Who doesn’t like his house being flooded? Well, the answer, surprisingly enough is nobody. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t get caught in an unfortunate situation every now and then which may lead to you calling up various services to help you out. You may well find that a crazy situation like the London Beer flood can happen but isn’t likely.
That being said, we decided to look up some of the things that you could possibly do as preventive measures to ensure that you are able to keep the flooding water out of your house where it belongs, and there we took the help of Big5 to compile certain suggestions which we think would be beneficial for you to keep in mind. Now, this doesn’t mean that all of these suggestions would definitely work, as terrain, house-location and the initial structure would definitely play a role, but following these would definitely help you rather than harm you:
1. Clean out your eavestroughs as much as possible with an informed help
2. Remove debris from any storm drains nearest to your house and ask your neighbours to help you with the efforts
3. Test your sump pumpregularly
4. Check your backwater valve and keep it clean at all times
Personally speaking, all of these tactics would definitely be helpful, but like we mentioned earlier, they aren’t the be all and end all of ensuring that your house isn’t flooded. Therefore, if you can spend the time, resources, and efforts, we would suggest that you also are able to take care of the following things as well:
1. Make sure your property has a positive grade, i.e. water flows away from your house and not towards it, which means that purchasing a house which has an incoming slope would not be a good idea
2. Extend your downspouts so water discharges at least a couple of metres from your house I not more
3. Do not store documents or anything expensive in your basement, or rather, after watching IT and IT: Chapter 2, don’t have a basement at all
4. Make sure someone checks on your property when you are on vacation, and while you can not choose your own neighbours, we would still suggest having great relationships with them at all time
5. Where flooding is common, elevate your furnace, hot water tank, and electrical panel, or put them on a different floor
Now, once again, these 2 aren’t completely exhaustive lists to ensure complete safety of your house, but we are still sure that following up on most of these would definitely help you in 9 out of 10 cases.