Plumbing Preventive Maintenance Checklist

Your home’s plumbing needs to be carefully inspected and properly maintained to avoid any severe problems. Otherwise, you might end up having to call experts to replace significant portions of your plumbing or even structural elements around a home. Thankfully, a plumbing preventive maintenance checklist can help.

In this checklist, you’ll get an insight into actionable steps that you can take to decrease your risk of serious plumbing-related problems. When possible, we give quick tips to help improve your execution of these steps and minimize any long-term complications you might experience in your home or plumbing.

1. Always Check Your Caulking

When completing a plumbing preventive maintenance checklist, you need to make sure you check all the caulking around the various items in your bathroom. Doing so helps to minimize the risk of severe leaks by checking these areas properly and allowing you to fix them before they become more serious.

For example, you may find worn caulk around your sinks and toilets and notice leaking water around these areas. Unfortunately, this problem is not uncommon and can cause serious structural damage to your bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, and any other area where you run a lot of plumbing items.

You may not need residential plumbing help in this situation because you can usually pretty easily apply new caulk to these areas. However, experts may be wise if you don’t feel comfortable with this step, though most people should handle it with a minimal challenge to keep their plumbing strong.

2. Identify Mildew Causes

When considering essential plumbing repairs for your home, it is critical always to examine your pipes and the structures around them for serious mildew problems. It is not uncommon for mildew to develop in various areas, including in your bathtub, behind your laundry machine, and more.

Mildew and mold will grow in areas where standing water is allowed to sit and dry up, providing these growths with plenty of water to spread. Therefore, make sure that you identify these growth areas and spot standing water nearby that may contribute to their spread throughout your plumbing area.

You may need professionals to help you with this process, as they can identify why you have standing water in the first place. Usually, leaks or poor pipe or plumbing insulation are to blame. Properly insulating your plumbing items should help make this situation less of an issue.

3. Spot Any Leaks Throughout Your Plumbing

We briefly touched on leaks in the previous section, but we want to emphasize them here. Much of your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist should focus on spotting where these leaks occurred and taking steps to minimize their impact and improve your overall plumbing situation.

Leaks may occur in many different areas, including near your foundation, throughout your walls, in exposed areas, and much more. Unfortunately, you might miss many of these harder-to-identify leaks and need experts who can properly understand the unique ways of managing this situation for your needs.

Leak repair may require replacing the damaged pipes, repairing damaged areas, or installing new insulation to keep them adequately safe from decay. In this way, you can minimize the risk of serious leak-related damage and improve your home’s overall structural safety and design.

4. Try to Find Corrosion

When checking for common plumbing problems, you may need to work with local plumbing services to identify and repair many types of severe pipe corrosion. These issues may develop around brass and copper pipes and their fittings and lead to serious leaks and other troubles.

As a result, when completing your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist, it is critical to pay attention to these corrosion symptoms and do what you can to repair them. You may find it easy to replace some of these corroded pipes, as many may wear down and get damaged over time.

That said, it is also possible that leaks, excessive moisture, and much more could also lead to severe corrosion throughout your home and its overall plumbing design. In this situation, you’ll need high-quality professionals who can adequately spot all of these concerns and keep your home safe.

5. Inspect Your Toilets

Next on your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist is your toilet or toilets. These days, many homes have one or more bathrooms, meaning it is crucial to pay attention to their overall structural integrity and safety. In this way, you can avoid unnecessary damage and serious work-related issues.

For example, toilets may awkwardly flush due to poor water balance or pressure. Other problems include breaks around the toilet seal that let water flow around the sides. This problem could create a poorly leveled toilet or cause severe damage to the flooring elements.

You might be surprised at how this situation may affect many different processes, including your water well drilling. That’s because your well will also provide the water for your toilets, meaning that you need to make sure that you get the proper pressure from each toilet to minimize any issues.

6. Look for Sink Trouble

Your sinks should operate smoothly and with minimal trouble. However, there may be many issues that a plumber can help you fix with your sinks. For example, slow drainage is a serious issue that may indicate long-term and complex blockages that may require professional help to manage appropriately.

If you let your sinks stay clogged in this way, you increase the risk of severe damage, such as burst pipes, that could affect your overall operation. Even worse, you might develop complications with your faucets that could put pressure on their interior and cause them to wear down heavily.

Pay attention to symptoms of these issues, including bubbles coming up through stopped water or increasingly slow drainage. You might be able to remove some debris from your sink and minimize this problem, though you might need expert help to manage this issue as well.

7. Pay Attention to Your Showers and Tubs

Showers and tubs typically experience many of the same problems that could affect your sink. For example, they might drain slowly and cause water to pool up while you’re showering or bathing. Thankfully, you can usually use a simple drain snake to get many items out and improve water flow.

