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Godzilla525 posted:If there's one thing I can't stand the most amongst the bad 'budget' subdivision development cliches present it's that ugly fake plated stamped steel and plastic crap that ends up as a horrible attempt at polished brass. Ugh. Especially those domed light fixtures pictured on the left. If I ever end up in a house with those I'm going to make a nice YouTube video of me destroying them. Oh christ, the house I'm in now is full of those drat things (with the super long life 130V 60W bulbs in them to boot). Though as dim as those bulbs are, the house is 16 years old and none of them have burned out yet. I finally relamped everything that's not on a dimmer with CFLs recently, and found out every single one of them is attached to the junction box with one screw. ONE. And the one above my bed? It had a screw that was too small, as soon as I got the glass off the fixture fell off the ceiling and was dangling by the wires. The junction boxes the builder used for the ceiling lamps has a different screw pattern than the fixtures, there's no way to mount the existing fixtures with 2 screws. I'm sure every house in this subdivision is the same way. I don't have much say in replacing the fixtures except for the one in my bedroom; there's now an Ikea fixture in its place. The Ikea fixture is equally cheap, but has a white reflector instead of "brass", and accommodates 3 bulbs instead of 2 (and it's attached with 2 screws instead of 1!)
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Nov 1, 2011 06:34
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Several years ago, my parents had a couple of outlets installed in the back yard - one on a switch for a fountain (no longer there), one for low voltage lighting. Cue today, I'm trying to figure out why the low voltage lighting isn't working. First thing I notice is someone had cut a hole in the in-use cover so that an indoor timer would fit - apparently the timer built into the transformer died. When I lifted the in-use cover, my hand brushed the box and ZAP  [img]http://i.imgur.com/m42Ial.jpg][/img] I never liked the way it was setup - 2 single gang boxes, bolted back to back. Turns out one of the screws had rusted away, leaving the second box rubbing the wires. No, there was no bushing, just 3 wires passing through. The hot had been rubbed bare in one spot and was touching the box. The ground wasn't connected to either box, only to the outlets.  You'd think that would trip the breaker, but no - the ground was connected only to the outlet, with stranded wire - which had corroded and broken off (though the breaker would trip now and then). The second box had water sitting in it, as well. I wound up pulling the whole mess apart and replacing it with a double gang box and a new in-use cover. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a bit higher off the ground, but raising it would require pulling new wire - there's just barely enough to get the whole mess together. At least now it has a non-holey cover, and it's actually weathertight (with the cover on, obviously.. it's not on yet in the below pic).  Wish I'd thought to take pictures before I ripped it all out. But the piece of the plastic conduit still attached to the old box is about 3 ft long and served no purpose except to keep the whole mess from being twisted. I was able to re-use one of the GFCIs, the terminals on the other were corroded to hell (and it has obvious water damage). There's 2 GFCIs due to one being switched, and this circuit was added on to the kitchen lighting/garage lighting/garage door opener circuit instead of the circuit for the other outside outlets (which has a GFCI breaker). I have a feeling I'll find a flying splice in the attic next time I'm up there. Oh, the reason the lighting wasn't working - their indoor-turned-outdoor timer had gotten soaked and seized up. I'm tempted to rip the conduit out and re-run it, except instead of leaving the box sitting unsupported on the end of the conduit I would mount it to the fence instead. About 2 feet of it have pushed its way out of the ground by the switch anyway. For now, the lighting is on the switched outlet until I can figure out something a bit more elegant - they don't want to spend the money on a new transformer/timer combination, so I'll probably add a photocell to the transformer. randomidiot fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 01:44
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Right, it's attached to PVC conduit. What I actually want to do is dig the whole mess up, then re-run it so that the box is actually mounted on the fence.. instead of 2 feet away from the fence. The transformer for the lighting is on the fence already.  It's only about 30 feet of conduit, and it was buried shallow enough that about 2 feet have popped out of the ground at the other end. Makes mowing the yard fun. Besides, I don't have a whole lot of faith in the way the whole clusterfuck is wired anyway - I don't even know where it's tapped in to the kitchen/garage lighting circuit. At least the stuff in the buried conduit is THWN, but I need to figure out how/why it got tapped into the kitchen/garage lighting circuit instead of the existing outdoor circuit, and see if there's a way I can remedy that. Plus the whole conduit rising from the grave bit, that would get fun in a hurry if the conduit got nicked while mowing. I need to tackle the original outdoor outlets next - they're both crumbling and have bare prongs now instead of a plastic face. One always has something plugged in, but has the old style metal cover instead of the newer in-use covers, which concerns me more than a bit. Every time it rains that outlet gets soaked and we get a GFCI trip. Gotta love years of lowest bidder "side job" fixes.. the outlets installed for the lighting in front of the house are just scary. Why not just use the existing outlet instead of paying some handyman to add 2 more outlets?! 
randomidiot fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Jul 16, 2012 |
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Jul 16, 2012 04:15
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Older (80s and older, maybe as new as the 90s?) range, dryer, and oven outlets were usually 3 wire, despite there being 120V parts inside most of that stuff. Even new 240 appliances usually come with directions on how to safely hook them up to 3 or 4 wire circuits.
