If your home has a well, you’re probably not too worried about how well the plumbing in your home is sealed against outside threats. However, if you have a septic system or another well that isn’t properly sealed against external contaminants, your entire house could soon be at risk of smelling bad and starting to cause problems with your plumbing.
Leaky pipes can also result in water damage by allowing moisture to seep into the walls and rot the structure of the house from the inside out. Luckily, keeping your plumbing sealed is easy so easy that it almost feels counterintuitive to call attention to it! Here are some of the top things you can do right away to keep exterior moisture out of your pipes.
Use weather stripping on all doors and windows
If you don’t seal off your doors and windows, the sills and thresholds between your doors and walls will act as a passage for rainwater to sneak its way down into your home’s plumbing. This can result in leaks on higher floors or in the basement, where your water pipes are much shallower than they are on the ground floor.
To keep this from happening, seal off all gaps at the door and window sills with a weather stripping product. Once you have it installed, make sure to leave enough space at the top of your door and window frames so that you can open the door or slide the window easily.
Fix any leaks immediately
Once you have issues with your plumbing, it’s important to treat them as soon as they are detected. If you wait until your pipes start to leak, it will be much harder to fix the problem before it becomes a larger one.
Even if you don’t hear any dripping, the water that’s seeping from inside your walls is doing damage to your home’s structure and your plumbing. It’s important to stop this from happening as soon as you notice it.
The quickest and most effective way to do this is to turn off the water supply to the area where the leak is occurring.
Maintain your current plumbing system
It’s important to remember that your plumbing is part of the structural integrity of your home. If it’s under significant pressure or is receiving a flow of water that’s much higher than it’s designed to take, it could start to show signs of wear and tear.
If this is the case, it’s important to have your pipes inspected and the ones that are showing excessive wear and tear repaired or plugged in as soon as possible. With the rest of your plumbing maintained properly, you shouldn’t have to worry about it causing any problems with the rest of your home’s systems.
Keep your yard weed-free
This may seem like a small detail, but it’s an important one. If you have a weed-free yard, there’s less of a chance for the ground to be penetrated by the roots of nearby trees and plants. This can allow water that penetrates the soil beneath the yard to freely seep through your plumbing without having to fight against the natural resistance of the soil. Keeping your yard weed-free means that there are fewer places for any water to make its way into your home’s plumbing from underneath the ground.
Add a humidity trap to your air conditioning unit.
If you live in a location where temperatures are regularly above the dew point for the air, you may have noticed that your air conditioning unit is starting to leak. This is likely because the unit is trying to remove moisture from the air in order to keep it cool, but it can’t get rid of it all fast enough.
A humidity trap attached to the condenser of your air conditioning unit will help to reduce the amount of water that it has to work with. This will help to reduce the risk of any damage caused to your ventilation system and condenser coil by the condensation that results from the reduced cooling effect of your air conditioning unit.
Add a dehumidifier to the basement.
A dehumidifier will remove excess water from the air in your basement without having to use any electricity. Put the dehumidifier in an area in your basement that’s not used frequently, away from any walls or water pipes.
This will allow it to remove excess water from the air in the basement, but it will also remove the air from a small space and prevent it from circulating back into the rest of your home.
This will help to prevent damage to the walls, floors, and other surfaces in your basement due to condensation that results from the removal of excess water from the air.
Don’t forget the roof!
Water that’s seeping through your roof can damage your home’s structural integrity just as much as water that penetrates through your walls. It’s important to make sure that your roof is sealed against external threats, from leaves, dirt, and other building materials to seeping rainwater.
A roof with a large enough gap for water to enter from the outside is a roof that’s likely to have issues that require constant monitoring and repair in the future. This will save you money on repairs in the future if you kept it sealed, but it’s also a good idea to seal it now because it’s likely to be opened soon anyway.
Conclusion
The best way to keep your plumbing sealed is to make sure that all of the gaps between the doors and windows of your home are properly sealed. You should also make sure to keep your yard weed-free and maintain your plumbing system regularly by fixing any leaks immediately and keeping your current plumbing system functioning properly.
If you don’t seal off your roof against seeping water, your roof will likely need to be resealed when any future leaks are detected. When done properly, these steps shouldn’t take more than a few minutes out of your day and won’t cause any inconvenience at all.
The only real issue that they pose is that they’re necessary to do, and you can’t be as vigilant about them if you don’t recognize that they need to be done.
