According to the United States Fire Administration (USFA), there were an estimated 3 9,600 residential fires across the country back in 2018. Around 6.8 percent of these fire incidents were caused by an electrical malfunction, while some 2.4 percent of all residential fire incidents that year were due to equipment malfunction.
It’s important to note that many of these fire incidents led to injuries and deaths of victims, some of whom were children and seniors who were particularly vulnerable in times of emergencies.
If you love your family and you don’t want them to suffer a similar fate as the ones experienced by the hapless victims of residential fires each year, then you need to ensure that your electrical system and other sensitive components of your home are well-maintained.
Here are five must-do home maintenance tasks to ensure safety, comfort, and functionality all-year-round:
Home instrumentation and control checkup
Your home’s instrumentation and control panel is a critical component in ensuring that your security and electrical systems are kept at optimum performance and safety levels.
In principle and practice, only trained and licensed personnel are legally allowed to take care of the maintenance requirements of such a delicate system. In short, it’s not something that you can entrust to amateurs or handle yourself.
By ensuring that it is periodically checked and maintained by professional technicians specializing in instrumentation and control services, you can enjoy flawlessly functioning home security and electrical systems on any given day.
Additionally, you’re assured that the instrumentation and control panel will not malfunction accidentally and cause a fire in your home, which can be life-threatening and damaging to your property.
HVAC system maintenance
Your home’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system is yet another important part of your home’s essential systems that must be periodically maintained. This is because as they stand, HVAC systems are among the top energy consumers in schools, private residences, and commercial/industrial facilities. Without proper maintenance, the already high energy consumption of HVAC systems tends to double.
Because of this simple fact, you have to ensure that your home’s HVAC components are in tip-top condition at all times. Whether it’s during the summer when cool indoor air is needed or in winter when it’s critical to have warm air inside the house, the bottom line is to keep the entire system functioning perfectly through periodic upkeep.
As such, be sure to hire a professional HVAC maintenance crew to visit you several times each year to check if your heating, ventilation, and A/C components are still perfectly fine or if they need to be repaired or replaced at once. The last thing you’d want to happen is for any of the system components to act up suddenly and compromise the entire system in the most inopportune time of the year.
Lawn care
Whether it’s summer, spring, winter, or fall, your lawn deserves to be pampered like a baby throughout the year. Many of the lawn care tasks needed to keep your outdoor area pleasant and healthy are possible to achieve DIY-style, which means you’ll hardly spend anything to get them done.
For example, you can trim, prune, weed, fertilize, and mow without hiring someone. All you need are some basic lawn maintenance tools, basic lawn care knowledge, and plenty of patience as you give your lawn some tender loving care.
Alarms and detectors maintenance
If you have a fire alarm, home security, and carbon monoxide or smoke sensors installed in your home, it’s not enough that they’re there. Instead, you have to ensure that they are functioning and in perfect condition.
Quite a lot of homeowners have the wrong notion that once these security and safety features are installed, they won’t need to be checked or maintained. It’s only during actual situations when such home security systems are needed that homeowners find out they’re not functional.
You can avoid such an embarrassment by having your trusted maintenance crew periodically service all of your alarms and sensors. For utmost convenience, choose an arrangement in which the maintenance crew pays your property a visit on scheduled dates, so you won’t have to call them in each time or run the risk of forgetting to have your sensors and alarms maintained.
Cracks, pipes, gutters, and windows checkup
Those cracks on windows, walls, and doors that you ignore may be contributing to your high monthly power consumption, and serve as accidents waiting to happen. Meanwhile, your pipes and gutters may look okay, but they could be hiding leaks that could lead to costly water damages.
Avoid these perfectly preventable hiccups by periodically checking up on these components and doing the necessary repair or maintenance, whether on your own or by hiring a contractor.
Keeping your home secured and safe from avoidable problems should be easy, but only if you’ll take note of and observe these five essential maintenance tasks.
