Should CO (carbon monoxide) detectors be placed like smoke detectors?Not necessarily.Smoke detectors are placed near or on the ceiling because both heat and smoke rise.CO however is the same weight as air, so it mixes all over. That means that you could put your CO detectors on the ceiling, or y...
For those of you who have decided that your house needs the protection of a grid of lightning rods, we took a look at a company that provides the basic service, but decorates it into something classy looking on the roof.Custom Cupola & Steeple Co in Oakville, Ontario make just about anything ...
Plastic covered wires that run along the top of your baseboards are dangerous, because they can easily be damaged. It is so easy to just add a wire like this that it is often done, with extension cords, or even regular wiring simply being nailed to the baseboards to keep them off the floor.If th...
Judy, the true answer is NO, but you can make it look like you have not put in a beam. Do you like that?Take a look at the photo. Here they show using joist hangers and a "flush beam" that is up in the attic and not taking up headroom in the room below.Whenever changing the structure in your ho...
Joe and Debbie sent in this tip.Use a large clothes-pin style clip, used for clampping or lamp attachment. Grip it onto the end of a plastic pipe. Now you can slide that right up to catch plant hooks, allowing you to lift them up to or down from high places.Oh, the gadget I had for watering han...
Rick is having trouble with the smoke detector near his kitchen going off too often and he wants to turn down its sensitivity. You can't do that Rick, but the real problem is that you probably have the wrong alarm installed near the kitchen. There are three types of fire alarms.The most sensiti...
Hazardous waste is anything that can cause ecological problems if it is either put down the drain or sent to a regular landfill site. The five primary categories are:EXPLOSIVE -- the most common household product in this category are aerosol cans that if heated or crushed could explode and cause...
Gary in Portage La Prairie, Manitoba wants to put a hot tub on the main floor of his home, but he is rightly worried about if the floor can carry the weight.The answer is that very likely you will need additional support. Now obviously you don't want to call the local permits department to find ...
Several TV viewers came up with ways to protect the teeth of our saws.One slides a slit length of garden hose over the saw blade.Another plunges a narrow drywall saw right into the hose itself without a slit.Yet another uses school report binders to slide over the teeth.There is actually a profes...
Knob and tube wiring is safe if it is in good condition and it is doing no more than it was designed to do. In fact it was an very good wiring system designed to keep the two wires far apart from each other and well protected as it ran through the house.What could make it unsafe?Rodents gnawing ...
