When winter comes so quickly, there are some things you might miss out on doing and keeping your house safe during the winter. The changing of the seasons can really damage even the most sturdy properties. There are precautions you can take to ensure January snows, Summer thunderstorms, and autumn winds don’t compromise your property. Following, winter preparations will be explored to help you keep from stumbling into avoidable issues.
Your sprinklers can be one of the most important features of your property. They keep your plants healthy and green in summer; but if you’re in a place where there is winter-time snowfall, you need to blow those sprinklers out, or risk flooding your property. There is one primary reason for this, and it’s water freezing.
Most people don’t realize that water expands by about 15% when it is frozen. This means if you put a gallon full to the brim in your freezer, when the water froze, it would break out of the container and overflow into the rest of the freezer. When the water unfreezes, it will run everywhere.
If that happens with your sprinklers, the pipes could burst. At the very least, you’ll have diminished pressure the following season. At worst, you could flood your basement, and that can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Blow out your sprinklers before the first big freeze yearly; click here for assistance doing that, and landscaping throughout the year.
When it comes to your home itself, you need to safeguard its interior as best you can. Eliminate drafts. Reseal doors if they’re letting the cold in. Keep windows closed and shaded during the night, and open them when the sun faces them in the day to bring in the heat. Ensure windows are properly sealed as well. With us having a new home we always have the sun shining in the windows to bring in the heat. We close them to keep the house cool in the summer.
Just as exterior temperatures can burst the pipes on your sprinkler system, if things become too cold on the inside of your home, pipes can also freeze. If they burst, it’s very expensive to fix. This has happened to me before and it was a nightmare.
Say you went on vacation and turned the heat to the house off assuming you’ll save money on utilities. Now say a deep freeze hit that rocketed your community below zero for three days. Even if the house is properly sealed, should it get cool enough, some pipes may freeze, expand, and burst. While a beautiful cascade of water frozen in time may be a fine art-piece, it’s going to be really expensive to fix. Not something you want to come home to.
Sometimes you’ll have structural threats emanating from a DIY deck you installed in such a way as to incidentally compromise some structural feature of your home. Working with Deck Remodelers can help you determine the best approaches to such DIY work, and help you avoid accidentally compromising things through an oversight.
When you apply upgrades to your home, the goal should be to sustainably manage property value; but if you’re not careful, you can shoot yourself in the foot. A good rule of thumb is to consult an authority whenever you come into a doubtful situation where something doesn’t feel quite right.
For example, you could likely do a pretty passable job of re-shingling your roof, and this may be a necessary precaution against winter. However, if you’re not careful, you may end up knocking a few incidental holes in the roof that weren’t there before, and suddenly the home is draftier, and the pipes are again compromised.
If you can afford to work with professionals, that’s going to save you a lot of hassle. If not, be careful to do your homework. When winter comes, flush the pipes, ensure all windows and doors are sealed, keep the inside warmer than freezing, and consult professionals when pursuing something like a roof repair or deck remodel to ensure you don’t incidentally damage your home’s structure.
What are some ways you like to protect your home during the winter?
