The peaceful moments you take advantage of with the energizing tranquillity of fall is the right time to get ready to protect your home from extreme weather. According to Forbes, hurricanes, heavy snow, tornadoes, and wildfires can have serious negative impacts on your home – and, consequently, your financial well-being.
Fortunately, you can adopt different measures to protect your home from extreme weather. The following are four tips to help you keep your home safe and habitable even in extreme weather conditions.
1. Evaluate Your Home’s Insurance Policy
The first and foremost tip involves reviewing your home’s insurance policies to ensure you’re covered for losses brought about by extreme weather. Destruction resulting from earthquakes, hurricanes, and flooding is normally not covered by a conventional homeowner’s insurance policy. However, you can choose to buy such policies separately.
You should come up with a list or create a short video clip of your properties as documentation for the insurance agency. Also, always remember to store such documentation in a secure place, preferably far away from your home.
2. Secure Your Roof
A properly fitted roof in perfect condition can protect your home’s inside from extreme weather, including storms and ice snow. Therefore, hiring experienced hail damage roofing contractors to work on your roof is a crucial step to getting your home ready for severe weather.
These experts can help you apply to seal all over your home’s vent pipes or chimney, thus preventing water from dripping into your home. Besides, professional roofing contractors will help assess the structural integrity of your home’s roof system. If they detect any defect, they’ll rectify it to prepare your home for the bad weather ahead.
In addition, remember to clear all the clogged downspouts and gutters on your home’s roofing. During a severe storm, if the rainwater can’t flow through your home’s downspouts and gutters, it’ll flow over the sides. Therefore, it can reach sections where it drains into your home’s foundation, leading to flooding and structural destruction.
3. Clear All Outdoor Items and Trim the Trees
As you head towards the winter months, ensure you clear away all outdoor items, including sporting equipment, lawn furniture, and gardening tools. For instance, during a storm, the powerful winds can easily pick up such items and send them flying all over your home.
Apart from destroying your home, this can also lead to serious injuries to people or even fatalities. That’s why you need to remove all outdoor items beforehand in readiness for the extreme weather.
In addition, it would be prudent if you took the time to assess the trees in your home compound. Usually, extreme weather, especially heavy storms, can break big tree branches, causing destruction to your home’s siding, falling power lines, or smashing your car. Therefore, consider trimming the trees in your backyard to avoid such risks.
4. Prepare Your Home’s Interior
It’s also important for you to prepare your home’s interior before extreme weather takes off. During the freezing winter months, ensure you maintain your thermostat at 65 degrees to avoid your piping from freezing. Also, you can install a mains water shut-off appliance that switches off the water supply if a leak is detected, thus safeguarding your home against water flooding.
Additionally, you’ll have to ensure your attic is properly ventilated to prevent damage resulting from ice damming. Often, the warmth in your attic causes the ice to melt, allowing moisture to absorb through roof shingles, causing water rot.
Lastly, ensure you have power back up by getting a generator, as it’ll come in handy during extreme weather conditions. A generator will allow you to run your heating system, have lights, and keep food in your fridge fresh.
Final Word
Often, mother nature can be so intolerant. Therefore, you should always be ready to protect your home and family from extreme weather. Each year, the extreme weather season comes with uncertainty.
However, this doesn’t mean you can’t do anything to avoid some of the negative impacts. With the help of the four tips discussed above, you can protect your home and evade severe effects of extreme weather, including storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, among others.
Ultimately, it’s your preparation for the extreme weather months that matters most.
Check out: 5 Home Improvements That Add Long Term Value You Should Do Today
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