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HolHorsejob posted:Lol either a homeowner special or the lowest bidder. Sorry you have to deal with that. I should start posting pictures. It's seriously dunning-kruger level homeownership. The current owner even pays to have stuff repaired and it's still totally half-assed, even when the repair is "good." Like they don't know what "up" and "down" on light switches mean levels of incompetence. Like, a lot of lovely handymen will sawzall a hole in the wall to access a pipe. I've got a hole in the wall with no pipe behind it. Just completely random. Most lovely handymen screw in some panel in top. Mine didn't. It's literally just leaning there. I found out because the wind was strong one day and the hole in the basement is apparently connected through the walls to the loving outdoors, and the wind blew the un-screwed plate on to the floor. I really, really, really hate killing things. Like I catch bugs and release them outside. I have had to dispose of 4 mice this last month because the place is so full of holes and they can freely run roughshod through the place because apparently the entire place is basically the outdoors. Wish I could find out the architects name so I could piss on his grave
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Dec 3, 2021 08:20
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HolHorsejob posted:drat, good luck heating that 1/3. Yeah, forced air is completely useless if you have preposterously high ceilings. Radiators probably wouldn't be much better. I'd recommend getting a quote on radiant floor heating if you can. Ceiling fans are going to be installed for sure. It's 1663 sq ft with a full 9' basement. I have 2" iso board on the outside and am putting in R24 insulating between the studs. Radiant floor isn't an option as the doors are already installed for 3/4" flooring.
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Dec 3, 2021 14:58
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HolHorsejob posted:No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater than the heat from an ancient, deathly inefficient heating system. You want the real deal? You need an oil furnace. They usually come set from the factory at a 70F rise (i.e. 140F air coming out of your vents), and can be fired up to a 100F rise (170F air at your vents) with no trouble. That was a big selling point for 'little old ladies'. They didn't want to move to natural gas and get a tepid breeze from their furnace vents, they need to feel the heat in their bones.
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Dec 3, 2021 15:04
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HolHorsejob posted:In heating devices, efficiency is inversely proportional to the temperature gradient between the supply and return air/water temperatures. Less efficient devices = wider temperature gap between inlet (return) and outlet (vent/radiator). This is because one of the ways to make a system more efficient is to increase the air/water flow relative to the amount of heat generated. Yeah but this has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. The reason water heat is good isn't anything to do with a blast of heat - with radiator covers you don't really get that anyway. It's the more even heat in an old leaky house, and it's the lack of hot dry air constantly drying your eyes and skin out.
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Dec 3, 2021 16:28
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Radiator heat rules. I would always put my towel in the radiator before I got in the shower. And you can put your outerwear on the radiator while you get ready to leave for a little boost as you head out the door. As others have said it just feels even. A friend of mine lives in an old apartment building in Denver and keeps about half of hers off, since they are so hot. The ones I lived with were very warm and you couldn't hold on to them forever but you could touch them for a bit. Hers are dangerously hot and you can't touch for more than 2-3 seconds. I think they're legit steam. Don't do that.
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Dec 3, 2021 20:32
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Splode posted:Tbh I am always shocked by how flimsy American houses seem. Here is a decent-ish explanation of why US homes are built the way they are, but the TL;DW of it is that the post-war boom meant a lot of people wanted housing very quickly and it was a cheap and easy way of building out entire subdivisions in record time. Pick a couple of prints (optional, there are plenty where all the houses are the exact same), throw up a few dozen houses, and sell the American Dream to all of those people flush with cash. https://youtu.be/wpxLLCdW_Gc
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Dec 3, 2021 21:35
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Freaquency posted:Here is a decent-ish explanation of why US homes are built the way they are, but the TL;DW of it is that the post-war boom meant a lot of people wanted housing very quickly and it was a cheap and easy way of building out entire subdivisions in record time. Pick a couple of prints (optional, there are plenty where all the houses are the exact same), throw up a few dozen houses, and sell the American Dream to all of those people flush with cash. That even happens now on a small scale. It's common in my city for a big lot to get subdivided after the original house gets demolished and then two identical houses take the spot. I'm sure in more extreme cases the replacement houses are replacing a house that itself was part of a tract.
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Dec 3, 2021 21:45
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B-Nasty posted:You want the real deal? You need an oil furnace. They usually come set from the factory at a 70F rise (i.e. 140F air coming out of your vents), and can be fired up to a 100F rise (170F air at your vents) with no trouble. It's hard to beat an oil furnace/water heater, especially if you live somewhere without gas lines. The heat is fantastic, but again, they don't make them above 80% efficient (they did, but nobody installs them because they're an expensive and a contractor's worst nightmare) Between cheap natural gas and federal tax incentives, we probably converted 3 oil furnaces to gas for each one we replaced. e: re: furnace vs. boiler, hydronic systems are worse for dry air in cold climates because you can't just drop in a humidifier and have it maintain humidity while it heats. On a day when it's 5 deg F outside and bone dry, radiators drop the RH as they heat. HolHorsejob fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Dec 3, 2021 |
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Dec 3, 2021 21:53
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DR FRASIER KRANG posted:That even happens now on a small scale. Oh for sure, and it still happens in the suburbs too. The new-build house my dad bought in 2003ish is in a subdivision with maybe 5 or 6 floorplans, with some minor cosmetic variations on the outside. It has to be a lot cheaper than trying to make everything unique.
