How to Protect a Vacant House Through a Hazard Season

Why this matters

An occupied house survives most small failures because someone notices: the sump that sticks, the furnace that locks out, the gutter that fills with needles. An empty one does not. A pipe that splits in an unheated wall runs for three weeks before anyone opens the door, and the damage is measured in floors and framing rather than a ceiling patch. Owners who leave for a season usually ask the shop for "a check before I go." This is what that check should actually set up, step by step, and what the visit card the shop leaves behind should say.

Pick the season you are defending against first

The same house needs different things depending on what the season brings, and a generic checklist spends its effort in the wrong places.

• Freeze: the risk is water in pipes and fixtures that lose heat. Every step is about keeping heat on, keeping water out, or both.
• Hurricane and flood: the risk is water from outside and wind on openings. Every step is about the sump, the openings, loose objects and equipment that should be off.
• Wildfire: the risk is embers finding fuel. Every step is about vents, gutters, the roof edge and what sits against the house.

Write the season at the top of the visit card. A house in a mountain town can carry two (freeze and wildfire in the autumn), and then both sets apply. See related: Design Events: What the Code Assumes Will Happen to the House, which owns the idea of the hazard an area is built for.

The steps

1. Call the insurance agent before anything else. Many homeowner policies change once a house is vacant or unoccupied for a stated period, commonly 30 or 60 days, and some exclude freeze damage unless heat is maintained or the water is shut off and the system drained. Which condition applies is in the owner's own policy, not in this card. Skip it and every other step can be done correctly while the coverage that would have paid for a failure has quietly gone. The shop's job is to tell the owner to make that call and to write on the visit card which condition the agent named, so the setup matches it.

2. Decide the water plan and execute it at the main. For a freeze season the safest plan is heat maintained at 55 F and the main water valve closed, with the lines bled down through the lowest faucet so the system holds no pressure. Heat alone fails when the furnace locks out; water off alone fails when the trapped water in an outside wall freezes anyway. Both together means a failure has nothing to push. Where the owner wants a full winterization (no heat, everything drained, antifreeze in traps), see related: Restoring a Winterized Vacant Home for Inspection, which covers what that setup needs to come back. Test that the main actually closes: open a faucet after closing it and confirm flow stops within a minute. Skip the test and you leave a main that weeps through a worn seat, refilling the lines you just drained.

3. Put the water heater where it cannot hurt itself. With the main closed and the tank still full, set a gas heater to its vacation or pilot setting and an electric heater's breaker off. An electric heater whose tank is later drained with the breaker on dry-fires its elements on the next call for heat. Skip it and you have either a heater keeping 40 or 50 gal hot for no one, or a burned-out element waiting for the owner's return.

4. Make the sump able to run, and able to tell someone it did not. For a hurricane or a spring-thaw season, pour water into the pit until the float lifts and the pump starts, and watch it pump down and stop; the pump plugs into a GFCI-protected receptacle, and you pour with one hand and keep the other off the cord and the pump. Check that the discharge leaves the house and is not frozen, crushed or pointed back at the foundation. A battery backup pump and a high-water alarm that reaches a phone turn a power failure from a flooded basement into a text message. Skip it and the house has a pump nobody has seen run since spring, on a circuit that will be the first thing a storm takes out.

5. Set up the alerts that replace the person who is not there. A temperature and water-leak sensor on the house network, reporting to the owner and the check-in person, with an alert at 45 F indoors and on any water at the water heater, the main and the sump. A power-loss alert from the same system. See related: Setting Up Freeze and Power-Loss Alerts for a Vacant Home. Skip it and the first sign of a lockout is the smell three weeks later.

6. Close up the openings the season will test. For wildfire, confirm every vent is the ember-resistant type with its mesh intact, clear the gutters and the roof valleys, and get anything that burns (firewood, doormats, cushions, a stack of cardboard) at least 5 ft from the walls. For hurricane, install shutters or panels the owner already owns, bring in or tie down everything that can fly, and confirm the garage door is the wind-rated type or braced. For freeze, close crawlspace vents and cover hose bibbs. Ladder work for gutters and vents follows the shop's ladder rules: three points of contact, footed on firm ground, nobody on a roof in wind or on wet shingles. Skip this step and the house meets the season with the one weak opening that undoes the rest.

