The Haze Is Back: What Actually Helps Indoors, and What Doesn't

If you looked out of the window this morning and found the block opposite had gone soft at the edges, you weren't imagining it. The haze is back, and by mid-morning it was most of what anyone in Singapore wanted to talk about.

Most of the advice doing the rounds on days like this is about being outside — mask up, skip the run, check the reading before you head out. Far less gets said about the eight or ten hours you'll spend indoors, which is where the air has the most time to work on you. So here is what genuinely helps inside a flat, and what quietly makes things worse.

What's Worth Doing

None of this is dramatic. It's mostly about keeping the outside out, and not stirring up what has already made it in.

• Keep windows and doors shut while it's bad, and save your airing for the clear days. Check the reading rather than judging by the view — they don't always agree.
• Wipe with a damp cloth. Sills, window tracks, skirting and the tops of things collect first, and a damp cloth lifts the dust away instead of moving it around.
• Vacuum rather than sweep, and give the sofa, mattress and rugs a pass too — not just the floor.
• Leave shoes and outdoor clothes at the door, so what settled on them outside doesn't tour the whole flat.
• If you own an air purifier, put it in the room you sleep in rather than the room you sit in. You spend longer there, and unmoving.

What Quietly Makes It Worse

These are the well-meant ones — the things that feel like cleaning but aren't helping today.

• Throwing the windows open to air the place out. On a hazy day that isn't airing, it's inviting.
• Dry-dusting and sweeping. Both send fine particles straight back up, and you breathe most of them.
• Hanging laundry out at the service yard. It comes back in smelling of the day.
• Running the aircon on a filter you haven't looked at since the last time you thought about it.
• Doing the big clean now. It's the right job at the wrong moment — more on that below.

Be Honest About What Your Aircon Is Doing

It's tempting to assume that shutting the windows and switching the aircon on means the air is being cleaned. A standard split-unit filter isn't really built for that — its job is to keep lint and coarse dust off the coil, not to strip the finest particles out of a room.

That doesn't make it unimportant. A clogged filter makes the unit work harder, cool less well, and push whatever it has been collecting back into the room every time it starts up. Hazy weeks are exactly when filters load up fastest, so this is the moment to take the cover off and look — and if it has been a while, to get the unit properly seen to with a round of aircon servicing rather than left to struggle.

The Clean-Up Comes After, Not During

Here's the part that catches people out: the dust doesn't leave when the sky does. It has spent the week settling into curtains, cushions, mattresses and rugs, where a surface wipe never reaches. Cleaning hard while the air outside is still thick just means doing it twice.

Once it lifts, that's the moment for a proper going-over — the tops, the tracks, the corners, and the soft things that have been quietly holding onto it all. That's what deep cleaning and sofa and mattress cleaning are actually for, and why they're worth timing rather than rushing.

In the Meantime

Shut the windows, wipe damp, vacuum the soft stuff, and resist the urge to fling everything open the moment it looks slightly better outside. The rest can wait for a clearer day. When that day comes and you'd rather not spend it on your hands and knees, Nimbus Homes can take it off you — from regular housekeeping through to a full reset. Book your next clean and let the flat catch its breath.