Plumbing maintenance is one of the biggest responsibilities of home ownership. But, there will be times when the plumbing in your home will need some work and professionals are out of reach. Read on to learn some amazingly useful tips to help you keep your home plumbing in great shape all by yourself!
You should regularly check for water damage to your bathroom floor caused by your toilet in order to save money and further complications. Feel the floor around the toilet and check to see if the floor is soft, molded, chipping, etc. Sit in a reversed position, putting one foot on each side of the toilet and shift your weight from side to side to check if the floor feels slightly unstable. By noticing a problem early on, you can save yourself a bunch of money if you were to leave it alone.
Do not pour grease or other oils in your sink or down your drain. These substances will clog the drain as they cool and harden. This is very true for garbage disposal, since fat will make the blades run less quickly and efficiently. Keep a container in your kitchen that is used specifically for discarded grease.
Keep your plumbing flowing by maintaining a temperature above 32 degrees and wrapping up any exposed pipe works. Pipes can freeze when the ambient temperature in the area of the pipes dips below freezing. The best result you can hope for from frozen pipes is to be without water until the pipes thaw. The worst case would be that they burst, creating water damage and a big repair bill.
It is important to always run cold water while using your garbage disposal. Blades will stay sharper with cold water, making disposal quicker. If you use hot water, any grease in the disposal will liquefy, causing it to accumulate further down the drain, which could cause clogs.
If you are seeing water at the bottom of the dishwasher, most likely this is due to a faulty setup of the hose that leads from the kitchen sink. This hose should lead uphill first and then downhill so the water from the sink and the dishwater never mix.
Prevention is vital for avoiding costly repairs to your plumbing. One of the major repairs is clogs. Hair is a common material in drain clogs. You can stop this by using a screen or drain cover that is designed to keep hair out of your drain and pipes. It is much easier to remove the hair from a screen than it is to get it out of a pipe.
Know your plumbing tools and exactly how to use them before you start on any plumbing repair. Read each and every manual, and utilize the information that can be found in libraries and the Internet about do-it-yourself projects. You need to conduct research before attempting a repair, because it could be expensive to correct an error.
Drain Cleaners
Don’t use drain cleaners constantly. Compounds that are ingredients in common drain cleaners are quite corrosive and can cause pipe damage if overused. Rather than using cleaners, hire a professional to look at your clogged drain.
Always thoroughly check out plumbers before you decide to use their services. Some plumbers are simply not skilled or experienced enough to handle certain jobs, and they could even make your problem worse. Search for reviews of plumbers, or ask friends or family members to recommend a competent plumber.
Check the floor for soft areas around the toilet to determine floor damage. Straddle the toilet and rock from one foot to the other to see if you feel any weakening or “softness” in the floor beneath you. When you have a problem like this to deal with, the earlier you detect it, the less expensive it will be to take care of.
The valves that are hardly ever used have their way of somehow fusing together. Use penetrating oil to maintain them and run water through them once in a while.
Some have no idea of plumbing in general, so they pay whatever the plumber wants. If you own your own home, it’s important that you take the time to learn the basics of plumbing, enough to ensure that you know what a plumber will be doing. This will ensure that you are not ripped off.
Assess the actual hot water needs for your family and use this information to increase the functioning of water heaters. Being aware of how many people in your house use hot water, and how many of your appliances will need hot water to work, will help you know the size that your hot water tank should be.
Run cold water through your garbage disposal. The helps sharpen the blades and clears out the drain mechanism. If you use hot water instead of cold, it will turn any fat into liquid and cause the fat to clog your pipes when it later cools and solidifies.
It is not necessary to call a plumber for every problem. The preceding tips have given you the ability to take care of the smaller plumbing tasks around the home. By using the tips at home, you will not only be able to fix any plumbing emergencies, but you will also be able to reduce your costs because you won’t need to hire a professional plumber.