Common Health Issues With Homes – Part 2

Hello, and welcome back to our blog here at Safe Investment Home Inspections. This is part two of our series on some of the most common health issues with your home. Contact us today if you’d like a professional certified specialist to inspect your home.

Foundation Flaws

The structural integrity of your home is highly dependent on its foundation because this is what supports everything else in your home like the walls, floors, and roof. So if your foundation is threatened, your whole home is at risk. Flooding, high moisture, poor drainage, and expanding and contracting soil can all cause stress on your home’s foundation, eventually causing it to crack or shift.

 

The good news about foundation issues is that they’re typically more obvious than something like poor ventilation that could be causing issues without you even being aware. Poor drainage and hydrostatic pressure will cause pressure to build up around the outside of your basement or crawl space eventually resulting in cracks and leaks. Problems like this will always get worse and never fix themselves because soil is constantly shifting and swelling.

Poor Air Quality

Although mold, mildew, and termites are major culprits of poor indoor air quality, they certainly aren’t the only. Poor air quality can result from lack of circulation, a faulty HVAC system, or even human error or negligence. Believe it or not, indoor air quality can actually be a lot poorer than outdoor air quality due to it being a contained environment.

 

Outdoors, harmful pollutants are able to dissipate rather easily whereas indoors, pollutants will remain in the carpet, walls, or recirculated throughout the home. If you’re a smoker, you should note that tobacco smoke contains about 200 poisonous toxins. About 43 of these are carcinogenic meaning everyone in your home has a higher risk of getting cancer. And that’s not just people who smoke in their homes either. Just simply walking into a home after smoking is enough to spread these chemicals throughout the whole home.

 

Although we love our furry little creatures, pets can still be a significant contributor to poor indoor air quality, especially if our HVAC systems aren’t equipped to handle them. If you have the wrong type of air filter in your home, it may become too dirty to adequately filter the air resulting in poor airflow and poor air quality. It should also be noted that your HVAC system itself can sustain significant damage if air can’t flow properly through it.

 

Other things like combustion fumes, toxic chemicals, pesticides, and biological pollutants have been found indoors and you likely won’t even know they’re there unless you get an indoor air quality test. Another issue that many homeowners face is pollutants getting tracked in from outdoors and getting trapped in their carpets and rugs. This means it is absolutely essential to have your carpets professionally cleaned on a regular basis even if they don’t look dirty. Although vacuuming will certainly help to remove harmful contaminants from the carpet, it won’t get everything. Keeping windows open for a little bit each day can also help improve indoor air quality.

Contact Safe Investment Home Inspection

If you’re a homeowner, you can’t afford to live in an unsafe home. And the best way to eliminate any uncertainties about living in your home is to call a certified home inspector. At Safe Investment Home Inspections we will perform a comprehensive home inspection and let you know of any potential threats so that you can take the steps necessary to deal with them. Contact us today to learn more.