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ibpooks posted:Yeah, that should all the way up to the ME who stamped an upside down plan and the city inspector who reviewed it, and whoever inspected it before they started pouring slab. Granted the plumber isn't completely faultless, but I can totally see how it happened. Showing up to a jobsite like that to start the rough subterranean work -- there are no landmarks except a few surveying stakes amongst literally acres of flattened earth. You can't even tell where the building, parking lot, garden center and loading dock is because it's all flat. At least once the erection is done you know where the building is, but it's still just a giant rectangle with no landmarks inside. Which is why spending half a day head scratching and double checking is important. Plus if you get a sign off on the plans, then gently caress them, you did what was asked of you, in writing.
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Sep 16, 2011 07:03
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:It seems like it ought to be possible to detect this kind of thing somehow. The only solution I can think of is to have some kind of meta-meter that tracks power consumption for a group of houses, and which would be in a physically protected location (like, up a pole, in a lockbox) which gets inspected on a periodic basis. If power consumption for that meter spikes drastically, then you've greatly narrowed down your search area (from "the entire city" to "just this block/subdivision/whatever") and can start doing more manual investigation. A lot of newer areas will have a KVA meter on the secondary side of the transformer, which then feeds 10-12 houses. If you average the KVA readings over a month, then compare the meter reads for the 12 houses it fed, you can pretty trivially see who is stealing power. Most modernized systems do this auto-magically, and then the sheriff, utility rep, electrician, and potentially SWAT show up to remove that illegal splice.
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Jun 17, 2014 22:44
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I'm not a molecular biologist, but I work with them regularly. Most photosensitive molecules have fairly narrow absorption bands (on the order of 10-20nm, if I recall correctly), so unless photosynthesis uses multiple such molecules, you shouldn't need broad-spectrum light. Even if there were multiple different absorption bands to worry about, directly targeting those bands with multiple LEDs would probably still be more efficient than a broad-spectrum bulb. The issue is that while Chlorophyll A and B suck up a very narrow spectrum of light, a lot of yellow and green light is absorbed through side reaction processes. There have been a couple studies done with greenhouse lettuces grown in natural light vs. equivalent PAR LEDs that are a red/blue mix (what the Chlorophyll only idea would support), and the natural light ended up doing about 30% better due to that reason. That and the transpiration seen on natural light is what the plants were originally evolved to use, the lower transpiration rates on the cooler LEDs cause issues with sap flow and nutrient uptake. I ended up learning all this after an incredibly aggressive sales guy tried to sell me on a complete LED solution for a greenhouse I was gonna put in my back yard for strawberries and peppers. I ended up not purchasing one at all after figuring out how many thousands of pounds of delicious jalapenos and strawberries I'd need to haul out of the thing before buying them from the local Whole Foods was the losing choice. Turns out it's like 1000 pounds of them. Methylethylaldehyde fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Jun 21, 2014 |
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Jun 21, 2014 01:42
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:In that case anyone know a good renter's insurance company? I have a basic lovely plan with Geico and I assume they'd probably just drop me instantly if anything happened StateFarm is decent, if you can weasel USAA, it's pretty awesome. Hire an outside electrician to show up for an hour and say "yep, that's 100% unsafe", and put that in a certified letter to your landlord/slum management company. Or just ignore it. As long as the breakers aren't tripping, and you aren't running space heaters, those old breakers tend to just sorta muddle through life getting unusually warm, but not Bakelite smoulderingly hot.
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Jun 28, 2014 10:00
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kid sinister posted:Did you use the actual backstab holes, or was it one where you poked a straight wire under a plate on the side and screwed the plate down? Because those are OK. UL listing means "if you use this thing in the exact way the manufacturer said to, and incidentally the only way we tested it, then it probably won't burn your house down". The lovely plugs with the backstab holes in them have a little /\ looking set of copper blades in them that you shove the solid wire through, they bite in and that's the only electrical connection you have between the wire and the plug. This is also a really crappy electrical connection, so when you run a lot of current through it, it tends to heat up some. After a few years of this the connection gets eve crappier, and heats up even more. Eventually you notice it not working right, and pull it out to fix it. You then notice the ~6" of burnt to gently caress insulation on the wire, and you wonder why the house didn't burn down. Then you have to demo out part of the drywall to chase the burnt wire back to the next plug over and re-run the terminally hosed section of 35 year old romex that was stapled 16 times to each and every stud. This is why when I redid my house's outlets, I used the $7 an outlet specification grade plugs, with the through the back screw clamp type terminations that you can use with stranded wire. Also, the fancy stranded wire with 150ish strands compared to ~17ish strands is amazing to work with. The wire is like shiny copper hair, and you can virtually use it like metallic yarn it's so flexible. It makes putting pigtails in boxes for electrical work so so SO nice.
