UV lights can be a powerful ally to ensure healthy indoor air quality. While the environment inside your house may contain common irritants and annoyances you can actually see such as airborne dust and lint, the real threat exists from the stuff you can’t see. Invisible microorganisms including bacteria, viruses, mold spores and pollen may contaminate household air. Efficient air filtration helps control inorganic pollutants such as dust and dirt. However, it often has little effect on microbial contamination. In fact, airborne germs and bacteria often infect air filters and continue to thrive, reproducing and circulating throughout the house. Installing UV lights in your HVAC system airflow sterilizes every breath of air you take at home.

The germicidal properties of ultraviolet light have long been utilized in hospitals and other health care facilities to sterilize both surfaces and air. Ultraviolet technology is also used to decontaminate water in municipal water treatment facilities. This safe wavelength of light — a component of natural sunlight — destroys toxic microorganisms but has no effect on humans.

Resembling a very downsized fluorescent light tube, a typical UV lamp consumes only about 35 watts of electricity. Here’s how it can be utilized in HVAC systems to enhance healthy indoor air quality:

• Installed at locations in the HVAC system where contamination is most likely to breed — particularly the indoor A/C evaporator coil — a UV light offers targeted protection to destroy microbial infection of system components. Mold growth, algae and other bacteria growing on coil surfaces not only threatens indoor air quality, it also degrades A/C performance and energy efficiency. Continuous exposure from UV light prevents infection of the coil and sustains healthy air quality, optimum system performance and lowest operating costs.

For additional information on the benefits of adding UV lights to your HVAC system, contact the air quality experts at Jackson & Sons.

Our goal is to help educate our customers in Eastern North Carolina (including Wayne, Johnston, Greene, Lenoir, Pitt and Duplin Counties) about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems).