|
A vacuum with the bristle attachment.
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 09:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Beef Eater posted:Is there anything better than a broom and dustpan for getting dust and debris out of corners where it collects? About once a year when I do a big clean out of my garage/mini shop space I just use a leaf blower and send all that poo poo out the front. Before that I make sure to pick up any actual debris that shouldn't be living outside like random nails or pieces of plastic wrapper, though.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 15:33
|
|
|
If you aren't blasting every corner of your house with a leaf blower once a week are you really even cleaning?
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 16:08
|
|
|
Leaf blower? My whole house is a wet room that I power wash every corner like a restaurant kitchen.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 16:10
|
|
|
Amateurs. My house is on a large rotating gimbal and, every once in a while, I just turn it upside down and give it a good shake.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 16:16
|
|
|
BonoMan posted:Amateurs. My house is on a large rotating gimbal and, every once in a while, I just turn it upside down and give it a good shake. This is absolutely the best way to get crud out of your tent - Lift it up overhead with the doors open and shake it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 16:37
|
|
|
Beef Eater posted:Is there anything better than a broom and dustpan for getting dust and debris out of corners where it collects? I use our Dyson cordless for corners and along baseboards/stairs. Works great.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 16:43
|
|
|
Don't have corners to clean if you live in a round house.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 18:10
|
|
|
I am become Gary.Motronic posted:I'm thinking flooring stuff. Like sheet linoleum or vinyl tile(s). This was 100% the correct answer. I ended up getting some self-adhesive vinyl floor tiles (the cheapest HD had). I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. The instructions had a bunch of poo poo about heating it with a hair dryer or heat gun prior to cutting, but I found that if I scored it with a pocket knife it broke very cleanly and with little drama, including on cuts with angles. So a bit of back story. Here's the area affected:  See that hole? That's where a piece of loving floor trim was put in with glue instead of actually putting a tile there, and it soaked through, got moldy, and the dry wall behind it was a write off. Everything dried out, no damage behind there. Yes, I know the caulk around the tub there is a white hot mess, idiot PO used the wrong non-silicone caulk and it cracked horribly. It's awkward to get in there with the caulk gun and I suspect that when I got to that point of ripping out and re-caulking I was just out of fucks to give. Anyways, I measured carefully, cut up some vinyl, and got a piece that fit perfectly.  . . . but backwards.  Fast forward an hour and it's all done. Threw some vinyl up on the side of the vanity too. Everything's caulked (although messily down in the corners - can't get in there with the gun so I was just slopping stuff on with my fingers - also gently caress it I just don't care) and it should be fine for incidental water bullshit once it's all dry. Doesn't look terrible, doesn't look great, but it's also not visible unless you're standing in the tub so I'm calling it a win and a can successfully kicked down the road to whenever we re-do the bathroom. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 18:39
|
|
|
That looks proper. Nice.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 18:58
|
|
|
peanut posted:A vacuum with the bristle attachment. slidebite posted:I use our Dyson cordless for corners and along baseboards/stairs. Works great. My only vacuums are an old upright that's too bulky to clean along edges well and a shop-vac.
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 19:49
|
|
|
Shop vac with the skinny crevice tool or if you lost that, a toilet paper tube pinched flat on one end and jammed on the hose
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 20:17
|
|
|
Beef Eater posted:Is there anything better than a broom and dustpan for getting dust and debris out of corners where it collects? it's hard to beat this old classic. and for good reason
|
|
#
?
