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.

  1 published

• Water heaters and hot water distribution

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

  0 published

• Taps, traps, valves and fixtures

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

  1 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.

  0 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.

  0 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.

  2 published

All procedures in this category

• 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 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