November 13th, 2013 9:32 PM by Dan Howard
Winter will soon be storming into our lives and it is time to get ready for that cold, hard reality. The sad news is that even if your personal preparation for cold weather is packing the car and heading south, your home still needs preparation.
The First Step is to Assemble Your “Cold Weather Team.”
One of the first members of the team should be a good furnace company that will service “no heat” calls for their regular customers. The most important part of that sentence is the “regular customer” part. You do not want your first contact with a furnace company to begin with the sentence: ”You do not know me, but I don’t have any heat.” The story here is to call a reputable company, have them service the furnace for winter and become a part of their customer list. Your bonus is that with proper service and adjustment fuel costs go down and the safety and life expectancy of a furnace go up. If you have a fireplace you plan to use, have it cleaned and checked with a camera system before you use it. There will be house fires started with fireplace use and you do not want the picture of your burning home to be on the 11:00 PM News.
Find a “house buddy” for your Cold Weather Team. This can be friend, relative or neighbor. This is a simple concept. You are away from home on a winter vacation, the power goes off. You want your house looked in on. You call your house buddy and they make sure everything is Okey dokey, or they call in the cavalry, whichever is appropriate. You do the same for them. With today’s digital doorknobs, you don’t even need to swap keys. The door combination is all that is needed.