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Both my boiler and hot water heater will need to be replaced soon, so I'm looking into combi-boilers that do both, provide hot water for heating but also act as a tankless water heater. Seems like having a single unit removes some of the disadvantages when comparing tankless vs tanked just for hot water supply.
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Apr 24, 2021 22:17
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:49 |
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My inspector recommended a contact voltage tester as well for our older home. He said it can be good for detecting messed up ground situations - touch one lead to the live plug and another to the screw on the plate or the box itself.
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Apr 26, 2021 15:53
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Queen Victorian posted:Honeywell T87. You know poo poo is serious when a product has its own Wikipedia article.
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Apr 27, 2021 23:34
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My coworker had to go through a ton of nonsense to get his LG Smart washer app to actually work, including things like location permissions on his phone. He sent me a screenshot of the app, once he finally got it to the point where he could get notifications from the machine, the app itself was also covered in ads.
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Apr 28, 2021 19:25
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H110Hawk posted:Also lol at having an app for your washing machine. mutata posted:I just set a timer. v Yeah that's me, basically. I'm quite happy with our commercial washer from 1998 that's still running strong (except it broke when the inspector checked it! But I'm still thinking it will be an easy fix that I just haven't quite gotten to yet) and just setting a timer (on my Google Home, I'm not a total Luddite!)
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Apr 28, 2021 21:23
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I'm also on team radiator. We've lived here for 6 years and love the radiators. Now that we own or we'll be doing mini splits for cooling, but I can't imagine wanting to get rid of the radiators. Especially now it looks like you can get all sorts of fancy zone stuff in new systems. Which we'll need, since our current boiler is from the 60s.
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May 9, 2021 13:50
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I'm a radiator haver in Minnesota, so it gets cold here. We've got steam radiators with valves on each one, and so when we first moved in there was a little bit of tweaking on all the valves to get it to the point where ~67 at the thermostat was going to be about the same temperature in all the rooms.
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May 10, 2021 04:21
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I think there's a definite Goldilocks thing with contractors. I had that exact same thought, my normal methods are useless, because the slicker the website the higher the markup, or potentially a lower quality of work and they have to work hard on advertising because they're not getting word-of-mouth business. I asked for some recommendations from friends, and got a few plus found another company that was pretty big and slick but I wanted to give it a try. Project is a cracked cast iron vent stack in the basement, it's a 112-year-old house. It's a big crack, it extends up into the ceiling of the basement, so the repair job is a bit tricky, have to go into the walls (thankfully there's easy access from a closet up above. I called on place that was recommended, they've got a website with just a phone number, looks like it might just be a guy in a truck, or maybe a couple of trucks. The number didn't pick up, I left a message never heard back. Too small. The big slick place came by today. You call them up and you get a call center. I get the appointment scheduled (it was this morning), I get a few automated texts leading up to the appointment, I get confirmation of the time via text last night, and I get a text when he's on his way including a URL that lets me track his location so I know exactly where he is. He does the estimate on an iPad (while sitting out in his truck) by picking out a bunch of stuff to add to the quote. They also want to sell me their monthly service plan where I pay $10 a month but the call-out fee is waived. I get a quote of $3200-$8800 depending on scope of work. They're too big, and that's reflected in the price. They're a company that's grown to service the entire metro area, so there's a big overhead of business infrastructure there. Called a local place. Local as in, they're right down the street, about a mile away, and located right in the heart of the city rather than out in the far-flung suburbs. I know they've done work in the house, the water heater from the PO had their sticker on it. I call them up, I get an answer from someone in the office (no "your call may be monitored or recorded blah blah" nonsense, just phone rings and a person picks up). Get the diagnostic scheduled, he comes in, takes a look, explains that even though he can't be sure how far up the crack goes, because of the nature of cast iron it's very unlikely it goes up any farther than can be accessed in the closet. He spends a few minutes with me in the basement looking at some papers he brought with him (presumably pricing info) and writes me up a bid on a piece of carbon paper for $1600. Just right. So I'm going with the local place, and that will be my plumber going forward. And boiler maintenance/replacement most likely, because they do that as well.
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May 20, 2021 20:17
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There are pros you can hire (look for wildlife removal). I'm having someone come on Monday to look a look at some squirrels in the attic. $249 to come out and do the inspection and figure out where they're getting in, $650 to trap and remove the animals, and then when they do the inspection they'll give a price for sealing the attic up. I've actually got some young squirrels up there, and if they catch one and find she's nursing they'll let it go and wait until she's not. Because if she's nursing the babies won't move into a trap and just die. So they'll let them get old enough to move and leave on their own before they seal it up.
