Each year, thousands of Arizona residents email or call Rosie Romero’s radio show with questions about everything from preventing fires in their chimneys to getting rid of tree roots invading their sewer system. His goal is to provide answers that suit the specific lifestyle wherever someone lives in Arizona. Here are questions about home maintenance and improvement from the Tucson area.
I’m buying a house that went through foreclosure, and a home inspector found several areas of termite damage already, including around the front door. The pest control company recommended doing a whole house treatment, and we’re going ahead with that. But are there possibilities of infestation later?
A: Be sure to have that whole-house termite treatment done. But even so, you should always keep an eye out for future visits by termites. Inspect the foundations of the house regularly for mud tubes. Check areas where there seems to be rotted wood, like the frame around your garage door or around any exterior door. Damaged wood can have a hollow sound when tapped. Sometimes termites even build stringy-looking mud tubes that drop down from the ceiling.
If you’re still suspicious about how much infestation has already occurred in the house, you may need to do investigative destruction to find out what happened before — like taking down drywall in suspicious-looking areas. It’s possible that more repairing and replacing of damaged material has to be done.
I have a 30-year-old house that has a mix-it valve on a shower in one of the bathrooms. About a year ago, we had the previous shower faucet replaced with this new valve and now we can’t get hot water in that shower in the winter at all — only during the summer when all the water is warm in the house. How can this be fixed?
A: Probably the shower faucet was not installed correctly, and the water lines were crossed. It’s actually fairly easy to install these faucets backwards. You can have a plumber come in and adjust the valve stops. It’s also possible that you may need to clean or replace the cartridge inside the faucet. If all that doesn’t solve the problem, something may be wrong with the equipment that was installed a year ago, in which case doing a replacement of the valve may be necessary.
It seems as if I have a poltergeist living in my water closet. In the middle of the night, about 4 or 5 a.m., I can hear my toilet making burps or belches. I don’t seem to notice it during the middle of the day. What’s going on?
A: Usually that burping noise means that the flapper inside the toilet tank is wearing out and as a result water keeps leaking into the toilet bowl. In-tank chemicals and cleaning products tend to damage flappers and shorten their lifespan. If your flapper doesn’t fit very tightly, then the ballcock is set off and more water flows into the tank and the toilet makes that burping noise. You may not think that doesn’t happen during the day, but you probably just don’t notice it because there’s too much other background noise going on in the house or you might not even be around.
You can test for this problem by putting a dye tablet or a few drops of food coloring into the tank. In a half-hour, color may leak into the toilet bowl, and you can tell that there is a leak taking place. If so, you may need to replace that old flapper, a simple repair that almost everyone can do.
