New Home Purchase

This was newly purchased custom home less than eight years old and for a client I’d worked with in one of their previous homes. After living on one of the nearby islands during the pandemic, the family was ready to move back to the Seattle area. They have young children and minimizing their toxic load was critical to them, so finding the right home that was the right size, the right layout and location also had to be ideal for supporting their health and well being

To help her quickly assess and narrow down potential homes, we started off with a phone consult using a potential home she thought she might be interested in. We stepped through the pros and cons from a healthy home perspective and created a customized checklist and questions to ask to save her valuable time throughout the process.

About a month later, they found The Home. It was a custom home approximately 4,500 square feet on a good sized lot, outside of the city but still close enough for the dad to drive in a few times a week if needed.

Before making an offer, we did a pre-purchase assessment to address a few outstanding questions and concerns and walk through the changes she wanted to make and what the “healthy” version would look like.

Changes we did to make this a healthier home for the family:

• Fixed wiring errors to reduce crazy high magnetic fields
• Healthier flooring options
• Reducing EMFs in the kitchen to make it kid-friendly

High EMF Fields from Wiring Errors

When she did her first walk-through of the home, she brought her own EMF meter and found extremely high magnetic fields in one area of the home. The hallway on both floors that lead into the bedrooms, so not an ideal place to have some mystery readings, especially when they’re super high.

“What are they from?”

“Is it fixable?”

These were her two big questions.

Magnetic fields are tricky to mitigate, and you need to take multiple rounds of measurements and test out different scenarios to help narrow down the root cause. In this case, the pre-purchase assessment strongly pointed to wiring errors, which is a good thing because they’re fixable.

After the house was purchased, I worked closely with the electrician and it turned out the wiring that was done at build time was sloppy and created those higher magnetic fields.

An issue at the control panel with a neutral and multiple three-way light switches (so you can control the lights from two locations without having to run up or down the stairs) with sloppy wiring were the root causes after detailed troubleshooting. In this case, all of the three-way switches were connected to each other in a daisy-chain fashion and because the entire wiring was sloppy, they all had to be corrected.

Once those were fixed, the elevated magnetic fields disappeared and were close to zero with the rest of the house measurements.

Healthier Flooring Options

One of things my client wanted to do before moving into the house was to replace some of the flooring options, namely, the carpet.

Indoor air quality is at least 2-5 times more polluted than outside, and it can very easily be more than 100x more polluted than outside.

Which is the main reason she couldn’t wait to get rid of the synthetic carpet that was in some of the room.

Carpet traps all sorts of pollutants, toxic gases, allergens, dirt, and all sorts of things you don’t want to breathe in, and walking and vacuuming carpet stirs up all of that up and releases them into the environment.

Her original plan was to just switch out for a non-toxic carpet and more hardwood floors for the rooms that had the synthetic carpet.

The bedrooms did get a non-toxic carpet upgrade as planned.

However… wood floors are a healthier option compared to carpet, but they can be echo-y and aren’t so great when it comes to absorbing noise, especially with kids and multiple floors.

Instead the wood floors, she went with an even healthier option and now her floors are anti-microbial and naturally resistant to mold and mildew and termites, great at absorbing noise, a better thermal insulator and also sustainable-friendly and good for the environment.

Reducing EMFs in the Kitchen to Make it Kid-Friendly

This is a great kitchen, I have to say! Her kids are starting to learn to cook and they love it which means they’ll spend a good amount of time hovering around the island you see pictured below.

On her first walk-through, she noticed high EMF fields in the main kitchen area.

The questions she had were – what are they from and what can we do?

Kitchens have lots of appliances, in one area, so higher EMF fields are actually really common.

The pre-assessment validated that it wasn’t a wiring error, and that it was the outlet and the light switch for hanging lights directly above it.

The fix? We removed the wiring for outlet and the outlet itself and then rerouted the light switch to another wall. Easy peasy. The fields dropped immediately to the same low levels as the rest of the room making it kid-friendly and other than a new light switch, you can’t tell anything was changed.

Highlights

• Finding a healthy home that only needs minor changes is doable if you know what to look for 
• Bad wiring comes down to the electrician, not the age of the home
• Healthier, non-toxic options can also help protect your home