|
stinkypete posted:I have some reading and research to do. Thanks for your reply. Look into the Milwaukee 18V ecosystem, they have a ton of great options for automotive work, stubby impacts, ratchets all kinds of good stuff, probably for a similar investment to a compressor that can run a high speed tool like a die grinder+tools. They even have a tire inflator! If you head over to the AI tools thread you'll find tons of people that had full pneumatic setups gushing over them.
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 04:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 18:01 |
|
|
stinkypete posted:Thank you, that helps me with my decision. Ohhhhb you wanna paint well that might change things but I'll let someone else advise on that as I'm not really going to be able to speak on air vs airless devices. No 2 days about it youte gunna need to mask up your area and your body. No matter what you've got an aerosol of paint in the air. Get the green tape (gator I think) I've always had better luck with it. Use manageable pieces, don't so a whole wall in a run. I usually do 75% of my wingspan max if it's a good flat and square area. Honestly get some good cut in brushes and then just roll it unless you're doing something outside or oddly shaped like siding or something.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 05:11
|
|
|
I have the 3m paint fume mask for indoors. Does anyone have a source for cheap masking tape or Frog tape. I am using home depot and Lowes right now. Edit: There is never cheap or easy in the same sentence when it comes to new home ownership. stinkypete fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Mar 9, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 06:46
|
|
|
We bought a house that's still being constructed, and we get to choose where we put light fixtures, outlets etc. Nice. However, when we asked how much they charge for spotlights, they told us that they charge 87 EUR/spot. That seems insanely expensive, and googling around I've found that the price range on those things varies from $3 - $a couple hundred... There's no way I'm buying those lights through that company, so what should I look for in lights like that? They also helpfully attached this image so you know what I'm talking about : 
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 13:16
|
|
|
shut up blegum posted:We bought a house that's still being constructed, and we get to choose where we put light fixtures, outlets etc. Nice. Does that price include an electrician pulling wire where you want it or is it the light alone? If it's parts and labor that doesn't seem nuts.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 16:59
|
|
|
Just wanted to mention the biggest upside of electric which is not having a loud rear end compressor going off in the middle of your working.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 17:45
|
|
|
VelociBacon posted:Just wanted to mention the biggest upside of electric which is not having a loud rear end compresCHUGGACHUGGACHUKCHUKCHUGGACHUGGAhrrmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 18:23
|
|
|
Trying to figure out where some pipes go, as it makes no sense to me. Basement is unfinished, house is 2-story construction, so I can see it all relatively easily, before it goes up anyway. Beside my shower I have two black waste pipes that go up into a wall space, without p-traps. They both tie in to the waste pipe from the shower drain (After the p-trap), which connects to the tub drain (after the p-trap), and then to the main waste pipe running out to my septic. I'm guessing these are vents, but why on earth are there two of them? I *think* I've got a plumbing vent in the roof in the area, which is currently covered in snow so I'm not sure, but I certainly don't have two. There's no bathroom on the 2nd floor above where these pipes go up (there is one on the opposite side of the house) so I'm honestly confused. Tempted to open some drywall from within the closet (shared wall with bathroom) to figure out where they go, but it's not causing issues so I'm not sure I want to bother. Anyone have any ideas? e: actually looking at older photos I don't see any vent penetrations through the roof where those pipes go. 
TrueChaos fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Mar 9, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 20:12
|
|
|
TrueChaos posted:Trying to figure out where some pipes go, as it makes no sense to me. Basement is unfinished, house is 2-story construction, so I can see it all relatively easily, before it goes up anyway. Beside my shower I have two black waste pipes that go up into a wall space, without p-traps. They both tie in to the waste pipe from the shower drain (After the p-trap), which connects to the tub drain (after the p-trap), and then to the main waste pipe running out to my septic. It could be a loop vent which connects to a different vent elsewhere.
|
|
#
?
Mar 9, 2021 20:45
|
|
|
frogbs posted:Why is framing stuff so expensive? Is it the materials? None of the components on their own seem that expensive, but whenever I get a quote to have someone do it for me I can't believe it. Frames themselves are fairly expensive if you want nice ones, but the real reason it's expensive is because it takes a great deal of skill to do it well. Cutting mats is a nightmare on its own.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 00:02
|
|
|
H110Hawk posted:You're on 20 years of borrowed time. You should be prepared to turn off at the curb even if you do not turn off at the curb. Those do look newer but they're not quarter turn. You could be snapping something behind the drywall regardless. Yeah, I think i'm just going to shut it off at the curb, I know that works, it isn't difficult and likely won't result in any leakage. I need to start getting quotes for a repipe I guess.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 00:40
|
|
|
help I can't get into the garage, apparently it lost power and the rolling door doesn't open. we never got a key for the side door and I never got around to replacing the knob. I tried picking the lock, but that didn't work. then I got mad and took the mallet and chisel to it. that was a mistake. any ideas?   
