Ask the Builder: How to avoid expensive service calls

I don’t know of a living person that looks forward to an expensive service call. Your AC may quit on the hottest day, your kitchen sink may get clogged with egg shells three hours before your Thanksgiving guests arrive, or your furnace or boiler may decide to take the night off during a wicked cold spell. I’m going to share a few tips in this column that should save you many hundreds of dollars.

You may think I don’t suffer as you might, but I’m not immune to service calls. Just last year, my wife called me on a frigid December morning while I was at my son’s house. She awoke to a very cold house. I had stayed the night at my son’s house, 70 miles south. I was doing back-to-back days of work, helping him finish his basement.

Our relatively new modulating boiler had stopped working. I rushed home and immediately saw the error code on the digital readout. I tried to restart the boiler. It would light and start to fire up, but then it would shut down. I switched out the ignitor (think of an automobile spark plug) but that did no good. I was out of options. It was time to call in a boiler pro.

My wife has many expensive orchids, and we couldn’t allow them to perish with the dropping temperatures. I called a local company that serviced boilers. Two hours later, a tech was here. Before he crossed my threshold, the price was already $300, as it was a Saturday.

He spent an hour trying to get the boiler to work and was running into dead ends. Finally, he took off the clamp holding the combustion-air intake pipe to the boiler. The boiler could now get air from the basement mechanical room. Instantly, the boiler started up and ran perfectly.

Ten minutes later, the tech and I had removed the outdoor cover for the intake and exhaust pipe. A flat beech tree leaf had somehow found a way through a narrow 1/2-inch slot. Each time the boiler tried to fire up, the leaf would be pulled against the intake pipe, robbing the boiler of air. A sensor would shut down the boiler as a safety. Ten minutes after that, the tech was swiping my credit card for an $800 service call.

I’ve selected three of the top things you can do with ease to prevent service calls or damage to the delicate surfaces of your home. Let’s get started.

Plumbing clogs might rank in the top three service calls of all time. There are national companies devoted to nothing more than snaking out drain clogs. Many other plumbers specialize in this much-needed service. In almost all cases, you, the homeowner, do very silly things that create the clogs.

Food waste and grease create the most common clogs. The basket strainer in your sink often has four narrow slots that prevent large food waste from getting into the drain pipes. This is not enough. You should be using a very inexpensive strainer that fits inside your existing basket strainer. This secondary strainer is made with a fine-mesh stainless steel screen. The holes are so small that a peppercorn would be caught in the mesh.

Purchase one or two of these and stop all food waste from getting into your pipes. Food waste often doesn’t make it to the primary building drain in your home. It begins to build up and clog the pipe immediately behind your kitchen sink cabinet. Sop up all grease from plates, pots, and pans with used paper towels. Try to minimize grease going down your drains.

Garage door service calls are no doubt high on the list of unnecessary expenses. Many people neglect their garage doors. It’s very important to keep the roller wheels lubricated and the tracks clean.

It’s vital to keep the powerful springs that lift the door rust-free. A rusty spring can snap without warning. Springs within miles of saltwater corrode much faster than normal.

You can prevent rust by spray by painting the springs, or you can spray the bare metal with a penetrating oil. Never try to adjust this spring. Leave that to a professional. But you can get on a short step ladder and safely spray this spring with a lightweight oil to prevent rust. It’s expensive to replace a broken garage door spring.

The failure to remember basic high school chemistry knowledge can also drain money from your checking account. You can ruin painted surfaces in your home with aggressive cleaning practices. My own daughter did this to our entrance hall walls using a magic pad that’s been banned from my house. She burnished the flat wall paint, trying to clean off stains. Now there are random polished spots that will require me to repaint the walls.

Water is the universal solvent. Food stains, mud, dirt and so forth often contain some amount of water. Stains bond very well to walls and furniture once the water evaporates.

All you have to do is rehydrate the stain, and in many cases, it will come off with minimal rubbing. You can rehydrate a stain by getting a small paper towel wet. Squeeze out the excess water. Apply the towel onto the stain and press it against the stain so the wet towel contacts the stain. Wait 15 minutes and then try to gently rub the stain. You’ll discover, in most cases, the stain disappears with very little effort.

If you’ve not priced out what painters charge these days, there’s a good chance it will take your breath away to find out what it will cost to paint a couple of walls. To wash painted walls, use a simple solution of liquid dish soap and water. That's all you need to make walls look new. I prefer to use an inexpensive grout sponge when washing my painted walls.

Try it on just one wall, and you’ll be amazed. Remember, do the same thing with the sponge as you did with the paper towel. Get the wall wet with the soapy water, let it sit for five minutes, then come back with the sponge and rinse the wall with clear water. The five-minute dwell time is enough to produce professional results.

Subscribe to Tim’s FREE newsletter at AsktheBuilder.com. Tim offers phone coaching calls if you get stuck during a DIY job. Go here: go.askthebuilder.com/coaching