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Jun 30, 2014 13:18
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Motronic posted:Yes. You are building a tiny structure that requires absolutely nothing special in terms of load capacity or length. They're made out of a whole pile of 5-7 foot long pieces glued together into a beam!
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Jul 2, 2014 21:00
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:You're on a website where people sent a thread about traffic engineering in Ask/Tell to like 500+ pages, I think boring crime scene processing procedure would be right up our alley That traffic engineering thread was the best thing ever. I would second the notion that no matter how boring you think it may be, unless all the good stuff is things you can't share, like a lot of health care anecdotes.
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Jul 7, 2014 06:44
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slap me silly posted:I've been thinking about getting a house built, and it's totally gonna be ICFs. The big ICF lego bricks are literally the best thing. You can get ones that are self sealing, water proof, R-19, and have a 50 year lifespan.
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Jul 12, 2014 05:01
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kid sinister posted:Goon fknlo posted this over in the electrical thread. It's his, unfortunately. Previous owner did it. That's almost not entirely cringeworthy. The wirenuts should have been outside the subpanel in a junction box, and the cord grips are for rigid conduit, not romex, but all in all, not entirely a fire inducing death trap. They even did the grounding right! I'd tear it out and just put a junction box in depending on exactly what the hell they were trying to accomplish there. It looks like two branches being fed from the yellow romex, which is perfectly fine to do with wire nuts in a standard box. No clue why they got an 8 spot breaker box and then halfassed it with wirenuts afterwards. Methylethylaldehyde fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Oct 9, 2014 |
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Oct 9, 2014 01:36
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Dirty Beluga posted:if he's even reasonably competent with...voodoo science. And that's the problem with 95% of these crappy construction tales.
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Nov 14, 2014 18:44
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Motronic posted:My preferred method is with the copper rings. The compression tool I have was $120 and came with 1/2", 3/4" and 1" jaws as well as a go/no-go gauge. I use the Uponor pex expansion things, using This tool. It works sweet as gently caress, and I ended up getting the whole thing for like 130 with 3 batteries. Plus once they're in place they're 100% leak proof and giving you can eyeball all the fittings to check the crimp. If it has a compression sleeve and it's wedged into the T fully, it's good to go.
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Dec 2, 2014 01:01
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SkunkDuster posted:Gross exaggeration, but that is along the lines of what concerns me if I have an inspector come check my house out. Based on my inspection, there is a decent chance I would be charged as an accessory to manslaughter or child endangerment if I didn't call the appropriate authorities regarding the issues your house has.
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Jan 7, 2015 16:27
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Leperflesh posted:It's called "karst topography," and it's a really cool geological phenomenon! Unf, yeah baby, that's some well-developed karst you have there. Shake that thang! Oh poo poo poo poo! SHIIIIIIT!" *Sinkhole swallows home*.
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Feb 2, 2015 21:36
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DNova posted:Nah, you can definitely use it. Heavily, even. Be sure to hire a security guard to keep all the meth heads from stealing your roof.
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Feb 17, 2015 01:54
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Bad Munki posted:Just get amazon prime and make UPS do all your driving. Pretty sure even UPS has rules on where they'll deliver. 20 miles of unimproved gravel road would probably be pushing it.
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Feb 18, 2015 19:19
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PainterofCrap posted:Either that, or one hell of a built-in hot tub. Or a particularly hellish hot tub. You generally don't see putrefied rat carcasses in a regular one.
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Feb 25, 2015 11:12
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Slanderer posted:Honestly, that would be pretty unlikely- I think the bigger concern is corrosion of exposed metal and trapped water/contaminants in the breakers themselves, since that can cause trouble down the line (like a breaker failing to open up). Rusted closed breakers would be a super awesome way to start an in-wall insulation fire when you decide that no, 3 space headers on one surge protector isn't a bad idea at all!
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Feb 26, 2015 20:31
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:HDR actually wasn't introduced until Lost Coast came out, like a year after the game was released Day of Defeat: Source was the first major Source engine game that had HDR in it from the very beginning. Also, HDR was hilariously expensive back in 2004 land, whereas now it's more or less free processing power-wise.
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Mar 27, 2015 20:20
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SoundMonkey posted:Seriously though, sections of extension cord running through puddles is really no big deal as long as the jacket is intact and SJOW or SJOOW rated. poo poo is not as fragile as it looks, unless you're using the worst cable imaginable. Just make extra loving sure you have a properly grounded outlet and an inline-GFCI breaker. Learning the hard way that a puddle is electrified kinda sucks.
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Mar 28, 2015 19:36
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Baronjutter posted:If I bought a full-price LED at a shop here would it most likely perform better than my direct from china $10 "2000 lumen" bulb? Probably less change of counterfeit electronics inside the thing. At less cheaping out on every single aspect of the power supply. The difference between a binned Cree LED and some noname shitbox LED can be pretty extreme.
