Plumbing Tips Every Homeowner Should Know: Part 2

Plumbing Tips Every Homeowner Should Know: Part 2

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Welcome back! If you missed the first part of this blog, read it here. We promise, it’s worth it!

Let’s continue, without further ado, to our final three handy tips for keeping your home’s plumbing in fantastic shape.

Find Lovely Rita meter

We know the old Beatle’s song referenced a different type of meter. But, we’re going to ask you to go on a treasure hunt again and you’ll need a tune to hum as you look. Do you know where your water meter is? It could be inside your house, outside the perimeter, or in your front yard. 

If you have an outdoor water meter pit, you may need to remove a nut to loosen the lid on the cover and remove the cover to look at the meter. 

Once you’ve located your meter and can see the dial, consider running a water leak test to see if you have any slow leaks in your house. Read this blog for instructions. Call Garvin’s if you need help or have any kind of leak.

Push the red button

Someday you may flip the switch on your garbage disposal and nothing will happen. No grinding or usual disposal noises—you’ll hear… nothing instead. You may even have a nasty sink clog to go with it and wonder what to do. 

If that happens, you’ll have at least one trick up your sleeve. You’ll be able to press the reset button. To locate this tiny, red button, look on the bottom of your disposal unit. Once you find the button, pushing it will reset your disposal. See this video for a demo.

The button is like a circuit breaker. It pops out of your disposal unit to cut off the electricity and prevent the unit from overheating.

If you’re in luck and you just tripped overload protector, all could be well again with the reset. If not, your disposal could need fixing or replacing. Call Garvin’s if you need help.

Ditch the drain debris

Drain blockages happen all the time. Dirt, grease, waste and other debris gradually collect and block drains as sure as we all have to pay taxes every year. Blockages are annoying and can be disgusting. They may eventually cause your sewer to back up too.

If that happens, you can call Garvin’s, or you can be proactive and schedule routine sewer maintenance.

There are actually four ways to access your sewer line: An outside pipe (aka riser); a basement or crawlspace cleanout cap; a toilet, or a vent on your roof. Knowing where your access point is will help your technician to help you. Discover which one you have before you have an emergency.

Still not sure? Give us a call. Garvin’s Sewer Service has been the Denver-Metro area’s drain cleaning expert since 1940, the year color TV was invented! 

We clean drains with a blade-tipped cable. The blade spins through the drain line, quickly cleaning the full circumference of the line and pushing out and/or destroying the blockage.

Contact us online or by phone to schedule cleaning and set up routine sewer cleaning service.

Sewer service in Denver and Englewood

The professionals at Garvin’s Sewer Service are fast, reliable and can respond to a wide variety of plumbing and sewer problems. Call today, or fill out our online form.

Sources

https://homeguides.sfgate.com/fix-garbage-disposal-reset-button-doesnt-work-68212.html

How to Check if Your Toilet Tank is Leaking

How to Check if Your Toilet Tank is Leaking

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While Americans use a lot of water every day for drinking and watering flowers and taking showers, a little over a quarter (27 percent) of the water we use comes from our toilets. That sounds like a lot, but that number can rise even higher if there is a leak in your toilet tank that allows wasted water to run for hours at a time. Nobody wants to waste that kind of water, whether that be for environmental or budgetary reasons. How does one make sure they don’t have a leak in their toilet tank? There’s a simple test you can conduct to know whether you’ll need plumbing leak repair in Denver.

Performing the Leak Test

The first sign that something may be wrong with your toilet is the persistent turning on and off of the water in the toilet tank, even when you aren’t using the commode. But even if you don’t hear that water running, you still can perform this test to be sure a leak isn’t running up your water bill.

To get started, you will need a packet of toilet leak detection dye tablets. They are very quick and easy to use and are available through your plumbing contractor in Englewood or at your local hardware store. Here’s how you use them to test your toilet for a leak:

  1. Remove the toilet tank lid.
  2. Remove the blue dye tablets from the package and drop them into the toilet tank. You will immediately find that the water in your tank has turned blue.
  3. Put the lid back onto the tank and give the tablets time to completely dissolve. This usually takes approximately 10-to-15 minutes.
  4. After that time, come back and check the bowl of your toilet. If the water there has turned any shade of blue, it means that your toilet tank is leaking and wasting water.

What to Do If Your Toilet Tank is Leaking

Toilet tank leaks are usually caused by an ineffective flush valve system or a fill valve problem, either of which is something best left to a professional plumber. While you likely don’t need to call emergency plumbing in Denver to correct the problem, it is something you’ll want to have taken care of to ensure the leak is repaired so you can stop wasting water and lower your monthly water bill.

Every day a silent leak goes undetected in your home can amount to as much as 300 gallons of wasted water, which is about three times what the average American uses in an entire day. Not only is that incredibly wasteful, but it can lead to hundreds of dollars flushed away each year for literally no good reason. A quick call to Garvin’s Sewer Service will cost much less than what you’d pay in wasted water, and you’ll be doing the environment a favor by conserving water.

If you’ve run the toilet tank test and need Garvin’s Sewer Service to help you repair it, give us a call and we’ll stop that leaking toilet tank at our earliest convenience.