Every year between Memorial Day and the first week of June our office phones go quiet for about four days and then explode. The quiet stretch is the last weekend before hurricane season opens. The explosion is the Wednesday after the first tropical wave gets a cone on the local news. By that Wednesday, every plumbing supply house in Pasco and Hernando County is sold out of sump pumps, backwater valves, brass quarter turn ball valves, and any submersible pump under one horsepower. Every plumber within sixty miles is booked solid for two weeks. The homeowners calling us are the ones who waited. The homeowners we are not hearing from are the ones who did the prep work in late May. Here is the seven item checklist we run for our maintenance plan members every spring, with the cost of each item and how to do most of them yourself this weekend.
One. Locate and test your main water shutoff valve. Every house in Florida has one, usually at the front corner of the garage, sometimes in a wall mounted access panel, occasionally in a meter box near the street. If you have to think for more than ten seconds to find it, label it now. Then turn it. A working gate valve or ball valve should turn smoothly through a full ninety degrees (ball valve) or several full revolutions (gate valve) without stopping or feeling gritty. Most older Spring Hill, Brooksville, and Hudson homes have brass gate valves from the original build. These seize closed inside the bonnet from mineral buildup and you do not find out until water is gushing through a broken supply line at two in the morning and the valve will not budge. If yours does not turn smoothly, call us. We replace the seized gate with a quarter turn ball valve, brass body, with a clear handle, in about forty five minutes for $245 fixed.
Two. If you have a sump pump, test it. Sump pump failures during a major storm are almost never the motor. They are stuck floats, full debris baskets, or pumps that have not run in eighteen months and froze up. Pull the cover off the sump pit. Reach down and lift the float by hand. The pump should kick on within a second. If it does, pour five gallons of water into the basin from a bucket and watch the float trigger naturally. The pump should drain the basin within a minute or two. If the float is sluggish, if the pump runs but does not pump much water, or if the basin is full of mud and roots, that needs service before the storm. Replacement of a standard half horsepower submersible sump pump runs $385 fixed including the new pump, a new check valve, and a stainless cable float switch with a five year warranty.
Three. For homes with sewer back up risk, install a backwater valve. When the rainfall during a major storm overwhelms the county sewer collection system, the mains in the street can surcharge and the wastewater can back up through your lowest plumbing fixture and into the house. The lowest fixture in most Pasco County homes is the master bathroom shower or the laundry room floor drain. A backwater valve is a one way check valve installed on the sewer lateral between your house and the street main. When the city side pressurizes, the valve closes and your house stays dry. It is a one time install, code recognized, sometimes incentivized by insurance carriers. For a standard accessible lateral with an existing exterior cleanout, we install a four inch full port backwater valve for $1,295 fixed including the permit and inspection.
Four. Inspect your water heater. Two checks. First, walk around the unit and look for any rust streaking down the side of the tank from the top, the bottom, or any seam. Surface rust is fine. Streaking from a specific point means a leak is starting. Second, lift the lever on the temperature and pressure relief valve (the lever sticks out the side of the tank or near the top) for one second and let it snap back. Water should come out, and then stop completely when the lever snaps back. If no water comes out, the valve is stuck and needs to be replaced before the storm because a stuck T and P valve cannot vent if pressure builds during an outage. Replacement is $135 fixed and is part of our standard water heater service in Port Richey, Spring Hill, and across our area. Also drain about a gallon from the bottom drain valve and look at what comes out. Brown or rust colored water means sediment buildup that should be flushed before storm season.
Five. Cap or insulate outdoor hose bibs and exposed plumbing. In a major wind event, an unsupported hose bib protruding from the side of the house is exposed to flying debris. A direct hit can crack the body of the bib or shear it off entirely, leaving an open one inch hole into your plumbing system that will not stop spraying until you reach the main shutoff. The fix is twenty dollars in materials. Either remove the hose attachment and screw a brass cap onto the bib (a frost free hose bib has a square shank that takes a 3/4 inch garden hose cap), or remove the bib entirely and cap the supply stub if you are evacuating and will not be back for several days. Also check pool equipment, irrigation backflow preventers, and any exposed PVC on the side of the house for cracks or weakness before the storm.
Six. For homes on septic, pump the tank if you are due. A septic tank that is at capacity when a major rain event saturates the drain field cannot accept more water from the house. The result is sewage backing up through the lowest drain in the house, sometimes hours after the storm has passed. If your tank is on a three to five year pumping cycle and you are within twelve months of the next pump, get it pumped in the next two weeks. Our partner septic crews handle this for around $385 to $450 for a standard one thousand gallon tank in Hudson, Spring Hill, Brooksville, and Hernando County. Our coverage of septic system service across our area includes scheduling and inspection if you are not sure when your tank was last pumped.
Seven. For homes on well water, fill bathtubs and storage containers before the storm hits. A residential well pump runs on electricity. When the power goes out, no water comes from the tap. Filling every bathtub in the house gives you several hundred gallons of flushing water for toilets. Filling clean five gallon containers in the kitchen gives you drinking water for the family. If your well system has a pressure tank, the tank will hold ten to twenty gallons of pressurized water for the first round of bathroom and kitchen use after the power goes, but after that you are at the mercy of how full the bathtubs are. Also confirm your well head cap is secure and not cracked. Floodwater entering the well head contaminates the entire system and requires a shock chlorination cycle to make the well drinkable again, which takes twenty four hours minimum.
What we do if you would rather have us run the checklist. Every May our maintenance plan members get a complimentary hurricane prep visit covering all seven items above plus a pressure test, a leak check on every fixture, and a written report on what was inspected and what was recommended. For non members in Port Richey, Spring Hill, Hudson, Trinity, Brooksville, and across our service area, we offer the same visit as a one time service for $185 fixed. Any repairs identified during the visit are quoted in writing before any work begins. Book early in May for best availability. The slots in the last two weeks of May fill up first because every year the same homeowners learn the same lesson, which is that you want a plumber on your calendar before the cone shows up on TV, not after.
For storm season prep, repairs, or any plumbing service across Pasco and Hernando County, call our office at (727) 842 4663. A real person answers. The full breakdown of general plumbing service we run on these visits covers everything in the checklist above and more. Most calls are scheduled the same day. Emergency dispatch runs twenty four hours a day during a named storm, although we strongly prefer to have all of this handled before the storm makes landfall.
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