But what if your sinks and your showers are draining poorly? In this situation, you’ve probably got more serious blockage that could impact a broader reach of areas in your home. You’ll likely need a more high-quality plumbing expert to come to your home to provide repairs and drain help.

Is it always necessary to get help in this situation? If you’re careful about how you clean up your drain and make sure to brush long hair (to remove stray strands) before showering, there’s a good chance that you can minimize blockage and keep your showers and tubs operating smoothly.

8. Repair Faucet Troubles

Any good plumbing preventive maintenance checklist also includes faucet inspections to ensure that these critical items run correctly and without any serious issue. However, faucets may experience a surprising array of troubles that need maintenance and repairs to assess and fix appropriately.

For example, your faucets may wear down around the sealing rings, which help to keep water from leaking around the sides. When this happens, water may end up flowing too quickly and cause serious problems, including damage to the faucets and even the sink itself.

Tightening up the faucet with the proper wrench can help decrease the risk of this serious issue. However, you may also need to work with professionals who can handle these repairs and ensure that they are correctly done. In this way, you can avoid severe long-term complications and concerns.

9. Perform Simple Drain Maintenance

Your drains need to be kept in great shape, or they’re likely to back up and get damaged in several ways. This problem is something that can sneak up on people over time, particularly if they aren’t paying careful attention to the overall design and structure of their plumbing system and let it degrade.

First, you might need drain cleaning if your pipes are blocked up in any way. This situation is typically a problem if you flush items that you shouldn’t, such as various types of sanitary napkins, solid objects, grease, and much more. Cleaning gets these items out and minimizes severe drain blockage.

When you work with skilled drain services in this way, you minimize the risk of long-term damage and provide your home with the help it needs to stay strong. But, just as significantly, you cut back on the potential risks of burst pipes, a serious issue that may cause long-term damage problems.

10. Provide More Complex Plumbing Help

Next on your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist is to make sure that you pay experts to help with more complex issues. These problems go beyond mere pipe-related concerns and affect your water source itself and could become a genuine concern unless you’re smart about managing them properly.

For instance, you may own geothermal wells that must be properly inspected and repaired to avoid complications. If you don’t pay attention to these fixes, you could easily cause severe damage to the rest of your home by causing poor water flow and other related problems that may impact you.

On the same note, you also should pay attention to your well pumps, as these can quickly go bad and cause serious problems that require immediate repairs. Don’t try to handle these steps yourself. A plumbing professional can ensure that you fix these concerns without causing damage.

11. Don’t Ignore Your Washing Machines

How often do you check your washing machine for any issues? If you’re like most people, you probably haven’t studied this tool for years. That’s not an uncommon problem but can be a serious one if you let anything happen that affects how well it operates with your plumbing.

For example, your washing machine hoses (typically at the back of the machine) may be made of reinforced rubber that could end up bursting or getting damaged as they age. Serious cracks, leaks, and brittle textures may affect your washing machine and cause severe utility damage.

Thankfully, a quick inspection of your washing machine should spot these problems with relative ease. However, more severe problems, such as interior plumbing leaks, may be more long-term complications that require working with appliance repair professionals who understand this process and its operation.

12. Test Your Water Pressure

Now that we’re getting to the nitty-gritty of your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist, it is time to perform a few more complex procedures. For example, it is vital to gauge your water pressure and ensure that it is up to your needs. So how can you perform this simple step?

First, you need to know the proper water pressure standard in most homes. It would help if you had a PSI rating of at least 40-60. Anything lower may show problems in the waterline, such as sediment buildup, that is causing poor flow. High pressure may be adjusted at your water source.

Thankfully, checking your pressure is a relatively simple task. All you need is a simple pressure gauge you can purchase from just about any hardware store for under $15. Hook this gauge up to a clean and clear faucet and run your water. It will let you know what pressure you’re getting.

13. Inspect Your Water Heater’s Operation

You’re just about finished with your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist. Before ending, though, you need to make sure you check the water heater to ensure that it is running smoothly. There are a few different ways that you can perform a diagnostic on your water heater.

First, sit in the basement near the water heater and have someone turn on hot water elsewhere. Does the heater seem to operate smoothly, or does it struggle to run? Do you notice any bad smells as it runs? If so, there might be excessive sediment in the tank that must be flushed out to avoid complications.

If your water heater ends up failing, you might need to contact emergency plumbing experts right away to ensure that you are safe. A poorly operating water heater might be a symptom of more serious breakdowns and could affect your water’s safety by minimizing sanitation methods for removing bacteria.

As you can see, your plumbing preventive maintenance checklist provides a detailed examination of what kind of steps you can and should take for your home. You don’t have to take each of these steps in a day, thankfully. Instead, you can go through your checklist over an extended period, spotting potential problems and repairing them as needed. In this way, you can minimize the risk of serious plumbing-related difficulties and keep your home as safe as possible from severe complications and health issues.