Prevent Plumbing Disasters While You’re Away
Summer is here! The last thing you want to deal with when you’re on vacation is trying to find a plumbing company to come and fix a plumbing disaster at your house—a house you’re not even in! You can avoid this nightmare scenario by checking a few things in your home before you hit the holiday road. Here’s how to best prepare for your vacation in order to make sure nothing disastrous happens while you’re away.
Check The Laundry Area
In your laundry room, turn off both the cold and hot water valves that supply water to the washing machine. These are one of the most notorious places in the home for a catastrophic failure to occur, spilling as much as five gallons a minute into your home when you’re not around to do anything about it. Just imagine how much water can rush out before a plumbing company can get there to fix it. That’s a scenario to avoid!
Check The Outside Spigots
As with the hoses that supply your washing machine, you should shut off the water to your outside spigots as well. Turn them off completely and also disconnect all the hoses you have outside.
The Water Heater
There’s a valve that controls the supply of water to your water heater. Go ahead and turn that to the “off” position. This will make sure that if there is a failure in your water heater while you’re away, only the water actually stored in the tank will flow out, instead of enough water to supply a small village in your absence.
Also consider that there’s no reason to keep water hot when you’re not there to use it, so you may want to turn the temperature control on your unit to “vacation” if it’s heated with gas. If you have an electric water heater, then just turn the breaker on your electric panel that supplies it off. You may not have hot water for the first hour or so after you get back home, but you’ll also avoid coming back to a flooded house!
Cleanliness Tips
As much as you don’t want to come home to a flood, you also don’t want to come home to a house that smells bad. You can keep this from being a problem by cleaning out your garbage disposal with a cup of white vinegar before you go. You can also pour about a half cup of chlorine in your toilet bowl to keep a ring from developing around the rim in your absence. Just make sure to close the lid so Ms. Kitty doesn’t have a disaster of her own when you’re away if she likes to drink out of the bowl.
No one wants a vacation cut short by an emergency plumbing problem, nor do they want to try to find a plumbing company to go to their house when they’re miles away. Avoid coming home to a flooded house by taking these precautions before you go!
