How to Make Your Home Healthier at Any Budget with Dom Francks

All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life

In this episode of 'All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life,' Chris Hutchins interviews Dom Francks, a Stanford-trained engineer and General Man

Key takeaways

• Improving indoor environmental factors like air, water, light, and ventilation requires minimal ongoing effort but delivers lasting health benefits.
• Most homes have 5-8 areas for improvement, even if they don't have severe issues like mold or radon.

Main topics

• Indoor air quality and ventilation
• Water filtration for drinking and showering

Notable quotes

"You can fix [home environment issues] once, and they keep paying you back for years without you ever having to think about it again."

Conclusion

Creating a healthier home doesn't require massive investments or constant effort. By focusing

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Sleep, diet, and exercise all require you to make the right call over and over again, every single day, forever. But the air you breathe, the water you drink at home, the light you live under are different. You can fix them once, and they keep paying you back for years without you ever having to think about it again. The problem is there is just so much bad information in this category. So I wanted to look at what the data and science actually says. And to do that, I brought in Dom Franks, one of the few people I've met who I trust in this space. We go room by room through what actually matters in your home, what to prioritize at different budget levels, starting with just $500, what to do about your drinking and shower water, what really matters for indoor air quality, and a lot more. Along the way, I'll share what he found when he showed up at my house with a bunch of equipment and tested every single room, including something that happened in my bedroom every night that I was able to fix for free. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a comment or share it with a friend. And if you want to keep upgrading your money, points, and life, click follow or subscribe. Dom, I think we all know sleep, exercise, diet, they're Speaker 3 (1:10) really important to our health. Where does... What's going on inside of our homes stack up against those? Well, Speaker 1 (1:16) you're totally right. Sleep, diet, exercise, those are incredibly important things. And in no way are we going to diminish the importance of those things. However, those are things that you need to pay attention to every day. You need to pay attention to when am I going to sleep? What am I eating? How am I exercising? And yeah, you can put in place systems to make that easier, but that's a decision that you need to continue to be making day after day. However, a lot of the interventions and things that we're going to talk about that relate to creating a healthier home are decisions or actions that you take once and then those benefits compound for years and years into the future. So the cumulative decision fatigue or decisions required or behavioral change is essentially zero. And so we think these are really high leverage things to be able to do in addition to sleep, diet, exercise, all those other things. Speaker 3 (2:01) At one end of the extreme, like how unhealthy could a home be? Like, would that be the equivalent of not eating a vegetable or like eating 100 Big Macs every day for breakfast? You know, like I'm trying to think like from what you've seen, are there circumstances where this could be pretty bad and detrimental to your Speaker 1 (2:17) health? Absolutely. I think as you're thinking about the categorization there, there are absolutely homes out there that are going to have that 100 Big Macs every day if that were even possible. effect on your health. Things that would fall into that category are severe, really chronic mold exposure in a home. We'll talk a little bit more about mold and sort of what is appropriately stated out there about mold versus what is maybe a little bit overblown. But at the extreme, if you have a severe mold problem in your home, that could be causing a lot of problematic health issues. There's also pieces around carbon monoxide issues. Radon can be a big problem. Lead in your paint, as well as other areas in the home, as well as severely polluted air, things like that. Those issues, I would say, are rare, but not unheard of. We have certainly found homes that have severe acute health issues that could be created from what's in the home. And then there's a very, very, very big spectrum down to, okay, maybe I should be eating slightly more vegetables. And what we found in testing hundreds of homes at Lightwork is that every home has areas for improvement. Some start from a healthier baseline than others. And it also is dependent on particular people's sensitivity and how they feel in their home. But it certainly can be quite bad. But the majority of the time, there are significant areas for improvement. And what do you hear from people that you've worked with as the result of that improvement? Is it better sleep? Is it more energy? Yeah, we get a few different things. We focus a lot of our energy, not all of it, but a lot of our energy on the sleep environment. And we have absolutely had clients that have come back to us saying something like, after you took care of some of these issues in my sleep environment, I'm sleeping through the night for the first time in six or seven years. And I've spent thousands of dollars on sleep therapy. and all these other issues and taking meds and all these problems. And whatever you folks changed in my environment, whether it was light or air, or we changed a lot of things in this person's environment, so it's hard to identify exactly what it was, was extremely beneficial for their sleep. We also hear from folks around the benefit that they feel from other issues, particularly lighting. I think that we often spend times, especially in the time that we do a lot of our work in, under lighting environments that are really harsh, can be very unhealthy, at the very least just unpleasant to be in, but can also have negative impacts on our cognition and our performance. So we hear a lot of people reporting that they feel less tired at the end of the workday. They feel a little bit more creative and find that their ability to stay focused is a little bit easier. So there's a number of acute benefits that we see. folks come back with. And that's not even to mention the reduction in likelihood of long-term disease that is associated with just removing a number