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Jun 30, 2013 05:30
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stuxracer posted:Not a bad construction failure exactly, but the police were called to my grandpa's house this week. Speaking of the wrong house...
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Jul 20, 2013 14:56
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Motronic posted:You can't even put AC condensate into the sanitary sewer by any common US code I'm aware of.  Most houses I've lived in that had central a/c had the condensation drain tied into the household sanitary sewer somewhere, and usually an overflow that went outside. The house I'm in now has the condensation drain plumbed into the drain lines for the hall bathroom sinks, with an overflow sticking out of an eve (attic mounted HVAC). That's how it was when it was built (1994), and when we replaced the evaporator coils, the same configuration was used, with the addition of an overflow switch to shut down the unit. Every commercial place I've worked at usually had the HVAC condensation drains emptying into either a nearby floor drain or a mop sink.
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Jul 27, 2013 04:40
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Qwijib0 posted:some amazing HVAC work at this complex I've never seen that style RTU used for residential  - but it's gotta be quieter than the typical apartment stuff I've had. I'm used to the "cram the furnace and air handler above the ceiling of the bathroom or bedroom, so you get to hear every squeak and rattle from the air handler - and stick a tiny 1/2 ton unit outside the bedroom window".That had to cost a fortune compared to what I'm used to seeing, but I bet it's also a bit quieter.
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Mar 7, 2014 10:16
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Slanderer posted:Eh, my parents' house had a drawer like that running the length of the two sinks. Instead of pulling out, it was hinged and folded out to 45 degrees. It was pretty useful for storing kitchen gloves, the sink stoppers, steel wool, etc... My grandpa had what he called a "cabin" (read: 5 bedroom 4 bath 3 car garage quad-level house with a dumb waiter between the garage and 3rd level kitchen) in the middle of Nowhere, NM (a bit outside of Ruidoso). In the master "bathroom" (which was about half the size of the house I live in), there were outlets behind the drawers. Not easily accessible; you'd have to pull the drawer out, then plug in your hair dryer collection, then put the drawer back in. The outlets were actually labeled as "hairdryer", making it all the more  Same house had a phone next to every toilet, and steam shower equipment buried in the crawl space (which regularly popped a GFCI.. also in the crawl space). Early 80s, middle of BFE, nuff said. Probably lucky it had a single GFCI in the entire house. I gotta say though, being able to grunt out a log or five while talking on the (incredibly staticy) phone was kinda neat.  Waking up to bears wandering around the deck was kinda cool too.
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Mar 25, 2014 12:11
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Motronic posted:FYI, ADT is horrible and basically a finance scam. Go find a local installer who does their own thing and has their own dispatch or contracts out for it. They will install equipment that you actually pay for now including the labor. That equipment will be both higher quality and not proprietary so if you aren't happy with the dispatch/monitoring service you can change without gutting the system. As much as I absolutely loving hate ADT, they install pretty common stuff. Generally DSC or Honeywell/Ademco these days. There's not much proprietary about their equipment (and hasn't been since the 80s), but they do rape you on fees. With that out of the way, ADT always does an installer lockout on their panels, which fucks you out of making any programming changes without ADT showing up (you're limited to changing user codes and not much else; depending on the panel you might be able to change the master code - and most residential customers will just be using their master code anyway). Sometimes an independent alarm company will hire a former ADT installer who actually knows the codes used in that area - if they do, that installer can do a "takeover" - where they migrate the existing panel over to their own monitoring (compare it to a factory reset + unlock of a cell phone - start from scratch, move it to a new carrier). More often than not, you'll have to swap the panel board; if you're lucky, you get a board compatible with your existing keypads (and/or wireless) - i.e., if you're migrating from a mid 90s DSC panel, you can likely use a current Power series panel (you'd have to swap keypads, but most of the wireless stuff would still work with the right receiver - that receiver will probably work with the new panel if it's also DSC, and DSC also makes keypads with built in wireless receivers. the wireless stuff is a small fortune compared to the rest of the system) If you just want to convert a system to generic monitoring (that only tells the monitoring center that the siren went off), an installer can tap into the siren output with a dialer module, and use some resistors to keep the panel from realizing "oh hey I don't actually have a phone line connected/don't turn on the trouble light". That's what a lot of those companies that say "oh hey we can move you to wireless cell monitoring" do. The worst company was Brinks though. They could disable the entire alarm system (even local alarm and door chimes) if you fell behind on your bill - and if you discontinued your monitoring, they frequently either showed up to yank the equipment out, or remotely disabled it. The scary part of that is they often did installs in older homes that didn't have interconnected smoke detectors - and often removed the existing smoke detectors to install theirs. Their panels/keypads are 100% proprietary (I believe their smokes are too), and won't work with any other equipment. The motions, door contacts, sirens, etc are common 12VDC alarm stuff. I suspect the new Broadview version of Brinks is much the same. randomidiot fucked around with this message at 09:55 on Apr 20, 2014 |
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Apr 20, 2014 09:51
