Taking a Vacation? Don’t Come Home to a Home Repair Disaster
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If you’re like me, when you go on vacation, there’s always a small part of you that suspects that you’ll return to find that your home has been vaporized in an alien attack or slipped off the side of a cliff.
My family just returned from a lovely vacation, and while nothing dramatic happened in our absence, we did return to find several rather unfortunate repair surprises that likely wouldn’t have happened had we been in town to deal with them. Yes, your house can be like an unruly teenager having wild parties and wreaking havoc when you’re not there to reign it in.
What can you do? Well, there were a few things we could have done to avoid the situation we found ourselves in. Keep reading.
Ants Came Marching One by One, Hurrah!
If you’ve never seen a sugar ant in your house, I commend you. These little pests are attracted to sweets as their name would suggest, so you will most often find them in the kitchen and anywhere food is being eaten or stored. The best way to stop them from being attracted to your home is to keep a clean house and eliminate entry points. They are so tiny that they can get in through any cracks in the foundation, gaps around doors and windows, and tears in door and window screens.
If you see them, you can set bait traps along their route. They carry the bait back to the colony, which will kill the queen and all her subjects. Spray along the foundation, doors, and windows as well. If you have regular pest control, simply inform them that you have an infestation, and they will take care of it for you.
What did we do that allowed this to happen while we were away? I don’t know. It’s possible we didn’t clean as thoroughly as we should have. It’s been a while since our last pest treatment. I think it was probably bad timing, but if we’d been here, we’d have seen the first signs and could have acted before we had a full-on invasion. Because, let me tell you, they are EVERYWHERE. The only good news? Sugar ants don’t bite.
What’s Cooler Than Being Cool? Not My Refrigerator.
So the first thing I did when arriving home from the airport was go fill up a nice cold glass of ice water from the fridge, and imagine my surprise when there was no ice and room temperature water coming from the water dispenser. “Uh oh,” I said, opening the refrigerator. It was a balmy 78 degrees or so in there. I opened the freezer to find a pool of water where the ice used to be. I won’t tell you what I said next out of courtesy for our more sensitive readers.
If you are the type of person who meticulously cleans out their refrigerator and freezer before they leave town, I commend you. We had to throw away so much food. My husband John, who can fix most things or at least diagnose the problem, set about trying to figure out what went wrong while I had little mini snack funerals over the trash can and ordered takeout. Several days of relying on our garage fridge later, the warranty company showed up, and we discovered that it was the freezer fan that had malfunctioned.
When the freezer fan stops running, the refrigerator stops cooling. This can be due to an electrical malfunction, the fan getting frozen, or blocked airflow due to dust or food particles. There’s not much you can do about it since it’s not something you can see day to day. Our main issue was that, of course, we weren’t there to notice it immediately.
If you are going to be out of town for an extended period, it makes sense to have someone look in on your home every couple of days to make sure everything is okay. You might not think to have them check the refrigerator, but put that on your list.
Speaking of Being Cool, Where’s Fonzie When You Need Him?
I’m aging myself here, but I grew up watching Happy Days reruns after school, and I always loved how the Fonz could fix anything by just hitting it and going, “Ayyyyyy.”
Anyway, by far the worst disaster we’ve encountered since our return from vacation to this hellscape of a North Texas summer has been that our AC won’t cool properly. Since I’m the one constantly pontificating in my columns about how to keep your AC running this summer, I’ve definitely got my tail between my legs admitting this to you. And we tried the Fonzie thing — no joke.
So far, the downstairs unit is keeping it cool enough for us to continue living here, but the upstairs is currently a pleasant 94 degrees, so my kids have been sleeping on the couch every night. They’re actually hoping to make that a permanent thing, bless their hearts, but I suspect it will get old eventually. John has done all the things while we await the professionals: cleaned the outside condenser, replaced the air filters, cleaned the condensation drain lines, and checked the primary condensate line. All that good stuff we talk about here.
We suspect that we are low on coolant or might have a coolant leak. Both of our units are also 20 years old, so there’s that. The best-case scenario is that we’re low on coolant. The repair person could fill us up, and that would be that. What could we have done differently? Taken our own advice and had our HVAC serviced at the beginning of the season, when they’d have caught this problem before we were in 100 degree temperatures and having to wait a week for a repair person.
Taking a vacation this summer? Think about your house like you would think about your pet. Make some arrangements for its care and feeding if you can. Make sure it’s sealed and locked up tight against pests and critters. Make sure your appliances and systems are in good shape and locked down before you go, and if you’re gone for an extended period, have someone stop in to check on your home.
