If you ever stop and take a good look around your house you will find that you are totally surrounded by plumbing lines, plumbing fixtures and appliances that use plumbing to feed water to them. It is a lot of plumbing to say the least. Our friends at Air Conditioning Edmonton recommended to do some routine plumbing maintenance around your house on a monthly and semi-annual basis. Here are some things you can do to insure the plumbing in your house and the appliances that use it stay in as good of a working order as possible.

Inspect Your Plumbing Inside And Outside

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” applies to the plumbing and plumbed appliances that are in your house too. Once a month you should take a walk around the inside and outside your house and take a look at the visible plumbing in these areas. Do such things as check for leaks on the back of your washer, on the incoming and outgoing connections to your water heater and look under sink cabinets to see if the drain lines are leaking. Even a little bit of water dripping in the wrong place can cause corrosion, rotting wood and can lead to a very expensive repair; not to mention over time it adds up on your water bill too.

Also look for signs of corrosion as you inspect your plumbing fixtures and connections also. If the corrosion is bad enough a line burst may be imminent and you can prevent that from happening.

Plumbing Maintenance

Pour Hot Water down Your Kitchen Sink

There are a lot of activities that take place in and around your kitchen sink. You prepare meals, clean dishes and carve up vegetables and fruits in the sink area on a regular basis. When you do this you can’t help but get small amounts of such things as vegetable skin and grease from going into the drain. That is why it is important on a monthly basis to pour a large pan full of very hot water (not boiling it could hurt your plumbing seals) directly down the drain; this will get rid of such things as a grease buildup.

Also if you look at the kitchen sink drain line you will notice the trap underneath the sink (the u-shaped piping). On both side there will be connections that can be loosened so you can take the drain apart to clean it. Get in the habit of doing this once a month.

Drain Your Water Heater Tank

You want to also get in the habit of draining your water heater tank fully ever six months. Over time sediment builds up in the bottom of the tank and slows heat transfer; this will eventually cause the tank to burst and flood whatever room the water heater is in. Draining the sediment on a regular basis will keep that from happening for a long time.

If you do not want to do a plumbing maintenance inspection or you would rather a professional do it, there are many plumbers that would be happy to come to your house and do that type of service for a small fee. Here are more plumbing issues that you can fix on your own.