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Baronjutter posted:So it's like a company that has set designs they know how to build really quickly?? That's an interesting concept. I guess if you've been building the same house over and over and have all the supply chains and work-flow down pat you could maybe pull it off. Never seen anything like that before. It's called a template home? My entire subdivision was built by one builder, from about 8 different layouts. On my street alone (which is only 2 blocks long), there's about 10 houses with either the identical floorplan, the same floorplan flipped around, or the same floorplan with very minor changes. The only obvious outside difference, if the house isn't flipped around, are the brick and roofing choices (and none of these houses have the original roofs anymore anyway - built 20 years ago, with a lot of hail since then). That said, the only issues we've really had have been foundation (3 repairs so far, one by the builder), and that's generally an issue everywhere in DFW. It's built kinda cheap (you slam the garage door, the light on the ceiling of the bedroom across the house vibrates; no soundproofing between rooms), but there's been no issues aside from foundation (which could have been easily prevented with soaker hoses  )Mercury Ballistic posted:Wife and I are looking at houses right now. We live in the neighborhood we plan on buying in, and the houses are overall really good quality, just a little older, mostly built in the 1950s. Anyway we saw a nice one today, but in the kitchen near the sink I saw this interesting device: I'm old enough to remember buying some of those things - though I can't say I've seen one for sale since the mid 80s. Maybe late 80s at the latest. oldskool posted:My high school had hanging outlets in the wood shop as a permanent installation. As long as you install them properly & have the proper strain relief in the system so you aren't hanging equipment solely by the cables I don't think it's against code to do. This is incredibly common in retail settings - particularly in grocery stores. Every grocery store with a real meat department will have a dozen (or more) of them behind the meat counter; there's usually a few in each "side" department (deli, prepared foods, produce, meat, basically the stuff not attached to the center aisles) so that they can set up displays and coolers easily. If they don't have something actively using that plug, and it's not behind a counter, they'll usually build a non-powered display around it. The center aisles typically have 120V outlets built into most/every endcap. Generally the hanging outlets would be 120V (in the US/Canada), though stuff behind, say, the meat counter, may have 208-277 (to power stuff like the bigass saws they use to slice up half of a dead cow into steaks and ribs).
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Apr 28, 2014 11:43
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Ferremit posted:fibre to the home internet FTTH is loving amazing. I would literally live next to a train yard if that was my only option to get FTTH.
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May 4, 2014 10:24
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NancyPants posted:The deposit is not for normal cleaning. It's not for shampooing the carpet between tenants or throwing up a fresh coat of paint or running a vacuum. If a deposit is used for cleaning costs, it needs to be for stains (actual stains, not wear and tear), repairs, or filth. The deposit is to fix what tenants have messed up through damage or neglect, not the process of poo poo getting old. For what it's worth, two of the three apartments I've rented returned ~98% of my deposit. The last one was because I neglected to clean the oven (totally my fault, forgot about it). They deducted $15 to clean it. They also cited urine in the carpet (my cat has never missed the litter box and it was a spot behind the couch, so who knows wtf), but since I'd been there so long, they said they had already budgeted new carpet/padding. They deducted $3 to "clean that portion of the concrete slab" (for that price, probably just sprayed sealant over it). Whatever, $18 out of a $500 deposit doesn't bother me. The other deducted a few bucks for burned out light bulbs that I didn't bother replacing. Also to clean the oven. I wasn't on good terms with the property management at either of these places when I moved out either. The first one because the new property owners gave up on maintenance in general, the second because it took 3 months to get my a/c fixed (took a letter to the state AG to get that taken care of - a/c was dripping water out of the ceiling [not the overflow, it was actually dripping through the plaster], ceiling eventually collapsed in the bathroom). I had one not only withhold the entire deposit, but followed by sending me a bill for $950. They claimed I "forfeited" my deposit by not turning in the keys or having the power disconnected, except I did, and claimed all of the wear/tear/cracks in the walls/broken heater (all noted upon move-in - I gave them 5 pages worth of crap on the move-in report) plus fire damage (kitchen light caught on fire, then a downstairs neighbor had a kitchen fire that left my unit with a lot of smoke damage) was my fault. Gave up fighting with them, let it go to collections, and it's now old enough that it'll be off my credit report in a couple of months (my last apartment was rented before it hit my credit). My credit was already wrecked by then, so all it ever cost me was the cost of changing my phone #. I thought I was on good terms with the management of the above one when I left. Guess not. They have an F rating with the BBB, big surprise. randomidiot fucked around with this message at 10:22 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 10:19
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Leperflesh posted:Have you guys seen that show filmed in Vegas with that guy who is a huge dick and his interior designer wife he's a huge dick to (but she has no concept of staying inside a budget) who buy, fix up and flip houses? Flipping Vegas. I want to kick that guy in the balls every time he opens his mouth. Or mentions his loving Porsche.
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Jun 3, 2014 13:26
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 Make an anonymous call to the power company. Preferably before you have to call the fire department.
