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Dale Poort
Environment
2008-12-01 14:19:00
Costs of maintaining my home
QUESTION: Is there a way to cut the costs involved in owning my home? When I rented, I just called the landlord. Now as an owner, how do I affordably minimize my costs of maintaining my mechanical equipment in my home?
ANSWER: The most important thing involved in this answer is to make sure that you keep all of your mechanical equipment in the best condition you can keep it in ongoing. This involves doing something that seems totally unnatural to some folks. What it involves is, you spending some of your money on that equipment for a maintenance program, having inspections done and work completed, when it appears that there are no problems that are evident at all! More pointedly, your mechanical equipment, plumbing lines, appliances, etc. don’t usually just “go out” on a certain day for no good reason. Normally there are signs that indicate that there are problems getting ready to happen, but most homeowners don’t know what to look for, or how to do the repairs if they did know what to look for. A really good technician can keep you out of trouble and save you money. The one thing you don’t want to have happen is a holiday ruined by the furnace, hot water tank, or garbage disposal quitting when the house is full of guests. Guests have no desire to sit around and eat your food in the cold and listen to you saying “why does this always have to happen during a holiday at my house?” If you have an ongoing low cost maintenance plan in effect, the likelihood of you having a problem with your equipment at holiday time is pretty slim. Not that it can’t happen, but not likely if you’re doing the right things. Some local heating and air companies even sell and install radiant heating systems, either as an add-on in a room that has no ducts for the existing systems, or to increase the effectiveness of your existing systems in those areas of your building needing a little higher level of “comfort”. Another great idea is to purchase an affordable home warranty plan that can cover all of your appliances, your plumbing, hot water heater, your heating and air conditioning, and can remove the risk of incurring a high repair bill at the time of year you don’t need that...like during the upcoming holiday season! Home warranty plans can even cover things like pools, spas, hot tubs, and most other aspects of your home that might cost a lot to repair or replace. These low cost home warranty plans remove the “unknowns” from your life and give you peace of mind year round. For example, if you noticed your outside faucets dripping during the summer months, there’s a potential problem of the type that are normally overlooked by homeowners, and that can be real trouble in cold weather. The stem on outside faucets should project inside the warm basement wall of your home, preventing freezing in the winter temps. The washer on the end of the stem (inside the faucet) keeps water from seeping out into the faucet on the outside of the basement wall where it can freeze up. If that dripping water does freeze, it can break the faucet and water line, flooding your basement. What if that occurred while you were gone from the house on a shopping trip or a vacation, and you came back to find the basement full of water? That’s actually happened, many times to lots of folks. Anytime you’re planning to be gone for a while, always turn off your main water shutoff in your home, summer or winter! Now, since we don’t water grass or flowers outside in the wintertime, outside water faucets are usually an out of sight, out of mind thing. Easy to forget or ignore, right up until the freeze occurs. Then, Katy bar the door! You might have heard the old saying that a penny’s worth of prevention is worth more’n a pound of cure! That’s not just an old saying. Whoever said it first was a smart one. Everyone else who says it is a copycat! More helpful stuff next month...
 
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