leaving the stick and brick for the summer

Grit dog wrote:
While ferndale has an interesting take on the care of his personal possessions, I've seen or known of a couple too many of the typical/cheap toilet/sink valves failing to not at least do something as simple as spending 2 minutes to turn off the water if leaving it unattended for a long time.
But generally seen it due to freezing.

To ferndale's point, what is a long time? You could have enough damage if a line broke 1 minute after you went to sleep at night, until you woke up in the morning.
A simple vacation or weekend away, same scenario could as well.

So again to his point, does it really matter? Damage will be similar, but how long it goes un checked is more the issue, IMO.

All good points though on winterizing or summerizing a home.

While you could have damage from 1min of leaking or even a few hours... but the sooner you clean it up and dry it out the less likely there will be collateral damage. If you have an overnight leak and immediately in the morning, stop the leak and dry it out, good chance you never develop a mold problem. Let a leaking pipe spray water into the wall for weeks and you may need to do mold abatement and you may have rotted wood in the floors and walls...Make it 3 months and you will almost certainly have a much bigger problem...it escalates with time.

Back when we had a house, I would typically turn off the water and adjust the thermostat if we were leaving for a weekend. A week or more and I would kill most of the breakers. Just took a couple minutes, so no great burden.