A home that provides sanitary and safe conditions for its occupants is healthy. It should be able to give your family and your protection against diseases and any injury.
Numerous factors come into play while shortlisting healthy housing. For example, say you live in southern Maryland and are relocating to Houston. Houston’s air quality is quite different from that of South Maryland. Houston ranks 244th out of 1517 cities in terms of highest PM 2.5. The levels of ozone pollution are also increasing since 2017 in Houston.
Under these circumstances, people have to shortlist housing that helps provide a natural environment, open spaces, lawns, and recreational facilities along with basic amenities in a well-planned manner. They can take a look at River Oaks Houston apartments while searching for ideal housing in Houston with minimal exposure to pollution.
This article helps to identify what all you can do to maintain a healthy abode after shortlisting your housing.
The Relationship
Substandard housing conditions, including poor indoor air quality, leads to numerous health ailments and risks. There are various factors through which your health can get affected by housing.
The presence of pollutants and contaminants is what the indoor air can include. The HVAC system efficiency and the ventilation rates become critical in such cases. All these cumulatively can alter the air quality of your home.
The presence of such conditions can lead to respiratory symptoms and chronic health conditions, and the overall degradation of mental as well as physical health. A deteriorating air quality index means a higher chance of overall risk and chances of serious diseases. Premature deaths can also happen due to household air pollution.
The Principles
Experts suggest maintaining eight healthy home principles that can help to make your living space healthier and safer. According to these principles, you must:
- keep it dry
- keep it temperature controlled
- keep it clean
- keep it well maintained
- keep it safe
- keep it free of contamination
- keep it pest free
- keep it well ventilated
Various ways can help you maintain all these eight principles to fulfill your dream of a healthy home. It is worth mentioning that all these options are possible to maintain in every climate, every locale, every budget, every space, and every home structure.
You will now be able to clearly understand the coordination between indoor air quality and indoor health. Due to the abundance of information and study in this field, there are strategies in place to help achieve these principles in every budget and space.
How to Do It
Home Assessment
Home assessments are a very vital aspect of taking care of human health. Similar to indoor air pollution, various indoor health threats are not visible to our naked eyes.
Lead and particulate matter require indoor level testing by professionals. The dust mites, molds, cockroaches, and mildew can hide in dark corners and remain alive for a prolonged period. The fix for this is hiring experienced home service and monitoring air quality actively.
Healthy Home Habits
These are simple steps. The efforts are low-cost and low-effort tricks that can prove to be essential to achieve healthy home conditions. Daily simple steps that you can follow are advisable as part of healthy home habits.
You have to make such activities part of your daily or weekly routine. It can include steps like choosing not to wear shoes indoors to following pet grooming. It can help you to get rid of any pest infestations. You can have plenty of source control measures that can help in this regard.
Indoor Air Quality Control
The eight healthy home principles can become more simplified for the homeowners. You can do away with a lot of maintenance and guesswork out of the equation by utilizing indoor air quality solutions or pursuing home upgrades.
You can choose to install mechanical ventilation for the entire house to keep the ventilation levels maintained. Also, a dehumidifier can aid you to keep your home dry.
The indoor air quality or IAQ control strategies can effectively help you to look after the airflow, target pests and contaminants, and monitor temperature variations throughout your house. You can achieve more than one healthy home principle at once through many IAQ control solutions.
Steps like up-gradation of your home air filter can be a low-cost option to take care of several factors. It is also a comparatively easy upgrade, and you make a noticeable difference to your home’s indoor air quality and health.
So, as you can see, subscribing to a few steps can make a meaningful difference to maintaining your home health. You can start with the shortlisting of the right neighborhood and housing that helps to meet these objectives.