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DTaeKim posted:Looks like some birds took up residence inside my house. What's the best course to take care of the problem? One way excluder, wait 72hrs or so for every bird to gtfo, then seal it up.
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Aug 8, 2023 19:53
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Spikes32 posted:What's the best way to secure windows you want to keep cracked open at night? Stick in the sill the best method or something more involved? Check and see if you windows have built in limit stops: 
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Aug 9, 2023 02:47
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MarcusSA posted:Ok I gotta ask what do you do with that? Like the radon of 3 looks bad but uh then what? That's my question with indoor air quality monitors in general. Like ok... what now?
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Aug 16, 2023 12:08
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Outside of the fraudulent sensors that fake the data from one or two unrelated sensor chips, the trouble is these devices pack a diverse array of sensors in them and each variable and sensing method is going to have unique accuracy/drift concerns. Temperature is going to be pretty darn good because stable voltage references are relatively cheap and reliable. "VOC" is going to be bullshit because "VOC" is a massive class of compounds and anything short of a gas chromatography or mass spectrometer is making assumptions about what you expect to see and will be inaccurate outside those assumptions. The other sensors are going to be somewhere in between. All of them are going to be slow as gently caress to respond due to the devices being passive. FWIW Airthings apparently makes a commercial version of their radon sensor, but it requires annual calibration/recertification. They also say that they use a GRIMM system as a calibration reference for their PM2.5 sensors but I don't see any way to send a residential system in for recalibration. edit: Basically besides for temperature and maybe CO2/CO none of the sensors should be showing more than two significant figures at best or a "low", "moderate", "high" at worst. Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Aug 16, 2023 |
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Aug 16, 2023 18:02
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Are the installers one Mitsubishi's list of "Diamond" contractors? If so it might be worth reaching out directly to Mitsubishi with a "hey your certified installers are hacking together cables then abandoning customers" message. That has a tendency to start things moving.
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Aug 17, 2023 22:15
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That's a solved problem but it requires your agent to do more than the bare minimum and thus the situation you're in.
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Aug 24, 2023 20:56
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I bet the agent knows drat well how to turn off the any-time access but doesn't want to because then they would have to approve each appointment and those notifications would be annoying.
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Aug 24, 2023 21:36
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They set up a fake escrow company and then pressure the marks into depositing a sizable chunk of cash into "escrow" as quickly as possible by claiming others are going to beat them. https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/...13-e3f06b89b3ad
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Aug 25, 2023 01:39
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For the longest time I thought the people down the street were crafty af for converting a washing machine tub into a fire pit 
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Sep 3, 2023 21:18
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I don't think I've ever seen a Costco without a huge line at the gas pumps, it always seemed like a "you might save money but you'll pay with your time" deal.
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Sep 5, 2023 19:04
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Girl Scouts tried to mandate in-person sales for the longest time, but iirc a couple of families decided to ignore that mandate and absolutely cleaned up to a degree that their success attracted glowing press about the Entrepreneurial Spirt™️ of the girls which forced the GS organization's hand.
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Sep 18, 2023 16:39
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Look underneath them. Quartz is usually conspicuously marked by the manufacturer.
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Sep 30, 2023 22:24
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In general the people who you want to look at poo poo don't have to advertise to get business so they are hard to find and booked out for weeks. On the other hand people who you don't want to work on it advertise everywhere and are immediately available. It sucks but word of mouth tends to be the best way to find good help. The best contractors tend to travel in packs because they like to work with competent people, so if you find one good one it is a good idea to ask them for recommendations for other trades.
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Oct 5, 2023 10:59
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Deer might be decent swimmers but they are above all else dumb as poo poo. I would not be at all surprised if one managed to drown itself by swimming out into a pond then not being able to get back out before getting exhausted.
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Oct 11, 2023 11:12
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Here's the only real solution https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-snm3VYzTQE
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Oct 14, 2023 22:06
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George H.W. oval office posted:I lived next to Sun City in the 90s and I made the mistake of trying to do a Boy Scout fundraiser there exactly once. Buncha angry rear end olds that won’t help a kid out. gently caress Sun City Yeah these developments are parasitic at best. The developers sell the plans to a small municipality with promises of tax revenue only for the residents vote as a bloc against any spending that doesn't directly benefit them and only them and vote against any taxation whatsoever. The residents are also typically extremely hostile to anyone not in their private club and are skinflints when it comes to spending in local stores. Doing the stack of dollars when eating out, haggling over expired coupons, just the worst kind of customers out there. It was very very funny when Georgetown TX became such a large bedroom community for Austin that the voters in Sun City TX got outvoted and a major school construction bond passed for the first time in forever. Boomer/Silent assholes lost their goddamn minds. Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Oct 23, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 17:16
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Is there more to tell? It was mostly confined to the comment sections of local news outlets and such, which the Sun City residents all hung out in because they had nothing better to do than be assholes to everyone else. The comment sections are long gone as pretty much every news site has realized they are cesspools.
