Are you ready for a cold shower?

This summer we have had several days of 90+ temperatures. A cold shower might feel great and very refreshing, particularly after an active day of sports or outdoor work. Even a short walk from the car with a bag of groceries to the house can cause our bodies to heat-up and the thought of a cold shower sounds wonderful! But what if it’s not 90+ degrees outside and you haven’t been outside working or playing? The idea of a cold shower usually is not on your list of things to do!

Here are 4 signs you may be in for an unexpected cold shower tomorrow morning!

1. After using hot water for a shower, bath or for the laundry, your water heater makes crackling sounds as it’s heating up the water. This is a symptom of mineral build up in the tank. The build-up causes the water to boil near the burner and create the noise. When this occurs, you are using more energy to heat the water and causing extra stress on the hot water tank. The life of the tank is severely shortened. The tank will quickly develop a leak and you are taking cold showers!
2. When you are near the tank you see a small puddle of water directly under the tank of near the tank. This is an indication that the tank has already developed an internal leak in most cases. When this happens there is no repair available and the tank must be replaced or you’ll be taking cold showers! The other problem is you could have a major leak and cause damage in the area of the water heater!
3. When you look at your gas hot water tank, you see discoloration near the burner access door
   

   Area of possible discoloration.

   area. This is an indication that the burner is not functioning properly. There are a number of reasons for this but it usually means parts of the tank or flue baffle have deteriorated and have disrupted the flames on the burner. This can be a dangerous situation as carbon monoxide may be present because of improper combustion. It also means it’s time to replace the tank, or you’ll be taking cold showers!

4. Another clue that you should look to replace your hot water tank before you’re taking cold showers is the age of the tank. Many tanks will have a sticker on them clearly showing the manufacture date of the tank. The manufacture’s serial number can also help to determine the age of the tank. With that information and the brand you may be able to check the age on the internet. Most tanks installed have a 5 year warranty against leaks but will last a few years beyond the warranty. If the tank is 8-10 years old, you can expect to be without hot water and taking a cold shower some morning in the near future!

 

To avoid that unexpected cold shower, call today for an evaluation of your tank and information about the options for new high efficient hot water tanks!

  Get an ebook with 99+ energy saving tips here.

Check out our website for more information and money saving coupons or contact us today if you have questions.

It’s a good time of year to have our trained experienced air conditioning Technicians solve your cooling problems whether you live on Grosse Ilse, in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Melvindale, Wyandotte, or Lincoln Park.

Contact us for more information or visit our website at www.HomeServiceCorp.com.

Home Service Corporation serving our Michigan customers Heating & Air Conditioning , Plumbing and Electrical needs since 1980.

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Only The Good Ones!

Whether this is your home…………………………………..or this one is your home,

you expect a Service Technician to respect your property!

You’re not expecting debris left behind or your home damaged!

One of the biggest fears a homeowner has when needing a Service Technician for their plumbing, air conditioning, heating, electrical or pool heater service is how that Technician going to treat my home! We all know of a friend or family member who had a Service Technician in their home and they damaged the home or left a big mess when they left. Fear not any longer!

Each of our Technicians is vetted prior to hiring. We carefully check their driving records, their previous employment, a thorough background check and several interviews before they can become part of our team. We then have them travel with a Senior Technician so they understand the way we respect a customer’s property, how we expect the job to be done right the first time, and how we treat each customer with the courtesy and respect they deserve! To insure that this continues we have on-going customer service training and roll playing regularly! Each customer concern is taken seriously. If a Technician does not treat a customer with respect, or respect the customer’s home or can seem to satisfy our customers, we first discuss it with them and if the behavior continues, they become someone else’s employee!

If you ever have an issue with one of our Technicians, please contact our Customer Care Department and express your concern. We want you to be a fully satisfied lifetime customer!

  Get an ebook with 99+ energy saving tips here.

Check out our website for more information and money saving coupons or contact us today if you have questions.

It’s a good time of year to have our trained experienced air conditioning Technicians solve your cooling problems whether you live on Grosse Ilse, in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Melvindale, Wyandotte, or Lincoln Park.

