Maintaining a safe environment surrounding your home is undoubtedly the most crucial goal of living a fulfilling life. Therefore, it’s critical to be aware of all potential home safety hazards.
Unfortunately, several safety hazards can harm your family members at any moment. Therefore, you should always pay extra attention to your surroundings and minimize the risk of life-threatening issues. First, identify the most severe dangers and then take immediate steps to eliminate them.
Fortunately, in this intelligent era of technological superiority, you have the chance to prompt your solutions by utilizing innovative safety tools and materials that can protect your home from all kinds of threats.
This is a short and definitive guide to the most common safety hazards and how you can minimize their risks. If you want to keep your residence, home, and the surrounding area safe, you can follow these safety hazards guidelines.
Trip & Slip Hazards
When it comes to household hazards, falling is one of the most prevalent. 6 out of 10 falls happen at home, and one in every five adults either fractures a bone or injures their head. Falls occur because of various factors, including wet floors, slick stairs, and misplaced items like toys.
Here’s what you can do to prevent falling and slipping at home.
Stabilize Staircases
If small children are in the house, ensure all stairwells have sturdy handrails, firmly affixed flooring, adequate lighting, and safety gates. Even with a newborn in your arms, walk-through baby gates adjust to most situations and are simple to install.
Finally, make sure there are no tripping hazards on the stairwell. It’s tempting to leave things near the stairs to put away on your next trip up or down, but they’re also easy to overlook and trip over when you’re in a hurry.
Cover Slippery Surfaces in Bathrooms
Secure rugs to reduce sliding on slippery surfaces to improve bathroom safety. Safety treads are an excellent method to safeguard everyone in your house from slipping in the shower.
Install Supports around Showers and Bathtubs
Install grab bars to assist family members of all ages securely entering and leaving the shower. Alternatively, You can add more than one to provide additional assistance to elderly family members and others.
Corral Toys
Even a little toy can cause a trip hazard. Give the kids a convenient place to store their toys and ensure every playdate goes smoothly. Moreover, it would be best to store skateboards, bikes, and other mobile toys in a secure place where family members and guests would not trip over them.
Fire hazards
There are about 24,000 house fires each year in Canada. Even candles can cause a house fire, but there is a lot you can do to keep a house fire from the beginning or from spreading out of control. Our fire hazards prevention guide might help you learn more.
Install Fire Alarms
For greater fire protection, install fire alarms on all levels of your house and make sure they’re in good working order. In addition, consider purchasing a smart smoke detector. A smart alarm provides real-time updates through Wi-Fi.
You can also use your cellphone or other mobile devices to access remote monitoring. If you don’t want a mobile app for your smoke alarms, consider a non-connected smoke alarm and a Carbon Monoxide Detector Alarm with a voice warning.
Watch Your Candles
Never leave a burning candle alone, and never use one close to flammable materials such as curtains or blankets. Also, please make sure that this potential source of fire is kept out of reach of youngsters and that animals won’t topple over it.
Buy a Fire Extinguisher
Fire extinguishers should always be available in your house, and you should inspect them once a year to make sure that they’re in proper working order. Maintain a fire extinguisher conveniently in the kitchen or next to the fireplace mantel.
Unplug Unused Appliances
To prevent electrical hazards, make sure your electrical equipment is in good working condition and that none of the electrical wiring is worn. Also, make sure that the electrical outlets are not overloaded.
When not in use, it’s a good idea to disconnect small equipment like toasters as a precautionary measure for the safety of the electrical grid.
Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Hazard
Even at low concentrations, carbon monoxide (CO) can cause headaches and nausea, while it can also cause vertigo, eyesight impairment, and even death.
Carbon monoxide is practically impossible to detect by sight, smell, or sound, which is one of the reasons why it is such a challenging threat to identify. But, there are measures that you can take to prevent CO poisoning.
Install a CO Detector
Protecting the well-being and safety of your loved ones is as simple as installing a carbon monoxide detector that will notify you when CO levels reach dangerous levels in your house. A CO detector that can be plugged into an electrical outlet gives you an additional sense of security and eliminates the need to change the batteries in the sensor.
Additionally, some devices detect smoke and carbon monoxide and serve a dual purpose.