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 01:41
|
|
|
Are you posting from inside or outside the house? Assuming you unlatched the door. You now need to get a new entryway knob. The quickest and cheapest way would be to head to Lowes/Home Depot and spend $40 on a Kwikset SmartKey lockset. Not all keys work with the Smartkey stuff. The next best route is to order a lockset that matches the other doors and get it keyed to match--takes a few days longer and will cost from $40 to $200 (or even more if you have crazy locks.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 02:16
|
|
|
You see the thing I hav the red line running along? Its kind of a lovely job,(my ms paint skills) but try sliding that thing with a screwdriver or something. That, or something in there similar to that should move the latching mechanism to get the door open.
wesleywillis fucked around with this message at 02:24 on Mar 10, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 02:22
|
|
|
If you are still outside. I think you made my day brighter.  Two things--you need to pull the latch out of the door frame. Normally when you twist the lock, the twist motion moves the arm along the top edge between the brass sides holding everything together. As that arm moves toward the opposite side of the latch, it pulls the latch out of the door. Looks like maybe you need to reach in there with needle nose pliers to pull back the arm? Second, if you're not in the house--can you post a picture of the strike plate/latch area? And is there a dead bolt?
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 02:23
|
|
|
If that's the outside, either try to slide the middle parts around. If that doesn't work put a screw driver on those two pins and hit it hard with a hammer. You will be trying to knock the screws out into the inside. Otherwise, use your chisel. You've already hosed it up, it's not going to get worse.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 02:23
|
|
|
yeah I can't get inside, just need the door opened, i think messing with the insides should work thanks all already have a replacement deadbolt
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 02:42
|
|
|
erosion posted:help 
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 03:38
|
|
|
I didn't see an appliance thread anywhere so I'll ask here. I'm thinking about replacing an appliance or two in the not too distant future. Does the same rule for plumbing and electrical fixtures apply to appliances? You typically only find "the good poo poo" at an actual appliance store? Like how the real poo poo typically comes from a plumbing supply or electrical supply store and the cheaper versions come from lowes-depot?
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 13:18
|
|
|
VelociBacon posted:Just wanted to mention the biggest upside of electric which is not having a loud rear end compressor going off in the middle of
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 14:04
|
|
|
wesleywillis posted:I didn't see an appliance thread anywhere so I'll ask here. That rule doesn’t even actually apply to appliances.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 14:39
|
|
|
H110Hawk posted:Does that price include an electrician pulling wire where you want it or is it the light alone? If it's parts and labor that doesn't seem nuts. They charge 60 to drill a hole in the concrete, which I understand is a fairly normal price. Then 87 to install the light, including the wiring etc. I'll do some more research, but hadn't considered the labor. Thanks for pointing that out.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 14:46
|
|
|
shut up blegum posted:They charge 60 to drill a hole in the concrete, which I understand is a fairly normal price. Then 87 to install the light, including the wiring etc. OK yeah if you're installing the spot in to a location that does not currently have a light fixture, then that's a way different scenario. 87 EUR is about $103 in freedom bucks, and that's a pretty good price to install and wire it up. Could probably find people to do it cheaper, but you're stuck. If you don't do it now, it'll cost way more to add it once construction is finished.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 14:59
|
|
|
He could befriend an electrician then it’s side work But that’s the long game
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 15:08
|
|
|
Ugh, I left mine on the other night in my first floor remodel, I was way to lazy to climb down the extension ladder and turn it off, so I just woke up every hour when it cycled on due to leakage.
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 15:55
|
|
|
shut up blegum posted:They charge 60 to drill a hole in the concrete, which I understand is a fairly normal price. Then 87 to install the light, including the wiring etc. Yeah €87 seems like the right price including the fixture, wires, and labor to install it. I imagine it's actually a very cheap light and most of that price is the labor cost. Here a pack of contractor cans is probably $10/can. Now is the time to get the wires installed where you want them - while the walls are open. Don't forget ethernet for your wifi AP on the ceiling. 
|
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 18:25
|
|
|
I got a couple more questions about my baseboard painting adventures. Basically, what we've been finding is that the quarter round, at its base, has been stained and gloss coated. So far, I've been sanding them basically to bare wood. I've been doing this because we had a number of areas where the paint chipped through to the gloss coat, and I figured going all the way down was the best way to get adhesion. So, is that amount of sanding totally necessary? Could I get away with taking the gloss down with 150 and washing it up with TSP instead? I'm not really against filling in chips as they come up, and it would save me a lot of work and cleanup on the upcoming areas (living room, bedrooms, and stairway). The paint pretty much just flakes off when I hit it with the paint scraper, but I'm not as worried about dings there as I was with the kitchen and hallway. I didn't get a before sanding, but here's what it looks like after sanding:  Edit: Also realized I’m at least possibly dealing with lead paint with the woodwork around the windows, as this house was built in 1921, so I’ll definitely be treading lightly there in the future. nitsuga fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Mar 11, 2021 |
|
#
?