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Dec 3, 2021 21:59
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My PI grew up in an eastern bloc subdivision called 'little america', since shortly after the communist revolution the government had purchased american house plans and built an american-style suburb
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Dec 3, 2021 23:08
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Tunicate posted:My PI grew up in an eastern bloc subdivision called 'little america', since shortly after the communist revolution the government had purchased american house plans and built an american-style suburb PI… private investigator??
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Dec 4, 2021 02:11
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B-Nasty posted:You want the real deal? You need an oil furnace. They usually come set from the factory at a 70F rise (i.e. 140F air coming out of your vents), and can be fired up to a 100F rise (170F air at your vents) with no trouble. Lol those things need you to dig a gigantic oil tank into your garden somewhere, which will turn the soil around it into toxic waste basically forever. Over here it's illegal to keep the tank in the ground for more than two years after you stop using the oil furnace. At that point you have to hire contractors to come and dig it out and remove all the contaminated soil, then an environmental consultant to prove that the soil is clean. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/underground-storage-tank-removal-and-abandonment-permits.aspx
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Dec 4, 2021 03:05
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Dejan Bimble posted:PI… private investigator?? Principal investigator Academia for lab boss
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Dec 4, 2021 03:06
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I'm going to find out if outdoor furnaces are allowed where I live and do rads. If not, probably propane and rads. Thanks for the input. If I go the outdoor route I can pipe my garage as well when it's built.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:26
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Lead out in cuffs posted:Lol those things need you to dig a gigantic oil tank into your garden somewhere, Enh? Most people round these parts with oil furnaces just have the tank in the basement or above ground next to their house. Why do you need to bury them?
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Dec 4, 2021 03:41
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StormDrain posted:A friend of mine lives in an old apartment building in Denver and keeps about half of hers off, since they are so hot. The ones I lived with were very warm and you couldn't hold on to them forever but you could touch them for a bit. Hers are dangerously hot and you can't touch for more than 2-3 seconds. I think they're legit steam. Don't do that. Sometimes you get some rare places here that have direct remote heating, i.e. the coolant water gets pushed into their systems and isn't just pulled through a heat exchanger to heat the water already in their house. If that sort of system springs a leak, you've suddenly got pressurized 80+ Celsius water spraying out somewhere, I've heard some horror stories of those things basically steam-boiling an entire house because they spring a leak while no one's home to turn it off and you may as well just toss everything inside.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:41
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Phanatic posted:Enh? Most people round these parts with oil furnaces just have the tank in the basement or above ground next to their house. Why do you need to bury them? The house I grew up in had the oil tank indoors. In the basement. Who ever designed the house basically made a room for it with concrete walls. It had a connection outside the house and the oil truck would connect and fill it.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:50
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Thomamelas posted:The house I grew up in had the oil tank indoors. In the basement. Who ever designed the house basically made a room for it with concrete walls. It had a connection outside the house and the oil truck would connect and fill it. My wife’s aunt lives in an old Victorian that got retrofitted with an oil furnace. It just sits on a little slab in the basement, not contained in any way. I’ve often wondered about the wisdom of having it there but I guess it was added in long enough ago that nobody cared? Can’t imagine it’s up to code these days.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:56
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Phanatic posted:Enh? Most people round these parts with oil furnaces just have the tank in the basement or above ground next to their house. Why do you need to bury them? Large buildings/apartment complexes would often opt for a 1000-gallon tank underground instead of the 275 gallon on legs that homeowners typically have. They're a terrible idea, imagine having zero visibility into an oil leak until it's too late. The conversations where they came up always involved lots of 3-letter acronyms.
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Dec 4, 2021 03:56
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HolHorsejob posted:Large buildings/apartment complexes would often opt for a 1000-gallon tank underground instead of the 275 gallon on legs that homeowners typically have. They're a terrible idea, imagine having zero visibility into an oil leak until it's too late. The conversations where they came up always involved lots of 3-letter acronyms. Also just out of a sheer humanitarian perspective, every time I've been involved in replacing an oil tank, even when it was "just" an above-ground, was a completely miserable experience. Think of your local tradesmen, don't expose them to that.
