Home systems

Heating, cooling, water, drainage, home electrical work and the devices that keep a dwelling safe.

Scope

Heating, cooling, water heating, fixtures, drainage and the devices that keep a dwelling safe. Work that needs no access to a live service panel, no gas fitting and no structural change.

Common failure modes

• Airflow restricted by a filter that was never replaced
• A safety device past its service life and never tested
• A drain, a condensate line or a sump pit that nobody has looked into
• A seal or a washer that has hardened and no longer seals
• Preparation for a freeze or an outage started after the event, not before

Sections

• Heating, ventilation and air conditioning

  Filters, vents, condensate paths, outdoor condenser coils and thermostat settings on central forced-air heating and cooling systems.

  4 published

• Water heaters and hot water distribution

  Inspection, temperature settings and drain maintenance on domestic water heaters.

  8 published

• Taps, traps, valves and fixtures

  Taps, traps, aerators, shut-off valves and fixture seals inside the building. Non-structural work only.

  7 published

• Drainage, sump pumps, outdoor taps and irrigation

  Water that moves around a building rather than through a fixture: sump pumps and their discharge, outdoor taps and hoses, and garden irrigation. Much of this work is driven by the season, and none of it is inside the pressurised supply within the building.

  10 published

• Receptacles, switches, thermostats and low-voltage circuits

  Receptacles, switches, lamps and low-voltage circuits — a thermostat, a doorbell, landscape lighting — together with the tests that show whether a fault is in the device or in the circuit behind it. Everything here stops at the last device on a circuit that already exists.

  8 published

• Alarms, extinguishers and emergency readiness

  The devices that warn a household — smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, fire extinguishers — with their test and replacement intervals, and the preparation that makes an outage or a forecast storm survivable: supplies, documents, and equipment that was test-run before it was needed.

