Matt Alba, founder of Little Lungs

Matt Alba has spent 20 years in residential heating and cooling, and founded Little Lungs to give a child's room its own answer.

Little Lungs narrows that work to one room, because the room a child sleeps in is usually the one the whole-house system serves worst: a corner bedroom at the end of the duct run, a converted office, an upstairs nursery under a hot roof. Matt writes every Little Lungs guide and blog post, and the method in them is the one he uses on a Free Air Check.

How Matt approaches a child's room

• Measure where the child sleeps. Temperature and humidity at crib height, compared with what the thermostat says.
• Size the room, not the house. An ACCA Manual J load calculation run for that single room, with the unit's lowest steady output checked against the room's overnight load.
• Keep the air off the crib and the outdoor unit away from the child's window.
• Plan air as its own decision. A mini split's coil screen is not an air cleaner, so filtration is planned separately.
• Write it down before selling it. A scope and a price before anything is ordered, and the room measured again after the work is done.

Guides by Matt Alba

Articles by Matt Alba

• How do mini splits work, and which kind belongs in a child's room?
• Why is the upstairs nursery so hot? (And how to fix the one room)
• How to choose an air purifier for a nursery
• Nursery room-prep checklist: temperature, air, sound and light
• Are mini splits loud? What one sounds like in a baby's room

Little Lungs services

Matt's method runs through all three Little Lungs services: the Free Air Check, Nursery Climate Design and the Certified Install. More about the company is on About Little Lungs.