Nearly every home in America has a smoke alarm mounted somewhere on a ceiling or hallway wall. According to the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), 99 percent of U.S. homes have at least one installed, which sounds like a safety problem already solved. But the same research found that roughly a third of people never … Read more
More than 500,000 people are treated for ladder-related injuries in the United States every year, and more than 300 of them die, according to Consumer Product Safety Commission and CDC figures compiled by the American Ladder Institute for its national safety campaign. That death toll is worth sitting with for a second, because a ladder … Read more
Somewhere on a porch near you, a box is sitting in plain sight right now, and the odds that it stays there until you get home are worse than you’d think. According to home security data compiled by SafeHome.org, there were roughly 119 million reported package thefts in a recent year, which works out to … Read more
Homeowners insurance claims data tells the same story every single year, and it has almost nothing to do with the week a blizzard actually hits. Water damage and freezing claims averaged $13,954 per claim between 2018 and 2022, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and that category now makes up more than a quarter of … Read more
Los Angeles claimed the top spot on Orkin’s 2025 list of the nation’s rattiest cities, edging out Chicago and New York for a title nobody wants. On the East Coast, Ehrlich’s own rankings put Philadelphia at the very top of its list of the most rodent-infested metro areas in the region. Marc Potzler, a board-certified … Read more
Philadelphia is once again sitting at the top of a list nobody wants to top. New data pulled straight from actual pest-control service visits — not opinion surveys, not guesswork — shows exactly where bed bug treatments spiked hardest across the country last year, and the pattern is worth paying attention to whether you live … Read more
Oregon just did something it has never done before in the nearly five-decade history of United Van Lines’ annual movers study: it became the single most popular destination in the country, with 65% of all moves involving the state last year being people arriving rather than leaving, according to the mover’s 49th annual National Movers … Read more
Americans wasted about 70 million tons of food in 2024, worth roughly $380 billion that never made it from the store or the garden into anyone’s actual meal, according to ReFED’s 2026 U.S. Food Waste Report, the most comprehensive national accounting of what the country throws away and why. Spread across every person in the … Read more
Every year, grills spark an estimated 10,600 home fires across the United States, according to the National Fire Protection Association’s most recent home grill fires report. That number includes 4,900 structure fires and 5,700 outdoor fires each year, together responsible for 10 civilian deaths, 160 injuries, and $149 million in direct property damage annually. And … Read more
Here’s a number that stops most homeowners cold: between 2000 and 2008, at least 30 people died as a direct result of deck collapses in the United States, and more than 75 percent of everyone standing on a deck when it gave way was hurt or killed in the fall, according to forensic engineering data … Read more