Mar 10, 2021 18:27
|
|
|
I have a big question and an effortpost of photos. I think it's about insulation. I live in a cozy house in the deserts of Arizona, where the cities are made of gold. It also gets extremely hot in the summers. Or, as USA Today would say:  High risk of sun stroke    Here's the canyoneer household electric bills. $0.14/kWh at the meter and 110 degrees outside will do that to you. Love those $60/mo electric bills in the winter but really don't care for those $375/mo ones in the summer. I note this because it never snows, and on the coldest nights of the year might dip down to almost freezing.  Here's our layout. West facing rooms in the house can get warm in the afternoon as the sun is setting. The south bedroom is my goonlair and home office (henceforth OFFICE). I have helpfully marked it with a thermostat icon because that office gets EXTREMELY warm in the summers.  It gets so hot, I can't work in there with the door closed and I need to set up a box fan in the hallway and blast air in to circulate from the hallway. Like, probably 15+ degrees difference between rooms. This hasn't really been a problem, because this room has historically in my house been underutilized during the day. It is a problem now, because with COVID I'm working from home a lot now and that's probably going to persist for a while. I always figured it was warmer because of its facing and because it's a goonlair with computers. A few months ago, I ran some ethernet cabling through the attic from the living room cable modem drop to the office. This was the first time I had been up in the attic since living here for ~8 years. My brother in law was helping me, and asked me "where is all the insulation in your garage?" If you follow the rooflines in the photos, you'll notice that the office shares a roofspace and attic with the garage. I put it on my to-do list, and finally have gotten around to it. I've educated myself on the internet, and then went and looked at the situation. Folks, I think it's pretty bad. I took all these photos poking my head through the attic access hole in the garage. (marked by the blue star on the layout, and the only access hole). I added some Skyrim style compasses at the top to help the viewer orient themselves in the photos.  Looking east!  You don't need soffit insulation baffles if you don't have insulation! Well, to be fair, there is between 0 and 1/4 inch of blown cellulose visible in some places. To the south! Here's the gable, and also no insulation to be seen. The dusty plywood there is to provide a little platform while servicing the air handler unit that lives here.  Hey here's some insulation, and a whole lot of daylight visible on the roof seam?  The west, directly over the office. I may be a simple country lawyer, but I don't think that heaping up a bunch of insulation in a single spot is really best practices here.  To the north, roof access to the rest of the house. Left ducting is the HVAC supply duct to 3/4 of the house, and the right is the register return pipe. I didn't snap pictures today from inside the bigger attic, but to be fair, I do recall there being more insulation there. At about the joists level of blown-in cellulose. I'm going to guess that from the state of these photos, and the insulation done either half-assed or zero-assed, that the rest of the attic probably needs some insulation help too, and I very much doubt that anything is well sealed. The good news is that what's there is all blown cellulose, and not the itchy fiberglass hellstuff. I'm thinking the right thing to do is go in, seal up all the air leaks through the ceiling, and add some insulation. Here are my questions, and my suspected answers: What should I use to insulate the garage? Blown cellulose, I think. It's easy to work with, good at what it does, and inexpensive. Should I insulate the entire garage ceiling? Or can I just build a nice barrier and insulate over the top of the office part? Maybe the whole thing? Because I think air leaks from the garage ceiling are doing bad stuff to the energy efficiency of the rest of the house, as they're all connected. What R value should I be shooting for? Energy.gov says minimum R-30 for hot climates, my local utility says they recommend minimum R-38 for ceilings. I see the warning repeated frequently that more is not necessarily better, and there are diminishing returns for just piling in extra insulation. Even so, I'm thinking if I use 30% more materials to get to R-49 that may be worth it, because the bags of insulation aren't super expensive anyway. Do I need a vapor barrier or something? I don't know. Isn't that what the roof is for? Do I need to do anything with the walls? Probably not, the outer walls have fiberglass batting inside. So, am I on the right track here?
