The Maintenance Mistakes That Cost People the Most

We are not interested in making anybody feel foolish here. Every mistake on this list is one a sensible person makes, usually for a sensible reason, and usually because the cheaper option genuinely looked like the better one at the time.

What they have in common is that the bill arrives much later, by which point nobody connects it to the decision that caused it.

Topping up the gas instead of finding the leak

The unit is not cooling, somebody adds refrigerant, it works again. Everybody is happy and the invoice is small.

Except an air conditioner is a sealed system. It does not consume gas. If the level dropped, it went somewhere, and it will keep going. So the same job repeats every few months, each time at full price, and the compressor spends the periods in between running undercharged, which is not what shortens its life gently.

The leak repair costs more once. The top-up costs less every time, forever, and takes the compressor with it eventually.

Painting over a crack

A crack above the door frame gets filled on the surface and painted. It looks perfect for about four months.

A crack is movement. Filler laid across the top of one has nothing to grip and no room to flex, so it opens again along exactly the same line. The second attempt does the same. By the third, somebody has usually decided the wall needs re-skimming, which it did not.

Cut open along its length, filled properly, sanded flat and primed, the same crack stays put. It is a slower job and it is done once.

Pouring chemicals down a slow drain

The bottle is cheap and it works, briefly. What it does is soften the blockage enough for water to pass, which feels like a fix.

The blockage is still there and now it is being repeatedly dosed with something aggressive, along with the pipe, the joints and the seals around them. We have replaced runs of pipework that would still be perfectly serviceable if somebody had cleared them mechanically the first time.

Resetting the same breaker every day

It trips, you push it back, everything works. Repeat for a month.

Every reset sends fault current down the same path again. What was a failing element or a damaged cable becomes a burnt contactor, a damaged board, or something considerably worse. This is the one on the list where the cost is not only money.

Buying the cheapest quote for a bathroom

Three quotes come in, one is noticeably lower, and it is difficult to see what the other two are charging for.

What is usually missing is the waterproofing. Tanking is invisible once it is tiled and it is the layer that actually stops water reaching the structure. Tiles and grout slow water down, they do not stop it. A bathroom tiled without proper tanking holds for a few years and then somebody two floors down has a stain on their ceiling.

You cannot inspect a bathroom for the thing that was left out of it. That is precisely why it is the thing that gets left out.

Ask any bathroom quote what waterproofing is included and how it is applied. A company doing it properly will answer immediately.

Hanging something heavy with the plugs in the box

Every flat in Dubai has block, concrete and hollow partition walls, sometimes in the same room. The plugs supplied with a bracket assume one of those.

A television that comes off a partition wall takes a chunk of plasterboard with it, and the television is the cheap part of the story if a child was underneath. The fixing is decided by the wall, not by what came in the packet, and finding out which wall you have takes about ten seconds.

Ignoring a small water mark

A faint ring on a ceiling that has not changed in a while gets accepted as part of the room.

It is not stable, it is slow. Water is still arriving, and it is arriving into plasterboard, timber and insulation that nobody can see. What starts as a repaint becomes a section of ceiling, and if it has reached a neighbour it becomes their claim as well as your repair.

Photograph it with a date. Photograph it again a fortnight later. If it has moved at all, it is live.

Doing nothing because nothing is broken

The most expensive mistake on the list, and the least dramatic.

Equipment in Dubai runs day and night all year, so it accumulates wear at a rate that the manufacturer’s service interval never assumed. Nothing about that is visible while it is happening. The coil loads gradually, the drain silts gradually, the terminals loosen gradually, and then one day something stops.

You do not need somebody in the property every month. You do need somebody looking at it a few times a year, because a resident who lives with a slow change never notices it.