Is Your Home Ready for Fall? Here are 7 Tips to Get Ready

Everyone who owns or lives in a house knows that the counterpart to spring cleaning is fall maintenance, and the end of summer or early autumn is the ideal time to start preparing your house for the cold weather to come.

This involves measuring up your safety protocols, getting your heating system up and running (and shutting off the cooling system), and preparing the interior and exterior of your house for the fall and winter. Looking for ways to get started? Here are seven tips to help you get a head start on your fall maintenance.  

1. Safety First!

There are four things you need to worry about when it comes to safety, and they are:

• Checking your fire extinguishers and replacing expired ones
• Inspecting and replacing the batteries in your smoke alarms
• Inspecting and replacing the batteries in your carbon monoxide detector
• Going over your home emergency plan with your family

2. Fire Up the Furnace

Before turning on your furnace for the first time, it’s a good idea to give it a visual inspection to look for signs of wear on the outside. Clean out or replace the filters as well. When you do fire it up for the first time, listen for screeching or whining, and check to make sure it’s functioning (heating your house) effectively.

3. Switch Over From Cooling Mode

There are three things you need to address to stop the cooling process in your house. For one, shut off the air conditioner, give it a vacuuming, and put a cover on it to protect it from the elements. Second, set your thermostat to between 68 and 70 F (the lower you go, the more money you’ll save on heating costs). And lastly, switch your ceiling fans to rotate the other way: they should go clockwise in winter to push down hot air.

4. Turn off the Water Outside

The last thing you need in the dead of winter is for an outdoor pipe to freeze or burst, and you can prevent this by shutting off the water to the outside. After you turn it off, bleed the pipe by turning on the tap and running it until there’s no more water.

5. Un-Gunk the Gutters

Get out the ladder, because fall means gutter cleaning! Once the leaves have fallen, clean out the gutters so that rain and melting snow and ice have somewhere to go—other than pooling around your house—come spring.

6. De-Draft the Doors and Windows

This is a two-pronged approach that involves caulking cracks around windows, doors, and entry points, and installing or updating weather stripping on doors and windows.

7. Repair the Roof

This starts with a basic inspection to see if your roof is showing signs of damage. The wind, rain, ice, and snow will wreak havoc on the roof over the winter, so it has to be in decent shape going into it. Look for missing shingles and bricks (in the chimney), rips, cracks, tears, and other damage. If you see anything alarming, call in a roofer.               

Taking care of these home maintenance chores now will ensure that you have a fun and safe autumn, and a warm winter. But along with these tasks and inspecting your furnace on your own, you should also have your heating system serviced annually by a professional.

To schedule your fall maintenance appointment in Anoka, MN, call Superior Heating, Air Conditioning & Electrical Inc. at 763-422-1721.