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May 23, 2021 03:50
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I need to drill a hole in my kitchen floor for an ice maker water supply. I'm as sure as I can be (without cutting out a piece and sending it to be tested) that the sheet laminate has asbestos in it. I'm aware of the shaving cream method for controlling the asbestos while I drill, but I'm wondering if I need to do anything to the hole to "seal" it once I'm done to keep the supply line from knocking loose any asbestos when it bumps up against the edge?
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May 23, 2021 16:34
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FCKGW posted:I bought a Samsung french door fridge that lasted 2 years until the water dispenser broke so they sent a tech who said there's foam blocking the vents (???) and deemed it irrepairable so they issued me a complete refund. This is why I paid $440 for a 5-year warranty from the appliance store for my $1710 fridge, I absolutely do not want to be worried about dealing with this poo poo.
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May 24, 2021 23:27
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Lol new fridge got delivered today. Had to disassemble 3 doors in the house to get it in, and turns out one of the door switches is busted.
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May 26, 2021 01:14
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Window chat, I've got old pre war wood windows, and some old (but not as old as the wood windows) aluminum storm windows. Upon reflection, it might be the storms that I hate more than the wood windows. I need to replace one storm anyway (bullet damage, lol). Good Larson storm windows appear to be under $200 a piece and it seems like removing the old storms and putting in new ones is a DIY job so it would only be a few thousand for the whole house. And assuming I'm correct that Larson is a good brand, I'd get some energy efficiencies out of it as well. Am I crazy or is this a good idea?
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Jun 3, 2021 20:52
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Steam chat: I had a plumber from a local place I trust to look at my water heater, and mentioned I wanted to replace my steam boiler with a combi-boiler. The same company also does HVAC, and he said new steam systems come with a bunch of electronics ("$5000 worth") that break all the time and require a ton of maintenance. So he recommended converting to hot water as well if I was going to replace the boiler. I really like our 112 year old radiators and the heat they put off so I'd really rather keep it as steam so I need to learn some more. And btw this is in Minnesota so we know cold.
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Jul 12, 2021 16:44
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Motronic posted:38 lbs is no big deal, but see my edit about the kinds of people you need to find to do this work. If something like that works for drywall, it should be just fine for mounting to my lath+plaster+wood panelling walls, right?
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Jul 22, 2021 18:04
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My house has some old (presumably original 1909) windows, and some newer vinyl windows, and I absolutely cannot notice any significant difference between them. Granted I've got godawful ugly aluminum storm windows on all the old windows. And the house itself is covered in vinyl siding anyway.
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Jul 27, 2021 04:31
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I had an eye exam a few weeks ago, I have the kind of vision that people pay thousands in Lasik to get!
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Jul 27, 2021 13:21
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Anyone happen to have any knowledge or experience with Panasonic WhisperGreen Select fans? Along with insulating and air sealing the house (which I'm having professionals do) I've been given the advice to install a continuous ventilation fan in the bathroom, since after air sealing the house won't breathe as much on its own. I was looking at the Panasonic WhisperGreen Select anyway, then I got someone to throw a continuous ventilation fan on a larger quote they gave me (that I didn't end up going with) and they were going to do the Panasonic WhipserGreen Select, so I feel like I'm on the right track there. This is something I feel confident I can do on my own. To run it in continuous mode, there's a module that can be attached that will ramp up the fan to full speed on a signal from a light switch, then turn it off after a determined period of time. To attach it to a light switch you run power directly to the fan, then you connect two red signal wires from the unit to the switch, such that flipping the switch completes the circuit and activates the higher fan mode. What I can't figure out from watching their videos or reading their documentation is how the switch interacts with that timer. Does the timer start after the switch is turned off? Does the timer start as soon as the switch is turned on (meaning you'd have to flip the switch off and then on again to restart the fan)? E: Typing all that out made me search on YouTube and I found a video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAy7YDM0Nuw. It appears it's the first option I described, where it runs at high speed while the switch is on, and then when you turn the switch off, it continues to run at high speed for the time set on the timer, and then when time is up it goes back to low speed. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Jul 30, 2021 |
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Jul 30, 2021 22:12
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Would that impact the warranty on that unit? To me the warranty is one of the nice things about Mitsubishi, and I wouldn't want to lose that peace of mind just to save some cash. Also something to keep in mind, it's not "plumbers" that install it, it's HVAC technicians, so just because he's an ace plumber doesn't mean he'd be an ace HVAC installer. But yeah, that poo poo's expensive when you look at what an installer will quote you vs what you can get it for online.
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Aug 3, 2021 00:11
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I'm assuming there's no safety reason why you shouldn't mix high and low voltage in a conduit, is it mostly banned because your high voltage stuff will mess up the low voltage signals?
