The major appliances in your home are valuable for several reasons. First, they come with a hefty price tag. They also save you time and energy throughout your day. Finally, it’s a huge inconvenience when they are not working, or aren’t working as well as they once did. So, it’s worth your time to do a little preventive maintenance to keep your appliances clean and running at full capacity.
Refrigerators
Fridges are used a lot, and therefore they need special attention. Here are some quick cleaning necessities that can extend their lifespan:
- Clean the coils: Use a brush to remove dust and lint.
- Eliminate odors: If you had something stinky in there, remove the smell using baking soda, charcoal, or newspapers.
- Clean the gaskets: The seals around your refrigerator doors can get dirty or even moldy, so it’s important to clean them often..
Ovens
Keep your stove top and oven in tip-top condition with these tips:
- Calibration: Use your owner’s manual and oven-safe thermometer to establish accurate temperatures.
- Clean up spills: If your pot boils over, clean it up immediately so that you can get down through all the layers.
- Burner contacts: Your electric burners won’t heat properly if they don’t have good contacts.
Garbage Disposals
Your garbage disposal is a useful kitchen tool that requires some quick maintenance, such as:
- Clean the flaps: If the disposal has an odor, lift the splash guard flaps and scrub the gunk off of the underside.
- Start over: If the disposal overheats or stops, your first remedy should be to try the reset button on the bottom.
Washers and Dryers
The workhorse of your home are the washer and dryer. Here’s how to treat them with some TLC:
- Don’t overload the washer: Stuffed machines don’t clean clothes and risk burning out the motor.
- Be gentle with the doors: You don’t want to break the lid or door switches; they are expensive to have to replace.
- Lint trap care: Don’t just remove the lint; scrub the screen to get off invisible residue.
With these simple care and cleaning tips, you can extend the life of your expensive major appliances. Do you have any additional tried and true care tips to add? Leave them in the comments!
Top photo: emilysnuffer/Flickr
I’m printing this out so my family and I can go through everything. We have never done any maintenance work on our appliances and really need to! Thanks. 🙂
We are hard on all of our appliances and ask a lot of them. I run everything almost every day and if I don’t pay attention to maintaining them, I’d be in big trouble!
Love the tips! It’s important to take care of appliances, they don’t come in cheap! Thanks for sharing these. They are very helpful.
Not just the lint trap, be sure to clean out the hose yearly. Last thing you want is a lint fire.
Great advice, appliances are expensive to replace and of course saving on energy costs is always good.
These are great to know! I do t do half of these
These are excellent tips and suggestions. I need to clean the refrigerator coils again.
Also, don’t forget to clean out the lint behind the dryer, in the hose, and the duct work. Trapped lint can cause a fire.
This is great I’ll have to tell my mom and dad about this, I’ll also have to tel my grandma about this she loves to keep everything super clean.
This is so true. I make sure to do simple maintenance on my washer and dryer especially.
When we bought this house a year ago, we bought the home warranty like everyone else. We had just a year ago bought our own new fridge and washer and dryer so we didn’t get that part of the warranty, however have used it for the water heater, the AC and something else… and there are warranties on these products… get them!
Maintenance is so important in keeping your appliances running smoothly. My husband is not a handy man so we always get extended warranties for this reason, lol.
I totally agree with this. Regular maintenance is a must! Plus, having faulty appliances and being not able to check on them is not just dangerous but also causes additional and unnecessary costs. I remember replacing our flourescent bulbs with LED lights and our electricity consumption dwindled somehow. 🙂 Savings!
I never thought about how much providing good maintenance to my appliances could actually save me money. I do clean the coils on the frig, but I didn’t think about the further cleaning I could be doing there!
Wow i will save this tips it very useful. Its so important to take care our appliances
Ugh! I definitely need to do the refrigerator maintenance. I just looked at the gaskets on ours, and it is horrible!!!
These are some great tips! I’m TERRIBLE about keeping behind and under the fridge clean.
Great tips! Especially about the washer and dryer. I didn’t know a few of these tips yet!