Contact us for more information or visit our website at www.HomeServiceCorp.com.

Home Service Corporation serving our Michigan customers Heating & Air Conditioning , Plumbing and Electrical needs since 1980.

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21 Things to ask a contractor!

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5 Quick tips for Spring Cleaning your AC System..

A series of tasks that homeowners feel encouraged to do during this time of year we call spring cleaning. Inside the home this can include dusting under the beds, washing windows, cleaning carpets, dusting the baseboard moldings among other things. We are just tired of winter and ready to have everything bright and sparkling clean for the Spring and Summer season.
Outside Spring Cleaning tasks can include raking leaves that may have hung around, picking up paper and trash that showed up after the snow melted, removing covers off of shrubs and flower beds, and washing the windows on the outside. Here are several things you can do to assure your plumbing pool heater and air conditioning systems are ready for the warmer weather.

• You can remove the air conditioning cover off the outside unit and check the unit for any damage that may have happened during the winter months. Be sure the disconnect is energized. You can clean and weeds or debris that may have accumulated around the unit.
• Look at the coil also and see if it may be partially plugged with cottonwood, or other debris. You may be able to clean the coil with a hose and sprayer. Be careful not to damage the fins on the coil. Also check for wasp, hornet or bee’s hives. Carefully use a proper insecticide and remove the hive.
• A coat of auto polish and wax will keep your unit looking nice all season. It’s a good time to do it while the temperatures are cool.
• Next, replace the furnace filter if it has not been replaced in the last month. Air conditioning requires more airflow than the heating cycle so a clean filter is even more important during the cooling season.
• Finally, if your air conditioning system has not been serviced in the last two years, it’s time to call for a system checkup to assure economically and steady operation when you need it. We have specials so call today!
  Bonus Tips:
• Now that the weather has warmed up, turn on the valves for the outside faucets. Carefully check for leaks that may have occurred do to freezing both inside and outside. Quickly turn the vales off if there is a split from freezing to avoid any water damage.
• If you have a pool with a heater, you can remove the cover from your pool heater. Check the unit for any visible signs of damage that may have occurred during the winter months. Also be sure the disconnect is energized. The unit cabinet can be cleaned with a car polish and then waxed to protect the finish. Remove and debris, grass or shrubbery that may restrict airflow or access to the unit before it begins to grow even more obstructive. Kill any wasps or bees in the unit and remove the hives.

  Get an ebook with 99+ energy saving tips here.

Check out our website for more information and money saving coupons or contact us today if you have questions.

It’s a good time of year to have our trained experienced air conditioning Technicians solve your cooling problems whether you live on Grosse Ilse, in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Melvindale, Wyandotte, or Lincoln Park.

Contact us for more information or visit our website at www.HomeServiceCorp.com.

Home Service Corporation serving our Michigan customers Heating & Air Conditioning , Plumbing and Electrical needs since 1980.

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Hug Your Plumber Day continued……

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.” — Albert Einstein, The Reporter, 18 November 1954 April 25^th, 2014 is “Hug Your Plumber Day”. Hopefully you have read part 1 of this article. If you haven’t, please read it. As science advanced and scientists, doctors and other health officials recognized that polluted water and human waste was a major cause of many of the epidemic diseases of the dark ages, they pushed for solutions to protect people. With the growth of cities, the outhouse had to go since there was not enough space to have them and have the tight living conditions of cities. The Romans brought the idea of piping water to their cities and towns in huge quantities through gravity from mountain streams where the water was cleaner and safer. Within the cities at the end of the eighteen century and the beginning of the nineteenth century piped water systems were again used. But this time they pumped water from lakes and rivers and had little dependence on gravity. Plumbers installed this piping and the piping within homes to provide clean water to homes and businesses. It was a learning time and advances in devices and installations that further protected the water supply each of us use today. These advances came through trial and error and many were the direct result of the ingenuity of your plumber. These include air gaps between a faucet outlet and the rim of a sink, valve design inside a toilet that prevents the waste water being sucked up into the drinking water system, faucets that reduce the possibility of scalding from extremely hot water, relief valves on water heaters to prevent explosions along with dozens of others. All skillfully installed and calibrated by your plumber. On the drain side of the system, your plumber has installed the piping to carry away waste water and human waste. He has sized the piping to be sure the waste is safely and efficiently carried away. He installs vents so the system will work properly. He installs the piping which connects to the plants that process the waste and safely returns the water back into our ecology. Your plumber installs traps and systems so smells from the waste are not found in today’s homes and businesses. Rarely do we even notice how effective these systems operate. Countries with modern plumbing systems are free from those diseases born of polluted water or human waste. Today’s plumber has spent at least three years as an apprentice and often has an associate’s degree from a local college. Your plumber is a highly trained, highly educated craftsman. Remember to give him or her a hug (or at least a handshake) next time you see your plumber. It’s a good time of year to have our trained experienced plumbers solve your plumbing problems whether you live on Grosse Ilse, in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Melvindale, or Oak Park. Contact us for more information or visit our website at www.HomeServiceCorp.com. Home Service Corporation serving our Michigan customers Heating & Air Conditioning , Plumbing and Electrical needs since 1980. Related Posts 21 Things to ask a contractor! Myth or Fact? 11 Summer Dollar Savers

