A new showerhead can give your home bathroom a major boost, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of water use efficiency. Best of all, in most cases replacing your shower head can be a simple DIY project.

If you’ve always had a home connected to your local city water or municipal water source, you might take it for granted that public water like this is the only water source. But many homes, particularly those located in rural areas, are connected to well water. And yes, that’s exactly what it sounds like — water from a well, one that isn’t regulated the same way public water is.

When you think of plumbing jobs, installing a washing machine might not be the first one that comes to mind. After all, most people associate plumbing with sinks and toilets. But there’s much more within your home that connects to incoming sources of water (not to mention outgoing water) and your washing machine is definitely one of those appliances. Think about it — without water coming into your washer via pipes, this appliance isn’t going to work very well.

When you hear the words “burst pipe,” what comes to your mind? You might picture it as a worst-case scenario — you walk in the door to find your home flooded, with inches of water rising on the floor and a steady stream of water pumping out of a wide-open pipe.

After those cooking appliances are ruled out, a dishwasher is the second most common source of a kitchen fire. Apparently, fires start every 63 seconds and cost an estimated $10.3 billion in property damage.

If you understand how the toilet works, you can easily diagnose, avoid, or solve most problems involving a toilet’s operation, so you don’t have to call in a plumber to fix something you could easily take care of yourself with a few tools you probably already have around the house or parts you can pick up from the hardware store.

You love your bathroom, but you hate those rust stains! Besides those, your bathroom feels like a luxurious spa you can escape to, a place that’s clean and welcoming and not at all gross. You’re even proud of how you’ve kept things like mold, limescale, and soap scum under control, which tend to be the primary problems that people struggle with in maintaining their bathroom. But those rust stains…

As great as indoor plumbing is, there are also those times when something goes terribly, terribly wrong. And in those situations, an emergency can be catastrophic, causing thousands of dollars in damage and even threatening your health and safety!

Most material stuff in your life has to be replaced at some point. Your shoes? They won’t last forever. Your computer? It wears out after so many years. Your car? Eventually, it breaks down beyond reasonable repair. So is it any surprise that your plumbing will have to be replaced at some point, too?

A clog could strike either your bathroom sink or your kitchen sink, and either could be just as bad as the other. Even though you know to be diligent and careful not to put anything down your sink that you shouldn’t, every household will see its fair share of gunk get washed away.

There are plenty of ways to save money when remodeling your bathroom. You could have a sparkling new bathroom at a fraction of the cost you would spend if you were just frivolously throwing money at the project — and who can afford to do that?!

Everyone loves a good vacation — and for families that are busy all throughout the fall, winter, and spring, the summer season is an ideal time to get away from the house, enjoy a change of scenery, and enjoy a week or two somewhere else! But one of the worst ways to conclude a great vacation is to come home to find that there’s been some kind of plumbing emergency. Uh-oh!

There are plenty of plumbing emergencies that many of us will live through — a clogged drain, an overflowing toilet, even a leaking ice maker in the fridge. But one that most of us hope we never have to deal with is a water shutoff. That’s right — a water shutoff, which is exactly what it sounds like. No running water for an extended period of time.

Not everything is dishwasher safe! You’re probably aware of this to some degree. You might have even had an experience with putting something that wasn’t dishwasher safe through a cycle, only to open up the door later to find that whatever it was got completely ruined by the hot water or detergent.

You can stave off mold growth in your bathroom and never have to deal with the grossness. On the other hand, if you are surprised to notice a spot in your bathroom where too much moisture has collected for way too long, and you now have a small moldy patch, don’t despair — it’s easy enough to DIY a treatment yourself and keep your bathroom mold-free going forward.

There’s, unfortunately, a lot of misinformation out there, and following ill-advised suggestions could end up causing you bigger problems in the future. That’s why it’s always important to get your information from a reliable source — ideally, from your plumber.

Low water pressure could be caused by several different factors, so it sometimes takes a little bit of detective work to determine what the specific cause of the problem is.

You rely on your garbage disposal a lot — whether you’re cooking a meal or cleaning up after one, or even just clearing out your refrigerator, it’s good to know you can send most food scraps down the sink and then count on your garbage disposal to grind it all up so it can be flushed away.

The main culprits for a smelly drain are mold, biofilm, or sewer gases, and most people will be able to determine the likely cause of the smell just by doing a quick assessment.

If you have a drip coming from a pipe or faucet every two seconds, that adds up to 30 drips a minute — about 3,000 gallons a month! Depending on the rates you pay, that could be anywhere from $50 to $70 added to your water bill. That’s somewhere between $600 and $840 a year!