Maintaining Your Place

How to maintain your pad? Let’s talk rental maintenance!

What do you need to do to prevent problems?

What should you do to maintain you place?

What if something broke, or you broke something?!

Note if you have an immediate maintenance need or emergency, please submit a maintenance ticket or, if it is an emergency, use your emergency call list numbers. Not sure if we will consider it an emergency? We have a few basic guidelines to help decide.

Two types of maintenance: Preventive and Repairs

Preventive maintenance are steps you take, usually simple, to keep things from breaking.

Repairs are steps you have to take once something breaks!

Preventive Maintenance

Nothing runs perfectly forever, especially if you don’t give it a little tender love and care. Some things in a house, apartment of townhouse require regular care. Without it, things will break down, and usually it’ll cost a lot more (in $ and time and headaches) to fix it than it would have to take good care of it.

This is called preventive, or preventative, maintenance: simple steps to increase the likelihood that your home will keep on working smoothly.

The primary preventive maintenance tasks you may need to address are:

Maintaining your HVAC.

So, HVAC is your heating ventilation and air conditioning. That’s HVAC. That means warm cozy stuff in the winter and cool, comfy air in the summer. BUT they don’t just magically work all on their own. There are some things you should do to make sure its hot when you want it to be and your cool when your want that too!

A few key things: check and replace the filters at least every 3 months. The filter keeps your air clean. They can get clogged. When they are full of dirt, they are inefficient (and can cost you money because your HVAC works harder–or not at all). It’s really easy to change these out, and we usually do it at least once during the year for you, but it’d be a great idea for your to do it a few more times.

Also, and this is a big one at move in time, do NOT crank your AC up a whole lot and then open and close the doors a bunch. If you do, the AC will “freeze up”–literally because an ice cube–and you have to turn off the unit and let it defrost (and that’s best case scenario… worst case, you stress it out, and it breaks–uh oh!).

Keeping Pipes from Freezing

We have a tenant sheet on this, and we usually send out reminders when the temps drop. You so DO NOT WANT your pipes to burst. Yeah, we get it, you leave town, you want to save a buck, you turn down (or, egad, NO!, off) the heat…. and, well, you might save a buck, but you cost yourself a bunch because now you have a pond (or skating rink) in your basement…. Seriously, this has happened. Don’t do it.

When its really cold, you can open the doors to the cabinets under your sinks. You also can let a trickle of water run.

For more information about these pipe protection tips and tricks, check out our FAQ all about protecting your pipes!

Repairs

Repairs are a different matter. There’s lots of stuff that can break in your house. If you are comfortable trying to fix it, then by all means go for it, and we provide an ever increasing list of Repair FAQs to help you with common problems, from Air Condition Not Working to Garbage Disposals Being Stuck to Clogged Drains and Water Leaks.

If you can’t solve the problem yourself and would like some help, just submit a support ticket. We are happy to help you with whatever isn’t working quite right!

Frequently Asked Questions about Maintaining your Place