  14 published

All procedures in this category

• How to fix a toilet tank that fills too high or too low, and set the correct water level at the fill valveA toilet tank that fills past the overflow tube keeps sending water down the drain long after the flush is done, and it
• How to bleed a radiator that is cold at the top and warm at the bottomA radiator that is cold at the top and warm at the bottom almost always has air trapped inside it. The air collects abov
• How to tell if a surge protector still works, and when to replace a surge protector or power stripA surge protector is the power strip you bought because the box said surge protector, and the thing almost nobody is tol
• How hot should my hot water be and how do I check itThis page is about measuring the hot water your taps actually deliver, with a thermometer, and writing the number down.
• How do I safely heat my house when the power goes out?When the power goes out in cold weather, the choice of how to stay warm is the one that can go wrong fastest. Carbon mon
• How do I know which LED bulb to buy? Reading lumens, watts equivalent, color temperature and bulb base size before you shopMost people still shop for a light bulb the way their parents did: by the watts printed on the old bulb. Watts measure t
• Match an extension cord to the appliance it will supplyAn undersized extension cord can overheat and catch fire, even though the appliance works normally. You will read three
• How to clean out a sump pump pit and check the check valve so the pump stops cyclingA sump pit collects ground water, and over months it also collects the things ground water carries: fine sediment, and s
• How to clean a clogged faucet aerator when the water flow drops or sprays sidewaysWhen one tap goes weak, or the stream splits and sprays off to one side, the cause is almost always the aerator: the sma
• How to clean the outside AC unit / condenser coil before summerThe metal fins on the outside of your air conditioner or heat pump collect dust, pollen, grass clippings and leaves over
• How to unclog a slow or blocked drain in a sink, bathtub or showerA drain that empties slowly, or not at all, is almost always blocked close to the fixture. Hair, soap and grease build u
• How to clear a blocked condensate drain on a central air conditionerWater pooling near your indoor air conditioning unit is almost always caused by a clogged condensate drain line. As your
• How to descale or flush a tankless water heater, and whether vinegar or a CLR-type descaler is safe to useA tankless (on-demand) water heater has no tank for sediment to settle in, but hard water still leaves mineral scale ins
• What to put in a home emergency kit and how much of itA go bag, a 72-hour kit, a hurricane box, a bug-out bag — whatever you call it, the hard part is not the list, it is the
• How to tell if you have a hidden water leak using your water meterA water bill that jumps for no clear reason often means a leak somewhere in the plumbing, and the reason it is easy to m
• How do I find the date on my smoke alarm and how old can it be before I replace itA smoke alarm can look perfectly healthy and still be past its working life, because the part that wears out is the sens
• How to find your main water shut off valve and check that it actually worksEvery water emergency starts with the same instruction: turn off the water. That instruction assumes two things most hou
• How old is my water heater and how do I read the serial numberNobody asks how old their water heater is out of curiosity. The question comes up when it has started to leak, when a ho
• Where is the water under my hot water heater coming from, and does it mean I need a new one?Water on the floor under a water heater is not one fault. It has six common origins and they do not have the same answer
• How to find out which outlets a GFCI protects, and why a dead bathroom or garage outlet is often a GFCI that tripped somewhere elseA GFCI receptacle is the outlet with the TEST and RESET buttons on its face, and it almost never protects only itself. C
• How to flush a water heaterSediment settles at the bottom of a storage water heater over time, and it is the most common cause of a rumbling or pop
• Decide what food is safe after a power cutWhen the power fails, refrigerated and frozen food are at risk. Use temperature readings and ice crystal presence to dec
• How to check a fire extinguisher at home and read the gaugeA fire extinguisher is one of the few safety devices in a house that gives no signal when it stops working. It loses cha
• How do I check if my water heater's pressure relief valve pipe is installed correctlyThis page shows how to find the discharge line that runs from the temperature and pressure relief valve (the T&P valve,
• How do I insulate the hot water pipes at my water heaterSlipping foam sleeves onto the first few feet of pipe at a water heater is one of the genuinely easy jobs. The sleeves c
• Make a home fire escape plan and practise itA home fire escape plan is a simple floor plan of your home that marks two ways out of every room, one meeting place out
• Where should I put smoke detectors, and how many do I needA smoke alarm only protects the room it can actually sense smoke in, so the count and the position matter as much as the
• How to keep water pipes from freezing in a cold snap, and what to do if one has already frozenDemand for this page arrives on a forecast, which is the worst possible moment to start reading. So it is written in the
• How do I read the label on my hot water heater and figure out what the numbers meanA water heater carries more information than most owners ever read. Beyond the model number and the serial number, the s
• How to fix an outside tap that drips or won't shut off by replacing the washer and the packing inside the stemA frost-proof outdoor tap — also called a frost-free faucet, a freezeless faucet, or a sillcock — looks like an ordinary
• How to replace a thermostat and get the wires on the right terminalsSwapping a room thermostat is an afternoon of careful labelling wrapped around about ten minutes of actual work. The wir
• How to replace a shower head and read the GPM flow rate stamped on the new oneA showerhead loses spray force over the years as mineral deposits clog its holes, or a household simply decides to cut i
• How to replace a worn toilet flapper when the toilet runs, ghost flushes, or leaks silently into the bowlA toilet that hisses long after the flush, refills by itself in the middle of the night, or simply costs more than it us
• How old is my carbon monoxide detector and when do I replace itA carbon monoxide alarm has a sensor with a finite working life, and it can reach the end of that life while still looki
• How to change the air filter in a furnace or central air conditionerChanging the air filter is the one maintenance task on a central heating and cooling system that a householder can do wi
• How to change the battery in a smoke detector and test itA smoke detector that chirps once a minute is almost always asking for a battery, and the change itself takes about two
• What do I do during a boil water notice, and what do I do once it is lifted?A boil water notice, also called a boil water advisory or a boil order, is an alert from a water utility or a health dep
• How to change landscape light bulbs and work out if my transformer can take themGarden lighting fails in a boring, predictable way: a lamp dies, someone puts in whatever was on the shelf, and three ye
• Set a heating and cooling schedule on a programmable thermostatA programmable or smart thermostat can hold a different target temperature at different times of day, so the heating or
• How to start up a garden irrigation or sprinkler system in springAn in-ground irrigation system sits full of trapped water and empty pipe over winter, and both Rain Bird and Hunter Indu
• How to fix a leaky faucet that drips from the spout or weeps around the handleA tap drips because one soft part inside it has stopped sealing — a washer, an O-ring, or the whole cartridge. It is not
• Find which alarm is chirping and what the chirp meansA chirp and an alarm are not the same thing, and mixing them up is how people either evacuate over a dead battery or, wo
• How do I store emergency drinking water for my household?An emergency water supply is water you keep on hand for a disaster or a service failure. The CDC recommends 1 gallon of
• How to get the house ready for a storm and a power outageThis is the list of things worth doing in the day or two before a forecast storm that might take the power out. It cover
• How to test a GFCI outlet with the TEST and RESET buttons, and what it means when it will not resetA GFCI receptacle is the outlet with the TEST and RESET buttons on its face, and it is usually the one in a bathroom, a
• How to test your home for radon with a short-term kit, what closed-house conditions are, and what the results meanRadon is a radioactive gas from rocks and soil that seeps into buildings. It has no colour, smell or taste. No amount of
• How to test a sump pump and its float switch before the wet seasonA sump pump spends most of its life doing nothing, and then it has one job on one bad night. The failure people actually
• How to test a sump pump battery backup and check the batteryA sump pump's battery backup only earns its place during the exact event most likely to defeat the primary pump: a storm
• How often to test well water and what to test it forA private well is not covered by the rules that protect public water systems, and no government agency tests it for you.
• How to winterize a garden irrigation or sprinkler system before it freezesAn underground irrigation system drains water from its pipes in one of three ways: a manual drain valve you open by hand
• How to winterize an outdoor faucet so it does not burst in winterThe single most expensive misunderstanding in home plumbing is that a frost-free outdoor tap looks after itself. It does