The last six months have exposed many truths and we’ve learned a lot about ourselves as a society, communities, and frankly ourselves as individuals.
One thing we can be sure: Health and Wellbeing are critical elements of our decision-making and how we navigate and evolve our lifestyle to accommodate the rapid changes and ramifications of COVID-19. We’re spending a lot more time in whatever place we call home, causing us to think much more critically about what ‘home’ means and what we want our ‘home’ to look like.
This set of recommendations is designed to help homeowners, potential home buyers, and renters leverage elements of their homes that are within their control to improve their overall family’s health, while also considering environmental sustainability.
Health and Wellbeing may look different for everyone, but here are a few basic tips to get started:
AIR QUALITY
Recently amplified in importance by COVID-19’s airborne transmission, air quality can impact overall human health, but is a critical factor to at-risk individuals.
Home Owners
Remember to check the air filters in your home, which may be at the intake or output, depending on your HVAC system. Manufacturers typically encourage you to change these twice per year, but read the recommendations for best practice.
Air filters are not a place to skimp in your home maintenance budget, so make sure you’re informed about the type and quality of filtration.
Sustainability Tip: Maintaining and updating air filters to the proper specifications of your HVAC system will make your system run most efficiently, reducing the least amount of energy.
Home Buyers
Ask about the type of HVAC system in the home and the regularity of the maintenance previously. If filters are not regularly changed, the systems may have been running inefficiently and may have endured additional wear and tear.
If you’re purchasing a brand new construction home, confirm that the builder did not run the systems during construction and if they did, that they did a flush of the system after construction was complete.
Renters
Hold your landlords accountable if regular maintenance, like air quality filter updates, is their responsibility in the lease. Make note that if they aren’t explicitly written into the lease, your filters may not have been changed. If the maintenance is your responsibility, follow best practices for updates to the filters.
Sustainability Tip: A healthier home encourages more time to be spent at home, resulting in a reduction in carbon emissions from travel. It also saves money, due to less need and/or desire to travel away from home or work from a cafe or coffee shop
General Indoor Environmental Quality
Plants
Having a few plants around the house have been shown to enhance mood, levels of concentration, recovery from illness, restoration, and reduced stress. This is well-documented in the research behind ‘biophilia,’ and biophilic design. The act of caring for plants has also been shown to enhance mindfulness and improve overall mental health. In addition to these benefits, plants have also been shown to be passive air filters. HGTV recommends the 20 Best Plants for Cleaning Indoor Air and B&L Ott shares a guide to Indoor Air Quality, including naming 10 great plants that you can plant today.
Active Air Filtration
Certain air quality metrics, such as a specified relative humidity range, have been correlated with a reduction in disease transmission. This range and other specific air quality metrics, such as CO2 levels, TVOC, and other particulate matter, have been detailed in systems, such as U.S. Green Building Council’s Arc Re-Entry’s guidelines for best practice in Air Quality to passively address COVID-19, enhance cognitive function, and human health within a space. If your air quality at home is outside of these recommended ranges, air purifiers and humidifiers or dehumidifiers may support active air filtration strategies.
Sustainability Tip: Leverage the use of surge protectors or automatic timers to improve plug load efficiency when the active air filtration solutions are not being used.
Air Quality Deep-Dive
If you’re really curious or have someone with allergies, asthma or other respiratory conditions, having a real-time air quality monitor may provide helpful insight into the air health of your home. These monitors can be built into digital smart home systems and accessible by app or can be small portable devices, depending on the level of investment.
Sometimes data can be a dangerous thing! Remember that once you know the levels of pollutants in your home, there may be more upgrades necessary to remedy the issue and sometimes the issue is coming from outside of the home and may not be within your control.
Sustainability Tip: Improved health and wellbeing may result in long-term reduction of resource consumption related to demand for health system
WATER QUALITY
Critical to overall immune health and can promote better hydration habits.
Home Owners
Many people buy single-use water bottles and don’t drink from their tap. This is rarely the healthiest solution and is not the most environmentally friendly solution. If your tap water does not have a pleasant taste, a water filter may be a great solution. These can be installed at the point-source to treat your entire home’s water, at each fixture (like affixed to a pipe under your sink), or on the fixture itself to filter in realtime. Refrigerators and other appliances that stream water directly also typically have filters that need to be changed as well.
Sustainability Tip: Single-use water bottles are heavy and have typically traveled a long distance to get to your store. This means that the transport to get essentially water of the same quality as tap water to your home resulted in unnecessarily high carbon emissions, and therefore air pollution.
Home Buyers
Ask for a water quality sample to be tested by the previous owner or the builder, if it hasn’t been already. Ensure that it is their responsibility to remedy any metrics outside of healthy guidelines. (The WELL Building Standard provides helpful water sample guidelines). Before you buy the home, remember to taste the tap water to better anticipate your tolerance and need for additional filtration. This will reduce your need to continue to purchase single-use water bottles at home, therefore reducing additional costs over time.