Keep Up With Home Maintenance
Once per year, hire a professional to maintain your home’s heating, ventilation, air conditioning system, water heater, and other equipment running on gas, oil, or coal. This will help prevent carbon monoxide leaks.
In addition, before you buy an older property, have a qualified expert evaluate the plumbing, electrical systems, and HVAC so that you can fix any problems that may come before moving in.
Choking Hazard
It’s painful to think of choking happening to anybody, whether it’s because a piece of food goes down the wrong way at dinner or when a child swallows a small object by mistake. Prepare yourself and your family from the huge risk of choking by reading these safety guidelines, and then put these lessons into practice.
Inspect Toys
Regularly check the toys for any missing pieces. To avoid choking hazards, choose toys appropriate for the child’s age group. It might also be a good idea to comb the floors for small items or anything accessible to young children’s hands once in a while.
Keep Choking Hazards Out of Reach
Make sure that young children cannot access small, hard foods, such as nuts or candies. Pay extra attention to the young children present during adult get-togethers because that is when they are most likely to try to hide something from you.
Monitor Playtime
You should still consider investing in a baby monitor, even if your child is no longer considered an infant. For example, when children are playing in another room, you can use this device to listen in for any signs that they may be choking.
Cut up Food
Always cut up big meals into smaller pieces before giving them to children younger than four years old. The same is true for soft foods such as grapes, cherry tomatoes, and hot dogs. A simple thing like a grape slicer makes it easy for you and your child to eat healthily and safely.
Cutting Hazards
There are a lot of everyday items with sharp edges both inside and outside your house. Many can be hazardous, from an open food can to a garden hoe.
Kitchen Safety
Use a lockable garbage can to keep young children and dogs from accessing sharp edges on open food cans and lids.
Knives, graters, and peelers are all popular kitchen tools that may cause serious injuries. If there are small children in the house, properly store and secure any sharp objects out of their reach.
Point knives and forks downward in the dishwasher’s utensil bin to keep little children safe from them. To make sharp objects even less accessible, move the basket away from the front of the dishwasher.
Lock Up Bathroom Sharps
Keep your razor on a high shelf or in a cabinet if you use one. In addition, you should keep extra blades in drawers with safety barriers and other grooming equipment like cuticle scissors.
Easy-to-install child safety locks keep your baby protected from accidental injury.
Put Away Yard Tools
If garden tools such as rakes, saws, and lawnmowers are not handled and stored correctly, they might cause injury. Do not rush when mowing the grass or weed whacking; always be cautious when operating power equipment.
Never leave your garden power tools out in the open. Always keep them locked up in a shed or garage out of reach of small children.
Chemical Poisoning Hazards
In 2018, the national capital poison center received over two million reports of poisoning. Unbeknownst to many, it’s possible to get poisoned by many household items, including cleaning supplies.
However, a little bit of caution and poison-proofing can significantly reduce the risk of unintentional poisoning in your apartment.
Store Medications Properly
Young children and teenagers are vulnerable to both over-the-counter and prescription drugs. Therefore, always throw away any leftover medications and never keep them on the counter. Use lockable medicine cabinets as a practical method to keep pharmaceuticals close at hand without revealing them.
Keep Paint Out of Reach
Even non-lead paint requires appropriate storage, so keep it out of the reach of youngsters. Never use a container other than the one that comes with the paint. Otherwise, your toddler can mistake it for something else, such as a drink.
Secure Other Chemicals
Secure your cleaning utensils to safeguard small children and pets against accidental poisoning. For example, store them in a high cupboard with a safety lock to prevent small children and animals from messing with household cleaners.
Likewise, you should keep pesticides and turpentine in a closet or lockbox in the garage.
Put Away Personal Care Products
Keep all cosmetics, hair products, soaps, and other hygiene products away from young children and pets. Use safety locks on all cabinet doors to keep even the most stubborn children out.
Lock Up Detergents
You should keep laundry and dishwashing detergents out of reach of pets and children, just like other cleaning utensils. If you use detergent pods, make sure kids don’t confuse them for sweets.
Fill the soap dispenser just when you’re ready to start a load, and inspect your dishwasher after each cycle for remaining residue.
