Many new people have moved to Sun City in the last ten years. I am taking this opportunity to review ten items that you should address to keep yourself safe and avoid costly repairs.
1. If your smoke alarms are more than 10 years old, they are beyond their useful life and are probably not working. You should change these before the end of the week.
2. If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector (the early Del Webb homes did not have them), you should get one and install it. If you have one and it is more than seven years old, you should replace it.
3. If your washing machine has rubber hoses connecting it to the water spigot, you should replace them with braided steel hoses. The rubber hoses get brittle with age and unless you turn off the spigot behind the washing machine whenever it is not in use you have full line pressure (about 50 pounds per square inch) on these aging hoses. When these rubber hoses fail, it is like you turned on a garden hose in your laundry room, doing tens of thousands of dollars of water damage. These braided steel hoses are available at local big box stores and on the internet.
5. This time of year, birds are looking for a place to nest. The vents from your bathroom fans and kitchen fans are very attractive to them. The big box stores have a device called a pest barricade. It is attached to the vent where it exits the house. Your dryer vents to the outside either through the side wall or through the roof. This vent carries air, moisture, and lint out of your clothes dryer and out of your house through this vent. In the process, the lint is deposited on the wall of this duct restricting the air flow. There have been more than a few fires in Sun City caused by this. This vent needs to be cleaned. Normal households need this vent cleaned once a year. If you have shedding pets, you may need to clean the vent two or three times a year. If when you clean the vent, you get a ball of lint the size of a 16-inch softball you are not cleaning it often enough and need to shorten the time between cleanings.
6. If you have a basement with a sump pump there is a black tube to feed the sump pump water away from the foundation. This tube must be removed in the winter to keep it from freezing and possibly burning out the sump pump. The tube must be replaced when the danger of freezing is over.
7. Furnace filters need to be replaced every one to two months.
Two items that are usually the responsibility of the home owner are maintained by the community association.
1. Driveways are sealed every other year.
2. Mailboxes that are damaged or worn are repaired by the community association.
3. If your house was built between 2005 and 2009 it probably has a fire suppression system (sprinklers), especially if it is an attached property in neighborhood #34. You can verify this by looking for sprinkler heads high on the inside walls. This is a good thing because if you should have a fire the sprinkler heads will start pouring water on the fire even before the fire department arrives.
The water is fed to the sprinkler heads by 1½ inch plastic tubing running through the walls. This requires that you follow protocols when hanging anything on a wall. The wallboard is one half inch thick so caution must be observed when putting nails or screws into the wall or when drilling holes for anchors.
Six of your neighbors have punctured these water lines and done water damage to their houses that ranged from several hundred dollars to five thousand dollars.
To hang a picture you should use commercial grade picture hanger hardware where the nail or nails go into the wall at a downward angle. The maximum nail length should be ¾ inch. Longer nails will extend beyond the inner edge of the wall and may puncture the water lines.
When going away for more than a few days, you should turn off the main water valve. If you have an ice maker in your refrigerator, be sure to turn it off when the water is off. If you do not, and the water is turned off, the ice maker will dry cycle because no water will flow into it to make ice. This may cause it to burn out; an expensive repair.
If you have suggestions for future tips or have questions about maintenance around your home submit them to ask.the.woodchucks@gmail.com