7. Leave the equipment in a known state. HVAC on and set, with a fresh filter and a test cycle observed through to the thermostat being satisfied, for a freeze season; off at the disconnect for a hurricane season if the house will not be cooled. Pool equipment in winter mode or off. No portable generator left connected or fueled in a garage; an unattended portable generator is a fire and carbon monoxide source with nobody to hear it. A permanently installed standby generator with an automatic transfer switch is different: exercise it and confirm its transfer, and note its fuel level. Skip it and the person who checks in has no idea what "normal" was supposed to look like.

8. Name the check-in person and the schedule. A default worth starting from: a walk-through every 7 days, and within 24 hours after any freeze warning, named storm, red flag warning or power outage longer than 4 hours. Inside, the check-in person looks at the thermostat reading, the floor under the water heater and the sump pit, and runs one faucet to confirm the plan is still in effect (it should give nothing if the main is off). Some policies require a check-in at a stated interval; match it if the agent named one. Skip it and the alerts in step 5 go to someone who is 1,000 miles away and cannot open a door.

9. Write the visit card and leave it where the check-in person will see it. It replaces everything the owner would have known by living there.

The visit card, filled in

A two-story house in a freeze region, owner away mid-October to mid-April, check-in by a neighbor.

VACANT SEASON VISIT CARD      job 3316   10/12
season: FREEZE (Oct-Apr)
insurer condition (per agent): heat maintained
  OR water off and drained -> heat kept AND
  main off; lines bled, not fully drained
water main: basement, front wall. CLOSED.
  closure tested: faucet stopped in 40 sec
  lines bled at laundry sink
water heater (gas): VACATION setting
furnace: ON, set 55F, new filter, cycle OK
  service tag on unit, next due Apr
sump: tested, pumped down + stopped
  backup pump on battery, alarm to 2 phones
sensors: 45F alert, leak at WH/main/sump
crawl vents closed, 3 hose bibbs covered
check-in: L. Ortiz (next door), every 7 days
  + 24h after freeze warning or outage >4h
look at: thermostat, floor under WH, sump pit,
  one faucet (should give nothing)
problem? call shop line, then owner

Two things on that card came from findings, not from the checklist. The main valve's first closure did not hold: water still trickled at the faucet after a full minute, so the tech exercised the valve, closed it again, and it stopped in 40 seconds. Had the owner relied on the first closure, the lines would have refilled slowly all winter. And the sump's discharge line ran out through the rim joist into a buried pipe whose end was crushed by a mower; the tech dug the end clear and cut it back so the pump would not dead-head the first time the snow melted.

How to know the setup will hold

Before the owner leaves, run the house through the failure the season is most likely to produce and watch the setup catch it. For freeze, set one sensor in a container in the refrigerator until it reads under its 45 F threshold, and confirm the alert reaches both phones; then touch a leak sensor's probes to a damp cloth and confirm that alert too. For flood, the sump test in step 4 already did it. For wildfire, the check is visual: stand at the property line, look at the house the way embers would, and find anything burnable within 5 ft of a wall or under an eave. Do not test by shutting off the main breaker or tripping an alarm monitoring center; simulate at the sensor, and tell the monitoring company first if one is involved.

What changes the setup: a house that will be shown or rented during the season cannot have the main off; then heat plus alerts plus a shorter check-in interval carries the load. A condo or a house on a shared water line needs the building's rules before anyone closes a valve. And a house in a hurricane region that also freezes (it happens) gets both sets, with the water plan decided by the colder risk.

References

• The owner's homeowner insurance policy, vacancy and freeze conditions, confirmed with their agent.
• CDC guidance on preventing carbon monoxide poisoning from portable generators.
• See related: Setting Up Freeze and Power-Loss Alerts for a Vacant Home; Restoring a Winterized Vacant Home for Inspection; Freeze Protection for Pipes in Walls and Crawlspaces; Defensible Space Zones and Where You Set Equipment.