Almost nothing in fabrication fails suddenly. It fails slowly, from a small thing that nobody attended to — a paint chip, a blocked drain hole, a dry roller. The work below takes an hour or two a year and routinely doubles how long things last.
Twice a year: before and after the monsoon
These two visits catch most of what matters.
Windows and doors
- Clear the weep holes in the bottom track of every sliding window. These small slots let water out. Blocked with dust, the track becomes a trough and water rises over the inner lip. This is the single highest-value five minutes in this article.
- Vacuum the tracks, then wipe. Grit in a track wears rollers faster than use does.
- Check the sealant line where the frame meets the wall, outside. Look for gaps, shrinkage or a line that has pulled away. Reseal before the rain, not after the damp patch appears.
- Work the hardware. Every lock engaged, every handle turned. A lock that is stiff now will be seized next year.
Gates, grills and railings
- Look along the bottom rail and at the feet. Standing water and soft, bubbling rust start here, out of sight.
- Check drain holes in hollow sections are open. If a section has no drain hole and is not sealed, it is holding water inside.
- Touch up paint chips down to bare metal immediately. A chip the size of a fingernail becomes a rust bloom the size of a hand in one wet season.
- Hinges and rollers: clean, then a light machine oil. Not grease on a sliding gate track — it collects grit and makes the problem worse.
What to use, and what not to
- Powder-coated surfaces: mild soap and water, soft cloth. No abrasive pads and no solvent — both dull the finish permanently.
- Anodised aluminium: the same, and keep cement and alkaline cleaners off it. Mortar splashes during building work stain anodising permanently.
- Stainless steel: wipe with the grain. If it has tea-staining — a light brown film common near the coast — a proprietary stainless cleaner removes it. Never use steel wool: it leaves iron particles behind that rust and make the stainless look as if it is rusting.
- uPVC: soap and water. Avoid solvent cleaners, which can craze the surface.
Yearly
- Gate automation: test the safety reversal with an obstruction, and check the manual release works. You want to find out it is seized on a calm Sunday, not during a power cut.
- Invisible grill: check cable tension and look closely at the track anchors. Cables relax slightly in the first year and should be re-tensioned.
- Safety nets: inspect for UV degradation — brittleness, fading, fraying at anchor points. Nets have a finite life and are the one product here that should be replaced rather than maintained.
- Roof fixings: look along the screw line for dished sheet or perished washers.
Every few years
Painted mild steel outdoors needs recoating every two to four years depending on exposure. The job is far cheaper if the surface is sound: a rub down and a coat, rather than wire-brushing scale off pitted metal. Leaving it until rust has taken hold is how a maintenance job becomes a replacement job.
The short version
Clear the weep holes, keep water out of hollow sections, and touch up chips before the rain. Those three habits account for most of the difference between metalwork that lasts five years and the same metalwork lasting twenty.