We winter without consequences: how to preserve a residential building

How to prepare a house for a long absence of owners in the winter

In life, it happens that you need to go on a long business trip or vacation, and leave your home unattended. This is a risky step, since the house can become damp, rodents and mold can settle in it, bipedal parasites can visit it, taking care of electronics and things. How to avoid this - there is nowhere to take the answer. I solved this problem in my own way. What I did - read the article.

Content:

• Briefly about the house
• About fire hazard
• In case of severe frosts
• About rodents and mold 
• From uninvited guests

Greetings to FORUMHOUSE readers! My name is Andrey, I live in Stavropol. It was to my lot that a year's business trip fell, and I had to leave my home. I will tell you what I did in order to maximally protect my home from troubles at the time of absence.

Briefly about the house

I have a brick one-storey house with an area of ​​87 m². The house stands on a block foundation, it has no basement. The walls are made of expanded clay block, faced with bricks. The roof is hip, finished with a metal profile. The house is heated by a gas wall-mounted boiler from Navien, which provides heating of the batteries and underfloor heating. The sewerage is a local septic tank, and the water is central.

I bought the house freshly built in 2017 with finishing. I did not do any repairs, except for laying floor tiles over a warm floor. The structure is damp and there is no point in carrying out any finishing work. The same applies to the furnishings - the house has only the necessary furniture, which, after major repairs, will be distributed to neighbors.

I planned the renovation for 2020, and of the new things I can only boast of a blind area and a new brick fence with a gate for forging. The yard is still without outbuildings and is half covered with backing stone. I am not an avid gardener and will roll up the entire area of ​​the yard in tiles.

About fire hazard

The first thing that comes to mind before a long departure is that the house can burn down. Fire is possible from both external and internal sources.

An external source is grass, which, when dried, turns into a good fuel. I had to leave in mid-August and I decided to completely rid the yard and the surrounding area of ​​grass, and also to prevent its further growth. To do this, I mowed it and threw it away, and processed the territory of the yard and the surrounding area with glyphosphates.

An internal source of possible fire is gas and electricity. My wiring was done by a qualified electrician, I trust her. But with gas, I had to make a difficult choice - to leave the house with the heating on and the risk of an explosion, or find less dangerous methods of heating the house. I chose the latter and there is an explanation for this.

Even if we consider that the boiler is new and technologically advanced, it still runs on electricity. In the private sector, there are often blackouts and this can lead to a malfunction in the brains of the boiler electronics. If you imagine that it will turn off when the power is turned off and for some reason will not turn on, then the house will cool down with the onset of cold weather. When the joints of the gas pipes in the boiler or the hose connections cool down, they may lose their tightness. According to the laws of physics, the metal will shrink and its volume will decrease.

When narrowing at the joints of the gas pipes, a gap may appear through which gas will leak under pressure. It is not so scary when someone is constantly at home, but if gas accumulates in the room for a long time, the house will turn into a bomb. I am not a gas worker, and perhaps I made the wrong decision, but I cut off the gas from the house by turning off the street tap. If you did something wrong - write in the comments.

In case of severe frosts

Frost is the most dangerous for a residential building, and especially for water supply and heating systems.

Since I left the house without gas heating, I had to drain the system. I did this with the boiler pump, then disconnected the pipes and blew them out with a compressor. When I was doing this procedure, the thought came to me - pour antifreeze into the heating system and forget about all the problems. But I did not dare to do this because I do not know how the antifreeze will behave in the heating system. If someone uses non-freezing in the heating system, please write down the pros and cons of this method.

I did the same with the water supply. I disconnected the water supply and drained the water from the pipe. In the internal water system, I also removed the water with a compressor. He drained the water from the toilet cistern, dried it, and treated the cistern fittings, especially rubber parts, with aerosol silicone grease. This was done so that the rubber did not dry out and the mechanism remained intact.

Since the temperature in the living space cannot be lowered to negative, the house had to be heated with oil electric heaters. More precisely, do not heat, but maintain a positive temperature. The oil heater has no open heating elements, is relatively safe, and can operate for a long time without supervision.

I bought two heaters and put one in the living room and the other in the hallway. I will say right away - I bought expensive devices. When it comes to safety, it’s better to overpay and buy a quality item.

I left the inner doors in the house open and closed the ventilation shaft so that the heated air would not escape from the room. I set the mode of operation of the heaters to 70% of the power in order to prevent overloading the device or the network. He pushed the furniture 15 cm away from the walls, disconnected electronics and household appliances from the sockets and covered them with cellophane wrap.

About rodents and mold

With the onset of cold weather, food in the fields ends and rodents move to residential buildings.

The Stavropol region is a fertile land for mice, and here you need to be wary of them. They not only sneak into houses, but happily chew on the wiring of cars.

My house is protected from these guests: the roof is hemmed, the floors are covered with 15 cm concrete. The only place where mice and rats can get through is the ventilation shaft, which I have closed. But even with all this, it is necessary to carry out a number of measures so that the rodents are not tempted to enter the room.

The first event is general cleaning. Nothing edible should be left in the house - the remnants of food should be thrown away, kitchen furniture should be freed from cereals and other supplies. The second is to secure "edible things", which include leather clothing and shoes.

The people on YouTube say that rodents do not like Lavrushka and should be spread all over the house. I trust people, but I always play it safe and, in addition to the lavrushka screen, I made a second line of defense from store-bought chemicals. Hope this works. Maybe I did something wrong again? Write in the comments.

Now about the mold. In two years she has not settled with me, although many neighbors live well in damp corners. Black mold is a real problem - it is harmful to health and poorly eliminated. I decided to process the possible places of its penetration, and this is the doorway, windows. I used copper sulfate as an antiseptic. I took the recipe on the Internet. Experts say that he is divorced in proportions:

• 1 liter of water;
• 30 grams of copper sulfate;
• a tablespoon of vinegar.

Since I'm not trivial, I mixed 30 liters of solution and applied an antiseptic using a spray bottle:

• on a concrete blind area;
• on the outside of the foundation in a circle;
• on window and doorways inside and outside.

Hope mold won't get into your home.

From uninvited guests

Another fear is that the house can be robbed. This fear is confirmed by the theft statistics, which are not decreasing.

And now about those who do not want to live on labor income, but have a tendency to live to prison at someone else's expense - about thieves. In the absence of the owner for a long time, the house begins to attract attention. Thefts from us happen all the time and you need to somehow be safe from them. Here I did not use the advice of experienced summer residents and veterans of the Vietnam War, namely: set bear traps, connect a current to the door handle, or leave vodka with arsenic.

I did three things.

• I bought stickers for the gate and the front door with the inscription: The object is guarded by the police. An alarm is installed.
• I installed three spotlights with motion sensors in the yard and one in the house.
• I put dummies of video cameras on the fence and in the yard.

It is not that expensive, but it will confuse the thief. It cost me 1400 rubles for a searchlight, 700 for a dummy camera and 100 for a sticker. I am writing about the visibility of the security of my house openly, since in December it will still be on a real alarm.

You can count on neighbors in this matter if they live nearby and you know them well. You can ask them to look after the house, but in my case it is difficult to do it. Not all houses are still inhabited and the nearest neighbors live seventy meters away from me.

I faced this question for the first time and did just that. It's been three months until everything is in order. If I missed something - write in the comments. There is almost no material on the conservation of residential buildings on the Internet.

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Additional information about home safety in materials about fire protection and "Dashing people"and also, oh burglar-proof windows. In the video - how to make a warm floor without electricity.

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