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angryrobots posted:Well, the W terminal SHOULD have been kicking on the heat. Are you sure that when you tried to turn the heat on before, it wasn't running the heat and AC at the same time? This didn’t work it it’s blew room temp air never got hot but the AC didn’t come on at least.
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Nov 21, 2018 05:55
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Bleh Maestro posted:This didn’t work it it’s blew room temp air never got hot but the AC didn’t come on at least. The W terminal should energize in heat mode, and it isn't. Something is borked with that tstat.
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Nov 21, 2018 18:19
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angryrobots posted:The W terminal should energize in heat mode, and it isn't. Something is borked with that tstat. Thank you for the help! I really appreciate it. I’ll report back if I fix it.
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Nov 22, 2018 01:38
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Here's a relevant Thanksgiving question. The in-laws big hardwood dining table has leaves. Over the years it's gotten pretty hard to slide the table in and out. The tracks probably have never been cleaned and lubed. What's the appropriate type of lube here? Is this as easy as cleaning whatever is gunked up in there then spraying some white lithium onto it?
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Nov 22, 2018 16:33
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Are they metal or wooden slides? Wood would be beeswax, for metal lithium grease is often good.
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Nov 22, 2018 18:03
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cakesmith handyman posted:Are they metal or wooden slides? Wood would be beeswax, for metal lithium grease is often good. Metal. Is that the same stuff as is in the can I sprayed onto my garage door chain or is there something else you are thinking about?
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Nov 22, 2018 18:28
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H110Hawk posted:Metal. Is that the same stuff as is in the can I sprayed onto my garage door chain or is there something else you are thinking about? Same stuff.
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Nov 22, 2018 19:10
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Any advice on garage door/track/roller lubrication products or how it should be done? I have high temp wheel bearing grease but perhaps I should buy something else?
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Nov 22, 2018 20:24
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cakesmith handyman posted:Are they metal or wooden slides? Wood would be beeswax, for metal lithium grease is often good. tangy yet delightful posted:Any advice on garage door/track/roller lubrication products or how it should be done? Amusingly: kid sinister posted:Same stuff. Thanks!
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Nov 22, 2018 20:27
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PremiumSupport posted:I quite like the Philips Hue color LED smart lights. They're easy to set up and program and they are very good at imitating natural light. They are a bit costly, around $100 for a single room starter kit, but once you have the controller you can easily add bulbs for less than $40 per light. Hues are pretty good, but entirely too expensive. That said, they’re on sale for Black Friday right now. Color bulbs are $39.99, and packs of 4 white bulbs are the same price. It’s a bit more reasonable at those prices. The new version of their software is trash, though.
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Nov 23, 2018 02:24
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I'm trying to rescue an out of warranty wine bottle refrigerator from the dump. It's divided vertically into two halves, and one side is cooling, the other isn't. Each side has 2 cooling elements which each consist of a thermoelectric cooling plate, with aluminum heat sinks on the inside and outside. There are 2-wire 90mm fans on each heat sink (one for distribution of cool air and one for exhaust of hot air). So the entire fridge has 4 cooling elements total, 8 fans total. Each side is controlled by a PCB board, the boards are wired together for power and for control from a separate input board. The side that is not cooling, the interior cooling fans are not spinning. I hit the wires on them with my multimeter and plugged it in. I got fluctuating numbers from close to 0 to 6V. I know the voltage is designed to fluctuate but I was expecting around 12V, since it was just kicking on and would have to run the fans to drop the initial temp. So I'm not sure what to do about that. The control boards look OK to me, no obvious signs of damage and the LEDs are doing what they are supposed to (no error). But the multimeter result has me wondering if there is something going on with the board. So my next steps are: 1. Replace the 2 bad fans. Either find similar 2 wire fans, or get computer case fans and solder the connector onto the new fans' wires 2. If that didn't fix it, replace the peltier plates in the cooling units on the side that isn't cooling. I can get some from Microcenter for $13 each or from eBay for a fraction of that if I'm willing to wait on shipping from China 3. Replace the PCB board on that side if it's still not cooperating ($40ish from manufacturer, will require some soldering as not all the connections are detachable) Alternatively if I don't want to replace the board, just disconnect the broken side and have a wine storage cabinet/cooler combo unit! Anything I've overlooked? Thanks!
