Prevention as cure for maintenance woes : The Tribune India

Join Whatsapp Channel

Ground Realty

Prevention as cure for maintenance woes

Preventive maintenance of house always scores over repairs and replacements.

Prevention as cure for maintenance woes


Jagvir Goyal.

Preventive maintenance of house always scores over repairs and replacements. It helps in preventing the failure of a device, an appliance, an accessory, a gadget or a fitting and saves the expenditure on repairs and replacements. It helps in saving the time spent in calling the technicians, attending to them, providing them with the required materials or components after their purchase from the market to repair a part or item of the house. It is,  therefore, always better to take some preventive steps. Here are some important points in this regard:

Look for termite signs: In most cases, howsoever strong anti-termite treatment you may have given during the construction of your house or after its construction, termites somehow survive. So keep looking for the signs of termites. Look at the four ceiling corners of each room, at the base of wooden door frames, along the wooden windows, inside the wash basin vanities, inside the cupboards, below the kitchen countertop, behind  wood cupboards if possible and so on. And in case you note any signs, immediately go for termite treatment by calling the experts who will drill holes and inject chlorpyrifos solution into these and seal the holes with pigmented white cement to match their finish with the shade of the floors. If you have gone out of your house for a period longer than a week, the first thing you must do on returning is to carefully and minutely check each and every room for termite signs.

AC Outdoor unit covers: Winters have arrived and Air Conditioners have been turned off. Careful house owners procure the covers for outdoor units and cover them well. As most of outdoor units of split ACs are installed on the roof, it is easy to cover them. Care should be taken that covers of required sizes only are arranged for different ACs as outdoor units of ACs of different brands come in different sizes. Loose fitting covers don’t fully serve the purpose as fine dust enters inside them and defeats the very purpose of their provision. The covers should be well tied and secured to the outdoor units. 

Turning off AC MCBs: Here, the most important point to keep in mind is not to run the AC, accidently or otherwise, when the outdoor unit is covered otherwise this may result in switching off of AC or damage to it. In case your AC units have the heating feature for winters, don’t cover the outdoor units as you may tend to switch on the heater in extreme winter, forgetting that you had covered the outdoor unit.  Best way to prevent the AC from running when its outdoor unit is covered is to locate the MCBs of ACs and turn them off.

Avoid built-in stabilisers: Appliances like refrigerators having built in stabilisers are often lapped up by users. The voltage range is proudly projected as 100 V to 300 V by the manufacturer on these appliances. However, in reality often such refrigerators get damaged whenever there is a large voltage fluctuation. The motherboard of the refrigerator stops working and there are chances of damage to the costly compressor also. Such damage weighs heavily on the pocket of the refrigerator user. It is, therefore, better to buy a refrigerator that doesn’t boast of absorbing voltage fluctuation and to buy a voltage stabiliser also for it even though the refrigerator manufacturers declare openly that voltage stabiliser is not required for their refrigerators.

Secure wooden floorings well: Wooden laminate flooring is chosen by most of the house builders for the bedrooms and in some cases, for drawing room also. While the wooden laminates get laid well with tight click joints, it is important to care for the edges of end laminates. To secure the edges of laminates and for smooth transition from wooden laminates to other types of floorings, edge mouldings are provided by the wooden flooring manufacturers. These mouldings are costly items, sold at per running foot cost but most not be avoided to ensure longer and trouble free life of wooden flooring. There are specially designed mouldings available to cover the edge of laminates at the door entrances. Then there are mouldings for transition from wooden flooring to carpet, from laminates to tile flooring and even for laminates to vinyl flooring. In case wooden laminates are provided in the stairs also, stair nose mouldings should be used for stair nosings. Similarly, skirting boards are provided by the suppliers for skirting provision in the rooms. Choose and use the right mouldings and enjoy the wooden flooring without any trouble in future. 

Cleaning wooden floorings: Avoid cleaning wooden laminate floorings with wet mops to avoid warping of laminates. Use a moist rug at the most and wipe softly. There are mild neutral laminate cleaning solutions available in the market which can clean wooden floorings of all the dirt. Even shoe marks or any greasy spots can also be cleaned by using these. 


Drawer slides operation

These days, all the drawers are provided with slides for their smooth opening and all cupboard shutters are fitted with hydraulic hinges instead of normal hinges. Sometimes, the drawer slides start giving problems as these don't soft close smoothly. This happens mostly in drawers fitted with two handles on them for their operation. In such cases, the user has the tendency to pull out or push the drawer back by using one handle only. Use of single-handle instead of both the handles makes it move in an eccentric manner as more force gets applied to one slide and less force to other slide. In such cases, sometimes, you need to stand and wait till the drawer fully closes to shut position. To avoid such a problem, either use both handles to push or pull out a drawer or otherwise get fixed up a single handle on a drawer. This precaution will help in smooth soft closing of slides and you need not call a carpenter for drawer removal and its readjustment and fitting into position.

Mirror fixing on walls

Replacement of cracked mirrors fixed on the walls is a cumbersome process. Avoid this problem by caring for right fixing of mirrors on the walls. Before fixing mirrors on the walls, ensure that the walls are free of dampness. Otherwise this dampness will soon damage the silver layer and protective layers of the mirrors. Also ensure that the walls on which the mirrors are to be fixed are perfectly plain and free of any distortion or curvature. In case there is some unevenness, a small space of 6 to 10 mm needs to be left between the wall and the mirror by use of spacers. In case some adhesives are used to fix the mirrors on the ply boards or cupboard shutters, take care that the adhesives are compatible with the protective layers on the back of the mirror. Adhesives like Fevicol, Araldite badly damage a mirror. The adhesive should not contain any acids. Overall, extra attention should be paid to mirror fixing on the walls and the wooden surfaces.


— The writer is HOD and Engineer-in-Chief, Civil Engineering Department in a Punjab PSU

Top News

Chief Judicial Magistrate's court in UP's Banda orders judicial inquiry into death of gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari

UP court orders judicial probe into gangster-politician Mukhtar Ansari’s death

Ghazipur MP Afzal Ansari on Tuesday alleged that his brother...

‘Heart attack or poisoning’: The life and times of Mukhtar Ansari—crime and politics

‘Heart attack or poisoning’: The life and times of Mukhtar Ansari—crime and politics

Eastern parts of Uttar Pradesh are among the poorest regions...

Alka Rai, widow BJP MLA killed by Mukhtar Ansari, says 'justice has been served', visits Ram Mandir

Alka Rai, widow BJP MLA killed by Mukhtar Ansari, says 'justice has been served', visits Ram Mandir

Alka Rai is the wife of MLA Krishanand Rai, who was shot dea...

Cash-strapped Congress gets fresh IT notice of Rs 1,700 crore, say party insiders

Cash-strapped Congress gets fresh I-T notice of Rs 1,800 crore

Ajay Maken addresses a press conference

CBI files chargesheet against 20 institutes, 105 individuals in Himachal Pradesh multi-crore scholarship scam

CBI files chargesheet against 20 institutes, 105 individuals in Himachal Pradesh multi-crore scholarship scam

22 educational institutions were on CBI radar in the scholar...


Cities

View All