Insulation Recommendations for Asthma Patients

Air quality, indoor and outdoor, can dramatically impact asthma symptoms. While you can't necessarily change outdoor air quality, you can take several steps to improve air quality inside your home.

Insulation is commonly considered necessary for basic comfort and energy efficiency, but it can also have an indirect, but significant, impact on overall air quality. Primarily, insulation moderates both the temperature and moisture inside your home.

Asthma Triggers

• Before undertaking any modifications to your home, it is helpful to understand your asthma triggers. If insulation modifications can benefit your asthma, then you make some changes. But if they don't, then you can save the time and expense.

  Asthma triggers may include temperature changes, dust mites and mold. If you don't know what your asthma triggers are, your doctor can take a medical history and in some cases do medical tests to help identify your specific triggers. When you accurately identify your asthma triggers, you know what environmental changes will help reduce or prevent asthma flares caused by those triggers.

  If your asthma triggers include temperature, dust mites and mold, one kind of environmental factor you can assess is the level and type of insulation in your home. Insulation can help regulate the heating and cooling in your home, creating a more constant temperature. A constant temperature can help you avoid asthma flares related to temperature changes. A constant temperature also prevents internal condensation that forms when there are rapid temperature changes. Preventing condensation reduces the moist environment that dust mites and mold require to grow.

Energy Audit

• You can pay a company to do an energy audit, which includes an assessment of insulation. If you are a do-it-yourselfer, the U.S. EPA Energy Star website provides step-by-step instructions for doing your own audit. Some things to look for are a certain R-value, which measures heat resistance, and gaps or inadequate depth. The higher the R-value, the greater the heat resistance.

  The Energy Star website provides recommended levels of insulation based on your geographic location. Some organizations, such as the Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago, have published specific construction recommendations for asthmatics. As with the Energy Star website, these recommendations are geography-based.

Remediation Plan

• If you find that your insulation installation is lacking, you need a remediation plan. This plan may involve some simple repairs such as sealing your attic or adding additional insulation to what already exists. However, in some cases, you may need to remove and replace the insulation with something more suitable. In all cases, be aware that direct exposure to insulation materials can trigger asthma itself.