Top Tips for Fall Home Maintenance

Are you ready for winter? From prepping your outdoor fireplace to keeping your lawn free from leaves, there’s quite a bit to keep in mind.

Follow Homes by Taber’s top tips for fall maintenance and get ready to welcome winter with open arms.

Inspect Furnaces

Okay, so this is more of an indoor item, but it was too important to leave off the list. After all, your heating system is meant for your home and your home only - not the entire neighborhood! Just like the yearly check-up with your doctor, your furnace needs a little TLC too.

You can certainly hire a professional (and should at least once a year to confirm all is good to go), but there are a couple items you’re able to check through on your own:

• Examine the filter for your furnace. If it’s dirty, replace it. A dirty filter cuts down on the heat you receive from the furnace - so the cleaner your filter, the more energy efficient your heating is likely to be.
• Test your thermostat. All Taber homes have their thermostats hardwired, so no need to worry about batteries.
• Confirm that your supply registers are open and unobstructed throughout your home. If a bunch of them are blocked, your house isn’t going to heat as effectively.

Rake Leaves

No fall maintenance list is complete without this autumn staple. Where else do the kids get their gigantic leaf pile to jump into?

Even if you don’t have kids, there are plenty of reasons to get those leaves off your lawn:

• Be a good neighbor. One strong breeze can carry all your leaves right into your neighbor’s yard. Less work for you, but tensions might rise.
• Lawn health. If it’s a few leaves, you’re probably in the clear. If there are a bunch, though, you need to clean them up. Grass covered by a thick layer of leaves won’t receive the sun and air it needs to survive. All those decaying leaves can also lead to pest infestations and fungus. Yuck!
• Compost. Of course, you don’t have to send those leaves away on a garbage truck. If you have a garden, go ahead and shred those leaves up to use as a fertilizer. A thick mat of leaves can drown your grass, but shredding or chopping them up will help them decompose faster than you can say “Happy Thanksgiving!”
• Safety. With rainstorms or melting snow, leaves can get super slippery. If they’ve blown onto sidewalks or driveways, that could make those walkways dangerous.

Store Lawn Mowers and Hoses

Nothing feels as satisfactory as putting your lawn mower away for the season! There are a few steps to keep in mind, though, before closing the door on summer:

• Clean gunk and debris from the deck and blades before storing. First of all, this makes your job easier come springtime. Second of all, nothing is more unappealing than decaying leaf debris jammed in your lawnmower.
• Prevent stale or degrading gasoline by adding fresh gas and some fuel stabilizer to the tank.
• If you don’t have a shed or garage for your mower, make sure to cover it with a tarp to keep it clean (and protect from unwelcome critter nests).

For any garden hoses, make sure to drain the hoses out completely, remove them from outdoor faucets, and cover those faucets. Ideally, hoses should be stored in a garage, shed, or basement so they don’t sit out in snow and ice all winter long.

That way, trapped water won’t freeze as temperatures dip down. Doing so will also help prevent frozen pipes.

Clean Gutters

Once again, those pesky leaves come into play here. Clumps of leaves can clog your drainage spouts and mess up your perfectly functioning drain system.

If it isn’t nipped in the bud, the overflow can potentially cause costly fixes to your foundation. Heavy rains and water can back up and flood your house, causing expensive repairs and a big inconvenience. All of this can be prevented by simply maintaining clean gutters.

If you have big trees on your property, clean your gutters at least twice a year - and definitely check them out after a big storm to make sure nothing has gotten stuck.

Other than that, it just takes an afternoon and some elbow grease to keep things running smoothly. Rubber gloves and a long sleeve shirt can protect your arms while cleaning, and a small plastic scoop is useful for digging out debris.

When done removing all the junk, flush out gutters and downspouts with a hose to confirm it’s all draining correctly.

Clean the Chimneys

To get great use out of your Taber home’s outdoor fireplace, make sure you’re keeping that chimney clean and unobstructed.

A basic cleaning job is pretty simple to do at home. If you see a lot of creosote, though, you’ll need to call a pro. A major culprit in chimney fires, creosote forms when wood burns incompletely.

So how do you tell if the creosote in your chimney is too much? First, make sure your chimney has no downdraft and put on a pair of goggles and a disposable dust mask. Then, using a fireplace poker and a flashlight, scrape the black surface above the smoke chamber - you’ll measure the groove left behind to see the creosote levels. Below, we’ve broken down what each level means for you:

• If the groove you left is paper thin, good news! Creosote levels are safe and you are good to go.
• If the groove is ⅛ inch thick, schedule a cleaning ASAP.
• If the groove is ¼ inch thick, immediately stop using the fireplace and do not use it again until it has been cleaned. At this point, a professional chimney sweep is recommended.

But wait, what does creosote actually look like? Well, it comes in a few different forms. Here are the basic ones:

• Extremely light dull gray, brown or black soot - easiest to remove.
• Black granular accumulation - removable with a stiff chimney brush.
• Road tar-like coating - difficult to remove even with scrapers.
• Shiny, glaze-like coating - the most dangerous, nearly impossible to remove.

Relax!

Ah, time for all those cozy nights inside. Even if it’s not cold enough yet for your favorite sweater, rest easy knowing you’ve taken care of all the hard autumn prep.

Stay tuned for winterization tips from Homes by Taber as the temperatures continue to drop!