Heating and Cooling Your Home: Which Options Are Best for Your Family’s Health?

Heating and Cooling Your Home: Which Options Are Best for Your Family’s Health?

Properly heating and cooling your home keeps you and your family comfortable. However, certain heating and cooling methods may be better suited for your household if you want to preserve your family’s health. The healthy methods that will work best for your home are found below.

Plant More Trees Around Your Home

During the summer, the sun’s rays may stay on your home for a long time, thus raising its internal temperature considerably. To mitigate the effect of the sun’s rays, you should consider planting a few trees around your property. Once those trees are fully grown, they can protect your home from the sun and offer some cooling shade.

Trees can also help reduce your annual energy bills. Most families spend $2,000 annually on energy bills and more than half of that can be attributed to heating and cooling-related expenses. The money you save on those energy bills can go toward other purchases for your family.

Improve Your Home’s Ventilation By Installing Exhaust Fans

Too much moisture inside your home is a bad thing. Aside from the humid air making your family more uncomfortable, that excess moisture can also cause mold growth. If your kids inhale those mold spores, they may start to experience breathing problems and other complications.

You must prevent excess moisture from lingering inside your home. Installing some exhaust fans will help with that goal. Prioritize placing the exhaust fans in your bathroom, kitchen, and laundry rooms because those are the locations that typically accumulate moisture. Those exhaust fans will also make your home more comfortable, which is a nice plus.

Clean Your Chimney Regularly

There’s nothing like the warmth a fireplace provides during a particularly cold winter night. Huddled together with the people you love the most, the warmth from your fireplace almost obtains this soothing quality. Chimneys are still popular because of those reasons we just mentioned, which is evidenced by the fact that the market size for the chimney industry reached $518 million back in 2021.

People still like using their chimneys, but you must be diligent with maintenance if you keep yours active. Continuously using your dirty chimney means you are likely exposing your family to health hazards. The good news is you can get by with one chimney cleaning per year. Set an annual reminder for chimney cleaning before the start of winter and get it out of the way early.

Replace Your Old Air Conditioner With a Ductless Unit

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, around 67% of American homes currently feature some kind of air conditioning. Many of the air conditioning units people have installed still rely on ducts to do their job. Ducts pose no threat if they are well maintained. If those ducts aren’t clean, they can adversely affect your home’s air quality and even aid in the spread of disease.

Eliminate the potential threat posed by those dirty ducts by installing a ductless air conditioner. Ductless air conditioners provide more than adequate cooling without jeopardizing your family’s health. They’re also easier to maintain compared to their more conventional counterparts.

Utilize Underfloor Heating

Heaters can be dangerous if you have children at home. As we noted earlier, fireplaces can also become dangerous if they remain unclean. To get a safe heat source inside your home, you should consider underfloor heating.

Underfloor heating provides valuable warmth without doubling as an obstruction inside your home. The appliances that deliver underfloor heating can be kept far away from common living areas to ensure that your kids won’t get to them. This type of heating is also easy to control. Lowering or raising the temperature will only take seconds.

Heating and cooling your home without endangering your family’s health is possible. Feel free to try out the suggestions we included here so you can create the most comfortable home for your family.