Feb 4, 2024 23:28
|
|
|
kreeningsons posted:it's hard to beat this old classic. and for good reason What's the good reason? I'm trying a broom and it's not working very well because the debris includes lint and cat hair that gets stuck to the bristles. Beef Eater fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Feb 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 5, 2024 01:39
|
|
|
I need a new staircase railing for a landing and three stairs.    Image credit: 1 2 All the local metalworking places I've talked to say these pictures are impossible -- that there would need to be bottom channel in addition to the sides for support, or alternatively support tabs like frameless shower glass. Clearly these folks figured it out, but they don't like returning phone calls/taking my money. Anyone know how this is possible? KS fucked around with this message at 04:59 on Feb 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 04:53
|
|
|
The glass might have notches that fit on tabs of the posts. There is probably a bottom to the slots where they fit on the posts.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 05:41
|
|
|
One thing I’ve figured out over the years is that unless you’re just really rich a lot of people don’t want to do certain jobs because it might be slightly different than the thing they normally do. I was looking into a tankless water heater a few years ago for our old small starter home. Nobody wanted to deal with it because they didn’t like tankless water heaters. So they’d either give me some ho hum reason why we couldn’t do it or want some ungodly amount of money.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 06:19
|
|
|
peanut posted:The glass might have notches that fit on tabs of the posts.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 07:31
|
|
|
This is the place I’ve used to do railings. https://agsstainless.com/  They’re great to work with, you send them detailed drawings and they’ll drop ship the whole system to you. I haven’t done the glass panels before but they do offer it: https://agsstainless.com/glacier-glass-panel-railing/ I ordered them myself and installed it over a weekend. It’s not hard to do. No idea if that’s true for the glass panels. On the wire ones the railing keeps the posts separated and the cables provide tension. Not sure how it works on the panels but I bet it’s something similar. Mustache Ride fucked around with this message at 13:23 on Feb 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 13:17
|
|
|
Cyrano4747 posted:Anyways, I measured carefully, cut up some vinyl, and got a piece that fit perfectly. This made me genuinely  It's a right of passage. Welcome to the club, brother. Shower looks good, gj. SouthShoreSamurai fucked around with this message at 15:37 on Feb 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 15:32
|
|
|
Invalid Validation posted:One thing I’ve figured out over the years is that unless you’re just really rich a lot of people don’t want to do certain jobs because it might be slightly different than the thing they normally do. I was looking into a tankless water heater a few years ago for our old small starter home. Nobody wanted to deal with it because they didn’t like tankless water heaters. So they’d either give me some ho hum reason why we couldn’t do it or want some ungodly amount of money. If they "don't want to do" that thing you've chosen the wrong contractor. You don't want someone who has never or only rarely dealt with the thing you're hiring them to do and definitely doesn't have parts on the truck to fix it. I don't know what "really rich" has to do with that. I get it, you may live in an area where none of the plumber or hvac people are familiar with tankless units. If that's what you want that sucks: you need to choose something else. Because the alternative is not having anyone to maintain or repair the unit when it breaks.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 15:35
|
|
|
Motronic posted:If they "don't want to do" that thing you've chosen the wrong contractor. You don't want someone who has never or only rarely dealt with the thing you're hiring them to do and definitely doesn't have parts on the truck to fix it. I don't know what "really rich" has to do with that. I suspect that it has to do with them having a poo poo ton of work and cherry picking simple jobs that they can over-charge for, with people who either have the money to not care or don't know what it should cost. A few years ago we had a water heater go tits up. It was old, needed replacing anyway, and thankfully was in the garage so all the water that came out just went into the driveway. The valve going into the heater was hosed, so I killed water to the house. We were able to get a plumber in on relatively short notice. The dude badly over-charged us to cut the pipes and put a couple of new valves on so we could have sinks and toilets again. I'd never done anything with plumbing at that point, and didn't want to learn while dealing with not having water to the house, so gently caress it pay the man. Whole time he's there he's bragging about how I was lucky to get him out there because he had a spare hour while doing this massive bathroom renovation job on a wealthy local politician's house over in <big fancy neighborhood>. Just would not shut up about how much money he was making on his other jobs. Then he gave me an absolute $FuckOff quote to install a new heater. We ended up living without hot water for a couple weeks while we called around and found a different guy who wasn't apparently so busy with high value jobs and who put it in for a fraction of the price.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 16:00
|
|
|
KS posted:I need a new staircase railing for a landing and three stairs. There's also the option they just don't understand what your sharing with them. You may need to engage two contractors, one for the steel posts and another for the glass. For the metal guys, provide me with posts set on this dimension and a top railing that is removable. For the glass, provide me with glass set in channels on posts. The main issue you'll have is just time, glass may take 4-6 weeks to cut and install, which is a long time to leave it, so you'll want to have something installed temporarily. Alternately, chat with the glass folks and see if they can use a structural adhesive instead of screwing in the channel and then they can likely set it without sliding the glass in from the top. EDIT: After a closer look at the first photo it looks like they're using an F channel (flange on one side for screws) and not a U shape (screws behind the glass and hidden), so that makes install a lot easier. Glass companies should handle that no problem. StormDrain fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Feb 6, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 19:13
|
|
|
Swapping a regular water heater is less than a half hours work. For a plumber it has to be some of the easiest money they can make. Switching to tankless took me around a day total. The tankless needed a bigger gas pipe, 4"PVC inlet and outlet, adding the electric outlet, and building a unistrut stand because field stone foundation. If I was a plumber with plenty of work I wouldn't want to install a tankless water heater either.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 19:55
|
|
|
StormDrain posted:There's also the option they just don't understand what your sharing with them. You may need to engage two contractors, one for the steel posts and another for the glass. Hah, it's been railingless for a year or so, but we have houseguests in June so trying to close it out. I suspect it's welded C channel rather than F channel but unclear. The real issue we're facing is the glass support -- it doesn't seem like tension setting is a thing except for this one place. They either want bottom support or clamps. Maybe it's adhesive, that makes a lot of sense. Mustache Ride posted:This is the place I’ve used to do railings. Thanks for the recommendation. Unfortunately the Glacier series here shows the clamps that everyone local is quoting, that I'm trying to avoid.
