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Santa's bringing a really rad Hot Wheels track to our house this year, but it is motorized and takes 6 D batteries (!!!) I don't want to go broke running this thing and chewing through batteries. I'm thinking of maybe those AA to D battery converters, and then a bunch of rechargeables? Anyone have any experience with those?
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Dec 13, 2020 06:08
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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?
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Mar 11, 2021 00:45
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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.
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Mar 11, 2021 01:19
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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.
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Mar 11, 2021 02:37
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Charles Ingalls posted:10 minutes with an electric toothbrush followed by using a white grout pen if needed should fix and discoloration or uneven colors so I wouldn't let that stop me I use a steam cleaner and it immediately restores grout color, no matter how gross it got. The grout sealant stuff works really well for preventing it, the goo and splatter just bead off.
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Mar 27, 2021 00:20
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My smoke detectors are 20 years old now (oops). Which model should I get? Mine are hardwired with a battery backup, and I hate changing the 9 volt batteries on them. I should probably also get a carbon monoxide detector too, yeah?
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Jun 1, 2021 08:01
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My favorite paint is Dunn Edwards Sparta Zero. No VOCs, smells like wet dirt when using it, and has great coverage. Even going from dark to light colors, I've not had to do more than 2 coats. Your time and effort is worth something, and I've never regretted spending extra on good paint. Pretty much all paint you'll buy will be latex based. Don't worry about the other stuff. The finish you want is called either eggshell or satin. High gloss finishes are normally used for trim and baseboards. Matte finish is an aesthetic choice, but is more difficult to clean when you're living with it. Eggshell and satin are between those. Here's an article but the tldr is just use eggshell or satin. https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-to-choose-paint-finish-36802713 For putting a coax plate on, you will need to cut a rectangular hole in the drywall, use what's called a one gang old work low voltage mounting bracket to frame the inside. Feed the wire into the wall, sort of coiling it. Then screw the coax face plate into that frame and you're done.
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Jun 4, 2021 07:26
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I'm replacing my dinosaur 20 year old wired smoke detectors with sealed battery units. What do I need to do to the old wire stub-out to make it safe? Terminate each wire in it's own wire nut and leave in the junction box?
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Jun 14, 2021 21:22
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H110Hawk posted:The cool kids are putting minisplits in their garage. 
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Jun 19, 2021 00:08
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My coworker had a good experience getting her ac system replaced through Costco
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Jun 20, 2021 18:00
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Selling my house, so getting around to some of the annoyances I have learned to live with but don't want to scare away buyers with  First project, this backyard gate.     The hinge side has a square steel pole with two steel plates welded on to make 4 little ears. These are attached to the cinderblock wall by expanding sleeve anchors. Time and wear has shaken loose the top anchors, and the hole has been made much wider and no longer holds the sleeves in place. Unsurprising, as sleeve anchors in hollow blocks can be fiddly. This makes the gate sag and the far end drags on the sidewalk. What are my options for repairing it? I'm selling the house, so I need it to be "right enough" to not be a jerk but it also doesn't need to last a century. The things I've considered are: Slathering the anchors with concrete epoxy and smooshing them back in Putting in a new sleeved anchor the next size up Combination of the two or Removing the bolts, installing some galvanized steel tie plates with several tapcon concrete screws to hold down the ears and provide a more distributed and equalized anchor, as illustrated below. 
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Mar 22, 2022 21:58
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hambeet posted:By cleat do you mean a piece of timber on the face of the dry wall and secured to the two studs, then securing the rod to that? +1. Every closet in my house has the rod hung like this, which also makes a handy platform for hanging a shelf. Though in this particular closet, a shelf might only be good for holding wedge shaped things. canyoneer posted:Selling my house, so getting around to some of the annoyances I have learned to live with but don't want to scare away buyers with Update on this. I asked for advice from a neighbor who does masonry for a living, and he offered to just come over and fix it for me. Turns out there was another set of sleeve anchors below the current set, probably put there by builders before the sidewalk was poured and then they needed to raise it. They didn't raise it enough though, because they needed to bend the latching rod on the gate upwards about an inch to meet the latch. So, we raised it again another inch, installed it with some long concrete anchors, and straightened out the rod and it works great. He brought his 4 year old with him "to help", and the boy almost caught a lizard. To thank them, I made cookies and 3D printed a glow in the dark articulated lizard that he was SUPER PUMPED about. 
