How Often Should You Vacuum Your Home?

Even if you’re not allergic, prolonged exposure to dust and other pollutants will make you allergic. The same way exposure to outdoor air pollution increases the risk of developing all sorts of allergies, exposure to indoor air pollution will make you allergic and even asthmatic.  

That’s because polluted air contains dust, microfibers, pollen, and all sorts of impurities that have a considerable negative impact on your respiratory system. Inhaling too much of it causes the body to go into hyperdrive, producing copious amounts of immunoglobulin E (IgE) that make you allergic to every little thing.

Regular vacuuming removes these pollutants from your home, meaning you don’t develop allergies.

#3: A Clean Home Gives You a Sense of Accomplishment

If you feel like vacuuming is a tedious task (most of us think this way), think of it as a money-saving chore. And no one’s opposed to saving a couple of bucks. When you maintain your carpet or hard surface floor with regular vacuuming, they last longer saving you on the cost of replacement. That’s not to mention when you suck up all the pollutants in your home, you’ll never have to pay for allergy treatment.

How Many Times Should You Vacuum if You Live Alone?

Remember that formula we mentioned? Vacuuming as many times a week as the number of people using the area?

The formula tells us folks living alone can get away with vacuuming just once a week, especially if they don’t have pets. Living alone means you don’t make much of a mess (hopefully), so you don’t have to clean as much. There aren’t a lot of people trudging on the carpet, leaving dirt and debris everywhere. And there’s no pet shedding fur that needs constant vacuuming.

You can probably hold off vacuuming and do it every week, preferably over a weekend if you live alone. There’s a caveat, though.

Depending on the heat source you have in your home, dirt, and dust may collect a lot faster even if there’s not a lot of traffic. A ground source heat pump, like the ones used to warm floors, spins dust upwards, scattering it on every surface in your home. That’s why you’ll find dust settled in areas that shouldn’t be getting dusty otherwise if you have radiant air floors, electric radiant floors, or hot water radiant floors.

If your home has any of these floor heating systems, you should vacuum it at least twice a week to prevent dust from piling up on everything.

How Many Times Should You Vacuum if You Live in a Family Home?

People spend a ridiculous amount of time in their confined spaces. We wake up in our homes, brew a cup of coffee, go to the office for eight hours, come back, prepare dinner, watch some TV and sleep in our beds for eight to six hours. That’s about 16 hours, or two-thirds of our day spent in our homes.

For that reason, the air quality in our homes is as important –if not more important – as outdoor air quality. We should be concerned about air pollutions in the places we live in as much as we’re worried about pollution in the environment.

If you think indoor air pollution is not a problem, think of the mold, pollen, gases (like carbon monoxide), dead skin cells, fur, and materials that pollute our indoor air quality. According to the EPA, the biggest four indoor air pollutants are asbestos, biological pollutants, carbon monoxide, and radon, and pressed wood products.  

You might not have asbestos lying around in the walls of your home, but there’s a lot of carbon monoxide, radon, biological, and pressed wood products floating around in your home. If you don’t get up and clear these pollutants, the chances are that you’ll be faced with the health risks. People won’t be able to overcome their allergies, and respiratory diseases become a real threat.

Luckily, vacuuming can help you deal with most of the air pollutants in your home. Outside of asbestos, gases, and lead, vacuum cleaners pretty much such up all the air pollutants from your home.

Regular vacuuming means asthma and allergy triggers nestled on your carpets, and wood floors are no longer a threat. Regularly vacuuming your carpeted and hard surface floors regularly following the right technique removes dirt and other particles that would otherwise pollute the air. It works better than wet-mopping, which doesn’t get to all the dirt and debris trapped crevices and hard to reach places.

You’ll want to get the right vacuum to guarantee your indoor air quality. A HEPA-filter vac guarantees all those dust and allergy-causing particles get sucked out of your home’s surfaces and contained in airtight compartments. Avoid the vacuums that spew dust particles back into the air by using only certified vacuums. Other than that, while vacuuming a space, use slow, deliberate, and repeated passes over an area to catch all particles.   

You should vacuum a family home more regularly than a person living alone. That’s a no brainer. Kids are bound to track all sorts of things into the house, not to mention the family dog or cat shedding fur on the carpet or furniture.

Falling back to our rule, make a point of vacuuming a family home as many times as the number of people living in the house. If you have a family of five, you should vacuum the home at least five times a week. Of course, you can’t vacuum ten times a week if you have ten people living in the home.

If you have lots of people in the house, you can vacuum frequently used areas a lot more often than infrequently used areas. The living room or family room, for instance, should get vacuumed as soon as you notice dirt piling up. Keep a stick vac handy to quickly suck up food crumbs bound to drop on the sofa or carpet after binging on a TV show. That way, you won’t have dirt and crumbs sticking to your socks and spreading to other spaces in the home.

For other infrequently used areas like bedrooms, you can vacuum it as frequently as the number of people using the area. So, if you have a kids’ bedroom with two kids, vacuuming it twice a week should keep it nice and clean. For kitchens, you should probably vacuum it once every other day since it’s bound to get dirty while you’re preparing meals for the family.

If you have a family pet, whether it’s a cat or dog, you’re probably going to spend the better part of the week following it around collecting all the fur it sheds. That’s where the stick vac will come in handy. You can use it to suck up all the fur from the carpet and furniture in between vacuuming.

If you notice your home gests unusually dusty, get your ductwork checked. The HVAC system might have unsealed ductwork between the walls, crawlspaces, and attic blowing dirty air inside your home. No matter how many times you vacuum, an air conditioner or heating system with unsealed ductwork will always blow dust on every surface of the home. Have a professional take a look at it, and you might be surprised by a reduction in the number of times you have to vacuum after the repairs.  

While you have a professional HVAC technician with you, you might also want to have them install the right air filters in your heating and cooling systems. Filters are your first line of defense in preventing dust from getting into your home through the ventilation.

Another way to keep dust and dirt from sneaking into your home and ruining the carpeting is having a “no-shoes” in the house rule. Make sure everyone takes off their shoes before walking in. A lot of dirt and debris get stuck on the soles of shoes, and some of it eventually ends up in your home if you allow everyone to wear shoes inside the house. 

Now that you have an idea of how often you should vacuum your home, here’s the gunk you’ll be cleaning up:

• The 1 million skin particles the average human sheds every day
• The more than 50 strands of hair the average human head sheds every day
• The allergens and debris clinging to your dog or cat’s fur

That’s about 90% of all the dirt in your home, and a vac sucks it all up in the one hour it takes you to vacuum. If you leave all this gunk lying around, it will be ground into your carpeted or hard surface floor, making it tougher to clean out. Vacuuming it away keeps the debris from attaching, but like earlier mentioned, don’t just give an area a quick lick and call it a day. Run the vacuum several times over in different directions to get to all the dirt.

To recap, vacuum your home according to the number of people living there every week. The rule is not set in stone. Make a habit of regularly vacuuming your living space as many times as necessary. After a party, you might want to vacuum your home even if you reached your weekly quota. That’s the only way you’ll safeguard the air quality and keep allergens away.