It’s the mix that counts

Adults spend about 80 to 90 per­cent of their time indoors. Even more when you add the increased use of the home office these days. This makes it all the more import­ant to design the liv­ing envir­on­ment in such a way that it does not affect the health of the res­id­ents. There are many factors that con­trib­ute to a healthy home.

A well-known phe­nomen­on from advert­ising: Sweets are advert­ised as if they con­sist almost exclus­ively of vit­am­ins. In this way, con­sumers get the impres­sion that the con­sump­tion of these sweets is “good for their health”. As a mat­ter of fact, how­ever, the high con­sump­tion of sug­ar causes ser­i­ous health prob­lems.

This shows that the term “health” is used quite freely. The situ­ation is sim­il­ar for buzzwords like “healthy liv­ing” or “healthy home”, which are find­ing increas­ingly wide­spread use. In order to provide health-con­­s­cious house­build­ers and ren­ov­at­ors with more secur­ity and use­ful guid­ance, a clear defin­i­tion of the term is desir­able. “Healthy for liv­ing is everything that has a pos­it­ive influ­ence on a per­son’s well-being and health. It is there­fore import­ant to avoid not only pol­lut­ants and emis­sions, but also too little light and too much noise, because these can also make people ill,” explains Hart­mut Urbath, Chair­man of the Tech­nic­al Coun­cil of the GEV, the Asso­ci­ation for the Con­trol of Emis­sions in Products for Floor­ing Install­a­tion, Adhes­ives and Build­ing Mater­i­als. The GEV’s Tech­nic­al Coun­cil awards the EMICODE^® eco­l­a­bel to build­ing mater­i­als that have been tested and guar­an­tee the low­est pos­sible level of VOC emis­sions.

Wheth­er adhes­ives, win­dow seal­ing tapes or insu­la­tion boards – before use, all build­ing mater­i­als must have been tested for harm­ful emis­sions such as volat­ile organ­ic com­pounds (VOCs). Only products that fea­ture very low emis­sion val­ues are awar­ded the gen­er­ally recog­nized EMICODE^® qual­ity seal. EMICODE^®-cer­ti­fied products thus make an import­ant con­tri­bu­tion to the health of your home.

But there is more to a healthy liv­ing envir­on­ment. Due to the high insu­la­tion stand­ard today – wheth­er in new-builds or exist­ing build­ings with ret­ro­fit­ted insu­la­tion – there is hardly any air exchange through joints and cracks. The con­sequences for the room air are a high­er CO₂ con­tent and excess­ive humid­ity. In order to avoid fatigue, head­aches and ulti­mately mold growth, adequate vent­il­a­tion is there­fore abso­lutely essen­tial. This can be done manu­ally by open­ing the win­dows and cross-vent­il­at­ing the rooms sev­er­al times a day. Or by installing a con­trolled vent­il­a­tion sys­tem that ensures the auto­mat­ic exchange of air. Such a sys­tem extracts the stale air from inside the rooms and leads it out­side. By recov­er­ing the resid­ual heat in the exhaust air, the fresh air drawn in from out­side is pre­heated, thus increas­ing the energy effi­ciency of the build­ing. The fresh air is filtered through fine dust and pol­len fil­ters before releas­ing it to the inside – a bless­ing espe­cially for allergy suf­fer­ers. For exist­ing build­ings, there are also decent­ral­ized vent­il­a­tion units to avoid the sub­sequent install­a­tion of a pip­ing sys­tem.

Tap water in Ger­many is tested reg­u­larly and has a con­sist­ently high qual­ity that is suit­able for use as food. Provided the install­a­tion com­plies with the strict leg­al stand­ards. Do-it-your­­self drink­ing water fix­tures are there­fore not recom­men­ded. Fit­tings and pipes, wheth­er made of plastic, cop­per or stain­less steel, must not release dan­ger­ous amounts of harm­ful particles into the drink­ing water. For this reas­on, the install­a­tion work is best left to a pro­fes­sion­al plumb­er.

An adequate sup­ply of day­light has a pos­it­ive effect on our psyche and phys­ic­al well-being. Lack of nat­ur­al light leads to tired­ness and con­cen­tra­tion defi­cits. Espe­cially people who work in a home office should make sure that they do not sit in a dark corner but are sup­plied with plenty of day­light through suf­fi­ciently large win­dows or sky­lights.