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On Tuesday I told the story of how this “healthy home” came to be: 15+ years of researching my way through mystery symptoms, one category at a time, food to products to fabrics to the house itself, running alongside 15 years of building new construction rental houses. The two finally converged when we found a piece of land at the beach and got the chance to build the good decisions into the structure instead of patching them on top. That post is here, and it’s free. This is Part 2 where I share every brand and all the details. We’ll start first with the unique thing we did in three of the rooms.
The three rooms
There was something unusual we did, and the builder told me it was the first time he’d ever heard of it. Midway through the build I was actively debating whether the on-site EMF testing was worth it, or whether we should just do the basic protections and call it a day. Zack from The Purified Home, the consultant we hired, is based in California, but he happened to be in South Carolina for a family trip and was willing to drive a few hours to test our house without us paying his travel expenses, so because of that we decided to go for it.
So, during construction, before the house even had power, he walked it with an EMF meter, room by room. He was testing four things: electric fields, magnetic fields, dirty electricity, and radio frequency. We were hopeful that everything out by the ocean would come back “clean,” but there were a few hiccups.
The city water tower a couple of miles away carries cell antennas, and the bedrooms facing it read many times higher than the rooms on the other side of the house. It was the same house on the same day, thirty feet apart, but now we had the data.
Without testing, you’d never pick those rooms out as different. There’s no sound, no light, nothing you can feel. It’s just a number on a meter in a room that looks exactly like the one next to it.
Here’s what we did about it - I’m giving you the whole recipe - because when I first went looking for this information it was scattered across consultant sites and one YouTube video and that made it feel overwhelming.
To fix the issue we didn’t have to do something to the whole house, and we didn’t even have to do something to the whole rooms. The report called for EMF shielding paint on the specific walls facing the tower, and that’s what we did. We focused on the bunk room, the mini master, and the master bedroom, and only on the walls that actually face the tower.
The paint we used was Safe and Sound RF-ECO 5G Shielding Paint from Safe Living Technologies. It’s technically a primer, with carbon and graphene in it, and it goes on black, then you topcoat it with the finish paint and color of your choice. But there’s something I didn’t know upfront and that is that the paint alone does nothing. It only works when it’s grounded. So after the first coat, a run of conductive foil tape went directly on top of the painted surface (usually behind the baseboard, or about an inch above it so it’s hidden), up to a small metal grounding plate screwed to the wall, and the plate got wired into a grounded outlet. Zack’s instructions called for one grounding plate per painted wall, so our five painted walls took five plates. Then came a second coat of the shielding paint, and then our normal finish color on top. You may need a coat of white primer first if you’re going light, since the shielding coat does dry black.
You’ll need the paint, plus a grounding cable, grounding tape, and a grounding plate kit for each room. The paint and tape are also on Amazon at the same price.
When you stand in those rooms today, you cannot tell that there is anything different about them. The walls look like every other wall in the house.
If you want the exact application steps our consultant wrote out for the painter and electrician, they’re below with the rest of the spec.
What’s below
Below the paywall are the actual specs including the brands we used, the numbers, the maintenance schedule, and a downloadable checklist you can hand to a builder or a sub or work through on your own.
The sections follow the same order as Tuesday’s post, so you can read them side by side. Tuesday has the why for each category, and this has the exact what.
If you’re building or renovating, save yourself a lot of research and read this first.