Home warranties

By now, you’ve likely seen the ads, gotten the emails and maybe even hung up on a few robocalls going on and on about the benefits of a home warranty. Are they actually worth getting, though? Let’s take a closer look at home warranties and what they really have to offer. This will help you to decide if a home warranty is right for you or if it would just be a waste of your money.

What Is a Home Warranty?

First of all, just what is a home warranty? This is an important question, because many people don’t actually know what a home warranty is for. A common assumption is that a home warranty is like some version of homeowners’ insurance, perhaps offering short-term coverage after closing on a home. While the timing aspect is pretty close, a home warranty is actually significantly different than a homeowners’ insurance policy. Instead, a home warranty covers certain things within the home to allow for their replacement in case they break soon after buying the property.

What Does a Home Warranty Include?

The specifics of what a home warranty covers can vary a bit depending on the specific home warranty plan you purchase. In general, though, home warranties are designed to cover major systems and appliances within the home. When you’re buying a home, your home warranty will have you covered if something like the refrigerator or water heater breaks down a few months after you move in. In most cases, major systems such as plumbing and HVAC are covered as well. The policy functions like most standard warranties, allowing you to get needed repairs or replacements while the warranty is still in effect.

What’s Not Covered?

Unless it’s specifically mentioned in your home warranty, general home repairs or other maintenance are not included in the warranty. This means that something like a broken window, a weak spot in the floor or peeling paint would have to be repaired as an out-of-pocket expense if they aren’t covered under your homeowners’ insurance. The home warranty is designed to cover only your new home’s appliances and major systems.

How Long Do Home Warranties Last?

Again, the term of a home warranty depends on the specific warranty policy you take out. One of the most common warranty periods is one year, giving you a full year’s worth of peace of mind after you take out the policy. Depending on your needs, however, you may be able to get a home warranty for shorter or longer periods as well.

Can You Add Extra Services?

Depending on the home warranty provider you choose, there may be add-ons that you can include with your warranty service for an additional cost. These can include things like swimming pool maintenance and repair, well maintenance and expanded services such as maintenance tune-ups for your HVAC system. Some providers even use add-ons to create customizable warranty plans, offering up a basic general plan and then expanding it to meet your needs by letting you add only the features you want.

Do You Need a Home Warranty?

Whether you actually need a home warranty or not is kind of a big question. The answer depends on a lot of factors including the age of the home that you’re buying, the amount of coverage you get from your homeowners’ insurance and even what you have in the house that would be covered by the home warranty. The price of the warranty plan should also be a consideration, since this can vary by several hundred dollars depending on the provider and the amount of coverage included. The right home warranty can be a good buy, but it’s worth looking at the cost and coverage to make sure the plan is actually what you need.

Solid Home Warranty Advice

Whether you’re in the market for a home warranty or still on the fence, HomeKeepr can hook you up with someone who can answer all of your questions. Sign up for a free HomeKeepr account to get connected today!

Unclogging house drains

So there you are, minding your own business while having a shave over the bathroom sink, when you see it. The water. It’s not draining. And your sink is threatening to overflow. You turn off the faucet and consider your options. Option 1: You freak out and start screaming. Option 2: You find a useful blog much like this one and learn how to handle a drain clog on your own.

Your Basic Clog-Clearing Toolkit

Depending on the age of your home and the type of pipes in your plumbing system, any of these items may be useful to keep around the house:

Rubber gloves. There’s a lot of fairly gross stuff that could be causing your clog. You really don’t want to touch that. Trust us on this.
Pipe wrench. When your sink trap is the source of the clog, this is all you need.
Bucket. Buckets are good for many things, including bailing out tubs and keeping clogged drains from dripping all over when you take them apart.
Hand plunger. These tiny plungers are great for sinks and tubs. Make sure you have caps for any double sinks in your house to help you create a strong vacuum..
Manual auger. When the going gets tough, or your drain is clogged a little bit deeper than a plunger can handle, sending an auger into the pipe can help you get things moving again. The longer the auger’s line, the further you can reach. Some are even made to hook to a power drill, giving you a little extra torque.

What’s not on this list, you may notice, is a chemical drain cleaner. There are several reasons for this. First, chemical drain cleaners can also cause pipes to corrode from the inside. When that happens, bits of rust can break off over time and cause a really hard clog that’s impossible to remove on your own. Secondly, if you do need to call in a pro, or you get fiesty and want to give the drain another go, the standing water will be caustic. You seriously don’t want that.

Time to Get To the Drains!

Clearing a drain is a pretty simple process. You can approach most drains in this order:

Step 1: Remove any drain covers or plugs.
Step 2: Use a flashlight to look inside the upper part of the drain. If you see hair or other debris plugging the way, put on gloves and pull it out. For stuff that’s really stuck, try a pair of needle nose pliers to get a better grip.
Step 3: If you don’t see anything immediately clogging the drain, open the trap and clear it out with a burst of water from another faucet that doesn’t drain using that particular trap.
Step 4: Nothing in the trap? Take the manual auger and feed it into the drain with the trap still detached, going into the wall. You’ll be flying blind here, so go slow and easy. Keep feeding the line until you meet the obstruction or run out of line. When you do find the clog, you will be able to punch a hole in it by rotating the feed line rapidly. Once the feed line moves smoothly, withdraw it from the drain line.
Step 5: Put everything back together and test the drain line by running the water again.

Did you succeed? If so, hooray!

If you still have standing water, you have a few options. You can plunge your heart out in hopes that you can move the clog along. You can also try repeating the steps above in case there is a clog deeper in the drain that you just missed.