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Jun 26, 2014 17:39
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Red_October_7000 posted:This is very simply where my understanding breaks down. Is there no qualitative difference between 240V derived from two 120V positives 180 degrees out of phase and 240V derived from a single phase, which is how I can only assume power is provided in countries where higher voltages are the norm? In countries with typical 240V, you normally get 50 hz, instead of 60 hz. There's also different fusing requirements for circuits. Switch mode power supplies in many electronics will often handle it fine, if rated for the voltage difference (my PC's power supply is rated 100-240V, 50-60 hZ). Anything like a microwave, appliances with motors, stuff with heating elements, alarm clocks, etc, will not like the difference between 50 hz and 60 hz. But assuming you're dealing with only 60 hz, there's no difference to the equipment about two 180 degree 120V lines vs one 240V and one neutral. North America uses 60 hz; most of the rest of the world uses 50 hz. Adding to the fun, all of Japan uses 100 volts. Half uses 50 hz, half uses 60 hz. And much of Japan uses US style 2 prong polarized plugs.
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Jul 5, 2014 13:38
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Motronic posted:It's a variance in what you're going to get at your house. I always figured the 130V bulbs were just another way of saying "contractor pack, long life".  The house I'm in now had several of the original 130V bulbs... from 1994. They were still working when I started swapping them out for CFLs about 5 years ago. Still have them in a box just in case a CFL craps out and I don't have another handy, plus we have a couple of fixtures that just don't look right with a CFL or LED.Both my UPS and Kill-A-Watt seem to agree that my household voltage ranges from 122-125, depending on the time of day. Sitting at 122 now; I assume because some generation capacity was idled due to it being late at night. It tends to creep up a little during the day, though in the hottest months it'll dip down to about 118 (about the same time ERCOT starts asking people to voluntarily shed loads).
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Jul 6, 2014 06:52
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kastein posted:Wild-leg delta is used in areas where you need 240 hot-hot 3phase, but also need to run 120 and 208 equipment and resi splitphase, preferably off the same transformer. At least, that is where I would use it. I would absolutely love to have it in my house for exactly this reason, and hopefully will get it set up if I ever build a workshop. There is a 3 phase power line right along where I would build it anyways. Every 3 phase I've ever seen in person has been 120/208/277/480, with some eliminating 480 for 240. Where I work now, we have 120/208/277. No 480 I can find; the HVAC and refrigeration units are 277, with most lighting and moderate loads (i.e. no refrigeration or heating) on 208. Our dishwasher pulls 55kW @ 208 going by the data plate. (mostly for the rinse heater)
randomidiot fucked around with this message at 12:25 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 12:22
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Bad Munki posted:Is "115V" somehow confusing? That's a monster truck of a unit anyway @ 15,000 BTU.  That's about as big as you're going to find that'll be a window unit... and/or run on a household circuit. Any bigger and you're looking at 208V+ units, usually a through the wall unit or split unit.That's enough to cool 800-1200 sq ft by itself. It'll run fine on a 15A circuit, as long as it's the only thing on that circuit - the inrush current on startup has gotta be insane on that thing. I have an 8k BTU portable unit (which is a pile of poo poo, never buy anything from Soleus Air, though at least the compressor and fan work properly), and turning it on is enough to make my PC's UPS flip out for a moment. It's also hilarious watching all the outside landscaping lighting go off for about half a second every time the compressor kicks on (the outlet the lighting is on was tapped into my bedroom circuit). Its running current is about half of that of the Sharp (a little over 6A). Some people do get confused when they see "115V"; most people in the US expect to see 120V, sometimes 110V. The majority of the country has 120-125 most of the time; I see 122-126 depending on the time of day. But anything rated 115 @ 60hZ will usually run fine on any commercially-supplied residential power in the US. randomidiot fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Jul 9, 2014 |
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Jul 9, 2014 09:26
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kastein posted:e: from an article I found on the data breach - the 3000 stolen credit cards for sale from the home depot branch (they're pretty sure there are more, but that's all that has made it out so far) had these billing ZIP codes. If your ZIP is among them, check with your bank and check your statement for suspicious transactions. From what I dug up, those are actually the zip codes of the stores that were compromised. And it's generally safe to assume someone shopping at one of those stores is from the same zip code or a neighboring one. ... every Home Depot I shop at resides in zip codes surrounding me. All of those zip codes are on the list. gently caress. My credit union tends to be pretty on the ball though, I get an immediate phone call for suspicious things (like when, for some reason, Steam tried to bill a game purchase from England instead of the US).
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Sep 13, 2014 06:57
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FCKGW posted:It appears to be the same malware and methods used in the Target hack. Yup. Both Home Depot and Target use Windows-based point of sale systems from NCR. Similar hardware, different user interface that likely relies on the exact same backend. A lot of grocery stores use a similar platform as well. I'd expect to see this stuff become more common - NCR is the second most common brand in large-scale point of sale, trailing behind IBM. NCR's systems tend to run Windows on the POS terminals (IBM used to rely on a System/390 backend for anything with more than a couple of registers, with the POS terminals running some flavor of *NIX; no idea on their newer stuff). The NCR stuff is a hell of a lot easier to use; IBM's registers have a steep learning curve, but tend to be a lot more powerful (and expensive). NCR stuff is based on common PC hardware, while IBM is ... special snowflake hardware. I think they've moved toward x86/x64 for their latest stuff, but there hasn't been a whole lot of change since the 80s on IBM's large scale stuff, aside from aesthetics and adding stuff like reward cards, integration for online order pickup, etc.