of these contaminants that you're exposed to on a day-to-day basis. Speaker 3 (4:51) Yeah. And some of those things, I think we just still don't know what the impact is. Like PFAS in the water. I was talking with a UCSF scientist talking about ways to get the PFAS out of our body. And it's actually, there's some promising research there. I was like, we don't know how bad this is, but like, it can't be Speaker 1 (5:05) good. Yeah. You're touching on a great. Point there, Chris. Part of the way that I like to think about this is through the lens of the precautionary principle. So rather than putting the burden of proof for every new chemical or compound or exposure to us, for the scientific community to prove that there is an issue before it's removed from our environment, I like to think about placing the burden of proof on the scientific community to demonstrate safety. So in the example of PFAS, Yes, it's absolutely true that we don't know the specifics of the dose and the response and how problematic for human health over a long-term time horizon specific quantities of PFAS in water are going to be. However, we don't need that level of data to decide for individuals. This is different from regulatory decisions. But for individuals, we don't need that level of data for me to decide, hey, I want to try to limit the amount of PFAS that's in my water. And that general approach informs a lot of the way that I think about creating healthy environments and healthy homes. I'm Speaker 3 (6:07) curious where I stack rank in this. You came, you brought all kinds of equipment and we did this for my house. We have this report. And I generally thought, despite having an older home, that like we were in great shape. I got a couple of air purifiers. There was a window of time where I thought we had filtered water, but it turns out we don't. There is a filter under the sink, but it goes somewhere else. How often? Are you finding homes where there's no issues versus some issues? Like what's the distribution of opportunities for Speaker 1 (6:37) improvement? Absolutely. So in your home, I found some opportunities for improvement, but overall your home was on the healthier side. So no massive red flags as far as we could tell. However, as you saw in the report, there's definitely some things that I would suggest you take a second look at and improve. Yeah, I mean, we're definitely Speaker 3 (6:53) already planning on doing those. So if we're... slightly in the good camp. Are most people there or like what's the, you know, not crazy bad need to move out and solve things, but what is the average home like? I'd Speaker 1 (7:07) say the average home does not have a massive red flag issue. I find that in about 20 to 25 % of the homes that I test that there is a severe problem that really needs immediate action. But the average home has five to eight issues. where immediate action is going to lead to an immediate felt impact for the folks that live there, along with a decreased risk of long-term disease. And examples would be decreasing particulate matter concentration in the air, improving your lighting, and improving the filtration in your water, both from a drinking water and a shower water perspective. Speaker 3 (7:43) Yeah, we're going to get into tactics, but I don't want people to think that finding things in your home is something that's going to cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to remedy. And I also don't want people to think that this is something that can only be improved. All these issues in your home are things you can only solve if you have a full home assessment, right? Like I do think, you know, I'm very fortunate that that happened and we got to look at that, but give people a little bit of a preview of where we might go so they know what they're going to walk away with because... Not everyone's going to have the time, space, energy to have a full home assessment, but certainly might want to improve things, maybe not on a huge budget. Speaker 1 (8:25) Absolutely. And we're going to walk through the exact things that I would recommend for folks at different levels of spend. But broadly, yes, there are many elements of creating a healthier home that don't involve a huge money expenditure and also don't involve a lot of complicated changes to your home. This can be very straightforward. This can be very effective and it can be something that you could take action on later today. Speaker 3 (8:47) I think we're going to put a link in the show notes to something that people can read through that you guys have put together that is not require buying Speaker 1 (8:55) anything right away just to kind of start reviewing. Absolutely. Yeah, we're going to lay it out for folks. So excited to get more into the details here on the show, but no need to take any notes. We've got some put together for you that should walk through this. I make it really simple to figure out what actions to take. Speaker 3 (9:09) Cool. You mentioned that sleep is something that people get a lot of benefit from and something, you know, at least one of the things you target. Let's kind of walk through sleeping area, maybe move to a living area, cooking area and working and kind of walk through the house at the kinds of things you're looking at and how when people at home are thinking about them, how they can start to evaluate them themselves or what kinds of things might need some more specialized testing. So let's start in the bedroom and feel free. to share as much as you want of the data you saw in our home as an example or Speaker 1 (9:42) any other data. So we're looking at four main things in the air quality in any room, but we're focused on the bedroom here. So first is particulate matter. There've been a lot of wildfires recently. And so this is any particulate that's in the air. So that's smoke, dust, pollen, mold spores, and other particulates. So when you hear about an AQI number, that is related to the particulate matter. we want to make sure that your particular matter concentrations are as low as possible because elevated particular matter can disrupt sleep so we'll get a little bit more into some actions you can take to address that we're also looking at ventilation which co2 is the best proxy for ventilation you might have heard things like oh you want to keep your co2 below a thousand parts per million or something like that it's probably not the co2 specifically that is causing the health impacts but it is a good proxy for how ventilated the room is we're also looking at humidity what we're focused on with humidity is both there is a range between 35 to 