|
|
#
?
Feb 6, 2024 20:27
|
|
|
Ok in tax assessment news. My value went up 65% but the city operates on a revenue neutral basis so my tax is only projected to go up 17%. That's something I guess.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 15:57
|
|
|
SouthShoreSamurai posted:This made me genuinely I did something similar putting up 1/4" drywall in a room we were renovating. Had a sheet that had to fit over/around two door openings, one electrical box, one outlet and one lightswitch. Measured the hell out of everything and cut everything perfectly, except perfectly mirrored so the back side of the board would've ended up facing out. Man I was pissed. Redid the cuts and it worked out but that first one was just a work of art.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 22:00
|
|
|
I hope you took your reversed sheet and used it as a template. Otherwise I’d have put it up as it was & hit it with 16-coats of PVX.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 22:59
|
|
|
Does anyone know of a breakdown on residential energy storage systems, in particular how the economics shake out? The main attraction, to me, is resilience against short power outages, without the need to maintain an ICE-based generator. I gather they can also be used to do some "arbitrage" with time-of-use pricing systems, e.g. charge at night, draw from the battery during the day. But I don't have a good sense of how "worth it" one is, economically. To be clear, solar is a separate issue here. Being able to charge the batteries off-grid is nice, but I'm not trying to set up a wholly grid-independent house here or anything. And in terms of environmental impact, it's probably better (and certainly simpler) to just buy power from a clean power retailer.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 03:18
|
|
|
Getting a whole-home generator interlock and gas generator big enough to run the whole place was about $11k cheaper than batteries. When we got solar, even the sales people were trying to steer us away from it for emergency backup power. The costs are coming down at a rate where they thought it's likely to only be a good buy in a few years.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 03:24
|
|
|
shoeberto posted:Getting a whole-home generator interlock and gas generator big enough to run the whole place was about $11k cheaper than batteries. When we got solar, even the sales people were trying to steer us away from it for emergency backup power. The costs are coming down at a rate where they thought it's likely to only be a good buy in a few years. I definitely understand that generators are cheaper, but then you have a big ol' engine that you have to keep working, and it's noisy and polluting in operation. Which isn't the worst problem to have, and if I had reason to expect regular long outages, I'd definitely go with that solution...but I still don't really like it. Good to hear that the battery prices are coming down. I did find it kind of funny that you can buy a car (Nissan Leaf) for ~$30k that has a 40kWh battery...or spend half that on a smaller battery that puts out less voltage and doesn't come with a car attached to it. ...hm, maybe what I really should be doing is looking into the feasibility of running a circuit or two of my house off of my Leaf.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 03:43
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:I definitely understand that generators are cheaper, but then you have a big ol' engine that you have to keep working, and it's noisy and polluting in operation. Which isn't the worst problem to have, and if I had reason to expect regular long outages, I'd definitely go with that solution...but I still don't really like it. You can get 30kwh for about 8 grand: https://solarsovereign.com/collecti...r-wheels-welded You'd still need an inverter with the ability to function off-grid and you'd almost inevitably be paying for solar capability you wouldn't be using. The batteries are rated for just under 29kw continuous before inverter losses, so maybe 29kw? That's over 200 amps at 120v so you could probably power a select number of things in your house for a while or everything in your house for an hour or two. I'd guess you're looking at 10-12k in equipment, plus anything you need to pay an electrician.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 04:17
|
|
|
Danhenge posted:You can get 30kwh for about 8 grand: https://solarsovereign.com/collecti...r-wheels-welded Interesting, thanks for the link. My average power draw is more like 1kW, so a 30kWh battery pack would last me a good long while, so long as it's not a really hot day. ...I guess that means I can pretty easily do the math on energy arbitrage too. Let's say that peak-use electricity costs $.10/kWh more than non-peak-use, and there's 10 peak hours in a day, just to make the math easy. Arbitrary would then save me $1 per day (1kW at 10 hours at $.10 per hour). Which is not amazing 
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 04:28
|
|
|
Wrt an EV: One of the solar/battery sales guys I talked to said that he thinks electric cars are going to be a better value for whole-home backup power than standalone batteries. Like you said, the car already has massive capacity. I just don't know how many of them can interlock easily with home power. It was one of the selling points of Ford's electric pickup though.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 04:53
