5 Appliances That Need Constant Monitoring
Your home is the one place where you feel secure. It shields you from the harsh outside and protects you from the testing weather throughout the year. This is the same for the appliances and utilities within your home.
Take for example your HVAC cools your home during the blazing hot summers and warms up the household during chilling winters. This protects you all year round. Just imagine life without it. That’s why having them running like a well-oiled machine is key to having them for life.
Your household appliances need maintenance, just like how all living beings need nourishment. Your home protects you from the worst weather possible, as well as, provide you facilities that are essential to your daily life.
Imagine having to go through the day without being able to wash clothes, refrigerate your food and have hot water to bathe and drink. Seems impossible right? That’s why you need to keep a keen eye on your appliances to live hassle-free. Here are a few appliances to look out for that wear and tear if neglected.
HVAC appliances
As mentioned above, the HVAC is crucial for maintaining the room temperature of your home. Living without one would make your home inhospitable. In order to prevent this, it is advised that you have your HVAC filters checked every 2-3 months. Dirty and clogged HVAC filters could lead to poor ventilation, and worse could push in dangerous bacteria and pathogens/ putting you and your family members in harm’s way. Furthermore, clogged filters help propagates the growth and spreading of harmful diseases, which could prove dangerous to your family members.
Your HVAC needs to be monitored also because, if the filters are left stagnant, they would gather mold, clogging the air paths and polluting them. Clogged air paths will lead to more stagnant air circulating the home. This would lead to bad and dirty odors being generated, leading to your home smelling bad.
When you have a clogged HVAC filter, your electricity bill skyrockets. This is because when a filter is clogged, it becomes much much harder for the appliances to circulate fresh air into your home. It is believed that at least 15% more energy consumption occurs when you have a clogged filter.
Clogged filters and mold, also attract more trouble. Due to its natural properties, mold serves as a hot spot for all sorts of insects and bugs. This could be your usual flies and beetles but can also attract dangerous bugs like termites.
Roof
The roof is the main protective barrier over your head. It really wouldn’t serve its purpose of protecting you during winter, if it begins to leak water all over your home. During the winter, the shingles on your roof act as both a barrier as well as pockets where ice collects. When the temperature rises and the ice melts under those shingles and the water seeps down from your roof. Checking for these ice bags will save you from paying for sealants and roof repairs.
Also, a simple check of your roof will allow you to spot broken and missing shingles and replace them. It’s always better to replace individual shingles which are broken here and there rather getting the whole roof replaced. Neglecting maintenance of your roof will lead to water seeping through and messing up your interiors. Ceiling leaks will lead to the paint jobs in your home being ruined as well as the appearance of cracks on the walls of your home.
Wiring
Electrical wiring is crucial to your home. The best way to know if there are any faults in your wiring is to see whether all the switches and plugs are functional. If you are plagued by incidents of electric shocks, you may have a grounding problem. A constant check of electrical functions in your home will prevent you from having to rewire your whole home. As the electrical wiring is embedded into the walls of your home, opting for a complete overhaul to fix electrical issues will cost you dearly. Not only will you be paying for the wiring process you might have to dismantle and dislodge various walls and parts of your home. This could lead to more expenses for repair and renovation of your walls.
A poor wiring system eventually denies access to all home appliances that use electricity. This could lead to difficult situations. Like no heat during winter and no air conditioning in winter. Imagine not having utilities like a washing machine or a dishwasher. You’d have to deal with spoilt food, if your refrigerator is not working, or hot water for bathing.
On the flip side, a poor wiring system could also be very dangerous or even fatal to you and your family members. Poorly grounded high voltage sockets and plugs could make electrical devices deathtraps. An electrical device with poor or no grounding can send electrical shocks to its user, leaving them severely hurt. High voltages over 400 volts can even prove fatal and cause loss of life if not taken care of.
Attic and Basements
While they aren’t appliances they certainly are an integral part of your home. The basement and attic serve to hold up the structural integrity of your home. Since they are closed spaces with stale air, they tend to invite the growth of mold. Mold sticks onto the wooden bases of your home, weakening them.
