Do You Know if Your Home Is Healthy?

Have you considered the air you breathe every day?

I'm a big believer that our environment plays a significant role in our health, including our home environment. I was doing a little research on this, and according to the EPA, Americans spend 90% of their time indoors. Now, if you're like me and you primarily work from home and you sleep at home, then you're at home a lot, so the quality of the air you breathe can have a big role in your health.

What might make the air in your house unhealthy? One thing is combustion byproducts, like carbon monoxide. If you have gas heating or gas cooking, there will be some carbon monoxide. Mold, cleaning supplies, paint, and other chemicals release volatile organic compounds—furniture too. Then, finally, there is radon. In the research that I've done and in my personal opinion, one great way to mitigate this is with ventilation. As we get into the warmer seasons, keeping windows open becomes a lot easier, but that might not be enough.

How do we know if the air that we breathe is healthy? There are a few things that, practically speaking, people can think about. One is if you have a gas stove, it is supposed to vent outside, especially with recent research on this. If you have a gas stove that doesn't vent outside, you either want to look at creating a way for it to vent outside or switch to electric. People love their gas cooking, but I encourage you to research it.

"I'm a big believer that our environment plays a very big role in our health."

The other thing is if you live in a house or maybe a condo on the ground floor or basement level, and you've never tested your home for radon, if that wasn't part of your purchase or you're renting, you may want to test for it. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer behind smoking, and you would not know there is radon in your home. It's easily fixable, but many people don't know. That's also an air quality thing that is worth looking into.

If you want to do more, you can bring in a professional to do air quality testing, and that will give you very concrete information on what indoor air pollutants are there and what the effects might be. There is also at-home testing you can do, which generally tells you if the levels are elevated or not. Last but not least, if you have natural gas in your home, you should have a carbon monoxide detector. Now, this detector will not tell you any level of carbon monoxide, just the level that would be dangerous. It's not the same as the air quality test or monitoring, but it's still very important to staying healthy.

If you have any questions about the health of your home or real estate in general, please feel free to reach out to me by phone or email. I would be happy to serve as your resource for all of your real estate needs.