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May 12, 2015 00:15
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Sylink posted:Yah, I'm just triggering because people keep posting solid asbestos and sky-is-falling stuff like its on the same level as gamma rays and even looking at it will kill you. More or less this. Asbestos is only bad over long exposures, or if you powder it up and do a few lines of it. I'm reasonably certain my popcorn ceiling contains asbestos, and all I did was seal it with two coats of latex ceiling paint and then not gently caress with it. It'll happily not give me any issues for another 15 years, and then it'll be a 2 week job suiting up and gutting the interior to bring everything up to current code.
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May 17, 2015 07:23
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Phanatic posted:Yeah, it's just odd-seeming, is all. If I'm building a raised floor for a server room and I use stuff that's rated to load limit of 1500lbs per square foot, it doesn't mean that my 1000-square-foot server room's floor can support 1.5 million pounds. There is a general 'x pounds per square foot', which is used for general loading of lighter stuff, office furniture, people, refrigerators, etc. There is also a point loading spec 'do not exceed y pounds per 10 foot span' or whatever for things like 1500 pound server racks full of UPS batteries, or machine tools. And yes, technically you could put that much crap on top of the floor.
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Jun 17, 2015 17:42
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My Lovely Horse posted:(I do mean none, in the sense of "the builders totally hosed up"). Plans don't mention insulation, we're not going to add insulation. gently caress 'em.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:52
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froward posted:Does hydraulic fluid eat holes in asphalt like diesel? It can, but most runways are all stupid-high PSI concrete, with less-stupid-high PSI concrete used for aprons and taxiways. It's not until you start to get to really regional airports that you see asphalt as a common item. Depending on the fluid, it'll eat holes in people, asphalt and most kinds of vegetation. Some of the specialty purpose aircraft grade fluids are loving awful poo poo. Great at what they do, but gently caress me I want nothing to do with them.
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Jul 20, 2015 10:31
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MrYenko posted:It also smells funny. Skydrol is one of them, there are a few monopropellants used for arms that are particularly delightful, like nitrous oxide and loving hydrazine, and whatever witches brew they used to get the start-carts running in the 60s. It would apparently preferentially suck every single bit of moisture out of your hands. Baby soft to old-man leather hands in like 2 minutes flat.
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Jul 21, 2015 21:15
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Splizwarf posted:Serious question: we all know how absurdly ornate a toilet-culture luxo-bathroom can get. What is the "I have too much money just look at this throne" equivalent in cultures that normally poo poo in a hole in the floor? In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, you can still find Solid Gold Toilets and Gold plated shitters in a lot of the mansions there.
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Nov 21, 2015 00:01
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SynthOrange posted:D-did it work? "I'm done, now go to your room".
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Nov 24, 2015 01:49
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kid sinister posted:Neutrals and grounds are joined at the same place! What??? Technically they're bonded inside the main circuit breaker panel. Doing so outside that panel can cause issues, hilarious, painful, fire causing issues.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:50
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In his case, someone managed to not bond ground, and gently caress up the wiring such that ground and hot are tied together inside the unit. Einey meanie miney welp, gently caress it.
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Dec 12, 2015 05:16
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ExplodingSims posted:I do commercial HVACR work here in Florida. The air is literally made of hot soup and rear end funk. I have no doubt that you can fill a five gallon bucket in an hour without really trying too hard. Tell us stories! Every single commercial HVAC and especially the refrigeration installs I've seen in person have been janky as gently caress in some way. Massive corrosion and poo poo wiring jobs are the most common, but I've seen an ammonia based water chiller that made me glad I lived well upwind of it. Did you know that you can keep any breaker from tripping if you drive a screw in between the switch and the housing until it physically won't move anymore? Did you know that someone, somewhere was stupid enough to do this in the wiring cabinet of a loving ammonia based refrigeration plant?
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Aug 3, 2016 11:00
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endlessmonotony posted:Around the area I'm in it's traditional to have a 400lbs bear statue made of wood to guard the yard. Is it a mass requirement or a size requirement. If you need a Bear statue of standard size, a concrete version would be a least three times as heavy, which would theoretically make it three times safer.
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Sep 13, 2016 20:30
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Like claiming "that's just my style" when you don't know how to draw. My style is a critical level of self loathing, no desire to improve, and a viscous sense of entitlement that demands you agree that I'm still the best. -- Every Other Art Student Ever
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Nov 20, 2016 19:27
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Phanatic posted:He's talking about geothermal heat pumps, with coils set into the ground. They're more expensive to install but they definitely work when it gets cold out because they're deep enough. Pretty much, you have an infinite source of water at whatever the average yearly air temperature of the area is. That's generally a huge fuckton of BTU capacity at 50 degrees or so. Even a halfassed heat pump can extract a ton of thermal energy from 45 degree water to keep you warm in the winter, and in the summer, it's pretty easy to cool your house when the condenser heat exchanger has 55 degree water to dump all that hot into. The downside is you need to either drill a bunch of bore holes in the ground to sink the coils into, or you cut and cover an Olympic sized swimming pool down 30 ft. Pricey.