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Nov 23, 2018 21:03
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Have you compared the voltages on the side that is working to the voltages on the bad side? Have you determined that the fans are in fact bad? That is, do they spin if you hook up a good electricity supply to them? Simplest would be to just try swapping them to the working side of the fridge. Your proposed plan of action doesn't look unreasonable, but I'd really want to narrow down the diagnosis before going too far into trying to fix the thing.
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Nov 23, 2018 21:10
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Have you compared the voltages on the side that is working to the voltages on the bad side? Have you determined that the fans are in fact bad? That is, do they spin if you hook up a good electricity supply to them? Simplest would be to just try swapping them to the working side of the fridge. Good questions thanks. I have not compared the voltage from the good side. Good idea. I pulled a fan from the bad side and hooked up a AA battery to it and no motion, but that might not be enough voltage to spin? I could try again with a 9V or yeah, I should probably swap out all the fans from the good to bad side and see what happens. Edit: 9V battery powered up the "bad" fan. D'oh. Tyro fucked around with this message at 21:31 on Nov 23, 2018 |
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Nov 23, 2018 21:24
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Tyro posted:Good questions thanks. I have not compared the voltage from the good side. Good idea. Are the control boards largely the same? Could you put the good one on the bad side temporarily to verify that the cooling element works? Or figure out the input voltage for it and test? If it's like 12Vdc you can use a atx power supply for example.
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Nov 23, 2018 21:36
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H110Hawk posted:Are the control boards largely the same? Could you put the good one on the bad side temporarily to verify that the cooling element works? Or figure out the input voltage for it and test? If it's like 12Vdc you can use a atx power supply for example. I think the boards are the same yes. It might be easier to swap all the cooling units instead of physically moving the boards but that's a good idea too.
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Nov 23, 2018 21:40
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PainterofCrap posted:Do you own the place, or is it a rental? I drilled a hole and ants came out  Not carpenter ants, I don't know what they're doing up that high. They immediately started sucking down the Terro bait I put next to the hole. I'll plug it up in a day or two.
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Nov 24, 2018 01:54
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I'm buying some wood blinds for a window (70" wide, 46" tall) and can't decide between 2-on-1 blinds and single blinds. I'm worried that a window this wide will cause bowing issues for single blinds, and I like the idea of being able to raise or lower half of the blinds to change how the room is lit. But at the same time the window is short enough that I'm worried that 2-on-1 blinds will look weird and out of place. Does anyone have experience in picking blinds and could help break my uncertainty? For reference, here's a picture of the window:  (with bonus Pacha in the bottom corner)
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Nov 24, 2018 03:39
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So, fans are physically OK. The good side was putting out 7.5V to the fans compared to the 4-6V the bad side was doing. Turning on the unit, it feels like the heat sinks on the rear of the bad side get cool to the touch (when they should be getting warm?) Could that be caused solely by bad input from the PCB or is it likely the thermoelectric plates have been damaged and need replacing also? Confirmed both boards are exactly the same, labeled "pcb80812k1". I pulled the board off to look at it, the cooling plate wires are soldered directly to the board so I didn't move it too far or try swapping the boards yet. I'm visiting family for the holidays and don't have access to a soldering iron here but plan to take this thing home with me to fix. The rear of the board looked mostly OK though there was some discoloration around the 4 soldered wires, which are the ones that run to the plates. Could be from when they were originally soldered on? The quality of the PCB is kind of cheap. Photos for the curious: Back of Unit, bad side on right from this perspective:  Presumed bad board with non-soldered wires moved out of the way. The fuse at the top where the power connector comes into the board is fine. I just last night noticed the two extra fuses in the bottom right corner, looks like soldered in and covered in heat shrink. Those will be a pain to check.  Back of presumed bad board, discoloration in lower left:  I found the factory service manual, which includes a circuit diagram (with no values listed for resistors, capacitors, etc unfortunately) If anyone wants to go down the rabbit hole or wants an interesting explanation of how these things work, this google translated Brazilian blog post has a writeup from a guy who fixed a similar problem by replacing a capacitor and then made some upgrades. I haven't taken physics since high school 20 years ago so I learned a bit (and some of it went over my head). Found a thread on some other forum where people are discussing fixing various similar devices by replacing capacitors. While that would be cheaper and fun, I don't really have time to do that right now so I think the $40 replacement PCB board might be the next step.
