What Is a Healthy Home?

A healthy home is a house built to support homeowners’ health and wellness by incorporating easy-to-clean surfaces, indoor air filtration and purification, humidity control, and low-VOC paints and materials. It may also be located in a walkable community with indoor and outdoor recreation facilities such as walking trails, fitness centers, and or swimming pools.

What is a healthy home?

A healthy home is typically new residential construction built to support homeowners’ health and wellness by incorporating indoor air filtration and purification systems, humidity control, easy-to-clean surfaces, low-VOC paints and materials, and overall indoor air quality (IAQ). A healthy home is frequently an energy-efficient home. It may also be located in a walkable community with indoor and outdoor recreation facilities such as walking trails, fitness centers, and or swimming pools.

What makes a home healthy?

According to home builders and homeowners, the most important characteristic of a healthy home is indoor air quality, which relies air filtration, purification, and ventilation. Depending on the filter used, these systems can reduce or eliminate common allergens and pollutants such as dust, pollen, smog, and bacteria from the home and significantly improve indoor air quality.

Builders and homeowners also consider humidity control an essential component of healthy home systems. Excessively damp indoor air is not only uncomfortable for homeowners, but it can cause mold and mildew on the inside and outside of walls as well as around pipes and ductwork. (Air that is too dry can lead to problems too, from warped floors to respiratory health problems, according to healthy home experts.)

Both groups believe easy-to-clean surfaces belong in a healthy home. For floors, that means products such as hardwood, tile, linoleum, cork, or bamboo.

Builders also see low-VOC versions of paint, floor coverings, composite wood products, and other building materials as a principal component in a healthy home. VOCs, short for volatile organic compounds, are chemicals that are released into the air and can cause health problems in people with asthma or other respiratory issues.