Roxul International is a company that makes all kinds of commercial and residential insulation for energy conservation, sound reduction and fire control out of molten rocks. They call it rock wool. They have two plants in Canada serving all of North America.
Roxul is one of those companies that'...
Yes Wendy, just as you can paint over any other painted walls.
You can paint with an oil based paint directly over the lead based paint (which will certainly be an oil based paint).
If you want to use a latex over it, then you must first use a "super adherent primer", made by most of the paint ...
A viewer on my HGTV program asked: "Does the type of siding make a difference in attracting Cluster flies?"
I always wanted to learn more about those flies that cluster on the side of houses (usually in the country) and mass in the windows in the early spring and late summer. They are larger ...
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...
In 2002, one of my HGTV staff read an article on the web about a man that had found the miracle solution for cleaning up oil spills in the ocean. He claimed that all you had to do was to put paraffin flakes on the oil and it would all gather together in one concentrated mass and you could simply ...
(See non-toxic cleaners in the last paragraph, and Do Rust Cleaners Work?)
RUST ON RUGS
There has always been one basic chemical available for getting rust off about anything and that was Oxalic Acid. That was the active ingredient in the old petroleum jelly that we used to clean the rust off o...
The sun's energy is free. It's collecting it that costs money.
There are two different ways of collecting solar energy; actively and passively.
Active solar heating systems collect the sun's heat and transport it into the house where it is used to heat water or living space. Usually there is a...
Linoleum used to be the kitchen floor covering of choice, but with the arrival of less expensive vinyl flooring which had colourful patterns, it got lost in the market. Yet linoleum has always been one of the most natural flooring materials following wood. It has been and is still made up ba...
Every few years I need to update this "innovations" entry as things just keep getting better. Not all "gadgets" to save water work, and not all toilets actually flush clean. For details on the comparative performance of low flow toilets that do work, check out the MaP rating system, which is be...
No de-icer is perfectly safe for concrete. Why? Because you are melting ice while the general temperature is below zero, allowing both water and some kind of chemical to flow into the concrete itself and refreeze shortly after. De-icers should not be used on new concrete -- wait until it is at le...
