TemperatureBetter Control of Indoor Temperatures
Many people don’t know this but if your indoor temperatures are too high, it allows chemicals around your home to leak inside at a more rapid rate. This can then lead to irritability, headache, and fatigue, or something worse. Significant swings in temperatures can also affect your productivity and make you sluggish and unmotivated, and factors affecting comfort like air conditioning can improve your indoor temperatures. In the summer months, you want to keep your temperature between 73℉ and 79℉, and in the winter months, you want to keep your indoor temperatures between 68℉ and 76℉. As well as causing discomfort, indoor air that is very cold or hot is highly unhealthy. Cold weather acts as a vasoconstrictor, which means it narrows blood vessels. Air that is too warm, for example, aggravates the effects of insufficient humidity. When temperatures get too hot, your body has defense mechanisms that kick in to keep your internal temperature steady. These include:
At that point, the body is forced to resort to other means to try to cool off. That’s why you may notice yourself breathing more rapidly as you get increasingly hotter. Your heart pumps more blood to your extremities, and less to your internal organs and your brain. That’s why you feel sluggish and foggy. You may begin feeling light-headed or even faint. You may also feel muscle cramps, especially in your legs. With the loss of fluids, salt and electrolytes, the body overheats. Eventually, if your body can’t maintain temperature, you can develop heat exhaustion or heat stroke, which can be fatal. (GreenFacts- Facts on Health and the Environment) Proper temperature is the basic indoor air requirement. Extreme indoor temperatures are a serious health hazard (Healy 2003, Kosatsky 2005) and too high or low temperatures perceived unpleasant. Too high temperature e.g. exacerbates the effects of insufficient humidity (Reinikainen and Jaakkola, 2001). https://ec.europa.eu/health/scientific_committees/opinions_layman/en/indoor-air-pollution/l-3/2-determining-factors.htm |