Sustainability Tip: Any reduction to the amount of single-use plastic bottles will result in an overall reduction of your household waste output (even if its recycling!
Renters
Though the source of water may be out of your control, you can still safely and sustainably control the water that you consume. Consider filters that are integrated into portable water pitchers and water bottles. This will reduce and single-use water bottle consumption and may actually promote healthier hydration habits!
Sustainability tip: Communities such as Flint, Michigan and many others do not have the luxury of access to drinkable, potable water from their taps. Single-use plastic water bottles may be necessary to address this crisis and should be saved for those in direct need.
Filtration for home water system, such as UV filtration
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LIGHTING QUALITY
The quality and access of natural and indoor lighting can largely affect sleep, body’s nutrients, vision health, and concentration/productivity levels.
Home Owners
Lighting is a common complaint from homeowners. You may or may not be thrilled with the current access to natural light in your home. Because you own the home, larger upgrades that can be done to address this, including installing larger windows, doors with windows, installing solar tubes, sun tunnels, and skylights. Consider the site outside of your home as well - Since you moved in, have trees grown up to block sun from reaching your windows?
Sustainability Tip: Updating windows may be an opportunity to update the home’s energy performance! Windows are a huge potential point of energy loss in the home
If you’re working from home and you've noticed that there’s one room in the home that gains great access to natural light during the day, consider rearranging furniture to make that room your home office. According to studies on Biophilic Design, it’s even better to arrange the furniture to have visibility to nature, even if it is just some greenery. Lighting has a tremendous effect on mood, productivity, stress level, sleep performance, and therefore energy levels, so it’s important to make adjustments to maximize access to natural lighting.
Home Buyers
If you are a virtual worker, even some of the time, consider access to natural light in your list of ‘must-haves’ for your new home. If you love a home that doesn’t have great access to natural light, start scheming about updates and upgrades to improve the conditions.
Learn more about the orientation of the home. If you’re visiting the home in August, for example, as the previous homeowners or builders what the access to sunlight looks like in January and February. Changes in seasons result in the opportunity for a shift in lighting, due to the loss of leaves in trees, the orientation of the home in relation to the sun, and other considerations.
Sustainability Tip:Depending on the climate you’re in, access to natural light can be a trade-off with energy consumption. For example, in the warmest part of the summer, you may not want too much direct sunlight to hit your house. Instead, consider indirect sunlight sources, which can come through the shade of trees, through the orientation of the home, and through shaded windows, such as affixing awnings and built-in window coverings.
Of course, natural light is best absorbed outside in direct sunlight. Consider access to outdoor space when shopping for your new home and try to picture space to sit outside while working remotely, when playing with children or pets, or when simply relaxing.
Renters
At first pass, it’s difficult to imagine how you can make adjustments to your access to natural light in a home that you don’t own, but there are a few simple strategies that have positive results!
Consider new ways to arrange the furniture in your home to maximize access to natural light. If you’re working from home at a desk, table, or counter space, look around during different parts of the day to see where the rooms are brightest. If necessary, this may be an opportunity to upgrade your workspace and find a piece of furniture that enhances access to light, but also promotes ergonomic, comfortable seating.
Human-centric lighting is an artificial lighting technology that is designed to mock the color of natural light throughout the day. This lighting, which typically comes in a bulb or full lamp or lighting fixture, maybe an opportunity to enhance your circadian rhythm, even in times where you cannot gain access to natural light itself.
Sustainability tip: Upgrades to lighting fixtures is another opportunity to save energy! When researching the right lighting solutions for your home, consider the energy consumption of the bulb and the longevity of the bulb.
When all else fails inside, try to find a space to go outside!
Rearrange furniture orientation and update window shades to maximize access to natural light
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Human-centric lamps and artificial lights
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Tree trimming, window and natural light home upgrades
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CONTRIBUTORS
We are here to help and happy to discuss any particular needs you may have.
Debra Wyatte, Chief Commercial Officer with Cecilian Partners, provides well over a decade of customer experience expertise working with community developers, production home builders, and homeowner associations. Having worked directly with over 100 MPC's across the country Debra leverages trends in design, operations, and programming that improve resident engagement; bringing to life community pillars and/or developer visions like health and wellness through strategic social programming and planning. She is an active member of the Urban Land Institute on a national and local level. She is a member of the Community Development Council (CDC) Green, ULI Health Leaders, and Building Healthy Places Committee in Colorado.
Kristen Fulmer, Founder of Recipric, is a sustainability expert, focused on health and performance within the built environment. Kristen strives to drive efficiency through research-based, marketable, and profitable sustainable solutions. She believes that the built environment can influence the human experience at many scales and that it exemplifies the power in the influence placemaking, equitable access to a support system, and sense of community. Following a background in architecture and design within the commercial real estate development industry, she has launched Recipric to address health, wellbeing, and sustainability in the sports, fitness and entertainment industries.
Learn how to apply these tips to your home with Recipric’s Home Field Advantage Package!