Preventing Common Plumbing Emergency Issues Is Easy With This Helpful Guide

There are plenty of things to keep a homeowner busy, from family to career, so a problem in the home itself is never, ever welcome. If you want to keep one of the biggest headaches, a plumbing emergency, from grinding your home life to a halt, we’ve got some tips to help with prevention.

Stop Leaking Fixtures

The constant drip of a leaking fixture doesn’t necessarily threaten your home, but it gets annoying fast.

The most common cause of this is a tap simply not being turned to “off” tightly enough, but if you do this and there’s still a leak, you have other fixes.

There are some parts of a fixture that are a bit like light bulbs, in that, over time, they can wear out and stop working.

The O-ring and the washer are two such small, easily replaceable parts, but they also cause leaks when they break down. Switching out these parts usually solves leaky fixture issues.

Prevent a Blocked Drain

If you fill your sink with water, then pull the plug to let that water drain away, but the water just stays there, you have a blocked drain.

This means there’s an obstruction in the pipe somewhere that no longer lets the water flow through the rest of the drainage pipe and into the sewer.

This type of blockage is usually gradual and first manifests as a “slow drain,” indicating that you have a blockage building up.

A mechanical solution to this is a plunger or a plumbing snake to keep the pipe clear. You can also use off-the-shelf drain cleaners, but be careful with this method. Too much drain cleaner in a pipe can damage older pipes, and even newer, PVC pipes may warp or melt due to too high an amount of corrosive cleaning chemicals.

Prevent Toilet Overflows

You don’t want to flush your toilet one day and have the waste inside it flow up, and out of the toilet and onto your floor.

This is a particular type of blocked drain but with added health risks thanks to the contagions carried by human waste.

The best way to prevent this from happening is to not use your toilet into a garbage disposal. If children play with the toilet by flushing things down, like toys, break them of this habit.

If you’ve been using the toilet to get rid of things like paper towels from the kitchen, this can jam your pipes.

It may be a paper towel, but unlike toilet paper, it is not designed to break upon contact with water so that it can jam a pipe in time.

Burst Pipe Prevention

The circumstances behind a pipe bursting are extreme. Very old pipes—especially if they’re cast iron—will break due to metal fatigue eventually.

This is especially true if they’re 75 years old or more, so replacement is the best measure.

Water pipes, on the other hand, may burst if you do things like keep your water pressure too high.

Over the years this can also weaken them, so keep water pressure within the tolerance levels of your plumbing.

The plumbing in the typical Tyler, TX home has been built to last. But you can add to that lifespan by following some of these preventive measures.