Home Maintenance Part 2

In this episode, we dive back into our home maintenance series with Part 2, where we focus on indoor maintenance tasks that can be done once a year or so. Listen along as we go deeper into this topic to help keep our homes running in peak condition—saving money and supporting a healthy living environment.

Resources: https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/preventative-home-maintenance

https://healthyhomes.ces.ncsu.edu/

https://extension.umn.edu/home-maintenance-and-safety/cleaning-healthy-home

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/guide_to_home_ventilation.pdf

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/carbon-monoxide

https://www.ncdhhs.gov/divisions/health-service-regulation/north-carolina-radon-program

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Extension Connection Podcast, where we connect our listeners to research-based resources to help them live better lives. Hey everyone. This is Lindsay Edwards, your family and consumer science extension agent in Polk County. And today I wanna dive into the second part of our home maintenance series and talk about all the things indoor home maintenance. Things that you should be focusing on maybe once or twice a year to ensure that your home is working to peak performance. Now, last month I talked about spring cleaning and one over a lot of different areas in your home that you can focus on when doing that yearly spring cleaning. And if you haven't listened to that podcast, I would encourage you to go back and listen to it.'cause we really dive deep into cleaning, especially those big appliances in our homes to ensure that they're running properly and efficiently. A lot of what I'm gonna talk about today comes from the North Carolina Cooperative Extension website called Healthy Homes, which covers a wide range of topics having to do with things that we can do inside of our homes to ensure that we have a safe and healthy environment for our families. I'll attach the website in today's show notes if you like to take a deeper dive into this topic. Home maintenance is so important to keep your home running as efficiently as possible and hopefully prevent any big things from happening that could potentially cause huge problems in your home later, or even have health implications. Keeping up to date on regular maintenance will help to mitigate those really big problems. So let's get started. The first thing I wanna talk about is our air and ventilation. The US Department of Energy has a great handout that, again, I will attach in the show notes. You'll probably hear me say that a lot. I talk about the three different types of ventilation. The first one is natural ventilation, like any ventilation to the outside through windows or even cracks in the doors. Spot ventilation like a vent fan, which is a second, and whole house ventilation, which is a third, such as fans and duct system maintenance is important to reduce any pollutants in your home to safe levels. In all three of these, the maintenance that does go along with these types of ventilation will differ, for example. Natural ventilation. In order to hopefully stop some of this ventilation, you'll do things like cocking your windows or sealing air cracks, and applying insulation to places like attics and basement to help stop excessive air flow throughout your home. In spot ventilation, you wanna clean vent fans above your stove, which is incredibly important because they can have a lot of grease buildup on them from cooking in your kitchen, and this can become a fire danger. Also, cleaning and dusting in any spot ventilation in your bathrooms, which we usually have a ventilation fan above our showers or tubs, and above our toilets. They usually will be very dusty if they haven't been dusted in a long while. So go ahead and dust those to make sure they're running properly. And with whole house ventilation systems, making sure that you're cleaning out your air vents regularly. Changing out your air filters is very important. At home, in our house, we like to label our air filters every time we change them with the date, we just write it on the side with a permanent marker to ensure that we are changing them regularly. Also along with home ventilation. Let's touch on the topic of carbon monoxide. Having carbon monoxide detectors are really important because carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless. Anywhere where you use natural gas, propane, or wood should have a carbon monoxide detector, and making sure that you change the batteries in it once a year is good practice to ensure that they are working properly. In the show notes, I'm going to attach a carbon monoxide information sheet that goes over this topic much deeper in depth, but just be aware that any type of fuel burning or combustion appliance can give off carbon monoxide. So ensuring that you're monitoring them in your home and that you're. Keeping your carbon monoxide detectors working is extremely important for the safety of your family. Also, while you're changing those batteries, go ahead and change the batteries and your fire detectors, which should be checked at least yearly and changed out to ensure that your fire detectors are working properly. Next topic I wanna cover is mold and moisture in your home. So one of the top things you can do to prevent moisture is actually on the outside of your house, and that's cleaning out your gutters, making sure your gutters are clean so water can move away from your home when it rains, will help prevent moisture buildup from happening close to your home. The next thing you can do is indoors, and that's to monitor your home's humidity levels. You want your home to be below 60% humidity. If your house is above this, you definitely wanna highly consider using a dehumidifier to collect the moisture. When you have higher moisture in your home, you're more likely to have mold growth in your home, go around your house and check for any signs of water damage. Key areas to focus on are attics basements, looking towards the ceiling, seeing if there's any water spots on the floors and walls in all areas of your home. Look underneath your sinks and around appliances to make sure no drains or. Actual appliances are leaking water. Think about your refrigerator. If you have an ice maker, there's water going into that. Make sure that there is no leaks around that. I once had a drain in my house going to the dishwasher go bad, and it busted. And the dishwasher we turned on and it leaked all over our kitchen floor and ruined our hardwoods in our house. So normal yearly inspection of things like that could have prevented that from happening in my home. The best prevention is ensuring you are checking all these things, all these areas of signs, of leakage and decay before they bust or ruin other things that are very large cost in your home. Now, mold. If you find mold in your home, it's caused from excess moisture. It's important that you deal with the problem E immediately to ensure that the mold does not get to unsafe levels inside your home. Any color of mold is unsafe for humans. We hear a lot about black mold specifically, but any color that you see of mold is not safe for us to be breathing in. At a recent local environmental health training, there was a representative from the CDC talking about mold, and she stated that there's three steps to fixing mold. The first step is figuring out where the moisture is coming from and to fix it. So again, if there's a leak underneath your sink, stopping the water, turning off the water, and fixing the leak before you even touch the mold. Step two is to control the humidity. Again, make sure your humidity is below 60% to ensure that mold is not growing. And then step three is to actually clean up your mold in your home. So the mold cleanup should be the last step of the three. In order to ensure that it doesn't grow back on our Healthy Homes website, they have more information about why mold testing is not recommended and also about cleaning up mold. And if you should hire a contractor to come clean it. If mold is something you find in your home, I highly suggest consulting these documents for help with this problem. Another thing you might consider testing for your home is radon. Radon iss a naturally forming gas that can be present in the home. You can easily order a radon testing kick from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. And again, I will attach a link in the show notes for that. There is a small fee for the kit, but you can test your well water as well as the air quality in your house to ensure that you do not have radon. Recommended that you, for radon every two. Which I forgot to mention when I talked about fire alarms is to ensure that you have a fire extinguisher somewhere in your house and make sure that it's still in date. Keep it close to any place that a fire might occur, such as a stove or fireplace. We keep ours underneath the sink in the kitchen, close to the stove, but also close to our gas fireplace. Another topic that needs to be checked yearly, and we kind of touched on this with the air ventilation, is caulking. It's one of those things that will wear out over time, and you may have to do maybe not yearly, but at least checking it yearly, is checking the caulk around your sinks in your tubs, in your showers to ensure that no water's penetrating anywhere, as well as around the windows and doors for air ventilation to prevent drafts and that excess air ventilation. I'm sure that there's things that I'm missing in this indoor home maintenance series because there's so much that you can do in your home to ensure that it's running properly. These are just some of the yearly things that you, maybe twice a year. Things that you want to do to ensure that your house is running in tip top shape. We know that preventative maintenance is usually much cheaper than having to fix a larger problem after time, so staying on top of it is super important. I'd like to thank you for listening to the second part of our home maintenance series, and we'll see you again next month. For our final part where we talk about outdoor home maintenance, please feel free to contact me, Lindsey Edwards, your Polk County Extension agent, if you have any questions, and I look forward to talking to you next time on the Extension Connection Podcast.