By practicing some fairly simple habits, you can minimize wear and tear on your household appliances. This will extend their life and keep repair bills
Carefully check your pockets for bills and coins before washing pants. Loose coins in particular can damage the drum and may get rattled into nooks and crannies where they can cause a jam. Besides coins, bills and papers can get waterlogged and fall apart. This is no good for your papers, but they can also lead to clogged drains. Checking your pockets only takes a few seconds in each pair of pants, but it can save you hundreds of dollars in preventable repair costs. The same goes for the dryer.
Avoid unnecessary appliance repair calls in Welland by taking it one manageable sized load at a time. It’s easy to want to pack the washing machine to the brim, and especially so when you’re staring at a heaping pile of laundry. Resist this temptation! An overloaded washing machine puts a lot of stress on the bearings. This can throw the drum out of alignment, making the machine unusable.
Be sure to empty your clothes dryer’s lint trap after every load. A couple of times a month, we also advise removing the lint screen and clearing the vent of anything that made it past the screen. An obstructed dryer vent dramatically reduces your machine’s efficiency. Moreover, it’s a safety issue. Lint that gets clogged in the vent pipe can start a fire by introducing flammable material into a hot, dry environment. We’ve seen cases where a customer has called about appliance repair in St. Catharines, only to find a smoking wreck of a dryer that’s beyond repair.
Not only knives, but any sharp objects such as rasps and graters, should stay out of the dishwasher. Your dishwasher’s racks are metal, covered in a vinyl coating. If that coating is split or nicked with a sharp edge or point, the racks will rust and stain your dishes.
Consider washing knives and other sharp objects by hand. If you decide to wash knives in the dishwasher, put them in a cutlery basket with the sharp ends pointing up. This will minimize the risk of damaging the vinyl.
You may have heard that a freezer works more efficiently full than empty. This is true, but there is a limit to that. Avoid overfilling your freezer, which can block air vents and restrict the flow of cold air. When this happens, it forces the condenser to work harder than it was designed to and may make it burn out.
Your oven uses heating coils in the top and the bottom to make sure that food gets cooked evenly. It’s a sensible design, but it needs to be protected. Anything spilled in the oven should be cleaned up right away, before it damages the heating coils. This can lead to a costly appliance repair Niagara Falls call, because this tends to be a time-consuming repair job. You can line your oven rack (not the bottom of the oven) with aluminum foil to catch spills before they become an issue, and remove them quickly and easily.
It can be tempting to use soap or other cleaning products to get your gas range clean, but this should be avoided. Using soap on your gas burners can lead to corrosion, as well as clog the lighting hole, which can cause the burners to ignite slowly or not at all. There are a number of stovetop cleaning products on the market. Check your manufacturer’s recommendations for how to clean your gas stovetop.
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Cast iron is a common cookware material, but you should be prepared to use it in a way that protects your stovetop. Cast iron pans have rough bottoms, and can easily scratch smooth cooking surfaces like ceramic. Wherever possible, use cast iron cookware that is coated, and take care not to drag pots and pans, but instead lift them on and off your burners. This will preserve your cooking surfaces and minimize wear and tear.
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