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Mar 28, 2022 17:14
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H110Hawk posted:
snickerdoodles! The lizard model I printed was this one from thingiverse. I did it in two tones, with the underside/belly in a bone color and the rest in glow in the dark green. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3505006 His mom says that he's having a blast pranking people with it. As a kid with a reputation for catching critters, everyone assumes that when he pulls the wiggling plastic lizard out of his pocket that he's caught another lizard to bring into the house and they jump out of their skin.
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Mar 28, 2022 18:33
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Teabag Dome Scandal posted:The trip lever on my toilet broke. Is there a way to reuse the handle and only replace the lever? It also feels unreasonably difficult to find side mount trip levers locally. Am I missing something obvious about finding a replacement? I have only ever seen the levers for sale with handle included (because there are a few different ways to attach them to the handle). If you're deadset on reusing the handle for aesthetics purposes, depending on how the lever is broken you may get lucky and be able to slip in a replacement lever or you may need to get creative in attaching it using a big honking screw. Lowes and Home Depot both sell side-mount levers in store too, perhaps you're just unlucky.
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Mar 28, 2022 23:01
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Teabag Dome Scandal posted:Ok so a bit ago I was asking for help with my Nest and it sounds like these things are kind of a pain in the rear end. Lots of angst on the HVAC subreddit. My biggest pro for it is that it can tell when we aren't home and adjust the schedule but I really have no concept for how much that actually saves us. I suppose if we regularly but randomly were gone for half the day it could help but unless the house is extremely drafty I would imagine the actual heat loss isn't going to be outrageous if the house is empty for several hours? Is there a way for me to figure this out? The HVAC subreddit probably hates it because they know a lot more about their trade than a homeowner does. A robot thermostat is one lever in the HVAC efficiency game, but it's not the most important one. The things that will really move the needle are proper insulation, clean filters, properly designed/sized/balanced system, and having your equipment well maintained and on a service schedule. The Nest is like $100 though and those other things cost more or are harder to do. I have one and it's definitely paid for itself when it replaced an old manual thermostat with no timer, especially since I could remember to turn it off on my phone when leaving on vacation. As far as how much heat you're losing, well, there's a way to know that! You want what's called a blower door test. You seal all your doors and windows as usual, and they put an airtight cover on the front door with a hole and a giant fan sucking out air. The inside of the house is then in a negative pressure state, and the machine will measure how well sealed your house is by how many air changes happen over a period of time. This will tell you IF you have insulation leaks, but not necessarily where. At the same appointment someone will walk around with a FLIR camera and find the drafty spots around windows, doors, ceilings, even electric outlets. Then you make a plan to seal those up and retest.
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Apr 4, 2022 21:02
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Check out this interview with Tom Silva about how he became a contractor and how he started with This Old House https://youtu.be/Ptm0XiQzkas In addition to being able to build or fix anything, I also learned that he sews! I've lived most of my life in the American Southwest, yet between Car Talk and This Old House I inherently trust dads with Boston accents to give good advice on fixing stuff
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Apr 9, 2022 20:59
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All else equal, I'd do floors first, especially since Doing It Right almost always involves doing something with the baseboards. If you painted and did the relevant caulking and repainting you'd have to just do it over again. I am a big fan of tile in any room that gets wet. Tile is trickier to install than laminate, and for the size you're talking about it is probably better to hire someone to do it rather than buy all the tools. If you do it yourself or hire someone, do not be a scoundrel and tile up to the baseboards with a grout line because that is the worst!
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Apr 18, 2022 04:23
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Whenever I consider hiring a professional for a task, I think about what kind of value that professional is adding and whether that's worth the extra cost to me. Professionals add value through force multiplication, access to better equipment, expertise and technical experience, better access to materials, and being able to summon a large crew to lend many hands. We painted our cabinets ourselves and they turned out great. It is a task that requires a lot of meticulous surface prep. It all but requires a good HVLP paint sprayer, good technique, and a lot of space where you can set up a dust-free, draft-free spray booth (lots of plastic sheeting in our garage). It also requires the willingness to do a lot of re-work for when you did everything right and somehow got a little running drip and need to go back several steps to fix it. The economics worked in our favor because we had help from family members who had done it before (skills and experience minimized rework), access to borrow a pretty good paint sprayer (not as good as a true commercial one, but a pretty nice consumer one), and enough space and timeline to absorb schedule decay. If any one of those factors didn't apply anymore I think I'd just hire someone for it.
