Leaving the House Empty: What to Do With the Appliances First

Appliances are designed around the assumption that somebody is in the house. Water lines are pressurised continuously because a leak gets noticed. Machines are left damp because they get opened the next day. A refrigerator holds a week of food because somebody would spot it climbing.

Take the person away for two or three weeks and every one of those assumptions stops holding. The two things that actually go wrong are water escaping with nobody there to see it, and things growing in the damp. Ten minutes of preparation deals with both.

The one decision that matters

Turn the water off. Everything else on this page is housekeeping; this is the item that separates a mild annoyance from a claim.

A washer fill hose is under supply pressure every second of the day, whether the machine is running or not. If one lets go while you are away, it does not spill a bucket — it delivers mains water continuously until somebody stops it. The same is true of the refrigerator line and the dishwasher supply, at lower flow and over a longer period, which is arguably worse because the damage is well established before anyone notices.

You have two options and either is fine:

• The main shutoff for the whole house. Simplest, most complete. Know where it is, and know whether anything in the house needs water while you are gone — an irrigation system, a humidifier, an ice maker you were counting on.
• The individual appliance valves — the two at the laundry box, the one under the sink for the dishwasher, and the one feeding the refrigerator. More fiddly, but it leaves the rest of the house live for a house-sitter or a neighbour.

Two practical notes. First, exercise these valves at least once a year when you are not in a hurry; a valve that has not moved since the house was built will often refuse to, and a stem that snaps on a live line is a plumber on a Saturday. Second, a single-lever laundry shutoff is a genuinely worthwhile upgrade if you travel often, because a valve that takes two seconds gets used and one that takes five minutes does not.

The washer

A front loader left sealed and damp for three weeks in a warm laundry room is the reliable way to produce a smell that then takes weeks of cleaning cycles to remove. It is entirely preventable.

1. Run a hot cleaning cycle the day before you leave — a cleaning tablet, or a hot empty cycle with washing machine cleaner. Not a normal wash with detergent.
2. Wipe the door boot dry, getting into the fold at the bottom where water and hair collect. This is where the smell actually lives.
3. Pull and clean the dispenser drawer, and leave it out or open.
4. Clean the drain pump filter if you have not recently. Standing water in the pump for three weeks is the other half of the smell.
5. Leave the door and the drawer open. The whole point.
6. Shut the fill valves, and if you are away for a long stretch or the room can freeze, disconnect and drain the hoses.

If yours already smells before you leave, deal with it now rather than after — the full clean-out procedure is a $10 to $25 job and three weeks of sealed dampness will make it considerably worse.

The dishwasher, and the drains

Run the dishwasher empty on a hot cycle, pull and rinse the filter, and leave the door ajar on the latch. Same reasoning as the washer: the machine is a sealed damp box otherwise.

There is a second, less obvious problem with a long absence, and it is not an appliance fault at all. Every drain in the house has a trap holding a plug of water, and that plug is the only thing between you and sewer gas. Traps that are not used evaporate. A house left for a month often smells when you walk in, and the cause is a dry trap in a guest bathroom, a floor drain, or the laundry standpipe — not the dishwasher, which people blame first.

For a long absence, pour a little water down the seldom-used drains before you leave, or ask whoever is checking the house to run the taps for a minute. If you come home to a smell and the dishwasher has been sitting empty and open, look at the drains before you look at the machine. Where it genuinely is the machine, the dishwasher odour guide works through the actual causes.

The refrigerator decision

The real choice is whether to leave it running or shut it down, and it turns on how long you are away.

Leaving it running is right for anything up to a few weeks. Do three things first: eat or throw out anything that will not survive, because a fridge full of spoiling food is a far worse homecoming than an empty one; turn the ice maker off if you are shutting the water off, so it is not cycling a fill valve against a dead line for a fortnight; and give the coils a vacuum, because the whole period is unattended and you want the machine to have margin. Some people set the temperature slightly colder before a trip. That is reasonable if the box will be opened on the way out and not again.

Shutting it down makes sense for a seasonal property or an absence of a month or more. Empty it completely, defrost the freezer, clean and dry the interior including the door channels, and then — this is the part people skip — prop both doors open. A sealed, unpowered, slightly damp refrigerator grows mould reliably, and getting that smell out of the liner and insulation is genuinely hard. Wedge the doors with a rolled towel; several manufacturers build a detent into the door for exactly this.

One more consideration: if there is a real chance of a power cut while you are away, a full freezer holds temperature roughly twice as long as a half-full one. Topping it up with sealed jugs of water before a long absence is free. What an outage actually does covers the rest, including how to tell after the fact whether the contents thawed and refroze.

A house left for a season

A vacation property, a snowbird arrangement, or a house on the market is a different problem from a fortnight away, mostly because of temperature.

• If the house will not be heated, the water has to come out, not just be shut off. That means draining the system, and it usually means a plumber the first time so you learn how it is done on your house.
• The washer holds water internally in the pump, the sump and the hoses even after the last cycle. Disconnect and drain the fill hoses, run a drain-and-spin, and sponge out what is left in the boot. The freeze article covers what happens if you do not.
• The ice maker line is the classic casualty — quarter-inch tubing, often routed through unconditioned space, feeding an appliance nobody thought about. Shut it off and drain it.
• Unplug what does not need to be plugged in. There is no reason for a microwave, a dishwasher or an oven to sit energised for four months waiting for a surge.
• Leave the disposal empty and run, and pour a little water in the trap on your way out.

If somebody is checking the house, the useful instruction is not “keep an eye on things.” It is: look under the sink, look behind the washer, look at the floor in front of the dishwasher, and read the thermometer in the fridge. Those four checks catch nearly everything early.

The first hour back

Come home and turn things on deliberately rather than all at once.

1. Water back on slowly, then walk the house and look at every connection you shut off. Weeping fittings show themselves within a few minutes of pressure returning.
2. Refrigerator first. Check the temperature with a thermometer rather than the display, and check for any sign that it thawed while you were gone.
3. Run the dishwasher empty before you trust it with dishes, and watch it fill and drain.
4. Run a short hot wash in the washer, empty, and look underneath afterwards.
5. Throw away the first two batches of ice. Ice absorbs whatever the freezer smelled like, and cubes that sat for three weeks taste like it.
6. Flush the water dispenser through for a couple of quarts before drinking from it.

The short version

For a normal trip: water off, washer and dishwasher run hot and left open, fridge cleared out, ice maker off. Ten minutes.

For a season: everything above, plus drained lines, unplugged machines, doors propped and traps topped up.

If something has gone wrong while you were away and it looks like water rather than an appliance fault, read the failures that damage the house first — the sequence in the first minute matters more than who you call. If a machine has genuinely failed, the directory lists repair businesses by state and city, and the Appliance Blue Book will tell you whether an old one is worth putting money into.