How To Keep A Healthy Home [Part 1]

In modern society, we are constantly bombarded with external stressors that we have learned to live with: Pollution in the air, chlorinated water, constant exposure to light and the constant electromagnetic waves that pass through the air. Our environment has drastically changed from what we once knew it to be. When we think of our homes we think of it as a place to rest and somewhere we can can put our feet up. But have you ever thought about the environmental stress that we have in our home? I had the pleasure of interviewing Zack Pelzel from Purified Home, a home improvement specialist that focuses on making your home closer to nature. Zack has great insights and tips on how to make your home into a more relaxing space.

Purified Home addresses the current state of your home by identifying the stressors and toxins that exist in the home. The philosophy of purified home is based on the 4 pillars. The 4 pillars are: Water, Air Quality, Light, Water, and Electricity/EMF’s. This structure helps find the imbalances in your home and locates what needs to be addressed. Check out the interview below!

M: Why did you get into this business and what inspired you to start Purified Home?

Wonderful, that’s a great question. There are couple things that served as an impetus for Purified Home. I  have an extensive background in the building industry, since I was like 17 or 18 I’ve been working on and off with general contractors and builders. And have always been an avid tinkerer myself, doing handy work and general contracting and things like that. So I was in a lot of homes.

Then after about age 35, I started Chinese medicine school and was treating patients, and patient after patient was coming in and they would get better temporarily, but you know something was still missing. I would prescribe them herbs and give them acupuncture treatments and they get better for a couples days. One day I was doing handy man work in the morning, and then treating patients in the afternoon and it just dawned on me. It was like a light bulb went off. These people are always reacting to their external environment, so I can treat them and prescribe herbs to them until I’m blue in the face, but unless their home environment supported the treatment that we were doing in the clinic, then they would always be in that reactionary or flight or fight response in their home.

So the whole premise of Purified Home is to create the foundation for optimal health. Which is to have that living environment, where your body can literally rest and digest and heal from the exposure of the elements throughout the day, both mentally emotionally physically and spiritually. And at that point the home becomes a sanctuary, you treat it like you treat a church or like a museum with that ultimate respect.

M: That’s amazing. So what is your philosophy on Purified Home?

You know, after years of looking at all the things that you are exposed to in the home environment, I had to reflect back on a 19 day backpacking trip I did solo, in the John Muir wilderness. I did the John Muir trail — that was when I was 37 — and I spent about 19 days there by myself, and something really interesting happened. When you are out there that long, you start to cycle through earth’s natural cycles, so you start to wake up with the sun and you start to go to sleep with the sun. You are filtering water out of mountain streams and so the water is just teeming, it’s alive. It’s a natural electrical environment — you’re just harmonizing with earths’ natural electrical magnetic field. Which is the Schumann Resonance. Lastly, you are breathing air that is literally being filtered by hundreds of thousands of trees all around you.

I use that as my model. We want to get the home as close to nature as possible, and what we call them is the four pillars. The four pillars are air quality, which is inclusive of not just air particulate matter, but ventilation and adequate levels of oxygen in the home, low levels of carbon dioxide in the home and ion concentration. And it gets really quite specific, so with air quality we think of air particulate matter, but we also need to think about ventilation and also humidity. The second pillar would be water — we bathe in, we shower in, we do dishes in, we wash our clothes in, and then all the water we drink, that we ingest. We want to get that as close to nature as possible. We want a high mineral content. We don’t need any of these additives or disinfectants that we add to get the water clean, like chlorine and ammonia.

M: What about electricity?

So the third one was the light. You know, the sun — sunlight. We want to get as close to the sun as we possibly can – to natural lighting. Everyone has these compact fluorescent bulbs. Those things turn on and off 120 times every second. So it’s a flicker – our eyes are fatiguing and stimulating.

And then lastly is a natural electrical environment — what some people are calling EMF (electro-magnetic frequencies). Well, the home is anything but natural now, because of all the gadgets that we bring in. There’s 3 fields that we test for, we test for electric fields that exist anywhere you have something plugged in, whether the device is on or off. You have magnetic fields, which anytime there is current flowing along a wire, it produces a magnetic field. And then lastly there is wireless technologies — gaming consoles and routers and all that stuff. So that’s the philosophy of the four pillars.

M: So basically you are trying to create a state of a natural environment, kind of like the way people used to live? In a sense, there is less stress because when you are outside you have environmental stress like pollution and traffic.  So you want to make your home as natural as possible.

A sanctuary is kind of what keeps popping up into my head. It’s the only environment that we can control. When you step outside you get exposed to the elements. But your home is your home. You can control that. So that is the core philosophy — being able to control that home environment.

M: That’s very cool.  So you have these 4 pillars, what do you think is the most important thing that people can do to change their home? What is that one thing that you would recommend they do in order to purify their home?

Well, since there are four pillars, it’s a truly holistic approach. They are all important. The simple answer is that they are all important. What I recommend to people is to look at the four pillars and  find out which one resonates you with you the strongest. If it’s water, we want to look at shower filtration — we want to look at whole house water filtration. Electricity, light, air — they are all important so you can’t just isolate one.

I would say right now the state that most homes are in, the electrical pollution is probably number one, because these are all unnatural frequencies that we are bringing into the home. They don’t exist in nature at these concentrations. So the EMF stuff — again electromagnetic fields, magnetic fields, radio fields — are all disruptive to homeostasis and balance of the body. It’s like someones is tapping you on the shoulder all day long. It’s not going to kill you, but its going to irritate you and put you in a stress response.

In the next post, we’ll continue with Zack on simple ways to keep the home environment cleaner. You can find out more about Zack and the Purified Home here.