Winter Maintenance Tips For Your Home

Is your home ready for winter? Snow, ice, and cold weather are part of life in Canada during the winter. Every year we prepare for winter, for ourselves, we break out our warm clothes and lip balms, for our cars we change over to snow tires and stock up on -40°C washer fluid, but what about for our homes?

There are a number of things big and small we can do to ensure our homes stay protected over winter weather. Big things like replacing your windows or insulating your attic might not be feasible but here are three small things anyone can, and should do, to make sure your home is prepared for the winter. Make sure your AC unit is covered, although they are designed to be outside keeping out snow and ice is very important to help keep your AC unit working properly for its usable life. This may sound gross but is import to know that dust is mainly made up of dead skin so when we turn up the heat and dry out our skin we create more dust. To help maintain air quality and keep your furnace working more efficiently check and change your furnace filter more frequently over the winter. This can also help allergy sufferers Every year as home inspectors we see hundreds of homes with frozen hose bibs, at best this destroys your hose faucet and at worst can cause a broken water line and flooding in the home. If you lucky enough to live in a newer home that has a frost proof faucet then you have nothing to worry about, just make sure you empty your hose and turn off the water. However, if you don’t have a frost proof faucet then you need to make sure that you properly drain the water out of the line that feeds your hose. Fortunately most every home will have a shut off for this in the home. All you need to do is close this shut off and open the hose faucet and let all the water run out.

Following these easy tips can make sure your home is ready for the winter. For a complete list of home maintenance tips visit the home maintenance tips section on our website. Thanks for reading and happy holidays from the team at Inspec Homes Home Inspections.