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Aug 3, 2021 18:51
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Yup, that sounds bad!
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Aug 3, 2021 19:03
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And here I feel like I'm going crazy running two runs of Cat5e from one end of the house to the other. Because my fiber modem enters at the front of the house, and I've put my wifi router at the back of the house (so I get signal in my garage), but I have my "server" in the same room as where the fiber modem is. So I'll need a cable running from the modem in the front to the router in the back, then another cable running from the router back to my dumb switch in the front. My previous plan was to use a little hole in the kitchen floor behind the fridge to run some cables down to the unfinished basement. But after having electricians rewire the house and just sort of nonchalantly cutting holes in the walls for new outlets, I realized I can do that too! So now I've realized it's not actually that hard, especially with a fish tape. So time to put that in the wall (and I found that there exists a dual voltage old work box that I could potentially even use to put the jacks on the same plate as the power plug there (but keeping the wires isolated in the wall!). And then since my fridge is currently fed by a water line coming up through a hole in the floor as well, I think I'm gonna do that right and put a shutoff/hammer arrestor box in the wall. FISHMANPET fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Aug 4, 2021 |
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Aug 4, 2021 16:27
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I would love to switch to some electric appliances for b) reasons as well, but we've got a rock-solid boring commercial-grade gas dryer that will probably last forever, and my wife doesn't like the idea of an induction stove. And then since I'm in Minnesota, going electric for heat and hot water is absurdly expensive for now.
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Aug 4, 2021 20:36
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Elder Postsman posted:Ok, so the floor drain in my basement bubbles up a bit - never overflowing, water level just rises a bit, then bubbles and goes back down - when I do laundry. Washer drains into a utility sink that's right above the floor drain. In the kitchen, directly above the laundry room, the non-garbage disposal sink backfills a bit when I run the garbage disposal. Other than these two things, all the drains in the house work normally, no slowness or anything. cruft posted:I have the exact same problem in the kitchen sink and I just figured it was time to pull the snake out again. I had something similar in my basement. Floor drain right above laundry sink, which the washer drained into. Laundry sink drained into a large verticle pipe right behind it. Floor drain was slow, until I had some work done and some crud got into the drain, then it was fully backed up. I wasn't able to snake it myself, so called a pro. In my case, the floor drain was poorly installed so it didn't have much slope, so stuff could easily get caught up in there, but he snaked it and it was fine, so it looks like every $10 years we'll need a pro to come and snake it (or we buy a heavy duty snake). So anyway, see if you can figure out what's in common between your clogged drains, and that laundry sink, if you can identify a common point in the drain system that's just those things and nothing else, it might just be a clog that needs to be blasted out.
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Aug 5, 2021 20:18
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Vim Fuego posted:https://www.homedepot.com/p/GREAT-STUFF-16-oz-Pestblock-Insulating-Foam-Sealant-with-Quick-Stop-Straw-99053993/207077796 Frequently Bought Together: Steel Wool
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Aug 7, 2021 03:42
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I had the mythical "extension cord running up from the basement to power the dishwasher going on" and electricians fixed it while they dealt with all the knob & tube, no switch (in Minnesota). Mine was extra fun because it wasn't actually an "extension" cord, the dishwasher was hardwired into cord that ran into the basement and was plugged into an outlet there.
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Aug 7, 2021 17:45
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I believe Ikea themselves also offer some design services, though obviously not as robust as even something like that IKD (that looks cool, I'm keeping that in my back pocket!). I'm somewhat in the same boat, though nowhere near ready to do anything about it yet. But our current layout is kind of bizarre, but I've been living with it so long that I can't really envision another way to use the space, so I'm hoping to someday be able to show a "blank" space to somebody and see what they come up with.
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Aug 16, 2021 17:49
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I'm the exposed joist hangers under the stairs in the living space, in picture 24.
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Aug 19, 2021 19:04
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Seems like that would really only work if your hot water heater is like, directly connected to that pipe. Mine takes about a minute to really got hot, so probably by the time hot water started coming through, i'd be done. But now you're all giving me horrible ideas for cutting in another bathroom outlet near the toilet JUST IN CASE.
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Aug 20, 2021 23:17
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In my 1909 house they were able to remove all the knob & tube with very little damage. Everything upstairs they could reach from the attic and fish down, and on the main floor they could fish up from the basement. In the kitchen they had to pull off one "tile" in my ceiling to make the transition from horizontal to vertical, and in the entry way they had to cut 4 holes in the ceiling to be able to run from the horizontal feed up from the basement to the porch and living room fan. If my floor joists had run front to back rather than side to side, it would have been a lot more holes. So it really does depend on the the very intricate specifics of your house. And they can have a general idea how they'd do it, but some of that stuff (like which way the joists run) they're not going to be able to really be sure about until they actually get into the walls. But if you get good people they should be able to do it without ripping down walls.
