Seasonal Home Maintenance Tips to Keep Your Home like New

Home maintenance is a never ending, but important activity for any homeowner. Maintenance is important not only to keep your home looking good, but more importantly to keep the various structural, electrical and mechanical components of your home functioning properly. Well-maintained homes use preventive maintenance to avoid costly and possibly life threatening breakdowns from occurring. In our house we maintain two seasonal checklists to ensure that we covering all of the necessary maintenance requirements of our home. I would like to share these with you.

Winter Season Maintenance:

Our winter season checklist activities begin in late fall. Most, but not all, of these activities are designed to prepare our house for the winter season. This list includes the following:

1. Schedule a Maintenance check of the heating system: As our gas-fire furnace has been idle since the previous winter I always have the system checked by a qualified HVAC technician before firing it up. During this checkup all burners are checked for efficiency, filters are changed, and the internal components of the system are checked for function and to ensure there are no leaks in gas lines.

2.Service Hot Water Heater: Whether your hot water heater is gas or electric fired it will with use build up sediment in the bottom of the tank. The more sediment is deposited the less efficient the water heater will be. I completely drain and flush my hot water heater twice a year, once in the fall and once in early spring.