13 Tips on How to Keep Dust Out Of Your House (With Cleaning Tips)

Photo by YoonJae Baik on Unsplash

Dust isn’t only unappealing from an aesthetic standpoint. The small floating particles can also lead to skin, throat, and eye irritation. Those who are allergic to dust often have even more severe reactions, such as dermatitis and wheezing. How can you keep the dust away?

Here are over a dozen ways to reduce dust in your house:

• Clean your home, including the air ducts and filters
• Remove your shoes before you come into the house
• Get a welcome mat
• Use an air purifier
• Shampoo your carpets
• Or get rid of carpeting altogether
• Organize your closets
• Run a humidifier
• Limit how often your windows are open
• Cut down on textiles
• Change bedding every week
• Groom your pets outdoors
• Keep a house cleaning schedule

Removing dust from your home doesn’t have to be difficult and intensive, as you’re about to see. Keep reading for lots of actionable tips and information on the above recommendations.

13 Ways to Keep Dust Out Of Your House

Remove Dust From Your Home, Including the Air Ducts and Filters

The first thing you should do to get rid of dust in your house is to clean it. A surface cleaning won’t do here. We’re talking about a deep-level cleaning like your grandma’s spring cleaning.

Here’s what we suggest you do:

• Change out furnace filters: During the active season of warming your home, you should switch out the current filters in your furnace for fresh ones. This will prevent the air that blows out of your vents from being stale and dusty.
• Clean your plants: If you have live houseplants, don’t forget to dust them off from time to time. The larger the plant’s leaves, the more dust they can accumulate.
• Vacuum: If you have pets, it doesn’t hurt to vacuum your home daily or every other day. Otherwise, you can get away with vacuuming weekly. A vacuum with a HEPA filter will remove dust much more efficiently than one without such a filter. When you’re done with the floors, you should use the vacuum to tidy upholstery and curtains.
• Dust the blinds: Blinds can harbor a lot of dust between the slats. This is easy to miss if your blinds are always closed. Open the blinds and clean each slat one by one until they’re spotless.

Remove Your Shoes Before You Come Into The House

Now that your house is cleaner, it will be easier to keep it that way going forward. According to a 2009 ScienceDaily report that cites data from the American Chemical Society, although dust settles indoors, most of it comes from outdoors.

Thus, whenever you get home from a day of work, school, sports, shopping, or whatever it is you like to do, you need to limit how much dust you bring in. One of the best ways to do that is by taking off your shoes and leaving them on the porch. You can then step outside and wipe down each shoe so it doesn’t carry in nearly as much dust. 

You might be worried about your coat or scarf bringing in dust, but this doesn’t happen at nearly the same rate as shoes and other footwear. If you’re still concerned, you can always install a coat hook in your entryway. This way, the dust won’t be able to go far.

Best Way to Remove Dust from Home – Get a Welcome Mat

We just talked about taking your shoes off on the front porch. Yet you can’t always help what other people outside of your family, such as visiting friends or even technicians like the plumber or the TV repairperson, do.

A bristly welcome mat is for more than decoration; it’s intended for users to wipe their feet on before entering the house. If you’ve only ever used a welcome mat when your feet are wet or muddy, start doing it every time you take your shoes off. You’ll have less dust and dirt to clean from your shoes.

How to Get Dust out Of the Air – Use an Air Purifier

Air purifiers can reduce the amount of pollen, smoke, and dust in the air. An air purifier is a must for someone with pollen or dust allergy. There are many air purifier types to choose from, so here’s a quick breakdown.

• UVGI filters: UVGI stands for ultraviolet germicidal irradiation, which is supposed to be able to rid the air of fungal, bacterial, and viral spores through UV. Their effectiveness varies depending on the bacteria or fungus species in question.
• Electronic air purifiers: Ionizers and precipitators in an electronic air purifier create a charge that makes air particles cleaner. 
• Photocatalytic oxidation: A photocatalytic oxidation air purifier includes a photocatalyst that reacts to ultraviolet radiation. The reaction creates hydroxyl radicals that dissolve pollutants. However, this can sometimes produce carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, or formaldehyde, so photocatalytic oxidation purifiers are not typical in households.
• Activated carbon filters: Activated carbon filters can capture some air particles, but not nitrogen oxide, ammonia, or formaldehyde. If the carbon filter includes a pleated filter, it might be more effective.
• Mechanical filters: Last but certainly not least, mechanical air filters are exclusively pleated with fibers throughout. One example of a mechanical filter is a HEPA filter, which has a delicate mesh that’s capable of collecting particles with a diameter of 0.3 micrometers.

Most air purifiers use filters. To keep your purifier running its best, you must replace the filter often, at least every six months but sometimes even more frequently. Follow the manufacturer’s recommendations, but also consider conditions that might make more frequent changes worthwhile.

How to Clean Builders Dust – Shampoo Your Carpets

Carpets are a dust trap, be that a throw rug on the living room floor or your carpeted upstairs bedroom. To remove dust from your carpeting, you can shampoo it or get it steam-cleaned.

You can DIY or have it done by professionals, but you have to allow time for the carpet to dry. Apartment Therapy recommends cleaning carpets every 12 to 18 months.

