What Does a Home Maintenance Plan Actually Cover?

"Preventative maintenance" is doing a lot of work in most plan brochures. It sounds responsible, but it doesn't tell you what a technician will actually _do_ in your house four times a year — and if you can't picture the visit, you can't judge whether the plan is worth paying for.

So here's the concrete version, based on how we run our own Home Service Plan visits. Contractors differ; use this as the checklist of questions to ask whoever you're evaluating.

The shape of a quarterly visit

A whole-home maintenance visit is a structured walk of the house — top to bottom, inside and out — with a task list that changes by season. It has three kinds of output:

• Inspection findings: things checked and confirmed healthy, or flagged early.
• On-the-spot fixes: small preventative tasks handled during the visit, included in the plan.
• Quoted work: anything bigger, written up with photos and a price _before_ anyone touches it.

That last split matters. A trustworthy plan is explicit about the line between "included" and "quoted," because that line is where bad contractors hide the upsell. Ours is in writing on the plans page, and every quote applies your member labor discount.

What gets inspected, area by area

Mechanical systems

• Furnace and air conditioning: filters, visible condition, condensate drainage, unusual noise or short-cycling.
• Water heater: age check, signs of corrosion or leaking, temperature-and-pressure relief valve condition, venting.
• Visible plumbing: supply lines, shut-off valves (do they actually turn?), traps under sinks, signs of slow leaks — the stains and mineral tracks that show up months before a failure does.

Safety devices

• Smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors: test, and battery replacement.
• GFCI outlets in kitchens, baths, and exterior locations: trip test.
• Dryer vent: lint accumulation — one of the most common preventable house-fire causes in the country.

Building envelope (exterior)

• Roofline from the ground: lifted or missing shingles, flashing at penetrations.
• Gutters and downspouts: flow, attachment, and whether water is being dumped next to your foundation.
• Grading and drainage: is the soil still pitching water away from the house? (In our region's clay-heavy soils, this is the quiet cause behind a huge share of basement water problems.)
• Caulk and seals: windows, doors, penetrations — the $8 tube of caulk that prevents the $800 sill repair.
• Concrete and masonry: step cracks in brick, spalling, settling in walks and stoops — as a contractor that self-performs concrete and masonry work, we pay particular attention here.

Interior

• Bath and kitchen caulk and grout: the water lines of first defense.
• Under-sink cabinets, around toilets, behind the washing machine: early moisture evidence.
• Doors and windows: operation, weatherstripping, locks.
• Attic (periodically): ventilation, visible leaks, insulation displacement.

What gets fixed on the spot

The plan's included tasks are the small, high-leverage ones — the things that are trivial during a scheduled visit and expensive once neglected. Typical examples from our tiers:

• Replacing furnace filters and detector batteries
• Re-caulking a tub surround or a window bead
• Clearing a slow drain or a gutter section
• Tightening hardware, adjusting a sticking door, lubricating hinges
• Flushing sediment from a water heater (tier-dependent)

Exact task lists vary by tier — bigger homes carry bigger lists. See the current tier breakdown on the plans page.

What's never included (and shouldn't be)

Be suspicious of any plan that implies unlimited repairs for a flat monthly fee — that math doesn't work, and plans that promise it recover the cost somewhere less visible. A well-built plan is explicit that these are quoted separately:

• Parts and materials beyond consumables (filters, batteries, caulk) — billed at cost, itemized.
• Major repairs: a failed compressor, a roof section, a water heater replacement. You get photos, a written quote, and your member discount — and because the problem was usually caught early, you're scheduling the fix on your calendar instead of paying emergency rates on the house's schedule.
• Remodeling projects — though this is where a plan quietly pays off: the contractor quoting your kitchen already knows your house, and members get priority scheduling.
• Emergencies between visits — billed per visit, with members getting priority response.

The report is half the product

Every visit should end with a written photo report: what was checked, what was found, what was fixed, what to watch. Insist on this from any contractor. It does three jobs:

• It keeps the contractor honest — findings are documented, not muttered from a ladder.
• It builds a maintenance history that follows the house. When you sell, a folder of dated, photographed quarterly reports is credible in a way that "the sellers say they maintained it" never is.
• It gives you a budget horizon. "Water heater is 9 years old, fine today, plan for replacement in 2–3 years" is the kind of sentence that turns a midnight emergency into a planned line item.

Questions to ask any plan provider

• Can I see the exact task list for my tier, in writing?
• Who performs the visits — your employees, or subcontractors?
• What does the visit report look like? Show me a sample.
• What's the cancellation term? (Ours is 30 days, in plain language.)
• How is out-of-scope work priced, and do members get a discount?

If a provider hesitates on any of these, that's your answer.

Want to see a real task structure with real pricing? Our Home Service Plans page lists all three tiers, what every plan includes, what's excluded, and the enrollment steps — or start with the $75 walk-through and we'll size the plan to your actual house.