Weekly Maintenance for your Home

September – Week 37

Just like preventative maintenance on your car, if you take care of a few small items around the house every week, you can avoid many emergency breakdowns and expensive repairs.

Baseboard Heaters

Although summer is not officially over, for many regions of North America heating of some kind is already being turned on occasionally. Before you turn on those baseboard heaters for the first time there is one maintenance task that should be done. Pop the faceplate, the metal facade that hides the heating elements, off the front of the heater by pulling the bottom of that plate near the centre of the heater. There are no screws, it is just force fitted onto brackets in the centre and each end of the heater. Now use a soft broom, or a broom attachment on your vacuum cleaner, to remove all the dust that has collected over the summer. Turning on the heater without cleaning this off will simply burn the dust off, sending irritating fumes into your house. When the heaters are used every day, there is no accumulation of dust. To put the face plate back on, simply hang it on the top of the three brackets and then tap near the bottom of each bracket and it will pop into place.

Crawl Space Ventilation

The time to close the crawl space ventilation for the winter is when you begin to regularly use your heating system. That could be this week or in a few weeks, but when you find yourself closing windows and turning up the thermostat, close off the heat losses from the crawl space as well. Click here for more informaiton on Crawl Space Ventilaiton.