Your Tour de France challenge: How good is your indoor climate? 

Whilst we marvel at the cyclists tackling mountain passes and sprint finishes during this year’s Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, it's worth remembering a surprising statistic: we spend 90% of our time indoors¹. As the Tour de France approaches and many of us settle in to watch from the comfort of home, ensuring a healthy indoor climate becomes more important than ever. 

Indoor climate refers to the combination of various environmental factors within a building, including temperature, air quality, humidity and light. A good indoor climate with plenty of natural daylight and a steady supply of fresh air is absolutely key to making our homes healthy places to live, work, and learn in. Together, these elements are proven to improve concentration, enhance sleep quality, and contribute to your overall health and well-being. 

Bringing fresh air into your home improves indoor air quality by reducing the build-up of everyday pollutants and allergens from human activities like cooking, cleaning, and even just breathing.  

Good ventilation is particularly vital in spaces like bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens, where it helps dispel water vapour and odours, reducing humidity, dampness, and mould build-up². 

The quality of indoor air influences humans in several ways: 

• Comfort: the pleasantness of the air is immediately felt when a person enters a building. 
• Health: breathing poor indoor air can have negative health effects, triggering allergies, asthma and other respiratory illnesses. 
• Performance: high-quality indoor air can improve mental performance and general well-being². 

Generous natural light does far more than illuminate your home. Daylight delivers multiple health benefits, including improving our sleep-wake cycle, alertness, performance and learning levels³. 

The inability to provide a good overall lighting environment can have a subsequent impact on health and place a substantial burden on individuals. 

Winning the race for a healthier home is simpler than you might think. By adopting a few daily habits, you can wear the yellow jersey of a fresh and healthy home. 

Your race-winning tips: 

• Ventilate frequently: Open your windows wide for 5–10 minutes, 3–4 times a day. This creates a rapid exchange of air, flushing out stale, polluted indoor air and replacing it with fresh air from outside.  
  For a truly winning strategy, create cross-ventilation by opening windows on opposite sides of your home. Better yet, utilise the stack effect by opening both roof windows and regular windows. Roof windows take advantage of the natural stack effect, where warm air rises and escapes through higher openings, drawing cooler air in through lower openings⁴. 

Pro-tip: If you have VELUX roof windows, the ventilation flap can provide consistent airflow in your home even when the window is closed, perfect for maintaining air quality during unpredictable weather. 

• Ventilate after specific activities: Be strategic about when you air your home. Key moments include: 
  • First thing in the morning after sleeping 
  • During and after cooking 
  • During and after showers 
  • When cleaning 
  • When drying laundry indoors 
  • In the afternoon when you return home 
  • After hosting: if you've invited friends over for dinner to enjoy the Tour de France together, remember to change the air once your guests have left. 

These activities create moisture and pollutants that need to be expelled. Regular ventilation after these everyday tasks helps dispel water vapour and odours whilst reducing humidity, dampness, and mould build-up. 

• Control your temperature: Just like a cyclist avoiding overheating on a mountain climb, maintaining a comfortable temperature is crucial for your well-being. In summer, temperatures tend to rise, especially in attic rooms. If you have roof windows, equip them with exterior blinds and shutters to block direct sun during the hottest parts of the day. If you want to keep your living room cool whilst watching the Tour de France without compromising on natural light, opt for an anti-heat blind. Its transparent mesh fabric protects against heat, keeping interiors up to 4 degrees cooler⁵, whilst providing reduced glare for comfortable viewing. 

Research shows that people with automated roof windows are more likely to ventilate their homes sufficiently. In fact, they're likely to air out their homes twice as much as people who rely on manual roof windows⁶. 

To ensure optimal air quality without the effort, perfect for those long Tour de France stages, you can use VELUX electric and solar roof windows. These innovative solutions can even be converted from existing manual roof windows with the appropriate motor kit, making the upgrade straightforward. 

Solar and electric roof windows can be activated via VELUX App Control, allowing you to schedule ventilation sessions in advance. Alternatively, the smart VELUX ACTIVE with NETATMO system uses sensors to automatically manage air quality, opening and closing your roof windows based on real-time data. This means you can enjoy a hassle-free Tour de France experience, knowing your home's indoor climate is being optimised whilst you focus on the race.

By combining better ventilation habits with smart technology, you'll cross the finish line to a healthier, more comfortable home - and that's a podium finish worth celebrating.