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It sinks in shortly after you close on your new home: Now that you’ve invested a ton of cash into a property, you get to experience the joy (and continuing expense!) of maintaining it. If it’s your first home, that means a steep learning curve. When it comes to home ownership, you simply don’t know what you don’t know.
Eventually, you learn a few things. Running toilets and roof leaks no longer send you spiraling, because you know what needs to be done—or at least who to call. But even experienced homeowners sometimes hold onto myths about home maintenance that waste time and money, at best, and can cause damage to your home at worst. If you’re still buying into any of the home maintenance myths on this list, it’s time to learn the truth.
When people specify new construction or recently renovated homes in their house search, one big reason is usually a perceived lack of maintenance. A brand-new house, or a house that was recently gut renovated, should be good for at least a few years before materials, systems, and appliances start to show wear and tear that requires maintenance, right?
Wrong. For one thing, even brand-new, high-quality materials or appliances can be installed incorrectly, have factory defects, or operate below their expected tolerances. For another, maintenance isn’t just for older stuff: Properly maintaining, cleaning, and servicing roofs, gutters, HVAC systems, and everything else in a house from the very beginning will make it last longer and be more effective overall throughout its lifespan.
Testing your smoke alarms
Smoke alarms save lives. But they can only do so if they’re fully operational, so testing them on a regular basis—at least once a month—is a very, very good idea.
But if you’re testing your alarms by pressing that big TEST button, you’re actually only testing the alarm. That’s important—a smoke alarm you can’t hear isn’t useful—but it’s not enough. You need to test the sensor as well to ensure that your smoke detector will actually detect smoke. You can do this the old-school way by lighting a match near your alarm, or you can buy a product specifically designed to test these sensors. Either way, performing this check (in addition to mashing that TEST button) is an essential part of testing your alarms.
Sometimes it’s easy to fall for the fallacy that if a little bit of something is good, a lot of it must be better. If that were true, it would follow that if a certain amount of insulation in your attic, crawl space, or other area of the house is good, dumping a ton more on top would be better.
In reality, the ideal volume of insulation is calculated carefully depending on the material, the space and square footage, and other factors. Too much dumped between attic joists, for example, can compress the insulation too much, making it less effective. An over-insulated house will suffer from higher humidity, resulting in visible condensation and potential mold growth. The air quality may suffer, as well, and you might notice extreme temperature variations between rooms due to the house being unable to “breathe.”
Your appliances are cleaning themselves
It seems logical, so when someone tells you that you don’t have to clean your washing machine or dishwasher because you’re literally running them through soap-rinse cycles every time you use them, it’s easy to believe. What good could another round of detergent and water do for the interior of a machine constantly soaked in detergent and water? And how could dirt accumulate in there, anyway?
But appliances like dishwashers are not self-cleaning. In fact, over time they can get absolutely filthy. The washing cycles leave behind residue—greasy, scummy stuff that isn’t easily washed away. Over (a relatively short) time, this residue builds up into a formidable layer of gunk that can lead to mold, bad odors, and a degradation of the appliance’s performance.
Ceiling fans are powerful tools for making your home more comfortable. They help circulate air, cycling hot air downward and cool air upward (or vice versa, depending on the season). And if you sit under one that breeze feels mighty nice when you’re hot.
That cooling effect makes people think that a ceiling fan actually cools off a room, but that isn’t true. The reason a ceiling fan makes you feel cooler is called the “windchill effect.” The air movement hastens the evaporation of sweat from your skin, helping you to cool down. But a ceiling fan will actually have no impact on making the room cooler, which means running them when you’re not in the room is a waste of money and energy. In fact, a ceiling fan left running for long periods of time will heat up, and could actually raise the room’s temperature.
Cutting grass too short
Considering how many people seem to think a lush, green lawn is the epitome of the Good Life, you’d think people would be psyched about the amount of work that goes into maintaining one. You would be wrong—most people hate maintaining their lawn, and would pay dearly to not have to mow them as often. That leads to the circulation of a popular myth: If you cut your lawn super short (like, brutally short) it will take longer to grow back, so you have to break out the mower less often.
In a sense, this is true—but only because cutting your grass too short will probably kill your lawn, and a dead lawn needs no mowing. Luckily, opportunistic weeds will crowd in, and at that point you can just mothball the mower altogether and give up. It’s much better to just suck it up and mow the lawn more regularly, but leave it a bit higher—about three inches high is a good starting point for most people.
The summer comes, the temperature rises, so you turn on your air conditioning system. Then you go out for a few hours—so you turn it off. After all, why pay to cool down a house when no one is there?
Because that’s actually the worst way to manage both the interior temperature and your utility bills. When you shut off the AC entirely, the house heats up. When you come back to that hot, swampy pit you’ll turn the AC back on—blasting, because you can feel your soul leaving your body through your sweat glands—and your air conditioning has to work super, super hard to drag the temperature back down again. If you leave the AC on but adjust the thermostat when you leave (or put it on an “econo” setting), the home will remain relatively comfortable, your energy usage will actually go down, and it will be easier to make rooms even cooler if you want to.
"Cleaning" garbage disposals with eggshells and lemons
Garbage disposals aren’t as useful or necessary as people might think, but if your home has one you’re going to use it. If you use it, you already know that it can get grimy and stinky, and the blades can dull just like any other blade. And you might think that dropping some eggshells down there will help sharpen those blades, and dropping some lemons in there will get rid of that stink.
In actuality, those eggshells won’t do anything to sharpen a blade, and they might even break them. If they don’t break the blades, they will likely cause a blockage somewhere in the system, because they cling to the sides of pipes. And a lemon might mask the stench coming out of your disposal for a short while, but it will more likely combine with it to create some new, terrifying smell because lemons won’t do anything to deal with the underlying cause of the stink: grime.
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