Common Water Damage Prevention Tips

Water damage is a very common problem in most older homes these days, but most of it can be avoided if you simply know what to look for.  You should do your best to safeguard the investment that is your home and making sure that the interior does not become water damaged to the point that it cannot be repaired without a large sum of money and quite a lot of work is important.  Avoiding the causes of water damage is the best thing that you can do to prevent this. 

When your bath tub, toilet, or washing machine overflows, you probably are not thinking about the integrity of the structure of your home.  To you, this is probably just a big inconvenience most of the time, but the truth is that if you let it happen over and over, it could do some serious damage to your floor and lower walls.  It is alright to be a little forgetful every now and then, but try to pay attention to these things.

The steam in the bathroom and kitchen can cause problems for the ceiling and walls, since steam is composed of water vapor.  This adheres to your walls and ceilings and keeps them moist almost constantly, which will eventually discolor them and cause mold to grow.  Mold is a problem all by itself, but it seems to go hand in hand with water damage.  Purchase a steam vent for the bathroom, kitchen, laundry room, and the basement and have those installed either by you or a professional to help keep the humidity in the home down. 

Rain gutters need to be cleaned out as often as necessary, although this is usually every fall.  These collect rain water and channel them down through downspouts that will carry the water away from the foundation of your house.  If they are not cleared out, then the water simply falls to the ground at the base of the house and tends to settle in pockets, which can seep down into your basement and cause cracks in the walls. 

Keeping your hot water heater checked on is also a good idea.  It should be installed on the lowest floor of your house and sit elevated off the floor in a drain pan connected to the water system of your house.  If it starts to leak, the water will be transferred to your home’s plumbing system instead of all over your floor.

Water Restoration 

Common Areas for Water Damage

The bathroom and the kitchen are the two rooms of our homes that, when remodeled, can add the most significant amount of value to it.  They are the two centers of our houses, whether we realize it or not.  A good house is usually inspected by a few different factors and these two are generally the focal points of many home buyers.  Home buyers want to know if a property has a good kitchen and if it has a good bathroom.  Depending on what they see, it can make or break a sale. 

Unsightly water damage can usually be prevented to either area of the home unless it is caused by mother nature, such as flood or hurricane damage.  What can you do to prevent water damage to the two most important rooms of your home..?  Similar things can be done in each room to help keep the value of your home from going down.

Taking a bath or boiling water on the stove gives off steam, but there is not always a way for the steam to get out of the room if there is no vent installed.  There should be a vent with a fan in each bathroom of the house and the kitchen, as well, to keep the steam from being absorbed by the walls.  Drywall that has been damaged in this way usually starts to sag after a while because it has absorbed so much water and not only this, but mold will start to grow on walls that catch steam like this, as well.  This is the perfect environment for mold to grow in. 

Any plumbing in your bathroom or kitchen needs to be checked on a regular basis for cracks or weak spots in its connections.  Anything in your house that uses water coming from the water system in your home needs to be checked on regularly to make sure the chance of a leak sneaking up on you is minimal.  Some leaks can sneak up on you while you are away from home or asleep at night, but a lot of time it is caused by just not keeping an eye on worn hoses or damaged pipes.

Sometimes a water heater is located in a pantry or in an area near the kitchen, so keeping a check on this is a good idea, too.  The water heater should be set inside of a drain pan that is connected to the water system of your home so that if it does leak, any water is directed down into the septic tank or the sewer.

Commercial Water Restoration 

Mold: The Benefits We Forget

Although molds growing unchecked can be harmful to human health, molds that are grown in laboratories for specific purposes have been used extensively for many years in order to improve the quality of life. 

Penicillin as we know it today was discovered accidentally when Alexander Fleming saw a plate of Staphylococcus aureus had become contaminated by a blue-green mold.  He noted that colonies of the bacteria next to the mold were being destroyed by it; he soon after grew a pure culture of the mold and found that penicillin killed not only Staphylococcus, but many other bacteria that cause disease.  He named it penicillin, published the results of his experiment in 1929, and the medical community has been using it ever since.

Molds are also used to make different kinds of cheeses, including bleu cheese.  Bleu cheese in particular is rumored to have been discovered by accident and since molds are not generally associated with good food, there is good reason for this assumption.  Early cheeses were aged inside caves and these places often contained the perfect conditions for mold to grow in.  

Without molds, we would have neither bread nor beer and even butchers inject mold into animals before they butcher them for preservation.  Aspergillus oryzae is used in Japan to convert the starch in rice into sugar in order to make the traditional alcoholic beverage of sake.  Red yeast rice is also made by being cultivated with a mold called Monascus purpureus and was used as a natural food coloring before the discovery of modern chemical food coloring.

Agriculturally, molds also help to decompose different kinds of natural debris such as taking care of the leftovers from forest fires and begin building a base for new plants and trees to grow on.  Decaying organic matter is also eaten by mold and thus they are the natural recyclers of the world.  If it is organic in origin and needs to be gotten rid of, overtime mold can accomplish this task. 

Something most people outside the medical community don’t realize is that if a medicine’s name has the ending of “mycin”, it was made using mold

Mold only becomes a problem if it begins to inhabit the same places that humans and their domesticated animals inhabit.  If they remain in a checked status, they do us next to no harm and as shown here, can even provide civilization with many benefits. 

Wet Carpet