Home Ventilation Should Balance Indoor Air Quality with Environmental Conditions In Western North Carolina, specific environmental conditions impact air quality, which can affect your family’s healthiness at home. These conditions – common to the southern Appalachians – include: Left unchecked, these environmental conditions can make your house – and its inhabitants – sick, complicating respiratory […]
Top 3 Subtle Ways Your House Could Be Making You Sick
Your house looks clean. So why do you feel sick and tired at home? Chances are, you’re dealing with one of the top 3 subtle ways your house could be making you sick. Let’s take a look at the role dust, humidity and mold play in creating an unhealthy home environment. Then, learn more about […]
Hitchhiker’s Guide: How Germs Travel From Public to Private Spaces
We call them “germs.” How must they see us? Perhaps, as hitchhikers, they see us as a ride, a way to get from here to there. Or maybe, like us, they don’t know we’re there. Found in the grimy, sticky, damp, sweaty deposits that abound on a multitude of surfaces, we come in contact with […]
Cold Snap? Your Home’s Ventilation Systems Keep You Breathing Healthy All Winter
Winter weather happens almost overnight. Rapid changes in temperature or a dramatic difference between warm indoor temperatures and the frigid outdoors can prove problematic. When cold temperatures dip below freezing, it’s important to check your home’s ventilation systems to be certain that your family’s air is healthy. Chances are, you take your home’s ventilation for […]
Saint Nick’s Winter Healthiness Checklist
Whether Santa slides down the chimney at your house or lets himself in with a magic key, there’s more to getting ready for his visit than setting out the milk and cookies. A couple of weeks back, I got an email from an old friend. Let’s call him Nicholas. Last Christmas, it took him quite […]
Mold Growth Is Western North Carolina’s “Quiet Ecological Disaster” of Devastating Proportions
Consistently high dew points and weeks of warm temperatures result in a regional increase of indoor mold growth, worsening health conditions, and rising costs into the tens of millions. That’s why I think it’s fair to assert that Western North Carolina is in the middle of a quiet ecological disaster of devastating proportions. Right now, […]
WNC’s Older Homes Offer Charm, Craftsmanship – and Potential Healthiness Challenges
If you’re looking for charm and craftsmanship, our region’s older homes check all the boxes. From century-old log cabins sitting on a ridge to Craftsman cottages in streetcar neighborhoods, the southern Appalachian mountains have no lack of unique, one-of-a-kind homes. In fact, 40% of the United States’ 137 million homes were built before 1969, which […]
Chronic Allergies? Cockroaches Should Be On the List of Culprits
If you’re a hunter kitty, that fast moving, flying American cockroach, known as a “palmetto bug,” or its smaller, particularly invasive German cousin sure looks like fun. But what you and I know that kitty does not is that cockroaches are not only not fun, they’re also not healthy. In western North Carolina, allergens such […]
Looking Up at the Downspout: Roof Causes of Trickle Down Dampness
Last time we met, we talked about your basement and “walked the foundation.” Now that we’ve scouted the foundation, it’s time to look upward and similarly “walk the roof.” Without fail, the essential core issue of the mold problem in any given home we visit grows out of one of these two key areas of […]
3 Low Cost Ways to Manage Runoff and Prevent the Humidity and Damp that Cause Mold
Heavy rains, coupled with humid temperatures, play havoc with basements and crawl spaces across the Southern Appalachians. As temperatures and water levels rise, so do problems with humidity and damp that lead to mold and mildew problems in our homes. Here are 3 low-cost things you can do right now to mitigate runoff issues that […]