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Nov 24, 2018 14:41
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Tyro posted:Turning on the unit, it feels like the heat sinks on the rear of the bad side get cool to the touch (when they should be getting warm?) Could that be caused solely by bad input from the PCB or is it likely the thermoelectric plates have been damaged and need replacing also? When you reverse the voltage they do this. It's entirely possible to be by design - why else would there be two sides? Presumably that's for setting temperatures, which could be colder OR warmer than ambient. If this is not the setting you have chosen it sounds like the control board is bad.
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Nov 24, 2018 15:30
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If you can swap the control boards that should help point us to the problem too.
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Nov 24, 2018 16:00
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Our shower is a single-handle Moen unit installed new ~2-2.5 years ago as part of a complete repipe. Past week or so I've noticed that my shower takes more "throw" to cause any change in the temperature. Almost like I have to turn it past the middle point then back to get it to actuate any change at all. This happens both "going to hot" (say from 40% to 65%) or reverse it just stays steadily the same temperature. It feels like something inside has gotten a lot of slop on it basically despite the handle feeling firm the whole throw. Pretty pronounced just now going from 100% to heat up the shower to 50% and it was still nearly scalding, down to 40% I see a little "jump" in the shower head hose and it's suddenly tepid at best. It's "cold" here now so small changes should have a higher effect right now as our tap water is chilly. ("Cold" in Los Angeles.) Does this sound like the valve cartridge is going out? If so I'm going to start the warranty process before the valve gives way entirely. Could this be due to calcium/lime buildup, if so could it be dissolved out if I pulled the valve? Our water is... not soft. Hopefully this goes better than my last plumbing adventure, where I slipped a wrench installing a brass cap on a 2-output valve and destroyed the fitting on our kitchen sink faucet turning $0.50 into $450 plus plumber.
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Nov 25, 2018 19:05
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Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:I can’t see from the pic but is your sink/dishwasher on that wall? A lot of the times the vent pipes that run up the wall will be run through small openings and when the pipe gets hot from hot water it expands and makes a popping or clicking sound in the wall. Meant to respond to this. Here's another angle, the dishwasher is to the bottom left of the cabinets. 
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Nov 25, 2018 19:14
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Tyro posted:So, fans are physically OK. The good side was putting out 7.5V to the fans compared to the 4-6V the bad side was doing. Turning on the unit, it feels like the heat sinks on the rear of the bad side get cool to the touch (when they should be getting warm?) Could that be caused solely by bad input from the PCB or is it likely the thermoelectric plates have been damaged and need replacing also? You might not need such in depth knowledge, just a multimeter, soldering iron and some solder wick or pump. We do have an electronics thread here in DIY.
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Nov 27, 2018 04:25
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I successfully installed 4 lutron dimmer switches + remotes in my 110 year old home. Would recommend for anybody with 1. old wiring (no neutral) and 2. bad switch placement. All of my lights only have 1 switch location, but the 'remotes' can be mounted to walls to mimic regular switches, so now I can turn on my kitchen, living room and dining room lights from either side of the room! Actually the kitchen and living room light switches were not in their respective rooms at all, they were in the dining room (which connects them). These were surprisingly easy to install on the 2 wiring types in my house, updated romex and the old cloth style wires with the metal conduit ground. They weren't cheap, but they were much cheaper than running new romex to provide additional switch points.
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Nov 27, 2018 15:28
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Oh dammit, I just upgraded my switch to a Lutron LED dimmer rocker a couple years ago, and now I'm gonna have to buy a new one. I can't not turn off my lights from my bed now that I know it's an easy option
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Nov 28, 2018 02:39
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i like nice words
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 What's the best way to fill in or block the gap between the floor and base boards? Our first winter in a new house and we can feel drafty air coming through.
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Nov 28, 2018 05:55
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iddqd posted:
Best way is to have a contractor come in, remove the base boards and inspect the work behind it either with a scope or an infrared camera. Then, appropriately seal the wall from the outside (?) air. There is a product that pumps out an aerosol mist that pressurizes a whole house, then slowly fills up most leaks in the house. Cheap way is put some caulking in those cracks. Tape where you don't want the caulk and then remove tape when done.
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Nov 28, 2018 08:53
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Quarter round could also help seal that up, it's more flexible than that large trim block so it will follow uneven floor contours better.
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Nov 28, 2018 13:41
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Don't fill the wall with expanding foam until the drywall cracks and pushes outward.