55 % that most people find most comfortable, but also we want to keep humidity below 50 % to prevent any problematic mold growth. And we'll get into mold a little bit more in a second. And then finally, we're looking at chemical presence. And so that's volatile organic compounds that can come from paint, furniture, other sources in the house. And so we want to make sure that those levels are low as well. All of those things with the potential exception of humidity, although extremes of humidity can affect sleep, all those things can affect your sleep. And so I would recommend putting measures in place or at least getting some data on how to make sure that your sleep environment doesn't have any problematic areas in any of those four areas. And it's not just sleep. I Speaker 3 (11:09) assume I remember when we had lots of wildfires breathing a bunch of smoke-filled air, or we had an appliance fire that basically was like burnt plastic in our house. So a lot of VOCs like... Yeah, I might not sleep well, but it's also probably not good for our health, right? Speaker 1 (11:25) Yes, absolutely. You know, particulate matter is a big problem in any area of Speaker 3 (11:29) the Speaker 1 (11:29) home. If I was going to focus on one room to try to address wildfire smoke or dust or something like that, I would focus on the bedroom. However, anytime that you're cooking food on a stove, whether you have a gas stove or an electric stove, that food is going to put particulates into the air. This is something that we see with everyone. If you have maybe an air purifier, an air quality monitor that you have anywhere near the kitchen. When you're cooking, oftentimes they're color-coded from blue to red. Almost always that air quality monitor is going to go to red for about a half an hour after you cook. So we would recommend making sure that you're using your ventilation hood as another thing that's really important in the kitchen. But yeah, it's not just focused on where you're sleeping, but particular matters, something that we're concerned about and want to make sure we address throughout the rest of the house. This episode is Speaker 2 (12:12) brought to you by Gusto. I've been building companies for a long time, and for the last decade, I've run every single one of them on Gusto. Payroll, taxes, onboarding, it all just happens. That's the part I'd tell another business owner. It's not that these things stop mattering. It's that they stop being something you have to chase down. Gusto is online payroll and benefit software built for small businesses. It's all-in-one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use, so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Automatic payroll tax filing, direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, 401k. And it is quick to switch since you just transfer your existing data and you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. There's a good reason that Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026 and is trusted by over 500,000 small businesses. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash all the hacks and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash all the hacks. One more time, gusto.com slash all the hacks. This episode is brought to you by WhisperFlow. You know that moment when you've got 30 seconds, you're between meetings or waiting in line, and there's a message you've been meaning to send, but it'd take too long to type, so you just push it off again? That's where WhisperFlow has really changed things. I just talk for about 20 seconds, and it shows up written out, cleaned up, and in whatever app I'm already in on my phone or computer. Two reasons it works. First, talking is faster than typing, not just in words per minute, but because typing makes me want to edit as I go and talking lets me just flow. And second, this isn't Siri or your phone's built-in dictation. WhisperFlow cleans up the filler words, gets coworkers' names right, formats lists as lists, code as code. I can ramble and it gives me clean text. The other thing I didn't expect, my AI prompts get noticeably better once I started talking to them because I started. including context, I'd never bother to type. Whisperflow works anywhere you'd type, Gmail, Slack, Notion, Cursor, on Mac, Windows, and iPhone. Try it free at whisperflow.ai slash allthehacks. That's whisperflow.ai slash allthehacks. Links in the description. Speaker 3 (14:37) And for Speaker 2 (14:38) someone who doesn't have Speaker 3 (14:39) any of these devices testing your indoor air quality, I know from having to search, there are hundreds. of products that will give you some gauge of your air quality. I remember in my search, there were two that popped up and I'm curious what you think. So I remember it was like air things had one that people liked and then air gradient had one that nerds liked because it was like a little more DIY-y in terms of how Speaker 1 (15:07) it works. Yeah, absolutely. I would say blanket. most of them do a pretty good job. The one that I have used the most is the Atmo Cube, which is more of a commercial sensor. There's reasons that we like that more, but for most people going from no air quality monitor to any of these consumer monitors is gonna be a benefit. You know, not to get too into the details, but a lot of the sensors in the consumer monitors aren't 100 % accurate, but they will generally be accurate for monitoring trends. So I wouldn't trust the absolute number. 100 % on any of those, but most of those monitors are going to be effective in telling you, did I have a three X increase in my particulate count from one day to another? And same for any of the other things that they measure. But Speaker 3 (15:51) if I want to know, like, do I have unhealthy air or do I have high humidity, you know, not trends, just baseline, they might not be perfect at is my humidity actually 40 or 43, but it's probably not going to show 40 when it's Speaker 1 (16:05) 90. Yes. I mean, any sensor can have an error, but I would definitely recommend as a place to start getting one of those consumer air quality monitors is a great investment. And, you know, if you see something that's super anomalous, then know that sensors are imperfect, but generally they're pretty good. Speaker 3 (16:19) Okay. So that's what we're checking for in the Speaker 1 (16:22) bedroom. And what happens if we find those things? Depends what you find. So I'll walk through those four things, filtration, ventilation, humidity, chemical exposure, filtration. The simplest solution is to install. standalone air purifiers. At the base level,