|
|
|
shoeberto posted:Wrt an EV: One of the solar/battery sales guys I talked to said that he thinks electric cars are going to be a better value for whole-home backup power than standalone batteries. Like you said, the car already has massive capacity. I just don't know how many of them can interlock easily with home power. It was one of the selling points of Ford's electric pickup though. Right now they really can't. These technologies are referred to as Car2Home(C2H) or Car2Grid(C2G) technologies and they're still in their infancy and the ones in development have been set back because of the transition from CCS to NACS that was announced this year by basically every manufacturer. NACS does not currently have any C2H or C2G standards built into it, probably because Tesla made NACS and they also want to sell you a PowerWall. Right now what the Ford Lightning and other vehicles have is a standard outlet plug to plug things into. It's not using a bidirectional charging cable, it's either a standard 120v outlet or in the case of the Lightning (I believe) a standard 220v outlet. So while you CAN power your home off of those, it's pretty limited power, and to do it you still need a traditional interlock that you have to flip over to power your home from your vehicle. The idea behind C2H and C2G technology is to utilize the same cord you charge your EV with to allow it to be bidirectional. During normal operation it would charge your vehicle as they do today, but then when there is a power outage, or in the case for C2G technologies, you want to feed power back into the grid, it can send power backwards back into your homes panel. This would all be mostly automatic, with maybe needing to use an app or something, but wouldn't require hooking up extra cords or flipping breakers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 05:15
|
|
|
I spoke with a solar guy recently because we wanted to explore the option and I told him that I wanted a battery that the solar system could charge for a backup in case of power failure during non-peak hours and he pretty much told me that isn't possible and that it's a few years out. I was kind of confused and didn't push him on it because I don't see why it wouldn't be? Like I would understand if its too expensive or something like that but he really was just straight saying "you can't do that"
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 06:10
|
|
|
D-Pad posted:I spoke with a solar guy recently because we wanted to explore the option and I told him that I wanted a battery that the solar system could charge for a backup in case of power failure during non-peak hours and he pretty much told me that isn't possible and that it's a few years out. I was kind of confused and didn't push him on it because I don't see why it wouldn't be? Like I would understand if its too expensive or something like that but he really was just straight saying "you can't do that" Yeah that guy was a liar don’t give him your business.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 10:56
|
|
|
hey yall, this is not ideal right? This is the drain for the sink, which is to the right of this image. i assume drain pipes arent supposed to go up like that, and also cutting completely through one and half of another of the crossbeams is also bad?
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 14:03
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:Interesting, thanks for the link. My average power draw is more like 1kW, so a 30kWh battery pack would last me a good long while, so long as it's not a really hot day. Are you on PPL or PECO in the new place? I don't think either has peak vs non peak prices, unless I'm missing something. Also, current price to compare is like 9 cents for PECO and about 11 for PPL, so your margin would be super small. Also, check with your neighbors on how often it goes out. In my area it's down to maybe once or twice a year, since there's less snow and prior snow already broke the branches off. We have PPL for power and PECO for gas because ???
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 15:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 28, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
D-Pad posted:I spoke with a solar guy recently because we wanted to explore the option and I told him that I wanted a battery that the solar system could charge for a backup in case of power failure during non-peak hours and he pretty much told me that isn't possible and that it's a few years out. I was kind of confused and didn't push him on it because I don't see why it wouldn't be? Like I would understand if its too expensive or something like that but he really was just straight saying "you can't do that" He doesn't know what the gently caress he's talking about. I just made this same point in another DIY thread but vetting solar companies takes forever because 98% of them are absolute dog poo poo and are run by morons who will gently caress up your roof.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2024 16:11
|
|