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Dec 4, 2021 04:08
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PurpleXVI posted:Also just out of a sheer humanitarian perspective, every time I've been involved in replacing an oil tank, even when it was "just" an above-ground, was a completely miserable experience. Think of your local tradesmen, don't expose them to that. ugghhh fuuuuuck don't remind me. I spent so many weekends as a kid scooping/shoveling nasty, jet-black loving vaseline and breathing in smoke after sawzalling the tank in half. I hated those jobs but at least they meant one fewer source of service calls where I come back with my hands soaked in oil. e: I'm amazed more people don't opt for this. The sludge in the bottom of an oil tank is hard to dispose of. It's super wide, heavy, and cumbersome, so good luck getting it up stairs that were probably built after it was installed. If the contractor opts to break it up, good luck getting the pieces out without getting oily/rusty stains on the inevitable wall-to-wall carpeting. vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv HolHorsejob fucked around with this message at 05:44 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 4, 2021 04:19
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PurpleXVI posted:Also just out of a sheer humanitarian perspective, every time I've been involved in replacing an oil tank, even when it was "just" an above-ground, was a completely miserable experience. Think of your local tradesmen, don't expose them to that. In Boston almost every place I rented had switched over to gas or electric, but still had a big oil tank sitting in the basement because it was far easier and cheaper to just plug it and leave it standing there than deal with how to get it out. I assume they're just going to sit there until someone bulldozes those old houses for a full rebuild or the sun finally swallows the planet.
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Dec 4, 2021 05:33
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i was in my basement today and realized, after living here for multiple years, that none of the woodwork is finished. three wooden doors, wooden door frames and trim, wooden baseboard all around the whole basement. no stain or paint on any of it. i told my wife and she said "huh... wait... you're right!" i am pretty sure the immediate PO was not the one who put any of that in. so we have a situation where this house changed hands several times and just... nobody noticed 
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Dec 4, 2021 06:41
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HelloIAmYourHeart posted:The Thrilling Conclusion to The Mystery Switch! I gotta call an electrician i had a busy holiday week and a busy work week on top of that, glad to see the correct solution is being applied! also patting myself on the back for getting the simulation right going by the wiring picture and your dad's notes, yeah. that's exactly what happened. in old wiring they would do "switch loops". the device or fixture would get power run to it first and a two-wire cable was sent to the switch box to open and close the hot (or, if they were particular hacks, the neutral!). unless you ran a three-wire, there's no neutral involved. they didn't consider that one day the switches themselves would want a neutral to consume their own power to go on the internet nor that this kind of wiring is generally a huge pain in the rear end if literally anything about the circuit has to change. as far as fixing this goes...uhhhh...it depends on what's in that receptacle's box. if the diagram is saying the "always hot" is coming from there to feed the switch box, then you either have to lose the switched outlet or have a new wire run up to this box from somewhere. don't envy whoever has to do that, given the age of things here. if the switch box is getting its hot from somewhere else, the white wire from the outlet can be put on neutral and connected correctly to the porch light neutral. then the black wire can be used to switch the outlet. i keep saying 'black' and 'white' but it's more like 'tan' and 'slightly more faded tan', good ol' cloth wire! good luck to all involved!
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Dec 4, 2021 07:07
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Phanatic posted:Enh? Most people round these parts with oil furnaces just have the tank in the basement or above ground next to their house. Why do you need to bury them? In our area it was common to bury your oil tank between the 1930s and 1950s, then bury them half full and pretend they never existed once the city finally laid natural gas lines in the neighborhood. The tanks would eventually rust and leak. About 10 years ago one lady had a full tank on her property leak and she didn't know about it, having been the third or fourth owner of the house since it was built and rmthe tank had been long forgotten to the ages. She ended up with a 2 million dollar remediation bill because the oil had leaked under two of the neighboring properties and insurance would not cover it. We moved into a '58 rancher last year and even though we found city records that there were gas lines installed the year it was built we still paid for a tank scan before we put in an offer.
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Dec 4, 2021 08:14
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“Finally found the short that was energizing some aluminum trim on the outside of the house and the back door.”
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Dec 4, 2021 09:45
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Blistex posted:I'm going to find out if outdoor furnaces are allowed where I live and do rads. If not, probably propane and rads. Thanks for the input. By outdoors do you mean literally outdoors or in a freestanding boiler room building?
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Dec 4, 2021 13:18
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When I lived in Massachusetts, a story made the newspapers. A fuel oil truck got the address wrong and filled up the oil tank in the wrong house. Unfortunately, the wrong house had had the oil tank removed years ago and hadn't bothered to remove the fill opening. Owners wound up with a basement full of heating oil. Meanwhile, I had electricians here and asked them to look at the doorbell transformer and see if the wiring still worked. There were visible cut wires where the doorbell used to be, and I was hoping to connect a new doorbell and a new chime and go on my happy way. Somebody somewhere before me had not only cut off the doorbell wires at the doorbell itself, but also at the level of the porch. Which means that the entire line would have to be re-fished in a 1930s house that's solid board and asbestos shingles, and the electrician's guessing it's a half-day job with two electricians. SIGH. Now I'm trying to figure out if you can get door chime transformers that pair up with wireless buttons, because I really truly would like a real doorbell chime.
