US Home Services Tips

Written by the team at Man Made Services — plumbing, drain and septic services in Pittsburgh, PA. Find us at Man Made Services . Pittsburgh winters are hard on pipes. Older homes with uninsulated basements, crawl spaces, and exterior walls are especially vulnerable, and the first hard freeze of the season is when most frozen-pipe calls happen — often to houses that sailed through milder winters without a problem. If you turn on a tap one cold morning and get a trickle, or nothing at all, what you do in the first few minutes matters. Panic does not help. A calm, methodical response usually does. First: figure out what you are dealing with. A single tap with no flow while the rest of the house works normally usually means one frozen section feeding that fixture. Every tap in the house reduced to a trickle, or no water anywhere, suggests a freeze at or near the main supply line. Start by opening the affected tap slightly. If the pipe does thaw, the open tap gives the melting water somew...

Written by the team at Man Made Services — plumbing, drain and septic services in Pittsburgh, PA. A water heater is supposed to be boring. It sits in a corner, heats water, and you forget it exists — until it starts popping, rumbling or hissing loudly enough to notice from the next room. Noise on its own does not always mean an emergency, but it is always worth understanding, because the cause tells you whether you can wait, whether you should act soon, or whether you need a plumber promptly. Popping and rumbling: usually sediment The most common cause of noise in a tank water heater is sediment. Minerals settle at the bottom of the tank and form a layer. When the burner or element heats the water, steam bubbles get trapped under that sediment and pop as they escape. Sediment insulates the bottom of the tank, so the heater works harder, uses more energy, and heats less evenly. Flushing the tank periodically removes much of the sediment, but if the heater has never been flushed and is ...

Author bio: Guest post by the Man Made Services team — Man Made Services , Pittsburgh plumbing experts providing emergency plumbing, drain cleaning, water heater, and septic services. Every Pittsburgh winter, it happens: a cold snap drops temperatures into the teens or single digits, and somewhere in the city a pipe freezes, bursts, and floods a basement. Pittsburgh's older housing stock — beautiful, but often with pipes running through unheated crawl spaces, exterior walls, and drafty basements — makes frozen pipes one of the most common and most expensive winter plumbing problems here. The good news: a frozen pipe is almost entirely preventable. Here's what to do before the first hard freeze. Why Pittsburgh homes are especially vulnerable A lot of Pittsburgh houses were built decades ago, when insulation standards were different and "pipes in the exterior wall" was just how things were done. Add in our freeze-thaw cycles — mild one week, single digits the next ...