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Nov 28, 2018 16:07
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My house has a tendency to develop mold near some of the windows (thanks, fog!). I can nuke it back for awhile using bleach, but is there some kind of treatment I can apply to discourage it from coming back?
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Nov 28, 2018 18:35
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:My house has a tendency to develop mold near some of the windows (thanks, fog!). I can nuke it back for awhile using bleach, but is there some kind of treatment I can apply to discourage it from coming back? Single pane?
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Nov 28, 2018 21:08
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:My house has a tendency to develop mold near some of the windows (thanks, fog!). I can nuke it back for awhile using bleach, but is there some kind of treatment I can apply to discourage it from coming back? It's hard to beat good ol' bleach. One thing that does help slightly is to make sure the surface is as clean as possible (no films), and a strong alkaline substance like trisodium phosphate (TSP) is my go-to. It's safe to mix it with bleach, but you'll want to protect any plants with pre/post-watering or better yet, plastic. My favorite vinyl siding cleaner, Mold-Armor, is the same theory: 6% bleach with a dash of sodium hydroxide.
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Nov 28, 2018 21:11
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kid sinister posted:Single pane? No, these are double-pane. The problem isn't with the window itself, it's with the frame the window slides in. Moisture is pretty pervasive here. That said, I don't expect that replacing the windows would help unless I got some kind of super-hyper-overengineered windows that somehow make a perfect moisture seal. I was more thinking like a chemical treatment I could put on the windows so that any spores that did land there couldn't replicate. B-Nasty posted:It's hard to beat good ol' bleach. Thanks!
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Nov 28, 2018 21:12
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How do you attach granite countertops? Yesterday when I was re-caulking where my countertops meet the tile backsplash, I noticed that the small section of counter between my stove and fridge is not attached at all, it's literally just sitting on the top of the cabinet. I didn't notice this for 5 years (granite is heavy) so I guess it's not a big deal but I don't wanna waste my time re-caulking that piece if it's just gonna move around. One site says to just use silicone to glue them down to the cabinets, and another says NOT to use silicone because it can "wick into and stain" the granite, which sounds like horseshit to me especially since it's on the bottom, but I figured I'd ask here just in case.
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Nov 28, 2018 21:41
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Granite usually just rests on top of a plywood support with silicone caulk underneath to prevent it from sliding around, others use liquid nails (which usually breaks the countertop if you try to move it later).
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Nov 28, 2018 22:11
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B-Nasty posted:It's hard to beat good ol' bleach. I thought bleach wasn't that good for mold because while it will kill the surface stuff, it can't penetrate far enough before it loses it's strength, so the mold keeps coming back because there's spores still present, even if you stop the source of moisture?
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Nov 29, 2018 00:22
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The Gardenator posted:Best way is to have a contractor come in, remove the base boards and inspect the work behind it either with a scope or an infrared camera. Then, appropriately seal the wall from the outside (?) air. There is a product that pumps out an aerosol mist that pressurizes a whole house, then slowly fills up most leaks in the house. AFAIK that's not something you can use in a house with things in it... you have to mask off every horizontal surface.
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Nov 29, 2018 00:31
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CheddarGoblin posted:How do you attach granite countertops? ... Dot adhesive silicone around the perimeter of the base cabinet top edge. Just enough to keep it from moving around.
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Nov 29, 2018 00:52
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Thanks for the responses about my gap between base boards and floor issue. It sounds like caulk will be the cheapest and easiest option for me. I am not handy at all - what type of caulk would I be using?
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Nov 29, 2018 02:33
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DrBouvenstein posted:I thought bleach wasn't that good for mold because while it will kill the surface stuff, it can't penetrate far enough before it loses it's strength, so the mold keeps coming back because there's spores still present, even if you stop the source of moisture? It is going to depend on the surface. I was assuming vinyl/metal or some other non-porous surface where the bleach (and TSP) would remove any trace of mold. That doesn't mean it won't return eventually; it's always a losing battle if the surface is moist, warm, and doesn't see sunlight very much. Quite frankly though, I haven't seen any convincing evidence that even on porous surfaces something else actually works better. If you have deep-seated mold on a porous surface, the only real remediation is to remove the material completely. Contrary to what other, expensive cleaning solutions claim, even the EPA/OSHA don't state that bleach doesn't work, they just don't recommend you dump a ton of bleach in areas where people hang out: https://www.epa.gov/mold/brief-guide-mold-moisture-and-your-home
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Nov 29, 2018 03:04
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