While necessary, these treatments wear down the carpet fibers faster, so you’ll need to replace your carpeting before you know it.

Or Get Rid of Carpeting Altogether

That’s why you might be better off with no carpeting in your house at all. Since carpeting will always attract dust, you’ll be in an endless cycle of paying to shampoo your carpet and then buying new carpeting since your rugs look worn down.

For all the money you’ve spent to keep your carpets tidy, you would have been better off using those funds to install hardwood or another hard flooring. Granted, hard floors aren’t impervious to dust. You’ll still have to mop your floors about once a week to clean surface crumbs, dirt, and dust. Yet dust doesn’t hide in hardwood like it does carpeting.

Once you have hardwood flooring, you won’t have to replace it nearly as often. Every couple of years, it’s a good idea to recoat your hardwood floor so it lasts even longer.

Organize Your Closets

How often do you really go through your closet, removing what’s in there and cleaning what’s underneath? Maybe once a year for spring cleaning, right? In the meantime, that’s 11 months for the dust to accumulate between your garments, underneath shelves, and in drawers.

If you have out-of-season shoes in your closet, the potential for dust to develop is even higher. You’ll need to increase your closet cleaning pace to once every few months instead of annually.

While you’re in there cleaning up, think about what you no longer wear or use. Rather than put it back in the closet, hoping your old clothing will come back into style someday, consider donating what you don’t wear. You’ll help someone else, and that will be more space in your closet so you can clean it more easily.

If you want to keep your clothes, group off-season clothing together and buy vacuum-seal or garment bags, keeping the clothes in there until you need them.

Run a Humidifier

Does the air in your home always feel a little dry? You can tell if you have dry air in a myriad of ways. If your lips often feel chapped, that’s one such sign. So too is not being able to breathe deeply and fully.

Look around your house, as it will also indicate if the conditions are too dry. The paint on the walls can begin to crack, wooden structures can warp, and your home will always be full of static electricity, a.k.a. static cling.

Static cling makes your sweaters stick to your skin and your hair look crazy, but that’s not all. The static electricity also pulls in dust and makes it stick. Removing dust becomes much harder to do.

If you don’t already own a humidifier, it’s not a bad idea to buy one and run it until the humidity in your home is around 40 percent relative humidity, even 50 percent. The static cling in your home will lessen so conditions will be less dusty. And you’ll breathe easier, too.

Limit How Often Your Windows Are Open

We already established that most dust comes from the outdoors, not indoors. Anytime you open your windows, then, you’re inviting stray dust to blow in and settle on household surfaces.

If you want to enjoy the breeze on a lovely spring day, then take some time to sit outside. You’ll feel more of the air around you than you would by being indoors with the window open anyway. If you must open the windows, try not to do it for long. Avoid opening windows on a windy day too, as more dust, pollutants and pollen can come in.

Cut Down on Textiles

Textiles are fabrics and fibers such as yarn, wool, velvet, twill, satin, mohair, corduroy, and cotton. If you look around any room in your home, you can probably count half a dozen textiles if not more, right?

This isn’t good for the air quality of your home since dust loves textiles. Thus, the fewer textiles in your home, the better. We talked about getting rid of carpets before, but you can do a lot more.

For example, instead of floor-grazing curtains, try roller shades. These window treatments add a sleek look to your living room or sitting room and are far less dusty. Limit how many throw pillows decorate your sofas, too.

Change Bedding Every Week

Your bedding is also made of textiles, but it’s not so optional. You need sheets and blankets to sleep, so don’t get rid of them, but launder them more often. You need to wash your bedding every seven days on the dot.

Not only do the bedding fibers harbor dust, but your sheets also hide layers of dead skin you shed when you doze. That should probably be enough to inspire you to wash your sheets!

Your blankets don’t need as frequent washing. You can leave these on the bed for months before sending them through a spin cycle. That also goes for cold-weather comforters. If your bed has mattress pads, please don’t forget to take these off the bed every month and wash them as well.

Groom Your Pets Outdoors

You love your pets and view them as another member of the family. Yet pets shed quite a lot, some breeds more than others. Dust accumulates from both shed fur and pet dander.

Pet dander is dead skin that your cat or dog releases as it goes about its life, just like your own dead skin cells in your sheets. Dander from pets and humans alike will increase the dust in your home.

You can brush and bathe your pet indoors and immediately clean up the aftermath, but you could miss spots. If you want to be especially conscientious of the dust in your home, start bathing and grooming your pets outside.

Keep a Housecleaning Schedule

You just put a lot of time, effort, and work into tidying your home so it’s dust-free. If you don’t want to turn around and have to do it all over again in six months, then create a cleaning schedule you can abide by now. Then stick to it at least every week.

Final Thoughts On How To Keep Dust Out Of Your House

If your home is dusty, then the air quality is poorer. If you have allergy sufferers in the home, their symptoms will be more severe. Even those without allergies might have dry skin and throat and eye irritation from all the dust.

There are many ways dust can build up in your home. We hope this article gave you some tools to be proactive about cleaning and solving the problem. Best of luck!