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Apr 19, 2022 01:05
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My electric tankless water heater has been tripping the breaker this week. Turns out there's a pinhole leak in one of the joints inside, marked here in the upper left with a red X Is this possible to repair? I've done lots of PVC joints and also soldered plenty of electronics. Seems like the copper coil really does not want to be disassembled, but I also really don't want to spend $600 on a replacement
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Nov 4, 2023 07:15
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Sounds like it's a pick two situation out of fix it fast, fix it right, and fix it cheap. The leak is most likely due to internal corrosion, as I don't think the prior owner ever did a descaling flush. Even if I fixed it by cutting out and rebuilding the joint, odds are good that a corrosion pinhole will show up somewhere else soon. This would be right and cheap, but not fast for someone like me. The combination of high temp, temperature cycling, high flow, and high power draw (36 kw  ) makes me suspicious that an epoxy patch would hold. So I gave up and ordered a replacement for $425+ tax and it will probably take me an hour or two to swap it out. And then I can keep up on the descaling and make it last.
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Nov 4, 2023 20:30
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canyoneer posted:Sounds like it's a pick two situation out of fix it fast, fix it right, and fix it cheap. Update here to with good news and bad news. I got the new unit, and installed it in an hour and it works great. Bad news is that the thing runs off of four 40 amp breakers. I knew this and flipped them at the box, or so I thought. The 40 amp breakers are the type that take up 2 bays and have a bar between them. Somewhere in my dumb mind last week I had remembered "4 breakers" and flipped off TWO of the 40 amp breakers, because they take up 4 spots, right? So that means I was poking around in there with the cover off trying to diagnose a leak while I had half the unit energized. Glad I caught that and flipped the other two before I started uninstalling it
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Nov 8, 2023 20:19
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Last place I lived out here in the desert had gas for the heat and hot water heater only. It was so uneconomical because we barely ran the heat in winter but still paid the fixed pipeline fees for delivery every month. Bill every month was ~$25 in fixed costs and taxes and then $3-5 in actual utilization for therms burned. Even if the electric was wildly inefficient we still spend much less by having zero gas. But yeah, it is a little unnerving to see 1/3rd of the circuits in the breaker box be dedicated to the hot water heater
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Nov 8, 2023 21:26
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Previously I've had peanut butter work fine, but I switched peanut butter from Skippy to something that kinda liquefies at warm temperatures, and it's not working nearly as well. I'm gonna use up some old mozzarella next; it's not gonna get eaten otherwise, might as well get some use out of it. I had a particularly clever rat that would carefully extract all the bait from snap traps without triggering them, even licking the peanut butter clean. Some dog food attached to the trigger plate with hot glue got him right away.
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Nov 11, 2023 03:05
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Grumpwagon posted:My garage is old, detached and drafty. Mostly that's a problem for another day, but chipmunks and such get in and poop on my workbench, and I'd like to start using it. Check with the plumbing thread first. Human feces are going to be so much more work to clean up compared to a chipmunk's
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Nov 21, 2023 21:52
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Anne Whateley posted:That’s pretty standard, and you use pulls on the fan itself to control whether it’s the light or fan or both and to what degree. If it’s a fan that doesn’t have any setup for pulls, it’s a fuckup. (Almost) every new fan these days wants to use a single switch for power and then make you use their dumb remote control to operate the lights or fan separately. Not in this house, buster!
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Nov 28, 2023 05:46
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Belt drive garage door openers are fantastic because they are so quiet. Every chain or screw drive one I've used has screamed like a banshee for 95% of its life.
