Avoiding Costly Water Damage in Your Home

SmartThings alerts a customer that a leak has started forming in his laundry room, allowing him time to rush home to prevent a headache from causing a disaster.

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“My SmartThings setup just paid off!

I was about 20 minutes away at the store when I got a text message: ‘Water Detected In Laundry Room!!!’

I called my wife and asked her to run down and check to see what was going on. It was only a trickle of water, which upon further investigation she discovered was coming from the pipes attached to our wash sink. She put a bucket under it to hold it off until I got home.

A little while later I got another text saying that water had been detected, so once again I alerted my wife and she went down and checked on it. To her surprise, the trickle had become much worse and was already overflowing the bucket. After that, she checked the bucket every few minutes and continually dumped it until I got home.

When I got home, it had become quite the leak. As I reached down to feel around the pipes for the source of the leak, I barely touched the fitting and the pipe completely erupted, blasting water for a second or two before I was able to shut the water off. Even just those couple of seconds was enough to cause a significant portion of the laundry room to drip with water.

Turns out that the fitting where the tubes from the sink screw into the water pipes had become worn out and finally gave up the ghost when I barely brushed my fingers across it. Even if I hadn’t touched it, I have no doubt that the fitting would have only lasted a minute or two longer than it did, except that I wouldn’t have been there to shut off the water, and my wife and I probably wouldn’t have discovered it until quite some time later.

I had just purchased the SmartSense Moisture sensor last week and put it in my laundry room, and couldn’t be happier that I did. Who knows how much damage it would have caused and how much it would have cost to repair. Technology saves the day!” – Scott

According to HomeAdvisor.com the average cost to repair home water damage throughout the country is $2,489. Yea… not cheap.

Here’s how to prevent a little leak from causing costly repairs to your home and irreplaceable damage to your valuables:

Items:
• SmartThings Hub
• Free SmartThings app
• SmartSense Moisture sensor
• Recommended: The Detect Leaks and Floods Solution lets you monitor excess moisture in multiple areas of your home and comes at a discount compared to purchasing two moisture sensors individually. Purchase it with the SmartThings Hub for only $198.

How to: