HVAC filters, water heaters, gutters, weatherproofing and seasonal tasks.
A sump pump is a single point of failure protecting the lowest part of a building. It sits idle for months, and it is called on precisely when conditions are worst — a heavy storm, often with the power off. Testing it after the water is rising is too late. How it works Groundwater collects … Read more
A burst pipe from a frozen outdoor tap is one of the most expensive failures in an ordinary house, and it is entirely preventable in about twenty minutes each autumn. Why it bursts, and why not where you think Water expands by roughly 9% when it freezes. In a closed pipe that expansion has nowhere … Read more
Smoke and carbon monoxide alarms are the cheapest life-safety equipment in a house and the most likely to be quietly non-functional. Dead batteries, expired sensors, and units mounted in places where they cannot do their job are all extremely common. The checks below take about ten minutes twice a year. Two different devices, two different … Read more
Chemical drain cleaner is the default response to a slow drain and it is usually the wrong one. It is corrosive to pipes and to the person using it, it frequently fails on the blockages people reach for it to solve, and when it fails it leaves a pipe full of caustic liquid that the … Read more
Indoor humidity is one of the few household variables that affects your building, your possessions and your comfort simultaneously, and it is easy to measure and control. Most people never measure it at all. The target Aim for 40–60% relative humidity, and toward the lower end in winter. RH What happens Below 30% Dry skin … Read more
A bathroom extractor fan that runs but does not extract is extremely common, and the symptom is not silence — it is mould. Black spotting on a ceiling, around a window reveal, or along a silicone joint is almost always a ventilation problem wearing a cleaning problem’s clothes. Test whether yours works The tissue test. … Read more
Air leakage is typically responsible for a substantial share of a home’s heat loss, and unlike insulation or glazing it can be addressed for very little money in an afternoon. The difficulty is that draughts are hard to find — the place you feel cold air is often not the place it is entering. Finding … Read more
Gutters fail quietly. A blocked downspout does not announce itself until water is running down a wall, into a soffit, or pooling against a foundation — and by then the damage is somewhere considerably more expensive than the gutter. Read this first: most gutter work happens at height, and falls from ladders are one of … Read more
A storage water heater is a steel tank full of hot water, and two things determine how long it lasts: how much sediment accumulates in the bottom, and whether the sacrificial anode rod is still doing its job. Both are maintainable, and both are almost universally ignored until the tank leaks. Before anything else: this … Read more
The air filter is the cheapest component in a heating and cooling system and the one most likely to cause an expensive failure. A blocked filter starves the system of airflow, and low airflow is the root cause of a long list of faults that get diagnosed as something else. What the filter is actually … Read more