This technique will work for most types of household drains, though those encased in cement or that drain up from a basement are a lot more complicated and will probably require a pro to unclog.

Drains can be incredibly frustrating to clear. Take your time and be thorough, that way you don’t have to keep going back into the drain.

Drain Problems Gotcha Down?

Whether your drain issue is complicated, it’s inside a floor or you just really don’t want to deal with it on your own, there’s always someone to help in your HomeKeepr community. Log in and check out the plumbers and handymen that your Realtor recommends. You know they’re gonna be great because your agent works with them regularly and is familiar with their high quality workmanship.

Is A Home Warranty Worth It?

Whether you’ve recently purchased a home or are considering renewing the home warranty that came with your home, chances are good that you’ve got questions. Big ones. You’ve probably heard a lot of different things about home warranty programs, ranging from really awful to crazy and near lifesaving. Like anything that remotely resembles an insurance program, there’s a lot of nuance behind individual experiences.

What is a Home Warranty?

You can think of your home warranty as a type of insurance if that makes it easier to understand. It’s technically a service agreement, kind of like what you’d get with a new car. Individual warranty programs have contracts with individual service providers who will come out and diagnose your problem, arrange for parts and then return ready to fix it. The quality of any single home warranty program, then, is only as good as the contracts that the company has with its service providers.

The yearly costs involved range widely, with very basic plans with limited coverage starting around $300 and comprehensive plans that include things like pool repair pushing the $1,000 mark. There’s also typically a service call charge and there can be an upper limit on the costs the warranty will cover.

Depending on the age, size and complexity of your home, that $1,000 plan still may look pretty good next to actually making needed repairs out of pocket. It’s all a matter of perspective.

How Does a Home Warranty Work?

It cannot be stressed hard enough that you should read the entire document before agreeing to a particular home warranty. Although they may seem the same, what one company will cover may be completely excluded by another. Your Realtor should be able to guide you toward a product that they have had a good experience with and consistently delivers good results. If they can’t, call the Better Business Bureau and read reviews online to be certain the company you choose will deliver the goods.

Working with a reputable warranty company is a simple process. It goes something like this:

You notice that the sink is backed up unexpectedly. Running the disposal doesn’t help and you’re not a plumber. You don’t even play one on TV.
You call the number to your warranty company.
An operator answers and asks for identifying information, along with a brief description of the problem.
You explain that your sink is full of water and you’re worried you may soon drown if someone doesn’t come to help.
Your operator collects all the necessary information, triages the case as either emergency or not, and does one of two things: gives you the number to a service provider OR promises to contact one on your behalf.
No more than a day later (depending on your urgency level), the provider calls you to arrange an appointment.
The appointment is set, the service provider comes out and figures out what the problem is. If it’s an easy fix, they may deal with it right then. If it’s a costly repair, they’ll need to go back to the warranty company and try to figure out how much is your responsibility and how much the company will cover.
You authorize a costly repair, it’s made, you pay your part and go on with your life. Or you decline it, kick the dirt and call the warranty company back for a second opinion, then go through the steps above again.
Warranty programs can be hit and miss, there’s no doubt about it. Sometimes the things they cover versus the things they don’t seem completely arbitrary. But, there’s plenty of competition in this arena that will allow you to get into a program you can afford and will be able to use if need be.

The Biggest Warranty Program Con

This has already been touched on, but bears repeating. The biggest drawback to a home warranty is the very thing that leads some people to believe that they’re cons: they don’t cover everything. Again, this is highly dependent on the program and service level you select, but you have to remember that a home warranty is not the same as homeowner’s insurance.

Acts of Nature, shifting foundations, broken sewer lines and broken windows are among the biggest pain points for home warranty users. These items are often not included because of the massive expense they represent, as well as the fact that many are already covered under your homeowner’s policy.

There’s absolutely every reason to read your warranty paperwork thoroughly so you know what will be and won’t be covered. That way you’ll be armed to fight a refusal to pay thoughtfully and efficiently should it occur in error.

Intangible Benefits Come With Warranties

There are a few people who end up winning the lottery with their home warranties. They move in and everything they touch just starts breaking. These are items that showed no sign of serious wear and were installed correctly, their breakdowns were wholly unexpected. But suddenly, that homeowner has a new furnace and air conditioner, the pool pump’s been replaced and so on. This really does happen, and even at $800 a year and $75 a piece for service calls, it represents an incredible savings.

However, most people don’t get that lucky and if they use their warranty at all, they only need it once or twice during their ownership. This is why it’s important to consider the intangibles with these programs. Sure, your breaker box seems fine today, but would you know what to do if it started malfunctioning? That’s where the home warranty really provides a powerful value.

People don’t buy home warranties to save money on home repairs. They do it to control their repair costs over the long term. Usually, they will spend a lot more on the home warranty than they would just hiring their own contractors, but these same people admittedly don’t know who to call or how to vet a potential service provider.

Service provider vetting is a service that the warranty company provides with their yearly fee. Peace of mind, at a cost, is the thing that many home warranty buyers end up choosing. For the highly risk averse, it’s a total win — these people can go on with life and not have to give home repair another thought.

What If You Could Find Vetted Service Providers and Still Save Money?

If you’d rather have a relationship with your plumber, roofer or other service provider rather than have one with a call center, a home warranty might not be right for you. Instead, you should connect with a referral community like HomeKeepr where you can get to know your people on a personal level, thanks to your Realtor’s recommendations.

There’s just something about telling your friends that “my electrician Greg came right over and fixed the faulty wiring,” rather than “I called the warranty company and some guy showed up” that can give you a huge feeling of security in homeownership, whether these are your first steps or you’re well on your way to your next address.