chances are it’s all of them. The bag is pretty porous and allows dust particles to escape through the holes more so than the filter, and only one of them needs to block in order for it to leak dust into your home.
You may never find out when it happens. Maybe your filter got more dust than it caters for, blocks up and under the thick layer of the dust, spits the dust back out. Or perhaps your bag, paper and cloth are very porous, or is old and it was just its time. No matter how it happened, you need to fix it.
How to Fix Clogged Vacuum Cleaner
Here’s the trick: you’re gonna have to take apart your vacuum cleaner, remove the bag, clean the pre filter and replace the HEPA filter and bag. I say it’s a bit tricky because it’s messy if you start sneezing and getting itchy eyes and skin, but it’s not hard. In fact, you don’t need to do this yourself to fix this, for its pretty easy to ask someone who is less sensitive to do it for you.
I filmed a video on how to change the bag in your vacuum, which you can see below. In this video I demonstrate how to clean the pre filter, replace it with a clean filter. I can honestly say that this process took me about 10 minutes, and anyone who watches this video can do it with little to no problems.
The only step you’ll need to add is actually replacing the HEPA filter inside your vacuum, before disposing of the old bag and HEPA filter. You need to dispose of the old dusty bag and HEPA in a plastic bag and into the garbage and avoid dust re-contaminating your home.
How to Get Dust Out of Your Home
Once you have the vacuum cleaner back up and running, you can focus on getting out the dust your clogged up vacuum dumped inside your home.
You’ll need to run your vacuum more efficiently to do this. If you need help with doing that, you can check out this video on manually vacuuming your home like a profressional.
Instead of vacuuming with your “power head”, you will need to get your “soft brush nozzle”. This will suck the dust from your hard surfaces and directly into the vacuum — the dust never enters the air. You want to use a damp microfiber cloth prior to vacuuming the dust, collecting dust directly off the surfaces and not through your filter or bag or else the dust will get stuck in the pre-filter and inside your vacuum.
Of course, you’ll want to do this thoroughly because you’ll collect a lot of dust in the process. I recommend you dust over all hard surfaces top and bottom to start so you have a lot of area to work with, and keep your windows open too. Again, try to vacuum as slowly as possible so you don’t miss a lot of surface.
How to USE Micro Fibre Cloths
We make learning how to use a microfiber cloth very easy with this video tutorial and step-by-step guide.
TIP: Before vacuuming, use a broom to get all the dust into one area so it’ll be easier to vacuum, just by sweeping your floor and using a dust pan at the end. Simple.
It’s Not as Hard as it Seems
You might be thinking, “I can’t do this!” But trust me, you can — it’s super easy. If you run into any problems, just leave a comment below and I’ll respond quickly.
As Principal Consultant to Mitey Fresh since 1996, I have acquired knowledge of adverse health effects at the client’s properties and recommend effective strategies to reduce occupants’ exposure by eliminating and controlling as many sources of pollutants in order to create healthy indoor living environments that are as exposure-free and natural as practically possible.
We cut out all the fluff and confusion of indoor air maintenance and strip it down to the bare bones.
Towards healthier living, Tony Parr 😊
Our passion comes from pure necessity that we can all live natural and healthy lives, we can all contribute to human well being and preservation and determine the future health of our children and their environment tomorrow.
As a result of working with us, women and their families thrive, work places and their personnel prosper, mouldy / chemical / electrical sensitive occupants heal. They’re healthier, they’re alert, they’re happier, more relaxed, more productive, and enjoying life.
Together we bring about healthy indoor environments and create rooms that provide calmness, healthy sleep, relaxation and restored energy for you and your family, create workplaces that provide ideal personnel attendance and elevated productivity.
By returning indoor spaces to more natural conditions, we strengthen you and your family and your personnel’s mind, body and spirit. It’s nice that it also sustains our planet’s ecology, you’d agree.
PS: Check out our latest enterprises here: www.facebook.com/MiteyFresh/
