January in Kalamazoo County

The lint screen catches maybe 70% of what comes off your clothes.

Your heat comes from burning fuel, which means your house makes carbon monoxide on purpose all winter and exhausts it on purpose — until something interferes: a cracked heat exchanger, a blocked flue, a backdrafting water heater sharing the chimney.

An extinguisher is the one tool in your house where "it's probably fine" isn't a plan — you find out whether it works at the exact moment it's too late to fix.

Every water disaster starts as a drip you couldn't see: the washing machine hose weeping behind the machine, the water heater rusting through at the base, the supply line sweating inside a vanity.

Electricity that's flowing right doesn't make heat where you touch.

Everything in a modern house has a circuit board in it now — the furnace, the water heater if it's fancy, every appliance with a display.

This card is only for houses with a radon mitigation system already installed — the white PVC pipe running from the slab up through the roof (or up an exterior wall), with a fan unit in the attic or outside.

Fire escape planning upstairs comes down to one question: if the stairway is full of smoke, how does each person in each bedroom get down?

First, the honest gate: no hot tub, no task — skip this card and enjoy your quarter.

Grout is rigid and belongs on the flat planes of tile.

Every toilet and faucet in your house is fed by a small flexible line, and if those lines are gray or black rubber, each one is a little time bomb with a 5–10 year fuse.

Every bit of air your system heats or cools passes through one filter.

Older dishwashers had hard food grinders.