I’m leaving my house vacant while we go away on school holidays. Any advice? If you’re only going away for a short time you won’t be turning off the power and water at the mains so you want to be aware of failures that can cause expensive heartache.

Nothing’s gone wrong in the past. What are you talking about? Fires and flooding caused by household systems failing. A classic example was reported in the media the other day.

What happened? Faulty air-conditioning set fire to the roof space of an Adelaide house in the middle of the night. It was only quick action by firefighters that limited damage to $100,000 and saved the house. It had been vacated ahead of renovation work.

Sounds terrible. What did the firefighters have to say? This incident brought yet another reminder from the MFS about the importance of having cooling and heating systems installed by qualified tradespeople and serviced regularly. Our company’s been in business for 39 years and we’ve lost count of the number of callouts we’ve had to fix major issues that could easily have been prevented with regular specialist servicing and safety checks.