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Sep 16, 2014 07:26
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So I recently started working in a grocery store. It's been open about 3 years, and prior to opening, it had been another grocery store that had been closed for several years. There's 2 stories. The former grocery store chain usually had their offices on the 2nd floor, while the current one has just two very small offices. I wandered up there the other day and... it's just bare concrete and lighting, with some old dusty shelving units and not much else. I found a compressor room, with two doors. One that said "DO NOT CLOSE" on a hand-written piece of paper and was propped open with a chair. The other door also had a hand written note that said "DO NOT OPEN". I found the other side of the door. 
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Nov 22, 2014 16:00
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Wasabi the J posted:An old surveillance method was to have someone patrol a long room or catwalk with one-way glass overlooking the store. You can sometimes see the glass in older, bigger stores. I can't find good pics, but this is what kind of view it would provide: Exactly. This store was originally a 1970s Albertsons, which had the entire back wall made of one way mirrors overlooking the store - with all the offices back there - along with the restrooms. There's now two tiny offices - a cash office, and the "HR/Manager Office" - and they're both at the front on the ground floor. At one time, there was a complete 2nd story. When Wal-Mart built the place out, they removed a decent chunk of the 2nd floor and went with some super high end super efficient magic voodoo refrigeration equipment (standing in that room is like standing next to a few old fridges, instead of being deafened by 30 3 phase compressors - seriously, the footprint of all of the equipment is about like 4 household refrigerators). Originally, I think the compressors were on the ground floor, as is the case in most grocery stores. The 2nd floor was entirely offices. Now what's left of the 2nd floor is bare concrete and lights, the compressor room (with the door to nowhere), and mostly abandoned displays. I know this partly because I shopped at the place when it was an Albertsons, and partly because I interviewed with another Albertsons for a job, about the same age/layout, ages ago - I got a tour of the 2nd floor. Albertsons of those age placed the restrooms upstairs as well. The stairs are actually behind fire doors now (one is always propped open a little), with another set of fire doors just behind them. I guess they just like to pretend the upstairs doesn't exist. Baronjutter posted:Doors like that are really common for mechanical penthouses/lofts or what ever. It's usually a bigger door, but yeah it's just to make replacing the equipment up there easier. What I usually see on the other side though is a lack of hardware so you can't just accidentally open it thinking it's a normal door. If you want to open it you have to unlock it use a tool or re-install the hardware. They'll often have warning signs and caution strips along the floor. There used to be a complete second floor behind the scenes when it was an Albertsons. That was originally a closet or office of some sort. Seeing the construction techniques used in some of the remodeling is downright scary. Load-bearing concrete walls just hacked out, with rebar still sticking out ready to draw blood, is a decent example. There's no lock on the door at all. Just a piece of paper with a handwritten note stating "DO NOT OPEN" attached to the door with a piece of scotch tape. It opens just fine. There's also no room to get any equipment through that area. thespaceinvader posted:But you'd think instead of a sign they might, i dunno, board the loving door over, at least on the inside. A sheet of OSB isn't exactly expensive, and a sheet of hardboard is a couple of dollars. Which is WAAAY cheaper than the bill when some fuckwit ignores the sign and your insurance laughs in your face. Technically you have to go through a fire exit to even discover the second floor, but one of them is always propped open. The second floor seems to be largely forgotten - it's just concrete pillars/walls, the most basic of lighting, a loving shitload of cameras, and old displays/shelving units. I only found it because I saw a "emergency exit only" door propped open and stuck my head through, and decided to see where the stairs went. I no longer work there though.
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Dec 1, 2014 05:04
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Baronjutter posted:I know it's been talked to death but I would rather live on the street than ever buy into a HOA. I don't care if its $10 a year and run by chill dudes, all that can change. My dad and stepmother live in a HOA. A very relaxed HOA that basically just pays for median trees and the gates. At one time there was a security guard, but the builder went bankrupt in the mid 80s (dad/stepmom live in the model home for the neighborhood). My stepmother's dad is on the board (and lives across the street  ), and bitched me out for parking on the street when I was visiting a couple of years ago. There's nothing in the HOA rules about parking on the street, but he still thought it was wrong that I was parking on the curb. Said it made the neighborhood look "bad". My car was far newer than his; with fewer miles, and visibly in better shape... but his is a Lexus (with peeling paint and multiple dents). And I'm not an early person, while both my dad and stepmom are out the door by 6am (5am for dad). I offered to park it in his driveway instead, since they have a 3 car garage with 1 car. He didn't like that for some reason.Dad/stepmom have a 2 car garage, but it's a 2 door, with a 45 degree driveway. The one time I tried backing my dad's car out of the garage, I drove across the neighbor's yard and driveway (in my defense, it was a Prius, and I get all kinds of hosed up if I can't see the hood). Both of their cars have paint transfer from the garage door frames...ExplodingSims posted:Really? I find that hard to believe. If anything, I've heard that most A/Cs tend to be undersized, especially in like tract housing developments, due to cost cutting. FWIW, the original HVAC install in this house struggled to keep it below 80F in the summer. Still on the original air handler, the outside unit is the same tonnage (5.5), new coils, but we added a shitton of blown in insulation. It can actually maintain 73F inside all summer (even when it's 110 outside). And the furnace barely runs in the winter now. It was all insulation in our case, though we do have very high ceilings (even the bedrooms have 10 ft ceilings, living room is 18-20 ft). Zhentar posted:The horrors of oversizing are vastly overestated. You have to get at least into the 200% oversized range before short cycling really starts causing any problems at all. I used to live in an apartment with an oversized a/c. I'd guess it was 3/4 or 1 ton, based on how it ran and the physical size of the a/c unit. It was 600 sq ft. poo poo insulation, but it would run for less than 5 minutes at a time (usually 1-2 minutes even in August). My highest electric bill in the summer was less than $75, and it was closer to $20 in the winter. Middle floor + property-wide boiler for hot water with a circulation pump, which meant the kitchen and bathroom floors were almost orgamisc to walk on in the winter. The downside, of course, is it did absolutely poo poo for removing humidity. I'd just crank it down to 60 and toss on a hoodie if it got humid inside.
