The plumbing system in your home is something that is easy to overlook until disaster strikes. Efficient plumbing runs in the background of your daily home activities without making much of a fuss. However, as with any part of your home, pipes need a bit of care and maintenance to stay at their best. Here are just a few tips on how to clean the pipes in your home to keep them happy.
Flush Your Hot Water Taps
The first step is a good flush of all the hot water taps in your home. This means turning on any hot water taps in the kitchen or bathrooms. These taps should include the sink and the bath as well. Don’t forget other areas you might have that can produce hot water, such as a wet bar. It is a good idea to run these taps for 15 minutes continuously. After 15 minutes, you can shut off these taps.
Flush the Cold Water Taps
The cold water taps come next. However, you don’t need to flush them as long as you did the hot water taps. You only need to open and run these parts of your plumbing for about five minutes in total. Just like your hot water taps, there are parts that you might forget to run. You may wish to create a checklist to go through for efficiency. Flushing each toilet in the home once is part of the cold water cleaning process here. If your refrigerator has a water dispenser, include it here as well. You can shut off these taps after five minutes.
Check Remaining Faucets
The hot and cold taps are the usual parts of your home’s plumbing system. However, you may need to allow for additional faucets that can contribute to clean pipes. Once you have finished with the regular taps, check the house and make note of external faucets, taps that are not used for drinking, or things like hose bibs. You will need to flush these areas. Just five minutes is a long enough period for these faucets in most cases.
Monitor the Water Pressure
Although a full flush of the plumbing system is the main way to clean out your pipes, there’s some additional maintenance you can do. Low water pressure could indicate a clogged pipe somewhere. Water pressure that is too high can put your pipes under constant stress when they are running. Adding a pressure gauge to the plumbing system can help you keep on eye on it to see if it stays within acceptable levels. This is a step you’ll want a plumbing professional’s help with, as they have the training to understand how different water pressure readings affect others. A professional plumber will also be able to help troubleshoot the whole process and catch any issues that may be hiding in your pipes.
When everything is working correctly, your pipes are doing an important job that you might not even think about each day. Performing a few simple steps can send a note of thanks to your pipes and keep them running smoothly. Additionally, you can use procedures to flush specific appliances that might need a good cleaning.
