People often think of the garbage disposal in their kitchen sink as an appliance that will never need to be replaced. To them, it’s just a part of the structure of the kitchen, and until the day the kitchen gets a major renovation, the garbage disposal will hang around and keep doing its job.
This isn’t true, of course. No mechanical appliance can last forever, and a garbage disposal handles an immense workload, operating almost every day. Although a broken disposal can be fixed, at a certain point it will no longer be worth repairing and it’s best to have a new unit installed.
The question is, how long can you expect your garbage disposal to last?
The water in the sink or the bathtub or the shower is not going down the drain, or is not going down the drain fast enough. You’ve got a clog in the drainpipe, but what?
Do you actively practice ways to conserve water in your house? We hope so, because there’s massive water waste across the country, and most of it is preventable through several basic steps. You already know about taking shorter showers: keep showers to five minutes and the savings over the year are enormous. There are other little tips, like shutting off the water while you’re brushing your teeth, or never running the dishwasher unless there’s a full load.
You have probably encountered this before: you come back home after a vacation of one to two weeks. You turn on the faucet in the bathroom or the kitchen, and the first water to flow out is reddish-brown. Nothing to worry about, it will go away in less than a minute as the dry pipes clear out residue.
Spotting tiny, fuzzy flying insects in your kitchen or bathrooms isn’t pleasant. These are “drain flies,” which live in damp environments, such as down in the drainpipes of your bathroom and kitchen sinks. They don’t bite, so they pose no health hazard to you or your family. Nonetheless, you don’t want them around, and not just because they’re unattractive. The presence of drain flies may mean you’ve got troubles in the plumbing that need to be addressed. 
How well do you know your home’s water heater? If you know that it heats up water and that’s about it, there are some more important facts to know, as well as tips for how to best take care of the water heater so it has a long, useful service life.
Leaky pipes are more common than people often think. In fact, your home may have multiple small leaks right now that you’re not aware of. If you think your water usage is higher than it should be, that’s often a warning of these disguised leaks.
When thinking of ways to make home improvements, you probably don’t first think about “plumbing upgrades.” We admit that it doesn’t sound terrifically exciting. But your plumbing is an essential part of your daily life, and upgrading older parts of it with fresh installations can make a huge difference. It can be a difference in convenience, or water savings, or problem prevention. Sometimes it can be all of these.
The tankless water heater has been around for more than a century. But not until the last few decades did the technology reach a point where installing one in a house made for a viable alternative to the standard storage-tank water heater. Because many people still know little about tankless water heaters, a number of myths and misconceptions about them have popped up.