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Jan 23, 2015 13:48
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Baronjutter posted:Realtors are almost universally scum, a few tiers below used car salesmen. If you ever had a "good realtor" he was just a good actor. FWIW, my mother used to buy houses that needed work, we'd live in them for a couple of years while the 3 of us (mom, stepdad, myself, and contractors for anything we couldn't tackle) fixed up the house, then sell it for a decent profit. She used the same realtor for everything for over 15 years for both buying and selling, and still stays in touch with her. We moved out of that area 18 years ago, and the realtor is long retired (she's well into her 80s now, and also left the area). She may have been out of the norm, but she was always great to work with. tl;dr don't assume all realtors are scum, and if you find a good one, hang on to them as long as you live in the area.
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Mar 11, 2015 07:49
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Delivery McGee posted:They did the minimum the law requires here, and after a certain point we just gave up and gaffer-taped the caving-in ceiling tiles in the master bedroom. Texas leans toward the landlord on tenants' rights because people who rent are dirty poors. We could have called the county inspector in and had the place declared uninhabitable, but then we wouldn't have a place to live. I may or may not have called the Texas Attorney General over one apartment I lived in, along with city code enforcement. Texas requires that landlords repair a/c if the rental property includes a/c; my a/c worked, but water would pour out of the bathroom ceiling whenever it was on, and I'd been complaining for several months about it, along with the resulting mold. They also advertised the property as being gated, but the gates had been broken for over a year, and I had a letter from the management stating they had no intentions to ever fix them (yet continued to advertise it as gated on their own website). A/C was fixed a few days after the city showed up (which required ripping the ceiling out in the bathroom, replacing the drain pan in the HVAC unit, and replacing everything that showed a sign of mold - so basically most of the structure in the bathroom, along with 2 walls, with a code enforcement officer checking in daily), gates were fixed 2 weeks later, and I got CC'd a copy of the back and forth between the state attorney general and the management. They were supposed to pay for a hotel while the unexpected bathroom remodel was going on, but they refused to pay up front, and I couldn't pay for it myself. For some reason they refused to renew my lease the next year. v  v
randomidiot fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Mar 22, 2015 |
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Mar 22, 2015 08:18
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Collateral Damage posted:Because now that it's been "remodeled" they can have some other sucker pay a higher rent for it. That was 11 years ago; it still rents for $600/month, according to their website (which is what I paid from 02-04). It actually dropped down to a little over $500 for a bit, but with Toyota moving their US headquarters nearby, rents have shot up quite a bit in the area. They're one of the cheapest around here that isn't a complete slum. Funny enough, I'm looking at their website now - they've remodeled them, and during the remodel they ripped out the alarm systems, built-in microwaves (granted, an itty bitty 600 watt unit mounted under a cabinet), along with the stoves with a built-in grill (Jenn Air style, except made by GE), and also got rid of the nice variable-speed vent hoods. But it's also changed ownership 4 or 5 times since then.
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Mar 22, 2015 22:05
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I wish I only used 800 kWh a month.  I think our low record in the winter is about 900 - that's with a gas furnace, LED/CFL lighting in the entire house, very conservative thermostat settings, etc. Don't forget losses due to conversion. A really good inverter might top out around 85-90% efficiency when fully loaded (and dropping to 50% or less while lightly loaded), plus you're looking at a square sine wave instead of true with most inverters. Anything with a motor in it will draw more power than it would when on utility AC, if it's getting power from a square sine wave. This may also throw off anything that relies on a true sine wave for a clock (so a lot of AC powered clocks may be a bit off, especially an oldschool clock with a motor instead of electronics).
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Mar 25, 2015 07:33
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:Yeah I think some texas redneck has either only used car inverters, or solar inverters 5-10 years ago, both of which put out poo poo "modified" sine waves (IE square waves with a notch in them) and were 80% efficient at best. Good, long-term use installed inverters are much better now, though the lovely ones you buy for your car are probably still poo poo.  I was going on my own experience with switching power supplies and several UPS models. Ignore me.apatite posted:if you can't hear/smell the neighbor fart your houses are too far away from each other In one apartment I had, I could smell when my neighbor took a poo poo, and he could smell our  . It didn't help that our bathroom fans shared a common exhaust (yay late 60s construction).He also smoked out my apartment when he left something on the stove and went to work. Nobody in the building called 911, but when I got home I had 2 other neighbors run up to me and ask me to call 911 because of the smoke.  WHY THE gently caress DIDN'T YOU CALL THEM YOURSELF?! Wound up being a fire that would have been limited to the area around his stove had people actually called 911, but wound up gutting his kitchen and living room, and wound up leaving both of our apartments uninhabitable for several days. I got home a few minutes after people started noticing smoke. 
