Prepare Your Home For Summer

Prepare your home for summer in Australia. If news reports are to be believed, the Land Down Under is heading for a really hot summer. There are even reports saying this summer could be the country’s hottest ever, with at least one or two heatwaves cutting across the southern states.

One of the greatest dangers Australians face with every sweltering summer is that the hot and dry weather provides a perfect condition for bushfires, which almost always rage throughout the country in the summer and damage acres of bushland as well as properties near it.

This summer, which is expected by experts to become record-breaking on so many levels, you need to prepare your home against bushfires, as well as to keep all members of your household from suffering heat strokes and other heat-related health problems. Here are some tips we hope could help you prepare your home for summer.

Keep your home cool in summer

Keeping the air conditioner on is perhaps the best way to keep your home cool in summer, but this also happens to be the costliest way of doing that. There are a number of less expensive ways to help spare everyone at home from the sweltering heat, such as:

• Shading your windows that face north and west with trees, pergolas, vines and awnings
• Installing reflective film coatings on your windows
• Insulating your ceiling
• Making use of fans inside your home before turning on the air conditioner
• Minimising use of ovens and other appliances that produce heat
• Keeping curtains and blinds down on hot days
• Using light beddings
• Wearing light, breathable clothing

Prepare your home against bushfires

When you adequately prepare your home against bushfires, you have a much better chance of going through without any such incident. Here are some tips that could help you prepare your home against bushfires and keep your property and your family safe.

• Keep your gutters clean, especially when they are right beneath trees. The dry, crunchy leaves that collect there in the months before summer are an excellent fuel for bushfires, and usually require just one spark to ignite and start an inferno.
• Store firewood away from the house, especially when you’re in the habit of keeping them handy for the colder winter months.
• Keep paint, painting solvents, methylated spirits and other flammable chemicals and fuels in a secure shed, away from the house.
• Buy a hose long enough to reach around your property’s entire boundary and make extinguishing any incoming fires a bit easier.
• Make sure your entire family knows where the nearest fire hydrant is, and that you have easy access to it.
• Install a smoke detector, which should be checked every month to ensure that it’s still working. The battery should also be replaced every year.

For Australians, preparing their homes for summer becomes doubly important, since summer time also happens to be Christmas time. As long as you adequately prepare your home against bushfires and to keep your home cool in summer, you have an assurance that your Christmas and summer in general will indeed be safe and very merry.