Which floors are best for asthmatics?

Carpets, or wood? Are your carpeted floors making you sick, or is it the other way around?

Should you remove carpets preferring hard surface floors? Carpet companies and floor installers often laud the benefits of carpeted floors, even for asthmatics. When we built our new home last year, selecting the right floors was a big decision because I had been having regular asthma problems for the previous five years.  So who's right?


One of the first things the floor salesmen asked was, "Why are you thinking of putting in hardwood floors?" If the reason is to avoid allergens, don't pay the extra money for hardwood floors, he claimed, because carpets act as a "natural filter."

After reading a lot of web sites we decided to ignore the carpet salesman and go with hard surfaces. I am glad we made that choice. The dust that collects on the floors has been a real eye opener.  It may be true that the carpets trap dust and allergens, thus acting as a kind of "filter", but the problem is, the carpets do just that. Carpets do collect -- and hold -- the dust, dirt, pollens, dead skin and so-on.

If you want to play on the floor with your children, practice Yoga in the living room, or just lie on the floor and watch television, carpets could cause a problem in my opinion. Back when I had carpet floors, no way could I get down on the floor and do push ups without wheezing, not even right after vacuuming.

With wood floors -- and, I assume with laminates and other hard surfaces as well -- I just run a damp dust mop over the floor, and it is ready for me to drop down and do push-ups, roll out my yoga mat and do my stretches, or whatever down close to the floor.  There is so little dust that putting my face right to the floor doesn't even bother me.

Will you have similar results? Perhaps, although individual differences might vary.

Are you strongly reactive to chemicals that may be in the hard surface floors themselves? If dust, pollen, and the other above-named allergens don't set off your asthma, then nice, new carpets might feel soft and comfortable to walk in, and our hardwood floors were double the cost of most carpets. If money were the determining factor, we could have gotten by with laminate which is much less expensive and still avoided carpets.

In our case, the hard floors have been a real blessing. I wouldn't go back to the carpets for anything, and when I dust the floors, I can see whether or not they are clean. With carpets (sorry vacuum cleaner sales people) I found that no amount of vacuuming would get the dust completely out of the fabric. To lie on the floor meant to spend the night up with asthma. With wood floors, those sleepless nights have been mostly a thing of the past.

My best advice: Other things being equal (and assuming that you don't react to any chemicals in the flooring), go with hard surfaces.

Resources: 

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/asthma-triggers/AN01948
http://www.carpet-health.org/aa.asp