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 00:45
|
|
|
Hello fellow hell-dweller! I suspect you're on the right track with insulation being A Problem but I can't actually comment there because... I've never climbed in my own attic and I have no loving clue how the insulation there is arranged either. I will say that there's not much of any insulation in my house over the garage itself but given that none of the rooms in my house anywhere near the garage itself have that sort of heating problem, I expect that they at least have more insulation around them. How old is your heat pump? My house's original 1999 11 SEER unit finally died for good this past September, and I had it replaced with an 18 SEER Goodman two-stage system. Charting total kWh usage versus "average" temperature (just "high+low" divided by two), this seems to have made a pretty big difference on hotter days:  It's also much nicer to live with - better temperature control in the house and much quieter when it's running. After I move / sell this place I'm going to proactively do the same to my new house.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:00
|
|
|
tl;dr: Insulate the gently caress out of that. Just have a company come do it. You will pay for it in a couple years if you do nothing else. Ask them for a full energy efficiency workup. They can help with air sealing, fixing leaks, insulation, etc. Do your walls have insulation in them? If not, full those suckers up too. Your attic spaces should be more or less as full as feasible while still allowing a draft above it / not actually full. Those companies will know how to do it. You're ideal for solar too, does AZ hate solar or are there incentives to put solar up there? Don't do this until you've insulated. Seriously it's night and day difference. I live in a place where 120F summers are not unheard of, but 100F is more common. It's SO MUCH NICER now that I've insulated. Our AC runs literally half to a quarter as much.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:00
|
|
|
H110Hawk posted:You're ideal for solar too, does AZ hate solar or are there incentives to put solar up there? It's a mixed bag. I did a SolarCity lease on my place and over the past ~7 years it has done slightly worse than breaking even in terms of total spend, and this is on SRP's older plan where they pay better per-kWh rates for the energy you sell back to them. I think any new solar installation would get stuck on the new demand-based plan where your kWh rate goes way down for both power bought and sold, but you also pay a fee based on your instantaneous peak kW load. I don't think APS' plans are much (if any) better in this regard.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:05
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:It's a mixed bag. I did a SolarCity lease on my place and over the past ~7 years it has done slightly worse than breaking even in terms of total spend, and this is on SRP's older plan where they pay better per-kWh rates for the energy you sell back to them. I think any new solar installation would get stuck on the new demand-based plan where your kWh rate goes way down for both power bought and sold, but you also pay a fee based on your instantaneous peak kW load. I don't think APS' plans are much (if any) better in this regard. So "yes" is what I'm hearing. (I realize wholesale buy retail pay are what's going to become the future but net metering is awesome or at least non-penalty rates would be nice.)
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:09
|
|
|
Is spray foam an option?
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:09
|
|
|
H110Hawk posted:So "yes" is what I'm hearing. I'm not doing solar on my new house anytime soon - if at all. If I do it'll be an owned system instead of a lease. But that money would be better spent on HVAC and insulation first.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:18
|
|
|
IOwnCalculus posted:AC chat AC is original to the house, 2001 vintage, definitely builder-grade. AC inspector dude said when we bought in 2013 said that it was end-of-life, and may die today, tomorrow, or in 20 years. I guess I have the Queen Elizabeth II of heat pumps because it refuses to die, but also isn't very helpful at the best of times. I hear you on the quality of life stuff. It's EXTREMELY loud right outside the living room window when it's running full-tilt in the summer, and when it goes past 105 exterior temperature it just runs full throttle, nonstop, for hours, struggling or unable to hit the target temp of 78 inside. Maybe I'll look at the SRP rebates and see if I can spend my BidenBux on replacing the system before it finally dies and makes me suffer for a couple days until it's replaced. GD_American posted:Is spray foam an option? I guess so, but I'd definitely be hiring someone for that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 01:19
|
|
|
Has the AC at any point been serviced, like had the pressures checked? Could be a worthwhile service call. But yes, you need to call an insulation contractor, and right now is the time to do it, before it gets hot again.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 02:16
|
|
|
Insulation is more worthwhile investment imo. You could have a 5 ton unit and still short cycle it to death if you don't take care of insulation.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 02:20
|
|
|
angryrobots posted:Has the AC at any point been serviced, like had the pressures checked? Could be a worthwhile service call. Yeah, my neighbor is an AC dude and helped me out a few months ago with that.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 02:37
|
|
|
I used blown in and paid someone to do it. If I was all gung ho and would do it again I would use an electric leaf blower with a mulcher and mask up with a good respirator. I paid for the labor not the materials on that one.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 03:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 18:01 |
|
|
I don't know about water etc. but planting a tree out there to shade the room/window will sure help too.
|
|
#
?
Mar 11, 2021 03:50
|
|