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Mar 28, 2015 06:14
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My room gets hot enough with 1 TV, a media PC, and an AV receiver. Add a fatass, humidifier, heated sheets, multiple game consoles, and bigass projector to it and it sounds like one hell of a sauna. The upside is at least he has enough room to move around in there. My bedroom is pretty cramped with a small desk and a double bed.
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Apr 1, 2015 05:02
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Laminator posted:I was looking at houses down in Austin and one of them was an old lady special, ugly as hell but looked like it was well-maintained. Thanks to this thread I remembered that some breaker panels were bad, but I couldn't remember which, so I snapped a picture... FWIW, I've lived in multiple apartments with Stab-Lok panels. Came home after a nasty storm to find a light haze in my late 80s apartment, and most of the breakers tripped (including the main ). Resetting any of them beyond the main resulted in a loud buzzing and an immediate trip (along with a puff of smoke from whatever surge protector had shorted).Not ALL Stab Lok panels are bad. Just most. The only damage was to every surge protector in the place (which shorted to ground, as designed - melting themselves and burning the carpet a bit), my DSL modem (which took a hit over the phone line I think, as my landline phone, router, and network port on my PC were also fried), and my microwave (not on a surge protector). The modem could still be plugged in, but would start smoking. I'd say Zinscos are far, far more dangerous, if nothing else, because the day I moved into an apartment with a Zinsco panel, the kitchen light caught on fire and the switch also melted and wouldn't turn off, and the breaker for that circuit melted as well. Fire inspector said the light fixture had had 100+ watt bulbs run in a 40 watt fixture, there was no insulation on any of the wires - they shorted against the fixture when I turned it on.
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Apr 16, 2015 09:46
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ductonius posted:I lived in a city that had snow six months of the year and the LED traffic lights had no problems because they all had sun visors on them which kept the snow off just fine. I'm not sure I've ever seen a traffic light that didn't have visors on it. Are there places where this isn't the case? Some (most?) visors are full circles, instead of having a cutout at the bottom. The bottom cutout will keep the lights pretty visible during snow, but reduces the effect of the visor when the sun is just below the light.
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May 11, 2015 11:02
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Laminator posted:I had a thought and went to look at the dishwasher... it was off. Flipping the switch ON, and the dishwasher light turns on. Apparently it's a common thing down here in Texas So far I've only run across those in Plano, never any other city in TX. And I know the house I'm in now has the dishwasher connected by a cord and outlet anyway, so it's not like it's difficult to secure power to it (just unplug it once it's been pulled out from under the counter). Though I've only lived in El Paso and a handful of cities in DFW.
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Jun 14, 2015 04:33
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30 Goddamned Dicks posted:Phone posing so no link, but I saw a report today that said the balcony was "for decorative purposes" and was pretty much explicitly never supposed to have more than one person ducking out for a quick smoke break on it. For what it's worth, there was a similar balcony collapse in a college town nearby. 3 people were on it. Management gave this statement to a TV station: quote:“It’s important to note that the balcony involved in this morning’s incident was a non-weight bearing structure,” said Christine Vogiatzis, general manager at The Grove. “It was a decorative piece that was originally installed to add to the building’s visual aesthetics.” They had full size doors leading out to these tiny rear end "balconies". If it was meant to be a non-weight bearing decorative piece, don't put a loving door in that opens to it. Especially when your target demographic is college students, and your apartment complex is walking distance from most of the bars in town. kastein posted:Better put backflow preventers on the hot/cold feeds to the shower if you intend to do that... unless you want the toilet filling with warmish water and the sink valves both having a mind of their own. Much like electricity, water takes the easiest path, if that means through the water heater, up the hot pipe, through the shower hot valve, and through the shower cold valve to the sink cold valve for 50% hot/cold coming out the cold valve, so be it. One restaurant I worked in always had issues with getting scalding hot water from the toilets, sinks, etc. Let me tell you, it wasn't fun taking a dump at work. ... they always left both valves on the mop sink wide open, and had a Y splitter on it with individual shutoffs (the kind you'd use to hook up 2 hoses or sprinklers to an outside spigot). I'd turn off the cold water at the mop sink every few days, things would be fine, then someone would think you needed warm instead of hot water for the mop bucket.
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Jun 25, 2015 07:37
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Enourmo posted:Wait, as in both faucets tied together into a single hose? No. Picture this:  But with your typical garden hose Y adapter on the end of it, the kind that includes its own valves. Since it's under constant pressure (due to the valves always being on, sometimes so long that they can't be turned back off without rebuilding the valve), the backflow prevention valve (whatever you call it) doesn't prevent water from moving between cold and hot.