Furthermore, you need to regularly check your attic and basements for termites. Termites are small ant-like insects that love to burrow and consumer wood. They tend to make wooden structures soft and mushy, thus weakening your home from the inside out.
Since the wooden structures are integral to the frame of your household. It is very difficult to replace or repair. Also, calling in the services of an exterminator after an extensive termite infestation will cost you a lot from your wallet.
Plumbing and External Drains
It’s always paramount to check up on the least used pipes and valves, sinks and shower heads. These can include the toilet flush in your guest rooms. Lack of use leads to clogs and seepage. If you have guest rooms or rarely used washrooms, it is advisable to occasionally check to see if clean water is flowing from all your faucets and taps, and check for any visible leaks. An indication that you might have a clogged pipeline is when there’s very low water pressure emerging when releasing a tap or faucet.
Another reason as to why you need to check your plumbing, is to prevent collection of sewage in your internal and external drains. Pools of stagnant water and sewage can cause the breeding of mosquitoes as well as the spread of harmful germs and diseases.
Furthermore, pipes tend to freeze up during the winter and crack when the ice around has melted in the warmer seasons. These cracks also cause leakages than can seep and ruin the interiors of your home. You can never tell that pipes are on the verge of cracking in the winter, but you will have to check them once the ice melts, the constant change of temperatures weakens them. Also, fixing a sewage or normal pipeline will take a bite out of your savings as well as extensive time to change up the pipes through a plumber.
What do you do if you can’t monitor your home appliances?
It is understandable that we can be quite busy with our work lives and tend to forget our household chores. But definitely, we aren’t ones to stand by and watch our homes deteriorate? Are we?
So what can you do to maintain your home? Invest in a Home Warranty of course! All the above repair/replacement cases above are your worst case scenario. You should look at getting a Free Home Warranty Quote. As a homeowner, you could be proactive and ensure that your home is well protected and all its utilities running smoothly. Maintenance on your own involves you doing a lot of budgeting and expenditure to ensure appliances in your home are proper. To make things easier for you, you could use this home maintenance calculator, that allows you to gauge the amount you’d be spending on servicing the various parts of your house. The calculator allows you to foresee how much you’d be spending on repairs for your whole household for the next 25 years!
If you feel that constant watch of your household appliances is a tedious task as you’re coupled with other responsibilities, you can always resort to applying for a home warranty. By paying a relatively small amount of money up front, you’re ensuring that the repair and servicing of your home appliances is taken care whenever a mishap befalls it. Furthermore, a home warranty isn’t like your ordinary product warranty that grants protection and repair for only one aspect of your home. It potentially adds life to various vulnerable aspects of your home like your plumbing, electrical, and wiring. American Home Shield protects all your systems & appliances at affordable rates.
How Home Warranties Work
You find a home warranty service provider, opt and pay upfront for one of their various home warranty plans, and et voila you’re secured! You already know it’s not as easy as you think. You as a consumer always strive to get the best, so obviously your first instinct would be to research what’s the best or value for money home warranty service. Let us be of assistance, with our ratings timeline, reviews and awards in one place, HomeWarrantyReviews.com
Based out of the world famous Bayes Algorithm, HomeWarrantyReviews.com calculates reviews (positive or negative) from actual consumers and rates home warranty companies from a rating of 1 to 5 (1 being the lowest). This ensures that what you see is what you get, based on the performance of the home warranty company in the last few years. Furthermore, if you’d like, you could even comb through the reviews of each company to see the issues past customers faced and then make your decision and get a quote. Below is the ratings timeline of one of our rising starlets in home warranties APHW. You can clearly see at how the consumers have rated the company over the past five years with a rating from 1 to 5. This is a clear example of a company that has been moving from strength to strength in the eyes of the public. How about dropping in and acquiring a quote?
HomeWarrantyReviews.com, intends to provide you accurate information on the best home warranty options possible. If you’re unhappy with how your current home warranty has been of service to you, you could always be a part of our company resolution program. This program gives the defaulting home warranty company a chance to resolve issues faced by its consumer. Failing to do so will allow the negative review written by the consumer to be published into the public space.
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