5 Plumbing Maintenance Tips to
Prepare Your Home for the Summer
By Ayla Anderson
Your home’s plumbing is the element of the household that affects the functionality of the entire property. If you have a backyard garden, it is responsible for your irrigation system. Indoors, it’s the element that your kitchen and bathroom can’t do without. Still, the only situation in which this plumbing system does its job is if it’s in a decent condition. Therefore, here are the top five plumbing maintenance tasks to prepare your home for the summer.
1. Change your habits
One of the biggest mistakes that cause the majority of plumbing problems in your household is caused by poor lifestyle habits. The single biggest one, as far as your plumbing is concerned, is definitely the habit of flushing random things down your toilet. Food scraps cause clogging but grease, oil and fats tend to harden when cooled down. This causes them to act as a mortar for any type of debris that will pass these pipes in the future. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is how the clogs are made.
2. Keep Your Drainage System Clean and Clear
Another thing you need to take into consideration is your drainage system. Summer is the time for the maintenance of your gutters, seeing as how it’s just before autumn (the season that causes the most debris). In order to ensure that your guttering system can take it all, make sure to clean it somewhere near the end of the season. Also, check if your downspout system and your drainage are functional, as well.
3. Prepare for a quick reaction
Inspecting your home’s plumbing is a necessary task that a lot of people prefer to ignore. Instead, these people wait for a problem to occur before they react, which is always a costly way of handling problems. The single biggest issue here lies in the fact that you’re acting reactively instead of proactively. Even if that were the case, when being reactive, timing is of the essence. This is why you need emergency Canberra plumbers on speed dial. Other than this, you also need to locate the main water valve so that you can buy yourself some reaction time.
4. Inspect your water bill
Your water bill can give you a hint if there’s anything wrong with your plumbing system. Some leaks, especially if they’re at the dripping intensity, are hard to notice. You would have to sit in front of the pipe and watch it for hours in order to notice several drops but this doesn’t mean that the difference isn’t noticeable on your water bill. Ideally, you would keep all the records of your last year’s bills and compare this month’s bill with the one from the same month last year.
5. Check your outdoor plumbing
When it comes to winterizing your plumbing, you would most probably want to do it in late autumn; however, there’s nothing wrong with taking some early steps. First, you want to check if your backyard irrigation system is functioning the way it should. Second, you want to make sure that all your fixtures are properly installed and working. During the summer (even late summer), there might be a lack of atmospheric moisture, which is why your garden may heavily depend on these outdoor fixtures.
In conclusion
As you can see, summer is a relatively safe part of the year for your plumbing. This is exactly why you need to schedule the vast majority of these maintenance tasks for the summer. Later on, you will thank yourself for being vigilant with property maintenance during the summer months. Just keep in mind that this is not something you do only once. It’s supposed to be a continuous process that you will repeat every year.
About the Author:Ayla Anderson is an avid reader and an enthusiastic blogger who writes articles on home improvement, business, Family and beauty. She is also an MBA student who spends much of her time giving advice to newly small businesses on how to grow their businesses. You can follow Ayla on Twitter.
