Tag Archives: remote control

First Aid Safety, General Safety Issues, Health Issues

NINE WAYS TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF GERMS IN THE HOME (GUEST POST)

 Submitted by Jacqui Barrie of AupairJobs.com

In a house with more than one child, keeping a viral or bacterial illness confined solely to the child originally infected can mean the difference between caring for one sick child and several. The process can also be a quite challenging one, due to the fact that even unwell children tend to be very mobile and aren’t always sure how they should manage their symptoms in such a way that limits contagion. In the interest of containing the spread of illnesses and preventing transmission between siblings and relatives, here are nine tips and tricks that may help you ensure the good health of the rest of the family.

  1. Practice Sanitary Habits All The Time – By the time that your child is exhibiting symptoms of most common illnesses, he’s been contagious for a significant amount of time. Because an incubation period can be long enough to create a false sense of security, it’s a good idea to practice sanitary habits as much as possible, stepping your efforts up during the colder months.
  2. Enforce a Strict Hand Washing Policy – While it may seem painfully obvious, making sure that kids wash their hands regularly and properly is one of the most effective means of reducing the spread of any bacteria or viruses that cause illness. Insisting that your kids wash their hands often and well, especially when a member of the family is ill, can help to keep everyone else healthy.  Keep a bottle ofhand sanitizer near the one who is sick, and remind him to use if often.
  3. Teach Kids to Sneeze or Cough into Their Elbows – Teaching your child to cover his mouth when he sneezes or coughs might be polite thing to do, but it’s ultimately useless if he does so and then forgets to wash his hands. Every surface he touches after a sneeze could end up coated in germs, so it’s best to teach your children to sneeze into the crook of their elbow, where contact with people and surfaces is less likely.
  4. Sanitize Shared Toys – Sanitizing toys that a sick child shares with healthy siblings in a solution of bleach and water can kill any lingering germs that may be lurking on them. It’s wise to get into the habit of regularly sanitizing toys during cold and flu season, even when everyone in the family is healthy, to prevent contagion before it starts.
  5. Wipe Down Common Surfaces – When a sick child lounges on the couch and channel surfs all day, he’s almost certainly transferring germs from his hands to the remote. Wiping down common surfaces and items that you know a sick child has been handling with antibacterial wipes can help to kill germs before healthy children pick them up.
  6. Pay Extra Attention to Bathroom Surfaces – Illnesses with gastrointestinal symptoms may leave your bathroom laden with viruses and harmful bacteria, while cold and flu symptoms can introduce germs to faucet and toilet handles. Make a point of paying extra attention to the surfaces in a bathroom, especially a shared one, when one child is sick and his siblings aren’t showing any signs of illness.
  7. Make Sure Tissues Are Thrown Away – Suffering from a runny nose on top of a host of other symptoms not only generates a pile of tissues, but also might cause even a normally fastidious child to leave those germ-filled tissues lying around. Contact with one of those tissues is a surefire way of transmitting illness, so make sure that your little one has a wastebasket nearby for his discarded tissues.
  8. Keep Kids Apart as Much as Possible – While it simply isn’t feasible to completely quarantine a sick child by exiling him to the solitude of his bedroom for the duration of his illness, it is a good idea to limit the amount of contact that your healthy children have with a sick one to minimize the risk of contagion.
  9. Sleepovers For Siblings That Share a Room – If your sick child shares his bedroom with a healthy sibling, it might be wise to consider putting your healthy child up in the guest room or your own bedroom until he’s feeling better.

While it’s certainly desirable to contain an illness to as few members of the family as possible, doing so may simply be out of your control. Managing to wipe every surface a sick child touches before it comes into contact with a healthy sibling simply isn’t feasible, so it’s wise not to be too hard on yourself if your other children do begin showing symptoms of illness.

General Safety Issues

HOME SECURITY V.S. HOME AUTOMATION (GUEST POST)

There is a school of thought that suggests home security to protect against burglars, fires, and any other unforeseen catastrophe is more attractive to older homeowners. This is because it appeals to their desire to protect their investments in expensive electronics, computers, guns, art, and coins, as well as the house itself. 

This same school of thought says that home automation appeals to a younger, perhaps hipper, crowd because of its focus on cool technology, accessible from smart-phones and designed to control home theater equipment, automatic door and window locks, and interior and exterior lighting. 

Sage wisdom suggests that neither way of thinking about home security and home automation has to be entirely right, or entirely wrong. There isn’t a one-size fits all stance when it comes to these two enhancements.

 While it’s true that the desire to protect your home, belongings, and family against potential disaster does increase with age, this isn’t the only factor that drives the desire to provide a safer home. Increased crime in the area, an overall sense of feeling secure, and a desire for reduced home insurance premiums hits home with all age groups. 

The same holds true for home automation. Gadgets and leading-edge technology may indeed be a younger person’s game, as they say, but not all home automation has to be the “gee whiz” kind that ultimately could take longer to setup and execute than the amount of time it saves. Optimizing central heating and air, remotely turning lights off and on, and even controlling your automatic sprinkler system are all forms of home automation that don’t necessarily appeal to just one age group. 

So, what exactly is http://www.yourlocalsecurity.com/security-tips/? In short, it’s a means of checks and balances, assisted by modern technology, to protect your  home, possessions, and family against things like:

  •          Home invasion
  •          Theft and burglary
  •          Fire, flood, and burst pipes
  •          Carbon monoxide poisoning 

With the assistance of monitored home security equipment, homeowners can protect against these things though the use of:

  •          Door and window sensors
  •          Motion detectors
  •          Medical pendants (panic buttons)
  •          Wireless remotes controls to arm and disarm security systems
  •          Fire and smoke detectors
  •          Carbon monoxide sensors
  •          Wireless cameras
  •          Flood detectors
  •          Control Panels with two-way hands-free communication
  •          Interior and exterior lighting 

In short, protecting your with these methods, are all in the realm of home security. 

So, how does home automation differ? In a nutshell, home automation is just as it suggests. Electronic control systems help homeowners automate certain tasks, and give them to power to control these things in ways that make sense to them, such as:·         Computer-based applications

  •          Third-party website access
  •          Laptop computers
  •          Smartphones, PDAs, and iPads 

Need to turn on some exterior lighting because you’ll be returning home after dark? You can do this with home automation. Through any number of home automation solutions, such functionality is readily available on most of the portable devices people carry today, and is as simple as launching any other interactive app on your smartphone or desktop computer. 

Home automation can also provide homeowners with such solutions as:

  •          Remote control of video surveillance equipment
  •          Remote control of automatic door and window locks
  •          Turning appliances on and off
  •          Optimization of central heating and air equipment
  •          Control over interior and exterior lights
  •          Remote management of Digital Video Recorders and other electronics 

For homeowners looking to have a little more control over certain electronic and electrical systems in their homes, then look no further than the wide range of home automation solutions provided by an ever-evolving industry. 

By Ryan Avila,