Questions worth answering before you call anyone

No, rewiring is rarely the first answer. Solid aluminum branch circuit wiring, used widely in houses built between roughly 1965 and 1973, is a real fire risk, but the risk lives at the connections rather than in the wire itself. The accepted remediations treat the connections: a complete copper pigtail repair using connectors listed for the purpose, or replacement of every device with one rated for aluminum. Have an electrician who has done this work before assess it, and treat any warm or discoloured outlet or switch as urgent.

It depends on what kind of device is tripping and how it behaves. A standard breaker tripping under a predictable load is usually an overloaded circuit, which is a this-week problem. A breaker that trips with nothing plugged in, trips instantly on reset, or feels warm to the touch is a fault, and that is a today problem. A ground fault or arc fault device tripping is the device doing its job, and defeating it by swapping in an ordinary breaker is the one response that is never acceptable.

It needs a dedicated 240-volt branch circuit sized to the charger, and in essentially every jurisdiction it needs an electrical permit and an inspection. The three things that decide what it costs are the distance from the panel to the parking spot, whether the panel has a spare double space, and whether the service has capacity once the charger is added. Get a load calculation before you get a price, because the answer to the third question is the only one that can turn a modest job into a service upgrade.

Usually not on capacity alone. A 100-amp service is adequate for a great many houses, and the right way to decide is a load calculation under the National Electrical Code, not a look at the panel label. Upgrade when the calculation shows the existing service is genuinely undersized for what you are adding, when the panel is a known-defective model, when it is full and cannot take another circuit, or when the service equipment is damaged or corroded. Add up what is actually being asked of the service before spending anything.

Repair it if the system is under twelve years old, still uses a refrigerant you can buy, and the failed part is a capacitor, a contactor, a fan motor, or a clogged coil. Replace it if the compressor or the coil has failed on a system past twelve years, because on that repair the parts and the labor together usually land within reach of a new system that will not fail again next season.

It is worth it if the visit includes measurement and you get the numbers. A tune-up that produces a written record of static pressure, temperature split, refrigerant subcooling or superheat, and capacitor microfarads is genuinely preventive and catches the cheap failures before they become expensive ones. A tune-up that consists of hosing off the condenser and handing you a quote is a sales visit with a hose. Ask which one you are buying before you book it.

Almost certainly yes. Replacing a furnace is a mechanical alteration involving gas, venting, and electrical connections, and essentially every jurisdiction that has adopted a building code requires a mechanical permit and an inspection for it. The permit is issued by your city or county building department, never by the state, and the contractor doing the work is normally the one who pulls it.

It depends entirely on why. Short cycling caused by a dirty filter or a closed-off supply register is a same-week repair. Short cycling caused by the flame rollout switch or the high-limit switch tripping is a same-day call, because those two devices exist to stop a furnace that is overheating or spilling combustion products into the house. If you smell anything burning, hear the burners ignite with a bang, or a carbon monoxide alarm has sounded, shut the furnace off and leave that decision to a contractor on site.

If your air conditioner is also near the end of its life, a heat pump is usually the stronger choice, because you are buying one machine instead of two and the incremental cost over a straight air conditioner replacement is small. If the air conditioner is nearly new and the furnace is not, replacing the furnace alone is normally cheaper and simpler. The deciding variables are the age of the cooling equipment, your electricity price against your gas price, and how cold your coldest week actually gets.

Not immediately, but stop treating a recharge as a repair. Production and import of R-22 ended in the United States at the start of 2020, so every pound available now is reclaimed or previously produced stock, and the price of a large charge is unpredictable. Keep running the system while it holds its charge. The moment it needs a significant recharge, the honest arithmetic almost always favours replacing the system rather than refilling a circuit that is known to leak.

Find the main shut-off valve and make sure you can close it before you do anything else, because a frozen pipe that has already split releases water the moment it thaws. Then open the affected faucet, leave it open, and warm the pipe from the faucet end backward with a hair dryer or a space heater kept away from anything flammable. Never use an open flame. If you cannot find the frozen section, if the pipe is inside a wall, or if you see a bulge or a split, close the main and call a plumber.

Repair it. A toilet that runs is almost always a failed flapper, a misadjusted fill valve, or a leaking flush valve seal, and those are inexpensive parts with a short labor time. Replace the fixture only when the bowl or tank is cracked, when the closet flange beneath it has failed, or when the toilet predates the 1994 efficiency standard and is using several gallons more per flush than a current one, in which case the water bill makes the case on its own.

Yes, on any house older than about forty years, on any house with mature trees near the line, and on any house where the general inspector cannot tell you what the lateral is made of. A general home inspection does not include the buried sewer lateral, and the lateral is one of the few defects that is both invisible and expensive enough to change what a house is worth. The scope costs a small fraction of a lateral replacement and it is the only way to see the pipe.

Replace like for like with a tank unless one of three conditions holds. Go tankless if you regularly run out of hot water, if the heater sits somewhere the floor space genuinely matters, or if you are already opening walls for other work. Tankless equipment costs more, and the installation usually requires a larger gas line, a new stainless vent, and a condensate drain, so the installed difference is much bigger than the equipment difference. In a household that never runs out of hot water, that money buys very little.

Urgent. Water at the base of a tank water heater usually means the tank itself has corroded through, and a corroded tank does not get better, it gets faster. Shut off the water supply to the heater and, on a gas unit, turn the control to off; on an electric unit, switch off its breaker. Then call today. A tank that is weeping now can open up completely within days, and a full tank releases forty to eighty gallons onto the floor at once.

Heat escaping into the attic. Ice dams form when warm air from the house melts snow on the upper roof, the meltwater runs down to the cold overhang, and refreezes there into a ridge that traps the next round of water behind it. That trapped water backs up under the shingles. The permanent fix is air sealing and insulation between the house and the attic plus adequate ventilation, not a bigger gutter, not heat cable, and not a new roof.

Urgent if bare deck or underlayment is exposed and more weather is coming, because the exposed area is where the next rain enters. Get it covered, photograph everything first, and then schedule the permanent repair. Not urgent if the missing pieces are ridge caps or a few tabs with intact underlayment beneath and the forecast is dry, in which case you have days rather than hours. Either way, document the damage before anyone touches it, because that record is what an insurance claim rests on.

Age alone is not the trigger. Condition is. Replace when the shingles show field-wide granule loss exposing the mat, curling or cupping across whole planes, cracking away from the fastener line, or when you are repairing the same roof repeatedly. A twenty-year-old roof in good condition on a well-ventilated attic can have years left. A twelve-year-old roof over an unventilated attic in a hot climate can be finished. Have someone look at the shingles and at the attic, not at the install date.

Repair first, almost always. Most roof leaks are not the field of the roof failing; they are a flashing, a boot, or a valley detail, and those are point repairs. Replace the roof when the shingles themselves have failed across the whole plane, when there are already two or more layers on the deck, when the deck itself is soft, or when the roof is at the end of its service life and you are patching the third leak in two years. A single leak on a ten-year-old roof is a repair, not a replacement.

File when the damage plainly exceeds your deductible by a meaningful margin, and pay out of pocket when it does not. The deductible is the whole calculation, and on many policies it is a percentage of the insured value rather than a flat amount, which surprises people. Get an independent assessment of the damage before you call the insurer, because a claim opened and then withdrawn still appears in your claims history. Never let a contractor tell you they will handle the deductible.