Vacuum Regularly For Clean Carpets and Healthy Air

Good housekeeping habits — like regular vacuuming — give us two important gifts. The first one is money.
Proper floor care keeps carpeting beautiful and long lasting. You can gain many additional years of pleasure and service from your carpet through two simple steps:

Following these two easy rules also protects your replacement coverage under your carpet manufacturer's warranties.
The second gift of good housekeeping is healthy lungs. Regular vacuuming gives you fresh, uncontaminated air to breathe.
In your home, outdoor air replaces indoor air at the rate of about one air change every hour. In newer, tightly-sealed homes, it's even less. Air is replaced only once every four to five hours. This allows a wide variety of pollutants to gather in significant concentrations within our homes.
Most of these "aerobiosols” — microscopic particles easily "kicked up" into the air — are too small to see. The smallest of these particles, ranging in size from one-half micron to 9 microns, pass into our lungs. Some are irritants and can be a health risk to infants, to the elderly, to the chemically sensitive and to allergy sufferers. They can include: 

Regular vacuuming with a well-maintained vacuum cleaner removes much of this material. But you must remember to keep your vacuum cleaner filters clean. Also to change its collection bag often. No matter how powerful your vacuum is, it becomes useless without good air flow. Depending upon the materials you're vacuuming, bags over one-third to one-half full become too clogged to "breathe" well.
Special allergen-trapping vacuums and filtering systems are becoming common. They have HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Arresting)-type filters that remove most micro particles from about one-half to 9 microns in size. A micron is about one twenty-five-thousandth of an inch. Pollen, for example, is relatively big, about 10 microns or larger, and it’s easily trapped by foam-type filters. Particles that cause lung problems are usually under 5 microns in size, like mite droppings and bacteria.. 

Help is also available from “micro filtering bags." These are designed to replace paper bags in many popular brand vacuums. Ordinary paper bags can pass as much as 50% of "micro particles" right through their walls. This includes much of the problem material like pet dander, dust mite droppings and bacteria. That's why you can often "smell" a vacuum cleaner while it's operating. Unlike ordinary paper bags, micro filter bags use a special blend of polypropylene fibers. Electrostatically charged, they work to capture extremely small particles. Micro filtering bags can capture 95% of all micro particles. Plus the bag can collect more particles without clogging and reducing airflow. As a result, they actually improve your vacuum's suction.

dust

Dust mites are the most infamous of micro particles. Harmless in themselves, their fecal material causes allergic reactions in people with respiratory sensitivities. Dust mites are related to spiders. Eight-legged creatures without eyes, they love to eat dead skin cells from us and our pets. In fact, researchers describe them as nothing more than “walking stomachs.” They proliferate in humid areas where people and pets “plop” down — pillows, cushions, bed linens. etc. In its four-month lifetime, a dust mite can produce a pile of droppings 200 times its body size. Virtually weightless, this material breaks up into “aerobiosols” and joins dust and other contaminants in our indoor environments. High temperature water — from your laundry or from our cleaning process — kills dust mites. Regular vacuuming, laundering, and periodic carpet cleaning helps control dust mite populations.