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Sep 23, 2021 05:03
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We'd been renting our house for over 6 years before we bought it, so upon learning that there were 2 hot knob & tube wires feeding 2/3rds of the house that the insulation had been all chewed off by squirrels. Yeah we were a little spooked about it.
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Sep 23, 2021 21:14
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Sirotan posted:I have one of these plugged in near my furnace, might be what you're looking for: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B00002N86A/ I just bought some of these to put on each floor, even though we already have combo CO/smoke detectors, because I too just want to know the levels to get some sense of what's happening, especially considering my boiler is 60 years old now.
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Sep 23, 2021 23:03
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I'm doing a 2 head system for $11k, so yeah $30k does not seem all that crazy for 5 heads.
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Sep 24, 2021 15:11
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Oh wow you're getting a service upgrade on top of it? That's a great deal (unless you're just talking about a sub-panel off your existing panel). I had my 1965 100 amp service upgraded to 200 amp service (because I needed a bigger panel anyway, and the service mast/entrance needed to be replaced anyway) and that alone was about $10k. My original Minisplit quote had an extra $600 to put in a subpanel for the mini-split since my breaker was full, but now with the big new panel I was able to cut that off at least.
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Sep 24, 2021 16:28
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Gah I wish my yard "weeds" were just dandelions and violets, I've got these pretty gnarly things that grow a couple of feet high and tower over all the grass.
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Sep 29, 2021 16:28
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Oh I've got volunteer trees as well, but these are... something different.
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Sep 29, 2021 16:39
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In the vein of the thread title, I had my attic insulated yesterday, but before that, I had to get all the old nasty (chewed up and peed on by squirrels) batt insulation. I literally couldn't pay the insulation company to do it (at least not in any reasonable time frame) so I spent the weekend bagging and hauling insulation out of the attic. As a reward for that, I finished up this project:  I built the table to hold a tool chest to store my tools, plus storing other tools and battery chargers on it. But there was no power there. And I realized standing there that the primary light in that spot was behind you, so you'd be casting a shadow into the toolbox if you looked for tools. I also found some pegboard organizers that I somehow inherited along the way, so I decided to kill two birds with one stone, install outlets on the wall as well as a switched light fixture. And the table is firmly anchored to the wall so it can't tip over. Went from an open wall with studs 4 foot on center (had to install a new stud in the middle to support the pegboard) to all of this. Only thing left is the light - turns out the lamp base I got is defective and doesn't have a ground terminal, so I need to swap it out. The one just hanging there is installed just to ensure the switch works (it does!), but I need to swap it out with one that has a grounded plug on it. I also picked up a 3000 lumen stoplight that I might put in instead of a bulb (why I need the grounded outlet in the lamp base) but I must say, I'm pretty proud of it all. Now I'm eagerly awaiting my Harbor Freight tool chest to come in so I can start organizing all my loose small tools. And figuring out what I actually want to put up on the pegboard.
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Sep 29, 2021 17:45
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I don't know anything about thermodynamics or energy but I've always wondered if there was some way to put a little extra heat in the cold water rather than trying to make the hot water even hotter. In the winter here the "cold" water is around 35 degrees, It seems like mixing 140 tank water with 35 cold water to get to 98 degrees at the tap would use more energy than mixing 120 tank water with cold water that's been heated to 55 degrees to get to 98 at the tap. I'll have to look at a thermostatic mixing valve though, my water heater is set around 140ish now and we don't have kids but occasionally I gently caress up and turn the tap all the way to "hot" to wash my hands and let it run so long it actually gives me the full 140 degree water and I get a nice little surprise. But any cooler and we have trouble taking showers in the winter.
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Oct 27, 2021 19:26
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A word of warning, the 888LM and 889LM are a bit of a shitshow. I think the 888LM had bad capacitors, to the point where if you had one you could get a voucher from Liftmaster to get a free 889LM replacement. And between the original 888LM I got, the warranty replacement they sent me when I couldn't get it to work with my supposedly compatible, and then the free 889LM, I haven't been able to get any of them to actually work with my door. I ended up just buying a new opener that had MyQ built in because that was way less hassle than fighting with that drat 888/889 nonsense yet again. And now my new opener has motion detection in the wall panel, so as soon as I open the door and put my foot through the door the light turns on.
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Oct 28, 2021 18:42
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 03:49 |
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If you've been blessed with GFCI breakers for (nearly) every circuit like I have, you can use your tester and hit the GFCI test button to trip the circuit and see which breaker it is.
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Nov 3, 2021 22:02
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