If you’re a homeowner, that comes with some significant perks. For instance, you can decorate your residence any way you want, and you can make any kind of improvements that you can afford. If you rent a house or apartment, you’re much more limited in what you can do. You have to run everything by the property owner before you make any significant changes.
However, being a homeowner also comes with some potential headaches that become your responsibility to correct. For instance, if you have a plumbing problem, you’ll need to contact and hire a reputable company like WorksPlumbing. You can’t just reach out to the super and have them fix the problem.
As a homeowner, you can’t just live with a plumbing issue and expect it to disappear. You might be able to correct some minor plumbing problems yourself if you have a DIY mentality. For the most part, though, you’ll want to get a professional to come handle the job for you.
Let us look at some common plumbing problems you might experience if you own your own home.
A Persistent Sewage Smell
You might detect a persistent smell of sewage in your home. If you have a laundry room, that’s one place where you may smell it. You may notice the odor when you go down into the basement or root cellar, depending on whether you reside in a part of the U.S. that has those things.
The smell of sewage might be an easy fix, but it’s not something you should ever ignore. It could indicate a sewage backup. If you let that fester, it can get worse. A plumber can come look at the situation and determine what action is needed.
A Leaking Pipe
You probably do not spend time thinking about it, but if you live in a house, you’re surrounded by pipes. They’re in all the walls, and they form a complex network.
The pipes you have in your walls carry water all around your house. They carry it to your bathroom, where it comes out in your bathtub or shower. They carry it to your kitchen, where it comes out in your sink and fills your pots for cooking or your coffee maker when you’re boiling coffee in the morning.
If any of those pipes start leaking, the first sign you might see of that is a wet spot spreading somewhere on your floor or ceiling. If you notice this, you’d better act immediately and call a plumber with an excellent industry reputation.
If you decide to wait, that wet spot can spread and destroy your drywall and the other materials in your walls, floor, or ceiling. The next thing you know, a floor or ceiling could collapse. That’s a much more expensive fix that you can often avoid if you call a plumber the moment you see a spreading water spot that indicates a leaking pipe somewhere inside the wall.
No Water Pressure
You might also decide to turn on your faucet and see that there is little or no water pressure. You’re expecting a strong, steady flow. Instead, you get a trickle.
This probably means you have a blockage somewhere, but there are other plumbing problems that could cause this issue as well. A plumber will have to come and conduct a series of explorations and diagnostic tests to see what’s going on.
Some homeowners might try to grab a wrench and look into the problem themselves. It’s admirable to want to save some money, but doing this could backfire. It’s usually better to get a plumber with extensive training to do the job since they’ll be better able to diagnose the problem.
No Hot Water
Few things are more irritating to a homeowner than turning on the hot water for a nice shower in the morning and getting nothing but frigid water instead. If you’ve ever experienced this, you’ll know all about the frustration that accompanies this feeling. You might count on your hot shower to wake you up in the morning when you’re on the way to work.
You can contact a plumber to take a look at the source of your lack of hot water. There may be something going on with your water heater. Maybe it’s old, and it’s time for a replacement.
Your plumber might recommend that you use a tankless water heater instead of one of the outdated, bulky models. Tankless water heaters are now in use in many homes, and often you can save money with them. They allow you to have a lower carbon footprint. Also, you can sometimes get government rebates when you buy a tankless water heater, so it’s worth looking into that.
A Stopped-Up Toilet
If your toilet doesn’t work when you try to flush it, you’re not going to be too happy about that. A toilet that works and quickly disposes of your waste is a modern convenience that you count on to work every single time you operate it.
You might be able to use a plunger or a toilet snake to fix the problem. Sometimes that works, and you should know how to do these things as a homeowner.
If that fails to work, though, calling a plumber to come take a look should be your next step. The plumber can come see whether you have something more serious that’s causing your toilet to back up. If you find that your toilet keeps clogging and using a snake or plunger isn’t proving to be effective for very long, that probably means you need professional intervention.
Contacting a plumber makes sense if you have a plumbing issue that you don’t feel like you can tackle on your own. Often, you can save money in the long run by getting an expert to do the job rather than thinking you can handle it yourself. Hopefully, whatever is going on with your pipes will not prove to be too costly.
