Carbon monoxide poisoning is the leading cause of death by poisoning in the United States each year, and every year, more than five thousand people are hospitalized with injuries and sicknesses related to it. Of the twelve thousand poisoning deaths that occur in the United States each year, at least six hundred are from CO.
This deadly poison, which is colorless and odorless, can attack in even the safest-seeming of homes. It can seep into the air you and your family are breathing, and you may not even recognize its presence at first. Although carbon monoxide is usually noted for how quickly and easily it can cause deaths, it can also cause chronic symptoms, including flu-like symptoms, upset stomachs, headaches, and even brain damage.
CO poisoning is even worse for young children and pregnant women. People who smoke a lot or who have heart or lung problems can easily succumb to the effects of it. This danger, however, can affect any members of your family, including your pets, but you can protect your family members from this dangerous poison by using a few simple techniques.
One of the best ways to protect your family from CO is to replace your old furnace and hot water heater. A low-efficiency heating system can leak the residue of the burning natural gas or oil, and high-efficiency furnaces and hot water heaters will leak less residue. Replacing your furnace can also keep your home safe by getting rid of the old appliances, which may have rusty spots that are more likely to leak carbon monoxide and other bad residues.
Another one of the easiest ways to protect your family from the deadly gas is to have your furnace serviced each year. Get a professional to perform your furnace maintenance, which can keep your furnace more efficient. This can also keep the area around your furnace clean, and all of your ventilation systems clear of blockage that can cause carbon monoxide to back up and leak into your home.
After you’ve taken all these precautions, you should install carbon monoxide detectors in your home. These detectors come in many different sizes and shapes, and they have many different functions. For instance, some digital detectors offer a function that shows how much carbon monoxide is in the air of your home. Since there is always some CO around, you can see whether or not the level is approaching dangerous. More simple detectors will simply have a light or noise that would tell you when the carbon monoxide level is so high that you need to get out of the house.
These steps should be enough to keep your family safe from carbon monoxide, but if you have a chimney, you should also make sure that it’s in good shape, since loosening masonry can also cause you to have carbon monoxide poisoning in your home. Be sure, too, to check any of your other appliances that run on oil or natural gas, since they will also have potential to leak the dangerous gas.
There’s no doubt about it: air conditioning is expensive. Paying to keep your home environment cool all summer can take major chunks out of your bank account, but there are ways that you can alleviate this problem by using your energy more efficiently. Energy-efficient air conditioning isn’t just about buying a whole new system; it is also about learning to use the system that you have efficiently.
1. Set the Thermostat High
It may seem uncomfortable to walk into a house that is only a few degrees cooler than the outside world, but running your air conditioner to shreds by setting your thermostat at seventy degrees all summer is ridiculous. Then you just end up needing to put on long sleeves and pull out blankets when you’re in the house, as your light, short summer clothes are uncomfortable then. Instead of having a freezing home, simply set your thermostat high and leave it up higher when no one is home during the day.
2. Use a Dehumidifier
Most people know that dry heat is way easier to endure than humid heat, which is why many people in sunny, dry Arizona will walk around in the summer quite comfortable in long sleeves while people in Florida take off all the clothes they decently can, even when it’s ten degrees cooler than Phoenix. If you want to avoid running your air conditioner simply to pull humidity out of the air, get a couple of dehumidifiers for your home, which can seriously help the problem.
3. Pull Out Hot Air
Trying to cool your home while firing up the stove and the oven can be a major annoyance. Using an exhaust fan can help this problem, but if you don’t have one of these over your stove, you can help cool your kitchen simply by setting up a fan on the floor. In conjunction with your air conditioner, this will help your kitchen stay comfortable even as you slave away.
4. Shade When It’s Needed
You may already be aware that pulling the curtains over your south-facing windows on those hot summer days can make your home more comfortable by several degrees, but did you know that shading your air-conditioning unit can help it run more efficiently? If you get to choose where to put your A/C unit, you should place it on the shady north side of your home. If not, plant trees or tall grass around the unit, which can help it stay cooler, working more efficiently. Besides this, the plants will shade your home, keeping it naturally cooler, and hide the air conditioning unit from sight.
5. Buy an Energy-Efficient Unit
If you’re really struggling to keep up with the electricity bills during the summer, it may be that you need a new air conditioning unit. Energy-efficient air conditioning when used in conjunction with all these other energy-saving ideas could help you cool your home more efficiently, and buying a new unit could very well save you hundreds of dollars a year.
These days, you might hear a lot about humidifiers, since many doctors and clinics are beginning to recommend them for different medical conditions. A humidifier basically takes water and puts it back into the air, creating an environment that is less dry and irritating. You can actually buy furnace-mounted humidifiers that will keep your entire home from getting too dry, which can help with asthma, allergies, and other health conditions.
How a Humidifier Helps
If you have one of the following conditions, a furnace-mounted humidifier can really help you feel better and stay healthy:
· Asthma and allergies: Although a humidifier won’t completely get rid of these conditions, it can help ease some of the irritation in the nose and throat that people with asthma and allergies tend to experience. If you or your children are constantly fighting sore throats and dry nasal passages during allergy seasons, a humidifier can certainly help ease the itching and pain.
· Dry Skin: There is nothing more annoying in the winter than dry skin. It can seem like no matter how much lotion you slather on and how many glasses of water you drink, your skin is still constantly itchy, flaky, and even painfully cracked. A humidifier can put moisture back into the air to help solve this problem.
· Dry Eyes: Contact wearers know the annoyance of being in too-dry air. Just think about what happens when you spend a lot of time outdoors on a hot, dry day, and your eyes will probably start to itch. Dried-out contacts can cause blurry vision, and they can be downright uncomfortable. Putting moisture back into the air of your home can help your contacts become more comfortable.
· Colds and Flu: During cold and flu season, there’s nothing worse than dealing with both a runny nose and a dry nose. Using a humidifier in your home can help ease many of the symptoms of colds and the flu, and it can help make your sick little ones much more comfortable.
The Importance of Cleanliness
Humidifiers can certainly help your family in all of the above ways, and they can even help your home, especially if you have wooden floors and beams that can crack and creak when they are too dry. However, it’s important to keep in mind that you need to keep your humidifier clean. Humidifiers that are spurting dirty or contaminated water into the air will only make things like colds, the flu, allergies, and asthma worse.
Furnace-mounted Humidifiers
While you can buy small humidifiers that will put moisture into the air in a single room or a large living area, the simplest and most effective way to humidify your entire home is with a furnace-mounded humidifier. Many modern furnaces come with these already integrated into the furnace system, but if yours didn’t, you can have a professional install a humidifier on your furnace.
These humidifiers work like many of the smaller ones do. Most of them have a fan that pulls water from a reservoir into your air ducts, which disseminates it throughout your home. The best part about these humidifiers, though, is that they almost all have self-cleaning cycles, so you only need to service them a few times each year.
