Water damage is a hassle. You don't want to blow your budget on repairs and spend your summer worrying about finances! Read the following to learn more about simple steps you can follow to keep your house safe from water damage and your wallets flush with money to spend!
Get Outside
- Hoses: A super easy thing you can do today that will prevent water damage tomorrow is to disconnect hoses when not in use. Standing water can pool at the base of the house causing unnecessary and unavoidable damage to your home. If you aren't using it, empty out that hose!
- Pipe Lines: You need to become intimately familiar with the layout of your house. Find out where all your utility pipes are located and ensure that your landscaping isn't obscuring or overtaking them. While your yard looks luscious and beautiful when it's overgrown, your pipes don't appreciate it. Roots can crowd and strangle your pipes causing severe damage and sometimes breaking them entirely. Try to keep your yard well pruned or eliminate landscaping around utility pipes.
- Gutters: In order for your gutters to do their job, you have to help them out a little bit. Cleaning out your gutters roughly twice a year helps to prevent standing water, which can damage the gutters and even your roof! Not only that, but too much gunk in the gutter can cause overflow leading to puddling at the base of your house. This can lead to expensive foundation problems. Incurring the small cost of having the gutters cleaned, or putting the time in to clean them yourself, twice a year is much more manageable and less anxiety inducing than breaking the bank over foundation repairs.
Know the Main
Do you know where your water main is? The water main is responsible for bringing water into your house. If you're away for an extended period of time, do you really need water pouring into your house and potentially leaking out of faucets? No, you don't. You can shut off the main when you're away to banish any possibility of leaks in your absence!
Be Proactive
It's easy to dismiss a small water spot here or there and tell yourself that you'll get around to addressing that issue later but waiting will make the problem worse. Water damage leads to mold, dry rot and other unpleasant and expensive problems that are totally unavoidable! Call a professional at the first sight of water damage to nip that problem in the bud before it spirals out of control.
Water Detection Devices
These little machines are your saving grace. You more than likely have smoke detectors in your house that are there to monitor your living situation and ensure that you are safe in your home. Water detection devices do the very same thing! They are able to detect minimal levels of moisture and alert you to the presence of slow leaks that often go unnoticed until they're a bigger problem. Place these devices near water heaters, toilets, washing machines and dishwashers so that they can detect a problem before it's a disaster and you can keep your home safe from damage!
