24/7 Emergency Service
Preparing Your Home for Vacation
7/7/2022 (Permalink)
We provide emergency cleaning and restoration services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Your vacation should be worry free! That’s why it’s a good idea to prepare your home before you leave on a long trip! To prevent break-ins, try to make your home looked lived-in, for example: stopping the mail, using lights on a timer, using motion-activated outdoor lightning, and keeping your grass trimmed are all excellent ways to have that lived in appearance. If you use social media, it’s also a good idea to keep the vacation photos to close friends and family you trust until you arrive back home.
Disaster can also strike while you are away in other forms: fire and water damage.
To help prevent fires, unplug electronics around the house that don’t need power while you’re gone. Unplug televisions, computers, or unused chargers, as an example. Keep the air conditioning running, if you do not have a programmable thermostat, you can raise the temperature to around 85 degrees.
Water damage while on vacation is more common than you may realize! Turning off the main water supply to your home is the best defense against flooding. There will likely be some water in the line, but it will not continue to spray water. This will limit the amount of water that can damage your home and save you thousands.
Rainwater can also cause trouble while you’re away. If the sump pump fails during a major storm, you could return to a flooded basement. Make sure your pump is working properly before leaving town. For an extra layer of protection, install a sump pump with a battery backup.
If you’re away for a period after the leak happened, this can also cause mold damage. At SERVPRO, we have seen homes completely overtaken by mold turning extended vacations.
Coming home from vacation to find water, fire damage, or vandalism is something that nobody wants to happen. We hope these tips help keep your property safe, but if you do come home to damage, we are ready to help. We provide emergency cleaning and restoration services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We have the training and expertise to help make your damage “Like it never even happened.”