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Dec 4, 2021 18:39
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Now I'm trying to figure out if you can get door chime transformers that pair up with wireless buttons, because I really truly would like a real doorbell chime. This is certainly possible. If an off the shelf solution doesn't exist, a DIY one definitely does.
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Dec 4, 2021 19:46
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Arsenic Lupin posted:When I lived in Massachusetts, a story made the newspapers. A fuel oil truck got the address wrong and filled up the oil tank in the wrong house. Unfortunately, the wrong house had had the oil tank removed years ago and hadn't bothered to remove the fill opening. Owners wound up with a basement full of heating oil. It's funny, because oil tanks have an ingenious solution that is supposed to prevent this: there are 2 pipes, vent and fill, and on the vent pipe there is a whistle. As the tank is filling, displaced air comes out the vent through the whistle. An oil delivery guy is supposed to listen for that whistle, and stop immediately if not heard. The whistle also prevents overfilling, because when oil reaches its level, there is no more air to displace. Of course, if the oil man is running late for his next fill and has his earbuds in, tough luck.
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Dec 4, 2021 20:07
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Lutha Mahtin posted:This is certainly possible. If an off the shelf solution doesn't exist, a DIY one definitely does. Hmm. I might, come new year, hire a goon to see if they can set up and ship a chime transformer with a Raspberry Pi that connects to a wireless doorbell. Unless there's a simpler solution? I certainly haven't been able to find anything on doorbell sites because it's such a niche want.
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Dec 4, 2021 20:13
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Something like this might work https://www.amazon.com/GE-Wireless-Doorbell-Battery-Operated-30393/dp/B00X6BC7OW
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Dec 4, 2021 20:16
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Arsenic Lupin posted:When I lived in Massachusetts, a story made the newspapers. A fuel oil truck got the address wrong and filled up the oil tank in the wrong house. Unfortunately, the wrong house had had the oil tank removed years ago and hadn't bothered to remove the fill opening. Owners wound up with a basement full of heating oil. in our town, there was a homeowner that didn't like the smell of the oil tank and plugged the vent pipe. The delivery guy shows up, starts filling, and notices it's taking longer than usual to fill...
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Dec 4, 2021 20:29
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Yeah we got the second cheapest wireless doorbell setup from Home Depot and it’s totally fine. Super loud inside, battery lasts couple of years, you can configure multiple buttons to the same base station with different chimes. For $20 it’s fantastic.
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Dec 4, 2021 20:33
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Proteus Jones posted:Something like this might work No, that's exactly what I don't want. I don't want a programmable electronic-voiced chime. I have a solid old-fashioned hammers-hit-the-bell chime, and I want to install that. It requires a transformer (in place) and a wired pushbutton (expensive to install). I want (if possible, and it may not be) to jerry-rig a wireless pushbutton to work with the transformer.
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Dec 4, 2021 20:36
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Arsenic Lupin posted:No, that's exactly what I don't want. I don't want a programmable electronic-voiced chime. I have a solid old-fashioned hammers-hit-the-bell chime, and I want to install that. It requires a transformer (in place) and a wired pushbutton (expensive to install). I want (if possible, and it may not be) to jerry-rig a wireless pushbutton to work with the transformer. Ah, got it. Yeah, a receiver tripping a solenoid would probably do the trick.
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Dec 4, 2021 20:40
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B-Nasty posted:It's funny, because oil tanks have an ingenious solution that is supposed to prevent this: there are 2 pipes, vent and fill, and on the vent pipe there is a whistle. As the tank is filling, displaced air comes out the vent through the whistle. An oil delivery guy is supposed to listen for that whistle, and stop immediately if not heard. The whistle also prevents overfilling, because when oil reaches its level, there is no more air to displace.
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Dec 4, 2021 21:04
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Hmm. I might, come new year, hire a goon to see if they can set up and ship a chime transformer with a Raspberry Pi that connects to a wireless doorbell. Unless there's a simpler solution? I certainly haven't been able to find anything on doorbell sites because it's such a niche want. you definitely could use a raspberry pi for something like this, but that might be way overkill. i am not an expert in home automation, but i am sure there are several ways to do your exact use case of "convert a simple pushbutton switch from wired to wireless". there are several threads on the forums where people talk about projects like this, one being the idiot spare time projects thread in yospos
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Dec 4, 2021 21:32
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kid sinister fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Dec 4, 2021 |
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Dec 4, 2021 21:53
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Lol drat I haven't seen a two post rack like that in over ten years.
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Dec 4, 2021 21:54
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