Hug Your Plumber Day, part 1 :)

If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.”
— Albert Einstein, The Reporter, 18 November 1954

 

April 25th, 2014 is “Hug Your Plumber Day”. Some history to better understand the contribution plumbers make to our lives today.
During the middle Ages, in castles the toilet was called a garderobe and it was simply a vertical shaft with a stone seat at the top. A hole in the bottom let everything just drop into a pit or the moat. Obviously there was smell and diseases from the mess. You had to be careful you weren’t walking underneath it when someone was on the “toilet” and take care not to fall into the moat. In the summer time the smell would have been terrible. Some Monks built stone or wooden lavatories over rivers. At Portchester Castle in the 12th century monks built stone chutes leading to the sea. When the tide went in and out it would flush away the sewage. During this period, wealthy people might use rags to wipe their behinds. Ordinary people often used a plant called common mullein or woolly mullein. In fact, people used to store clothes in the garderobes as the smells kept moths away that might otherwise eat holes in them. This is where the word wardrobe comes from.

The typical peasant family of the aptly-named Dark Ages lived in a one-room, dirt-floor hovel, with a hole in the thatched roof to let out the smoke of the central fire not a castle. The floor was strewn with hay or rushes, easy havens for lice and vermin. Garbage accumulated within. If they were lucky, the family had a chamber pot, though more likely they relieved themselves in the corner of the hovel or in the mire and muck outside. Water was too precious to use for anything except drinking and cooking, so people rarely bathed. Heck, they barely changed clothes from one season to another, wearing the same set every day, perhaps piling on more rags for warmth.

These are the conditions which spawned the infamous Black Plague, killing an estimated one third of the European population. Although poor plumbing was not the only cause, the plague serves as the most striking example of misery caused by poor sanitation in general.

The first of several waves hit England in 1348, caused by flea bites spread by insects that Lived on host black rats. They, in turn, fed on the garbage and excrement of the masses. London became largely deserted. The King and Queen and other rich people fled to the countryside leaving the poor suffering in the cities.
Panic, death and despair followed the abandonment of farms and towns. William of Dene, a monk of Rochester in Kent, England wrote, “Men and women carried their own children on their shoulders to the church and threw them into a common pit. From these pits such an appalling stench was given off that scarcely anyone dared to walk beside the cemeteries, so marked a deficiency of labors and workmen that more than a third of the land in the whole realm was left to.” So bad was the “Black Death,” the Great Fire of London in 1666 can be viewed as a blessing in disguise. Though it killed thousands of people, the holocaust also consumed garbage, muck and black rats, effectively ending the plague.
We’ll continue part 2 in our next post. In the meantime, it’s a good time of year to have our trained experienced plumbers solve your plumbing problems whether you live on Grosse Ilse, in Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Melvindale, or Oak Park.

Contact us for more information or visit our website at www.HomeServiceCorp.com.

Home Service Corporation serving our Michigan customers Heating & Air Conditioning , Plumbing and Electrical needs since 1980.

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Myth or Fact?

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