The Top 7 Benefits of Preventive Home Maintenance

Preventive maintenance is part and parcel of homeownership. Think of how essential regular maintenance is for your car. You need to keep the gas tank full, regularly change the oil, periodically rotate the tires and replace the brake pads, or else you risk breaking down on the side of the road. The same logic applies to your home and all of its systems and appliances. Neglecting your home maintenance plan will inevitably lead to inconvenient breakdowns, malfunctions, and expensive repairs.

Let’s review in greater detail why preventive maintenance is so critical and how you can comfortably manage your home maintenance checklist.

What Is Preventive Home Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance is the regular upkeep of your home’s essential systems, appliances, and structural elements. Virtually nothing in your home can be ignored indefinitely. Gutters need to be cleaned, HVAC filters replaced, water heaters serviced. Failing to attend to these sorts of tasks leads to trouble sooner or later, so preventive maintenance is exactly that — it prevents appliance breakdowns and costly home repairs.

Different maintenance tasks run on different schedules. A monthly maintenance checklist might include testing your smoke detectors and cleaning your kitchen appliances. Yearly home maintenance includes scheduling service check-ups for your home heating equipment and inspecting your chimney. 

The details of your personal maintenance checklist is largely dependent on the nature of your home, the age of your systems and appliances, and even where you live.

Why Preventive Maintenance Matters for Your Home

It’s hard to overstate the importance of preventive maintenance. Here’s how a little forward thinking benefits your home, your health, and your finances.

Fewer and less expensive repairs

Properly maintained appliances break down less often. For example, if you regularly clean or replace your air conditioner’s filter and keep the condenser coils free of dust, the odds are that your system will function properly for a longer period than it would have if you had neglected such tasks. 

Basic upkeep ensures that malfunctions are few and far between. Well-maintained appliances aren’t immune to problems, but when issues do arise, they’re more affordable relative to the expensive problems that very often afflict neglected appliances. 

You may have to budget for light maintenance in the short term, but you stand to save thousands in the long term.

Energy savings

Another boon to your wallet is the probable savings on energy costs. Poorly maintained home appliances and systems are, by and large, less efficient. Filters that are choked with dust and soot force HVAC systems to work harder to maintain a comfortable home temperature. Likewise, a water heater or water softener in desperate need of a tune-up may consume more energy than a similar appliance that has been recently serviced. 

Regularly maintaining your home’s heating and cooling equipment and adequately weatherproofing your doors and windows will yield cumulative financial savings over time.

Increased home value

The financial benefits of preventive maintenance aren’t limited to cost savings on repair and energy bills. You also stand to increase your home’s real estate value. Exterior maintenance, such as gutter cleaning, landscaping, window washing, and painting and staining, significantly improves your home’s curb appeal. Interior maintenance of systems, appliances, and cosmetic fixtures reassures prospective buyers that the home is in good condition, justifying a higher sale price. 

Improved home safety

Not all of the benefits of home maintenance are financial in nature. Comprehensive and routine maintenance is a matter of safety as well. Testing smoke and carbon monoxide detectors and replacing the batteries ensure that you and your family have adequate warning in the event of a fire or gas leak. Keeping your electrical appliances in optimal condition minimizes the risk of an electrical fire. There are several safety hazards that can arise from negligent home maintenance.

Cleaner air

You’ll breathe better in a well-maintained home. Cleaning your ducts and registers and replacing or cleaning your HVAC system’s air filters will minimize airborne dust particles, pollen, dander, and other allergens. Similarly, keeping clean kitchen exhaust fans will limit the amount of cooking fumes you breathe in while preparing meals.

Bonus equipment and structural protection

All of your home’s appliances, systems, and structural elements are interconnected. A malfunction with one piece of equipment can set off cascading problems in otherwise healthy parts of the home. A neglected air conditioner, for example, might ice over. When the ice thaws, the meltwater can seep into the flooring or walls, causing water damage that can in turn lead to rot or mold growth.

Another possibility is a poorly maintained electrical system that results in power surges that destroy or otherwise damage unprotected devices plugged into your home’s electrical outlets.

There are countless examples of this nature. A problem with one appliance or system can lead to issues with many more. You can nip this all in the bud by keeping your appliances in adequate shape via preventive maintenance.

Greater reliability

Neglected appliances are unreliable appliances. If you ignore your equipment indefinitely, it’s only a matter of time before you lose hot water, or the lights go out, or your home suffers from a pest infestation, and so on. And while you might be able to repair your appliance in the event of a malfunction, the possibility of another failure is usually greater. When you prioritize preventive care, all of your home’s amenities will be there when you need them.

Seasonal Preventive Maintenance Tips

The volume of home maintenance tasks can sometimes seem overwhelming, but you don’t need to accomplish everything at once. Staying on top of things can be significantly more manageable if you create a home maintenance checklist by month or season.

Develop your seasonal checklists by considering the appliances and systems you most rely on in each season. For example, a summer maintenance checklist should remind you to clean your air conditioner and inspect it for leaks or other signs of damage. If you kick on your heating system in the fall, schedule a service call for your heating appliances at the beginning of the season.

A seasonal home maintenance checklist should also reflect the tasks associated with the season’s weather. Clean your gutters of fallen leaves in the fall and inspect them for ice dams in the winter. And consider what the weather may enable or prevent you from doing. It will be hard to inspect your home’s foundation for cracks, for example, if there’s a substantial accumulation of snow.

Once you have the seasonally dependent tasks recorded, build out your checklists by evenly distributing other tasks that you can accomplish at any time of the year. Remember that there are some tasks that should appear on two or more of your seasonal checklists. You might clean your gutters in the fall and spring, for example, and you should check your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors every month.

When in doubt, refer to home experts, reliable technicians, and appliance manufacturers’ guidance to identify important maintenance tasks and the frequency with which you should attend to them.

When to Hire Professionals for Preventive Maintenance

The average homeowner is perfectly capable of accomplishing many home maintenance tasks, but it’s important not to get overconfident. If you’re not certain of what you’re doing, you run the risk of introducing problems and working counter to the very purpose of preventive maintenance. 

Avoid common home maintenance errors by consulting a professional when you feel out of your wheelhouse. Always enlist the help of a pro whenever dealing with high-voltage electrical work or potentially hazardous materials.  
And while you can certainly refill the salt in your water softener or replace the filter in your HVAC unit, true tune-ups should be left to professional technicians. Don’t neglect those service calls for your major home appliances.

The Role of Home Warranties in Preventive Maintenance

Home maintenance doesn’t have to be a solo endeavor. You can lean on a home warranty for support. Though usually associated with appliance repair and replacement, a home warranty can also cover regular home maintenance. You can use Liberty Home Guard’s policies, for example, to take care of gutter cleaning, window washing, or septic pumping — and many more household tasks.

Talk with our team to learn more about how our suite of protections and services can help you make short work of your maintenance checklist. We can also share more information about how a warranty can save you time, money, and a headache when you run into an issue with one of your home systems or appliances. Call (833)-547-6493.