Your home should be a place where everyone can feel secure all the time. While you may be living in a peaceful neighborhood, being safe doesn’t stop on the outside. As you live in your household, you need to make sure everything’s under control to guarantee the safety of everyone. To achieve this, it’s important to be aware of possible home safety hazards.
Common Hazards And How To Prevent Them
After maximizing the security of your home, the next thing you should do is ensure what’s happening inside is always taken care of. In this way, you can eliminate the possibility of developing accidents. Listed below are some of the common home safety hazards along with the measures to avoid them:
1. Fire Hazards
One of the worst culprits you could ever have inside your home is developing fire, which could pose physical harm to your family members and damage your entire home. With this, you need to confirm there are no easily combustible materials in your house.
Consider calling an electrician and have them check your home’s electrical wirings to see if they’re still in great shape. Make sure the professional comes from a reliable firm, and one way to check is whether they’re wearing a company uniform or electrician t-shirts.
Have the expert assess your lines. When there’s exposed wiring, it could cause sparks, which could develop into a fire. The electrician should be able to identify and resolve any issues.
Apart from electrical wirings, you should also ensure your home’s smoke detectors are in working condition. Ideally, you should change the batteries every six months, so there’d be enough energy when an incident occurs.
Moreover, you should always keep lighters and matches away from children, which can cause accidents. In this way, you can prevent your kids from starting a fire.
2. Falls
While some may consider falling to be a light issue, this occurrence is among the leading causes of home incidents leading to death. People could fall from anywhere inside your home, and the most common area in your household where it could happen is from the staircase along with the tiles of your bathroom and kitchen floor.
You may want to assess whether your staircase is in the best shape. This includes the steps and the railways as it supports people going up and down. You should also provide good lighting, which would guide people during the night. In this way, they can view every step they take, preventing any falls and trips.
If you have children, you may want to install safety gates on both ends of the stairs to prevent them from climbing up and down without your supervision.
For your bathroom floors, you might want to consider switching to a carpeted floor. While it might not be the best option for hygienic purposes, it’ll be an excellent choice to avoid slipping. Moreover, you might want to consider adding rubber mats to the shower area since it’ll be the space likely to get wet.
Ideally, it’d be best to add a shower enclosure to limit dripping. You can simply add a mat on the shower doors, so you can quickly dry your feet before heading out. In this way, you’d have every corner of the bathroom dry, preventing accidents from happening.
3. Carbon Monoxide
Carbon monoxide is an odorless and colorless toxic gas possibly floating around your house. With this, you need to make sure your home would be free from this to eliminate poisoning.
It’d be best if you could have carbon monoxide detectors working properly. Since carbon monoxide is a colorless gas, it’ll be difficult for you to identify its presence. With detectors, you can immediately leave the room and keep everyone safe.
Apart from installing detectors, it’d be great if you could prevent them from happening in the first place. You can begin by frequently checking your heater because faulty ones can emit the gas.
4. Poisoning
Apart from carbon monoxide, there are other ways people in your household could suffer from poisoning. If you have younger children, it’d be best to take precautions in safeguarding them, especially they still don’t know which things they should avoid.
You can begin by placing your cleaning products and harmful substances out of reach for small children. Preferably, you should place them on high shelves. If you don’t have much space, you can invest in childproof locks, so they can have restricted access to harmful substances.
Apart from chemicals, you should also note you can experience food poisoning in your home. If you’re transferring your groceries to a food container, you should add labels about their expiry dates. For your poultry, you should indicate the date when you bought it to avoid storing it in the refrigerator for too long.
5. Drowning
If your home has a pool, you should take extra safety measures, especially with young children playing around. While having a pool can be enjoyable since you can take a dip whenever you want, they could impose dangers as well when not supervised.
Children around one to four years old are at high risk of getting drowned since they still don’t know how to swim. With this, you need to instill proper safety protocols around your home. Ideally, you should always supervise your kids, especially when they’re at the pool or in the tub. Also, you should never lose sight of what your kids are doing because even a split second could put their lives at risk.
Apart from pools and bathtubs, you should also keep your children away from any water sources such as buckets and toilet bowls. For your best protection, you should always attend to your kids, especially when they’re near to any form of water.
Conclusion
As you build your home, your priority should be everyone’s safety. While making your home free from external dangers, you shouldn’t forget the inside of your home matters as well. You should identify every possible hazard and look for ways to eliminate them. For your best option, you should always consider hiring a professional to inspect your home for any safety concerns.
Consider the hazards mentioned here and always be vigilant in your home to avoid these.