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Dec 15, 2023 22:04
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Jenkl posted:What's the best way to clean hand prints and other grease off a stainless steel range hood? There are more than a dozen compositions of steel and surface finish that can be sold as "stainless". Best way is to treat it like a dirty window. You wouldn't start with a bottle of Windex on a car windshield covered in bug guts and road tar, right? Get off the grime first. Dish soap and a microfiber rag to remove the grime and goo. If it's particularly stubborn, a soft nylon brush helps here too and MAYBE a brass brush/bronze wool (though they shouldn't, they may cloud or scratch certain finishes). The secret weapon here is a steam cleaner. I have used mine to remove years of caked on grease buildup on outdoor grills and restore them to a nice shine. From here, it will be clean but is going to dry with water spots or clouding and not look nice. Now you want a stainless steel cleaner. There are two types: water based and oil based. Water based is going to be better for hiding dust, but oily fingerprints are going to stick out on this surface. Oil based is better for hiding fingerprints and water spots, but the dust will stick to it and build up faster. We use oil based on almost everything in the commercial cleaning business (kitchen fixtures, elevator panels, bathroom fixtures). I keep a water-based one in my kit for outdoor grills and outdoor surfaces that are cleaned 1x per week or less and/or gripping surfaces (like grab rails in accessible restrooms or hand rails on stairs) I've used a dozen different products, and the two oil based ones we keep in stock are Sprayway SW841 in aerosol and the Weiman one in the trigger sprayer. Follow the directions! Spray a small amount onto a clean, dry microfiber cloth and then polish the surface. You can tell by feel from the friction of the cloth gliding over the surface whether you've applied the right amount. It's difficult to over-apply if you are spraying on the rag instead of the surface. The layer of mineral oil will help bead water drips off, and you can blend in fingerprints with your hand or a clean rag between cleanings.
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Jan 3, 2024 02:09
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devicenull posted:They've got the GAF "presidents club" certification I encounter a lot more contractors who are certified in DGAF instead
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Jan 5, 2024 06:49
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dupersaurus posted:If I wanted to add a room to my house, who do I go to to start? If it’s just a box can a general contractor do it or do I need to hit up an architect first? And what order of magnitude do I need to expect to spend, middle five figures? When I looked at this a couple years ago I ended up just moving to a different house a few miles away. Seems like it was only really going to be worth it if the land was something uniquely special or valuable (beachfront, family inheritance, etc), not the boring suburbs where that house was.
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Jan 14, 2024 00:22
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And I'm the outlier here with a Samsung washer/dryer set going on 8 years that has been super the entire time. It was even a refurbished unit of one of the models that was recalled for having the top fly off and injure people during the spin cycle. If only I had that same kind of great luck with my dishwashers
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Feb 15, 2024 19:20
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Is it one of those extended wax rings because the flange isn't sitting at the right height above the finished floor? I never trust those extra thick wax rings. They're probably fine, but I just don't like them
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Feb 23, 2024 06:23
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My ideological issue with extended wax rings is that wax is a sealing material, not a pipe. All else equal, you want the deformable, sealing part of your system to be only as long as you need it to get the job done. The longer it is, the more possibility for damage when the toilet is used and if it rocks on the base. That shouldn't happen either if the floor is properly level and/or the toilet is shimmed so it doesn't move. I suspect there is a correlation between improperly installed flanges and unlevel flooring.
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Feb 24, 2024 17:37
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My rat trap success was bits of dog food hot glued to the trap trigger. Clever rats would just carefully pull the loose stuff off without setting it off but they'd get greedy and tug at the glued ones. These same rats would carefully lick off the peanut butter without setting the trap off
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Feb 29, 2024 21:50
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Use a brass brush and bronze wool to keep from adding new scratches.
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Mar 29, 2024 00:34
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Inzombiac posted:I have a phantom drip. Wrap em in toilet paper, that will make it obvious
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Apr 2, 2024 17:59
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The point was that they weren't actually doing the hard math of calculating sines/cosines and measuring out angles. They put the responsibility of that work onto technology, just like we do, except their technology was "a stick" and ours is "a ridiculously powerful computer"...and the stick is better. Computer says "assume perfectly straight and correctly dimensioned lumber". Stick says "cut on this pencil line to make these two line up"
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Apr 8, 2024 23:56
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A MIRACLE posted:Think we’re just gonna get a terrier For less than a round of rabies shots, you can get one of the motion activated mammal deterrent sprayers. Cats are clever, and it may turn into an arms race of alternating placement to get the message across to the cat. https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bird-X-Hydro-Critter-Blaster-Animal-Sprinkler-Repeller-Scarecrow-Motion-Activated-Solar-Powered-HCB-S/308642137 I've never used them but the photo in the ad makes me  
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Apr 18, 2024 20:44
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