Your Chattanooga home’s plumbing system is built to flow one way; however, sometimes the water flow reverses, which is called backflow, and it can cause serious health problems if you fail to protect yourself. If you’re worried about contaminated water flowing back into your home’s plumbing system, contact Scenic City Heating & AC to find out how backflow prevention can protect you and your family.
If you’re tired of running out of hot water, find out if a tankless water heater is right for you.
What Causes Backflow?
As mentioned, your home’s plumbing system is designed to flow one way, but various issues can arise that cause contaminated water, liquids, and gasses to flow back into your home. Most times, this happens when there’s a connection between potable and non-potable water lines.
The reasons for backflow are:
- Back Pressure Back pressure occurs when water pressure from a non-potable water source becomes higher than the pressure in your clean water supply, and is usually the result of issues with sprinklers, boilers, and power washing tools.
- Back Siphonage When you lose pressure in your clean water supply it can cause contaminated water to get sucked back into the system. This usually occurs when you have a main water line break or when the fire department requires a large quantity of water to put out a fire.
If wastewater and other harmful substances find their way into your water supply, it can expose your family members and pets to pollutants and pathogens that can make them seriously ill.
Backflow Prevention
There are a few devices that can prevent backflow from bringing contaminated water into your home; the first is an air gap.
The air gap is a simple way to prevent backflow that involves making an open space between devices that connect your plumbing system and the main lines. The gap helps to keep the water pressure constant thus preventing backflow. And while this is one method for stopping backflow, it isn’t always effective, which is why we recommend a backflow preventer valve.
Backflow preventer valves are specialized valves that you can install at any place in your plumbing system where there’s risk for backflow. Once you install this valve, it’s critical that you call a plumber to inspect it once a year to ensure that it’s working properly to check for potential problems.
To find out about installing a backwater valve into your plumbing system, call one of our professional technicians today.
If you have a stubborn drain clog you can’t get rid of no matter what, contact us and ask about our drain cleaning services.
Our Backflow Testing Services
As you can see, backflow is a potentially hazardous problem that can make you and your family members sick. One way to protect your water supply is with backflow prevention and backflow testing.
Our backflow testing service helps to determine where backflow is most likely to come from and how best to prevent it. To perform the test, we connect a testing kit to a backflow preventer, shut off the water from downstream, and test to ensure the preventer is working properly.