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Jul 4, 2015 07:23
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We got a computer upgrade at work. Previously, anytime an order came in, a printer beeped and spat out a ticket. Now we have bump terminals (screens with a row of buttons under them). I noticed that one of the new outlet boxes not only was sticking way out from the wall, but had two single gang outlet covers on them. Boss gave me the okay to go get a double gang cover. Removed the single gang covers...  .... oh. Box is packed so full that I couldn't push that giant rear end wire nut back at all. And once I put the original duelling single gang covers back on, the outlet on the right was completely dead until I smacked it. We only plug a radio into that one now. And of course there's the whole "uh, doesn't commercial wiring require THHN or BX? How does that work with a plastic residential old work box?" (hint: it's crammed full of romex) Best part is we have no idea what breaker it's on, otherwise boss would just fix it himself. We have 1 giant panel (about half of it is doubles IIRC), plus 2 sub panels, and since the restaurant is ~30 years old, there's been a lot of hack jobs over the years - lots of outlets that don't have work, lots of 208/240/277 volt outlets that haven't had anything plugged into them in 15+ years, . I noticed yesterday that the breaker marked "service disconnect" is 100 amps (!!!!), and appears to be 2 phase (we have 3 phase service). That entire box was so hot that the enclosure itself was uncomfortable to touch, and all of the breakers were too hot to touch for more than a few seconds. Same with the one of the subpanels (which has 3 of its 4 breakers labeled "spare"). We're pulling enough power that I wouldn't want to even touch that 100 amp breaker without arc flash gear on, and I'm guessing the subpanels aren't even connected to it - or they are, and the 100 amp doesn't turn off the panel it's in. The service enters at the top of the panel, with the 100 amp at the bottom, and the conduit from that panel to the next subpanel being at the bottom. e: I just noticed those outlets are stamped 15 amp. There's not a single circuit in the restaurant with a breaker under 20 amps; there's several 50 amp breakers though.  randomidiot fucked around with this message at 06:24 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 06:16
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15 amp outlets on a 20 amp circuit? I know it used to be kosher in residential (probably still is), but I didn't think it was allowed in commercial.
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Aug 7, 2015 06:26
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froward posted:incoming insurance fraud, I'm calling it.. I doubt it. It's long, long, long depreciated (the store is 30 years old), and it's a cash cow for the owner (who is one of the larger franchise owners in the company). He's a cheap gently caress who always goes with the lowest bidder though... and, well, you may be onto something. No sprinklers, no fire alarm. I went outside today to take out the trash, like I do every day. All of the meters (along with a pad mount transformer leaning at a nice angle) are by the dumpsters - found the one for our suite. The disconnect was buzzing and hot to the touch, and the sticker on it claimed it was rated for 240V 100A, with a rusty padlock keeping it locked in the on position. Makes me wonder if it's even a 3 phase disconnect. I don't want to be anywhere near that thing if someone manages to shut it off, I'm guessing there's a lot more than 100 amps going through it - the meter (LCD display on it) showed a load of 37kW. I did notice that the lights (all of them - coolers, ceiling lights, menu board, etc) have stopped flickering at random since the new outlets went in, at least, so they probably had the cover off of the main panel at some point. randomidiot fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Aug 8, 2015 |
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Aug 8, 2015 07:55
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When the store I work in was "remodeled" a few years ago (read: customer facing side got a facelift), they got a modern VoIP phone system. Why they did this in a small pizza place is beyond me - nearly every phone has to be unplugged/plugged back in a couple of times a day (otherwise you get nonstop busy signals, the phone rings nonstop, the display stops working, and/or a combination of the above), and the server/host/whatever you call it ("SBX" according to the manufacturer) has to be power cycled a few times a month. It's all running over the original 70s/maybe early 80s wiring. Finally noticed this today, next to the phone system. There's no DMARC outside that I've been able to find, except for a single line one for the building-wide (exterior) camera system (which has a DSL connection). 3 huge punchdown blocks near this for a store with 4 phones, 1 fax machine, DSL shared with the fax line, and 3 phone lines though! The building dates to the 1970s, so there's probably some kind of dmarc somewhere, it's just hidden. I.. don't think that's an approved grounding method. 
randomidiot fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 05:53
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StormDrain posted:And your stove doesn't fit flush against the wall, that's a pet peeve of mine. On top of what Ashcans said, the plug for an electric stove is at least a couple of inches deep. Electric stoves often can't sit flush because of that. And if the house was originally set up for a gas range, the outlet box for the stove may be surface mount, which brings it out a couple of more inches (minimum).
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Nov 30, 2015 10:36
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:My mother has a cooktop that's 2 gas burners and 2 induction or something like that. She remodeled the kitchen within the past 4 years and most of it came from IKEA. IKEA in the UK, mind. FWIW, IKEA branded appliances sold in the US are pretty much all made by Whirlpool. No idea in the UK though; I don't think Whirlpool is nearly as well known there? Platystemon posted:I rarely need anything stronger than alcohol to clean my glass cooktop. v Have a glass gas range here - exposed burners, but the rest is glass. Usually just takes a bit of glass cleaner for the majority of it (Stoner's Invisible Glass - it makes Windex look like water), as long as we clean it at least once a week. The actual grates get cleaned with fire (torch that poo poo.. outside). The surrounds around the burners/under the grates get soaked for hours then scrubbed about once or twice a year. And we cook a LOT.
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Dec 3, 2015 10:27
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