The 5 home maintenance tasks most homeowners skip

The 5 home maintenance tasks most homeowners skip

Five jobs that take under an hour each, cost under $50 each, and prevent thousands in repair bills. Most homeowners do exactly zero of them.

Homeowner maintenance falls into two categories. The visible stuff (mowing the lawn, painting trim, replacing rotted decking) gets done because it's right in your face. The invisible stuff (the water heater, the dryer vent, the gutters) gets ignored until it fails, and the failure is usually expensive.

Five tasks land at the top of the "ignored until it fails" list. Doing them on a schedule prevents the most common, most expensive home failures. None of them is complicated. All of them are skippable, which is why they get skipped.

1. Flush the water heater once a year

Water heaters last 8 to 12 years on average. With one annual flush, they often last 15 to 20. Without the flush, sediment builds up at the bottom of the tank, makes the heater work harder, eventually corrodes through, and you wake up to a flooded basement.

How to do it: shut off the heater's power (electric) or set it to pilot (gas). Attach a garden hose to the drain valve at the bottom of the tank. Run the hose to a floor drain or outside. Open the drain valve. Let the tank empty. Open the cold water supply briefly to flush the remaining sediment. Close everything back up. Turn the power back on.

Time: 30 to 60 minutes. Cost: free. Frequency: once a year, ideally in the fall before heating season.

If you've never done it and your heater is over 7 years old, the first flush can be dramatic. Brown water, sometimes rust-colored sediment. That's why you do it. The longer you wait, the worse it gets.

2. Clean the dryer vent twice a year

Clogged dryer vents are one of the most common causes of house fires. The U.S. Fire Administration reports approximately 2,900 home clothes-dryer fires per year, with the leading cause being failure to clean.1 Lint buildup in the vent is the fuel.

The lint trap inside the dryer is not the same as the dryer vent. The trap catches some lint. The rest goes through the duct that connects your dryer to the outside of your house. Over time, that duct fills up. The dryer works harder, runs hotter, and the lint eventually ignites.

How to do it: unplug the dryer (or shut off the gas). Pull it away from the wall. Disconnect the metal duct from the back of the dryer. Use a dryer vent brush kit ($25 at any hardware store) to push through the duct from inside to outside. Vacuum the loose lint. Reconnect everything.

Time: 45 minutes the first time, faster after that. Cost: $25 one-time for the brush kit. Frequency: every 6 months for a household that does multiple loads a week. Once a year for lighter use.

3. Clean the gutters twice a year

Clogged gutters back up water against the roof and the side of your house. The water finds its way into the soffit, the fascia, the exterior walls, and eventually the foundation. Repairs from gutter-caused water damage routinely run $5,000 to $20,000.

How to do it: scoop the leaves and debris into a bucket. Spray the gutters with a hose to confirm water flows freely to the downspouts. Check that downspouts discharge water away from the foundation (at least 4 feet).

Time: 1 to 3 hours depending on house size. Cost: free if you do it. $150 to $300 if you hire it out. Frequency: spring after the trees leaf out, and fall after the leaves drop.

If you have trees overhanging the roof, this gets done more often. Gutter guards help (LeafFilter, GutterGuard, etc.) but don't eliminate the need entirely. Even guarded gutters need an annual check.

4. Service the HVAC system in spring and fall

Two seasonal HVAC tune-ups (one for the air conditioner in spring, one for the furnace in fall) extend the equipment's life by years and catch small problems before they become emergency repairs in July or January.

A professional service visit runs $80 to $150 per visit. Some HVAC companies offer maintenance contracts that bundle both visits for $200 to $300 a year. They're often worth it for the priority service if something does break.

Between professional visits, change the furnace filter every 1 to 3 months. This is the cheapest, most consequential maintenance task most homeowners forget. A clogged filter makes the system work harder, raises energy bills, and shortens the life of the system.

Cost of a filter: $5 to $25 depending on type. Cost of a new furnace because you ran a clogged filter for years: $5,000 to $12,000. The math is obvious.

5. Test the sump pump every spring

If you have a sump pump in the basement, it's protecting you from flooding when the groundwater rises. The catch is that sump pumps often don't run for months at a time, and when they finally need to run, they sometimes don't.

How to test it: pour a bucket of water into the sump pit. The pump should kick on and pump the water out. If it doesn't, the pump is dead or the float switch is stuck. Either way, you have a problem to fix before the next heavy rain.

Time: 5 minutes. Cost: free. Frequency: once in early spring, when the snow is melting and you'd find out about a failed pump the worst way.

Add a battery backup if you don't have one. A primary sump pump runs on electricity. If the power goes out during a storm (which is exactly when you need the pump most), it doesn't run. A $200 battery backup runs the pump for several hours during an outage. Best $200 you'll spend on the basement.

The other small ones worth knowing

Check smoke and carbon monoxide detector batteries twice a year. Daylight saving time is the natural reminder.

Caulk gaps around windows and exterior doors every couple of years. Energy savings show up in heating and cooling bills.

Inspect the roof from the ground with binoculars after every major storm. Missing shingles get worse fast and are cheaper to address early.

Run the disposal with ice cubes and lemon peels monthly. Keeps the blades sharp and the smell down.

Test GFCI outlets monthly by pushing the test button. The outlet should click off. Push reset. If it doesn't reset, the outlet needs replacement.

The annual ritual that handles most of it

Pick a Saturday in spring and a Saturday in fall. Do the gutters, dryer vent, sump pump check, smoke detectors, and furnace filter in one day each. Save the water heater flush for one of the two days. The whole list is under four hours per visit.

If that feels like too much, hire a handyman for one day twice a year. Most charge $50 to $80 an hour and will work through the entire checklist for $300 to $500. That's still cheaper than one preventable repair.

Why most people skip these

Not laziness. Forgetting. The water heater doesn't yell at you to flush it. The dryer vent doesn't put a reminder in your calendar. The sump pump is in the basement and out of sight. The same psychological mechanism that makes us skip dental cleanings makes us skip these. The pain is invisible until it isn't.

The fix: put it in the calendar. Recurring reminder for the spring weekend. Another for the fall weekend. Once it's a routine, the skipped maintenance stops happening.

What to do next

Pick the one task on this list you've never done. Probably the water heater flush or the dryer vent. Do it this Saturday. Watch the difference (your dryer dries faster, your water heater is quieter).

Then put the next four tasks in your calendar across the rest of the year. By next spring, you'll have done all five at least once, and you'll have saved yourself somewhere between $2,000 and $20,000 in preventable repairs.

Sources

1. U.S. Fire Administration, Topical Fire Report on Clothes Dryer Fires in Residential Buildings. usfa.fema.gov

2. Consumer Reports, Home Maintenance Schedule. consumerreports.org/cro/home-maintenance

3. American Home Shield, Annual Home Maintenance Checklist. ahs.com

4. Energy.gov, HVAC Maintenance Tips. energy.gov/energysaver/heat-and-cool