By November 2020, wildfires had burned about 8.8 million acres of land in the U.S. Though dismal, these are not the only statistics that should worry you about fires. Some fires can happen in what people consider their safest spaces; the home. Other than fires, your home carries a risk of accidents. The U.K. reports about 6000 deaths annually from home accidents.

Appliance disposal by a well-equipped junk removal company might not be the first thing you will think of when you want to boost the safety of your home. However, appliances are not simple implements for easing your household chores and ensuring your indoor comfort in Sonoma or its surroundings in California. They can also be significant safety hazards when not correctly installed, misused, or left unrepaired after breaking down.

Below are the common risks you will expose yourself to when you leave appliances you no longer need or irreparable appliances in your home.

Fire

Electrical fires are the most common issues associated with malfunctioning appliances because most run on electricity. When not caught in time, a fire will destroy almost everything in its path and leave you with considerable losses. Though improper wiring is the common cause of electrical fires by appliances, a fire can also follow a malfunctioning device connected to electricity.

Some homeowners store their broken-down appliances in garages and other rooms out of their way in combination with their other unusable or occasionally used items. Even a small electric malfunction in these stored appliances can spark a huge fire when it ignites other items like sofas and beds in storage. Keeping appliances you no longer use, believing they pose no risk of fire, is a mistake that might lead to thousands of dollars lost in property damage, extensive burns, and even death.

Carbon monoxide poisoning

Venting your unused appliances might seem unnecessary, and it often is. Nonetheless, in some instances, clothes dryers, generators, gas fireplaces, furnaces, and gas space heaters might continue emitting carbon monoxide for a few days when not in use. Moreover, malfunctioning devices might also leak carbon monoxide into your home.

Without proper ventilation, more so in cold months when people close their windows and most places through which fresh air enters a home, carbon monoxide builds up in your interiors. Carbon monoxide poisoning leads to dizziness, weakness, chest pain, confusion, and headaches as the body’s oxygen concentration drops. It also places babies at high risk of developmental effects when exposed to high levels of carbon monoxide in the womb.

Crushing injuries

Most home appliances nowadays are bulky. With dwindling floor spaces, most homeowners will store the appliances they no longer use on top of each other to save on space. Though sometimes commendable, this places the pets and people in your house at risk of crushing injuries when the appliances move even slightly out of place.

Even something as seemingly small as a stored instant pot can cause significant crush injuries depending on the height of its fall. A report by CPSC (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission) attributed 459 deaths in kids aged a maximum of seventeen years to tip over of appliances from 2000-2018. Your desire to protect your kids at home is enough to call a company offering appliance removal services to prevent them from being a part of these gloomy statistics.

Electrocution

Any appliance powered by electricity carries the risk of delivering a fatal electric shock to members of your household. The highest risk lies in appliances with exposed cords like toasters and space heaters or the malfunctioning ones with broken or worn-out cables. In a home with kids and pets that can chew on exposed or damaged cords, appliance disposal is crucial to keep the wires out of the way of these curious creatures.

Chewing on the cords means exposing an electric current to fluid, something that leads to electrocution. The damaged cords can also be left lying around in water puddles and electrocute people or pets that step on them. Some of the long-term effects of electrocution include poor memory, headaches, limited range of motion, insomnia, depression, loss of balance, and uncoordinated movements. It is thus crucial to protect your loved ones from electrocution.

Foodborne illnesses

Even when a refrigerator malfunctions, some homeowners do not throw it out. They assume the refrigerator can still be helpful for the storage of food for short periods. Food stored in a malfunctioning fridge puts your household in danger of foodborne illnesses. This is because the closed environment of the malfunctioning refrigerator forms the perfect place for the proliferation of microorganisms that cause grave conditions like salmonellosis.

Tripping

When storing your broken-down appliances, putting the cords safely away might not be among the things you consider. Cords left in the way of people and pets become tripping hazards as they can snag their feet in them. Other than the risk of broken bones when people trip over cords, the cords might pull down an appliance and lead to a crushing injury. If you do not want to deal with constant fractures, appliances that you do not need should not be in your home.

Choosing to repair or replace a home appliance is often challenging. While you might want to save cash in repairing rather than replacing a device, this is not always the best choice. To protect your home’s occupants from the above risks, your first call should be to an appliance disposal company when repairing a device no longer makes economic sense.

The best appliance removal company for Sonoma residents and those around them is Junk King. The company has the best equipment and trained employees to remove heavy appliances from your home without damaging floors or walls. Furthermore, it has some of the most competitive prices and recycles about 60% of the appliances it takes, making it the ideal choice for eco-conscious homeowners. Contact Junk King Sonoma to remove the appliances you no longer need from your premises for the safest home.