Plumbing
The four that are worth it
| Task | How often | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Open and close the main shutoff | Twice a year | A seized valve during a burst. This is the difference between a wet floor and a flooded house. |
| Disconnect outside hoses | Every autumn, before the first hard freeze | A split pipe inside the wall behind the hose bib, usually discovered in spring when it thaws. |
| Flush the water heater and check the anode rod | Annually | Sediment that insulates the burner from the water, and a tank that rusts from the inside once the anode is gone. |
| Chase small leaks when you notice them | Immediately | Almost everything else. A stain on a ceiling and a slow drip under a sink are the early stage of the call we take at 2am. |
The anode rod is the one nobody does
A tank water heater has a sacrificial anode rod in it, there to corrode so the steel tank does not. Once it is consumed the tank starts rusting from the inside, and the first evidence is usually the tank failing. Replacing a rod is cheap. Replacing a tank is not.
In areas with harder water the rod goes faster. If your heater is five years old and nobody has ever looked at the rod, that is the check to ask for at the next visit.
What is not worth your Saturday
Also low value: adding a water softener because the internet said so, before anyone has tested the water. Test first. The result decides whether you have a hardness problem, an iron problem, or no problem.
What a professional visit adds
The checks above are the ones you can do. What a visit adds is the measurement: static pressure at the fixture, the condition of the supply piping where you cannot see it, whether the expansion tank still has a charge, and whether the heating appliance and the water heater are sharing a flue that suits both of them.
Booking it
We cover Manchester and the surrounding towns for water heaters, drain cleaning, leak detection and water treatment if the test comes back showing something worth treating.
If something is already going wrong, what to do in the first ten minutes is the more useful page.