Few furnace filters, except expensive HEPA filters, do much about trapping or killing germs. Electronic air filters will reduce somewhat the air born germ count because the high electrical voltages do kill some of the bacteria passing through them and probably all that is caught on the plates. ...
So what is a barometric damper? That is the strange swinging plate you find somewhere between your oil furnace or boiler and the chimney. Its function is to allow just the right amount of air into the flue pipe as the gasses go by to let the chimney perform its best.What goes wrong with a barom...
Stephanie from East York, Ontario keeps vacuuming her sliding glass door but it keeps jamming. She knows it has something to do with wheels in the bottom, but what to do?First get someone with a good back to lift the door vertically up and swing it outdoors off of its tracks. Be careful, it is ...
This question comes from Ura in Cochrane, Alberta.Whether you are looking at the flame of a gas burner or an oil burner, a soft, yellow/orange flame that is dancing slowly all around is a poor flame. There is a lot of material not being burned, but wasted up the chimney. Sharp blue flames are t...
Want to sharpen you own hand saws? You do need a few special tools to do a good job.First you need something to hold a smooth flat file perpendicular to the saw. You can buy a commercial jig for this, or make one out of a simple piece of wood as shown in the first photo. You must start every f...
Lani from Burnaby, B.C. writes: "We have a gas fireplace and the pilot light won't light. A gas company technician inspected the situation and told us the pilot light needs cleaning. Can we do this safely ourselves?"Why didn't he just clean it while he was inspecting it?But, yes you can clean i...
Carol from Halifax, Nova Scotia writes: "I have two toilets in a vacant condo that haven't been flushed for a long time and now are completely dry. What will happen if I use buckets of water to fill them (until the level is back in the bowls) and then fill the tanks the same way? I am afraid t...
People often find that old guillotine windows have to be propped up with sticks and the like to keep them open in the summer, because the counter weight sash cord has broken.Jon went through the process of how to open up the hidden cavity where the weights move up and down. There is always a ...
Smart chargers can prolong the life of power tool batteries.Today, the only problem with memory in power tool batteries is in our own heads. Yes, we remember when power tools had memory problems but we just don?t want to remember that someone told us that power tools have no more memory. Can y...
I was on a site recently where the contractor dug out his very old and abused tile saw, complete with a sliding table and a water tray below. It was a great gadget to keep the mess to a minimum, except that it was full of cracks and holes, dripping rather messy water all over the driveway and...
