Water damage is the most common and costliest disaster your home can ever experience. It can cause serious risks like mold growth, flooding, and foundational issues. Safeguarding home water damage is essential to protect your valuable asset from severe disasters.
Water damage occurs when the excess of water begins to collect in areas where it shouldn’t. To secure your home with the water damage, you must be aware of the potentials causes that are causing severe water damages.
A small leak can cause serious water disasters. Here is a list of Most Common Causes of Water Damage and some useful tips to guard against it.
- Plumbing problems
Some plumbing problems occur inside the walls and thus are impossible to detect, while some issues are caused due to hoses and pipe joints that are not attached properly. Unless the whole system is plagued by several leaks, you can repair the plumbing issues by yourself.
Here’s how to prevent plumbing problems in the house.
- Avoid pouring of cooking grease directly into the drains.
- Plan monthly baking soda treatments for drains.
- Use drain screens to prevent food particles and small items clogging drain line.
- Install a washing machine hose screen to prevent clogging of washing machine’s pumps and valves.
- Leaking Pipes
It might seem obvious, but water damage is often caused by leaking pipes. Pipes can burst out with just simple change in the water pressure. Even an insignificant leak can cause severe water damage for a long time. Drains that are blocked causes undue pressure in pipe causes pipe burst.
Tips to safeguard your home from leaking pipes issues.
- Regularly inspect your home for broken or leaking pipes to prevent water damage.
- Old pipes are more prone to leaking. Change these pipes from time to time.
- To prevent a pipe from freezing under cold weather condition, lag them with pipe insulation.
- Install water softener in the house which removes excess minerals from the water and prevents pipe leaking.
- Malfunctioning Household Appliances
When the appliances get older, their piper started to rust and hoses become weak. Household appliances like washing machines, water heaters, dishwaters, and refrigerators are most susceptible to damages. So, keep a watch on these older appliances.
Some useful tips to guard water damage caused by the failure of household appliances.
- In case of malfunctioning of any appliances, turn off the main water supply.
- In refrigerators and dishwaters, check periodically for the leaks under the sink where hoses are connected with the water supply.
- For proper functioning of the washing machine, replace the hot and cold water hoses in every 4-5 years.
- Water Overflow
Simply forgot to turn off a sink faucet or a bathtub causes serious water damages very quickly. It results in soggy carpet and can even break the ceiling of your room if ignored for a long time.
To prevent your home from water overflow damage, follow these tips.
- If you are going away from home for a long time, shut off the main water supply.
- Install water flow monitoring system in your house. It measures the water flow in your house. If water flow exceeds the normal level of a day, then it automatically stops the flow of water in your house.
- Specifying taps with automatic turn off moon lamp for some situations.
- Sewer backup
The sewage system of your home can be backed up due to storm in your area or tree roots blocking pipes of your homes. Irrespective of the cause, a sewer backup can cause a catastrophic water overflow if you ignored it. If there is any structural issue in the foundation which affects sewer line, then there is a risk of blockage of the sewer line.
Best tips to prevent sewer backup issue are:
- Clean out your sewer line in every 1-2 year.
- Install a sump pump in the basement to release excess water.
- Do not flush anything in your toilet other than bathroom tissues.
- Waterproof your basement area.
Hope this list will serve as a quick reference guide to deal with the major causes of water damage and useful tips to guard against it.