When a driveway slopes down into the house, you need to intercept any and all water flow and carry it away before it gets to the garage. If you don't do this, you will find the concrete pad in the driveway getting into moisture and frost problems, the door freezing to the floor, and the like.You...
If you look at the first photo above you will see a very strange thing. I am running a vacuum hose down the backside of a toilet.In the second photo you see what I caught with that vacuum hose, a little ball of polystyrene.In the third photo you see where that little white ball belongs, on the i...
First you have to have a toilet plunger. That is one that has a bulb shape, or a folded skirt inside a flat plunger. The round shape or skirt is needed to seal to the sides of the toilet bowl. A flat plunger just won't do the job.Then push down gently so as to not squirt everything all over th...
Chris from Welland, Ontario has problems with his leaching field plugging up. He has cleaned out the roots, but how can he keep them from growing back.The problem is that anything that would kill the roots will at the same time kill the bacteria that is necessary for the septic tank to work. Th...
Broken sewage lines can cause a back-up into the house, but also cause underground pollution outside the house. They do need to be fixed as soon as it is identified that there is a problem. When the line is destroyed by crushing, or shifting ground, or a tree root that has crushed it through ex...
It's all about maintenance and one of our viewers had half of a very interesting story.
Burnice writes: "I had a wonderful morning, the heating unit went out of my dryer! Why does everything seem to fall apart this time of year!??? The guy that fixes things went in to the dryer and pulled out t...
Several viewers are complaining about low water pressure in old houses. Old steel pipe tends to collect corrosion and calcium on the walls, enough to slowly choke off the flow of water. A look at the graphic shows what happens to water flow compared to a clean new 1/2 inch pipe. When it becomes r...
Low flow toilets: do they work? do they not work? This is an ongoing very interesting debate. This history of the evolution was first written in 2001. For the latest updates on this story and current data on toilets that do work, click here.
The average Canadian household uses between 7 hundred...
Leafs and other debris clogging up the rain gutters can be the death of a roof. On a one story bungalow you can pretty easily keep those gutters clean but when things are higher up, or you have a lot of mature trees in the yard, it can be a big maintenance task. If you have tried any of the scree...
The most effective technique, one that can save you hundreds of dollars of erroneous digging, is to use a "sonar probe".
This gadget is often combined with a video camera designed to look inside sewer pipes.
An emitter probe is snaked into the drain line. You walk...