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Oct 23, 2023 17:51
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Hed posted:Update on the NAR Lawsuit: Jury Finds Realtors Conspired to Keep Commissions High, Awards Nearly $1.8 Billion in Damages. "The verdict, which hands loss to brokerages and industry trade association, could upend the home-sale industry" Washington Post free link: https://wapo.st/47cJZwz
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Oct 31, 2023 23:29
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Don't rent appliances, it is almost always an extraordinarily bad deal. Just set an automatic transfer to your savings for $15/wk or so to cover annual maintenance plus sock some away for eventual replacement.
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Nov 6, 2023 23:58
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Happy carefree relaxing weekend everyone!  Turned out to be this fucker right here, conveniently positioned right next to the tub at the faucet end and at a low point in the tile floor, but hidden behind the door when you open it. 
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Nov 12, 2023 19:41
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Rabidbunnylover posted:My parents did a big remodel in the early 2000's and the contractors installed CAT5 in a bunch of rooms, but rather than running it all to a network closet, they just ran it between each adjacent room, so the whole house is daisy chained. They actually made junction box mounted network switches for exactly this situation! They sit in the box with two ports on the back, four ports on the front, and are POE powered. One of the two ports in the back is plugged into a POE source and the network switch passes the power through to the other back port to power the next device in the chain. Unfortunately they were for use in commercial environments and were about $120 each. It looks like they no longer make them because by this point every place has pretty much been expected to have renovated and rerun their network cabling and there's no real home market anymore since mesh networking has taken off.
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Nov 15, 2023 17:28
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Dropping' a log.
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Nov 28, 2023 21:51
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Yeah I got an alert from my Ecobee right quick when the AC didn't kick on one afternoon (because the power was out and Gary had bought an undersized standby generator that couldn't run the AC compressor). The alert was a simple "there may be a problem, here's a graph showing why the alert triggered, probably should check on that" type deal though.
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Nov 30, 2023 01:26
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IMO the idea network cable distribution is at least one drop per section of wall which isn't interrupted by a door and which is large enough for something to be placed against. Basically the thinking is it's fairly easy to run a network patch cable along a floorboard, but a real pain in the rear end to go across a door opening. So a bedroom with a closet would get at least two drops, a bedroom with a closet and bathroom three, and my family room at least four as can be seen in this lovely sketch:  Note that you don't need power on each wall since POE can send plenty through to power an access point or smart speaker. Also you don't need to actually light up all that cable, just have it well labeled and ideally all terminated a punch panel so that you can easily hook up any particular jack if you want.
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Dec 6, 2023 03:13
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Hadlock posted:It's free money That does seem high. Is it possible that your garage is so well sealed to the outside that the combustion air for your appliances is mostly being replaced from the house's conditioned air? I know that the reason our mudroom (10'x9'x10') gets so cold when the furnace is running and the door to the rest of the house is closed is that the furnace is primarily pulling air from the (vented, cold) crawlspace.
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Dec 17, 2023 20:29
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skybolt_1 posted:To be fair, my comparison was going from "balky, cantankerous 22 year old Coleman with a history of carb failures" to "brand new Champion inverter" so I am def. going to be biased. You are correct tho, for the money I could have gotten a generator that put out like 18kw and run my house plus my neighbors. Using the full range of variable speed can be an issue if you're running large inductive loads. At our old place we had a Generac 3kW inverter generator which was unable to start an older refrigerator when in Eco mode (the variable speed option) but had absolutely zero trouble when running at a higher RPM. Additionally some inverter generators with electric start require an at least semi-charged battery to be present to run, even if you intend to pull start them. Some manufacturers rig the ignition system to be controlled by the inverter/engine controller, and I guess that the engine doesn't spin fast enough for long enough in a pull start to power up those circuits. A 12V jump pack for a car works just dandy though, and once the generator is running and producing power it will sustain itself without a battery. Just some things to watch out for.
