It is always better to insulate on the outside of basements and crawl spaces, but usually more expensive and more trouble.
Brick or field stone foundations must not be insulated on the inside for much more than one foot below ground level. The poor quality of the mortar in these foundations dete...
(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...
David writes that he recently installed a double sink but it gurgles and backs up. It is 10 feet away from the plumbing stack and goes through a garbarator. What did he do wrong?
When you attach a large double sink on a long horizontal run, the drain pipe will tend to fill up with water ...
More and more people have domestic power washers, allowing them to quickly clean all kinds of things around the house. Of course one of the first things we want to use it for is to clean off the siding on the house. CAUTION -- you all know that you need to be careful not to damage wood or spra...
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...
Many utilities are buried just underground on residential properties.
--- Water supply pipes
--- Water drain pipes
--- Gas pipes
--- Electrical supplies
--- Telephone, TV and Web Cables
--- And sometimes even more as neighborhoods move more and more away from overhead wires.
Some of the...
Robert from Oakville, Ontario wrote: I live in a town house and only have two basement windows. Last year I cut out the wall on one of the windows and took out the 32" X 15" window and replaced it with a 32" X 24" window. It worked great. So this year I decided to enlarge the back window before f...
I have had several letters recently about bad smells and even flies coming up out of basement floor drains and sump pump pits. One viewer was quoted hundreds of dollars to break up the entire basement and replace all the sewer lines.
The real problem is usually that the trap under the floor has ...
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...
I am sure that I have done a TV show on this product, but for the life of me I cannot find it and people keep asking. There is a special category of re-finishing product, often called 'furniture re-finisher' (not furniture or paint stripper) but variations are made by several different manufactur...