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Dec 24, 2016 04:46
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Hexyflexy posted:After looking at it a bit, the best way I can describe how silly it is, "Imagine a tom and jerry cartoon, tom is going to get smacked in the face by a frying pan. The tree fort is the frying pan and the house is tom. A storm is happening, so this will occur repeatedly". Jerry is rolling out the props now....and yes! It's the anvil chorus! We're in for a real treat here folks!
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Feb 4, 2017 21:15
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I was actually looking into doing something similar, until I did actual research on bunker construction and underground housing, and learned how much of a tremendous pain in the rear end everything is. The redit guy commenting covered most of the high points. It's easier/cheaper to dig a bigass Olympic pool sized hole in the ground, build a 4 car garage out of those insulated concrete forms, then bury it than it would be to waterproof and strengthen a container to do something similar. Plus you can trivially waterproof the forms by gluing them together then tarring and tyvecing the outside. At a minimum you need:
Methylethylaldehyde fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Feb 18, 2017 |
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Feb 18, 2017 21:14
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Baronjutter posted:A lot of people in construction and development and armchair housing policy folks got really excited about the idea of solving housing problems by building huge container apartments and poo poo, but after you do the math and look at the results it's absolutely not worth it. I got really excited about that poo poo when the fad first hit, but after a lot of research and looking at the practical results, it just doesn't check out. Pretty much. If your time is free, materials are scavenged, and maintenance nightmares until entropy converts it all back to iron oxide don't bother you, they can be a great 'deal'. As a lovely throw-away shed thing to store crap in, they work great, because that's what they were designed to do. The answer to the housing crisis is well made apartment buildings with proper noise and vibration damping, with adequate underground parking for each tenant to have 2 vehicles plus a small storage space. Downside is asking for well made buildings during a housing crisis might as well be asking for blowjobs from a unicorn for how likely they are to actually occur.
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Feb 18, 2017 21:34
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Baronjutter posted:2 parking spots per tenant seems insane. A huge part of the "housing crisis" is car-centric urban planning forcing the cost of construction up by requiring massive amounts of parking. A typical underground parking spot costs 30-60k, that's a huge savings to eliminate. In a lot of cities they're realizing strict parking minimums are working against both affordability and good urban planing and reducing or outright eliminating them, and there's a general consensus in urban planning today that parking minimums are a bad idea that have caused a lot of problems. Obviously that only works in places where you can live without a car, or just one car between a family. But it's actually a lot cheaper and more efficient to provide good transit and services within walking/bike distance than to force everyone to build massive parking structures and then massive highways to connect with shopping and workplaces with equally massive parking. It's the most land and resource intensive way to get around imaginable. The problem is in a lot of areas you don't have the services needed to be able to get around the city like you would in Manhattan or Chicago, and as a result you need to have parking spaces provided. You could probably get away with one per tenant, but it becomes an issue if you're selling 2 bedroom condos and only provide space for one car. And good luck getting good transit services when outside of like 4 major American cities, public transit is considered for poors only. Dylan16807 posted:Wow, that's a lot. Now why is very little of that needed with a basement? Is a basement inherently safer, or is this a case of requiring top-notch A+ safety measures when most cases of meeting code only need a B-? Lots of easy/free venting via the hugeass house above you, mandatory 2 escapes from the place due to fire code from the mid 70s, and the fact that even if they're below ground, the air mixing that takes place is able to offset any issues. When you get into cases where your structure is 3+ meters below ground, you start running into issues where passive convection might not be enough to cycle the air properly, heavy gasses can settle without the ability to remove them, and tons of other things that a basement in a house wouldn't need to deal with. Especially if this is a bunker or structure designed to deal with NBC or civil unrest events, where you need to be able to lock it tight, and provide filtered air and water for a period of time. Methylethylaldehyde fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Feb 20, 2017 |
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Feb 20, 2017 05:38
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HardDiskD posted:lol if you think they maintained it. One phrase: 'Load bearing drywall'.
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Mar 21, 2017 18:57
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canyoneer posted:Plus you just pull down a house and rebuild it every few years. A good use case for mcmansions When the land is worth about 10x what the house is, it makes sense to treat the house as a more disposable asset, especially with how small they are. Average in Tokyo is like 105 m^2, which is ~1k square feet. Also, average not-a-condo house age is like 20-25 years, which is pretty decent for a house.
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Mar 21, 2017 21:40
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The second someone manages to find a way to turn glass shards and aluminum cans into a structural material, the quality of most new track houses is gonna go up substantially.
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Apr 30, 2017 02:17
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