Strangling Hazards
Cords can potentially strangle tiny toddlers and newborns on window treatments like blinds or drapes. Here are three suggestions for making your house safer for children.
Put Away Cords
It would be best if you kept the window and electrical cables out of reach of children. Never place a crib or bed with dangling cables near a window. If you’re using an extension cord, remember to put it away when you’re done with it.
Trim or Remove Window Cords
Trim cables to a length that only adults in the house can reach to prevent children from getting tangled in them. Better still, replace your window curtains with cordless ones.
Wrap Up Blind Cords
If you don’t want to redecorate, add blind cord wraps to your existing window coverings to make your house safer. Blind cord wraps are affordable, simple to install, and transparent so that they will blend in with your existing décor.
Drowning Hazards
Drowning is a potential danger when swimming or playing in the water outside and at home. Did you know that two-thirds of all children’s drownings occur in bathtubs? So, take these precautions seriously to avoid drowning hazards.
Attend to Children While Bathing
A child or newborn can drown in just a few inches of water; therefore, never leave a child alone in the bath and always close the toilet lid. Keep buckets empty and away from water sources if you use them for cleaning.
Keep Your Pool Safe and Secure
Always have pool safety equipment, such as a drowning hook and a life ring. In addition, the pool should be adequately fenced, locked, and monitored with gate, motion, and water break sensors.
When children are swimming, an adult should constantly monitor them and have a zero-tolerance rule for running or roughhousing on the pool deck.
Learn How to Recognize Drowning Hazards
Being aware of what to do if your child falls into the water can save their life. However, drowning does not always appear to be evident. Take a Red Cross swimming lesson to learn how to spot a drowning and provide CPR.
Burns
Burns may not be a typical home hazard, but they are present using dishwashers and stoves. Fortunately, there are a few different ways to ensure no one in your family suffers from a burn.
Latch the Dishwasher
Ensure your dishwasher door is tightly locked when you’re done using it. Keep children from opening it, especially at the end of a wash when steam burns are most common. Use the safety appliance lock to prevent accidental dishwasher access as an extra precaution.
Make Use of the Back Burners
Home and workplace burns are the most common, with children and women being the most vulnerable in the kitchen.
When possible, put on back burners on your stove to prevent injuries. This makes it harder for children to touch a hot cooktop by mistake. Even when the burner isn’t in use, never leave tempting objects like cookies on it.
Stove Knob Covers
Stoves, particularly gas stoves, are prime spots for anything to catch fire. So add stove knob covers to protect your house from a potential fire. In addition, they stop little children from accidentally turning on burners.
Food Poisoning
There is evidence that 48 million individuals (one out of every six) get sick every year, and 128 thousand end up in the hospital. Food poisoning is more severe than you may imagine, and approximately 3,000 people pass away from it each year.
The following tips are the most important things you can do to lower your chance of getting food poisoning.
Beware of Raw Food
Raw meats need to be handled and washed with care to avoid pathogens. Keep raw meats apart from ready-to-eat meals. Instead of putting them together, use the bottom shelf in the fridge.
Remember to wash the veggies with vinegar water at room temperature to make them safe.
Fridge Hygiene
Check that the temperature in your fridge never rises over 5 degrees Celsius. Try to refrain from overloading the refrigerator and placing hot items in it since this may cause it to stop cooling properly.
Keep in mind that the danger zone is somewhere between 5 and 63 degrees Celsius. If you see your fridge operating at these temperatures, know that bacteria is already spreading.
Final Word
There is no priority higher than ensuring the well-being of one’s family. Of course, your role as the guardian of your family will be made simpler if you are aware of the safety measures you should take, but nobody can remain on watch all the time.
Investing in monitored home security systems provides you with the assistance you need to keep your loved ones safe. Most of today’s home security systems include home automation and remote access, allowing users to check in on their homes and ensure that everything is operating normally.
Check out our structural engineering service to assess the level of fire, explosion, ice damming, water damage, wind damage, snow load, vehicle collision, and ground movement/vibration damage.
Our experts also assess all factors which could lead to a slip and fall, including environmental, pedestrian contact surface, human factors, and behavioral factors. Don’t hesitate to ask our experts if you have any questions or worries left in your mind, and they’ll help make your house a safer place.
