Don’t Let Home Safety Fall By the Wayside – Use This DIY Checklist
Home safety should be everyone’s No. 1 priority. Yet the National Safety Council reports that preventable deaths from accidents in homes continue to rise every year. Many mishaps can be avoided by taking simple steps and making easy adjustments to your lifestyle. Home safety begins by taking stock of where hazards exist, realizing how injuries may happen in certain circumstances and taking common-sense precautions to prevent them.
Here’s a brief DIY checklist to keep home safety at the top of your agenda:
Electrical hazards
- Inspect all extension and appliance cords and replace any that may be frayed, cracked or have loose prongs.
- Limit your plug-ins to one plug per outlet. Don’t utilize cube-taps or overload outlets.
- Don’t route electrical cords beneath rugs or string them over nails, heaters or pipes.
- Replace appliances that overheat, overload circuits, short-circuit or smoke or spark.
Chemical hazards
- Store gasoline, acetone, benzene, paint thinner and any other flammable liquids in approved containers in a storage location separated from the home, and make sure the area is properly ventilated.
- When flammable chemicals must be kept in the house, utilize storage containers approved by testing facilities such as Underwriter’s Laboratories or Factory Mutual.
- Don’t use gasoline or other flammable chemicals to start fires or for cleaning indoors.
- Throw out rags, discarded papers, mattresses and any combustible materials.
- Keep clothes, curtains, paper materials and rags clear of gas appliances and heaters and electrical.
- Promptly dispose of grass cuttings, leaves, branches and weeds.
- Clean and verify the proper function of chimneys, flue pipes and gas ventilation pipes.
- Make sure portable heaters are on a stable, level surface and safely removed from high traffic areas. Don’t use standard extension cords with portable electric heaters.
At Sobieski Services, we make your home safety our top priority.
Our goal is to help educate our customers in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC & plumbing systems).
Image Credit: David Gallagher