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Dec 20, 2023 16:01
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 dammit Gary! 
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Dec 27, 2023 13:51
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Also, what is everyone else's big year end annual maintenance checklist? I've got:
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Dec 27, 2023 16:51
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You can get cheap-rear end WHARGARBL brand pre-rinse style designs for $100 or less if you want. https://a.co/d/6HJxjsG
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Dec 30, 2023 18:06
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PerniciousKnid posted:I unplugged the ejector for an hour to see if it was just pumping the same water repeatedly through the faulty check valve, and it ran more than twice as long when I plugged it back in. So I'm not really sure what to think about that, I sorta figured it would just run for the normal 5 seconds. That indicates that it is at least mostly re-pumping the same water over and over. If it was actually collecting water that needed pumping you would expect it to run nearly 10x as long since it missed 10 cycles. The 2x extra pump time could be chalked up to more of the already pumped water draining back in. A check valve would be a very good idea.
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Jan 9, 2024 19:46
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A part of me felt silly about the generator install.  Don't feel silly anymore!
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Jan 10, 2024 02:17
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Perhaps you could do what this person in my city's Reddit did to fix their float switch issue:
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Jan 10, 2024 03:44
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PerniciousKnid posted:What kind of generator? Kohler 20RCA, set up with a service entrance transfer switch and running on natural gas.  Well, that's gonna take a bit of time to fix
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Jan 10, 2024 18:17
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We do a load of laundry nightly. While that might seem excessive, between normal household stuff (hand towels, bath towels, pillowcases, sheets, etc) that needs washing and the trail of mess left by a 3.5yo there's always something that can be thrown in to get the previous day's clothes and pajamas up to "medium-small load" size. That is kind of ideal because that size load dries quickly and completely on medium-low heat, and our front loading high efficiency washer adjusts the water automatically to the load size so we aren't wasting tons of water. We put away laundry... maybe once a fortnight or so lol.
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Jan 17, 2024 14:05
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Duckman2008 posted:A physical book is def the best password manager, assuming you use unique passwords and make them challenging. That said, the downside is obviously super inconvenient. This is from a couple days ago, but I just wanted to mention that one of the understated benefits of a password manager that is integrated with your browser or phone's operating system is that it will freak out and throw a warning if you try to tell it to enter your login/password into a domain/website other than the login portal for which the password was created. It is an additional, and quite effective, line of defense against falling victim to a malicious website impersonating the website you thought that you were logging into.
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Jan 18, 2024 16:59
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As it happens I just got my insurance policy renewal documents yesterday and I noticed that they basically disclaim all plumbing/HVAC related coverage for damage due to freezing or leaks if the house is unoccupied for four days and you don't either shut off the water and drain the system or "maintain heat in the dwelling". I think that 50°F is a bit low for the furnace though, I would aim for somewhere between 55-60° just so that a cold poorly insulated spot in the wall or crawlspace doesn't get to freezing temperature. Also our insurance only went up 100 bucks a year despite an automatic adjustment for replacement costs going up. Not bad at all. Shifty Pony fucked around with this message at 19:17 on Jan 18, 2024 |
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Jan 18, 2024 19:15
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Reach out to your water utility, they might be willing to credit an approximate amount for the leakage (or at least not charge you sewage on it).
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Jan 26, 2024 18:03
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I'm wondering if someone installed a French drain and routed it to the ejector pump to try and save money.
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Jan 26, 2024 21:01
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I think a lot of the "no soap on cast iron" stuff comes from old soap formulations which had significant amounts of lye still present. The surfactants in something like Dawn won't do anything to seasoned cast iron even if you soak it, but lye will actively eat away the coating in a matter of seconds via alkaline hydrolysis.
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Jan 30, 2024 22:00
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Newer Bosch dishwashers have what they call CrystalDry instead of the pop-open thing. It removes moisture from dishes by cycling air through a bunch of desiccant crystals (which also releases heat) and back to the space in the dishwasher. The dishwasher renews the desiccant as part of the wash cycle by heating it up to drive out the water, which condenses into the water being sprayed around in the tub. Apparently it works fantastically right up until there is slightly more water caught in nooks of washed dishes than the desiccant can handle at which point everything is left kind of uniformly not-dry because there isn't any ability to extract water and there's no more heat. The whirlpool that I have uses a fan to circulate room through the heated tub during the dry cycle and does a great job, better than cracking open the door.
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Feb 2, 2024 19:59
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