There are a number of appliances around the house that have user or trade adjustable temperatures and it is not always simple to get them right.Hot Water HeatersMost Hot Water heaters for domestic hot water are factory set to 66deg C. ( 150F ). This is actually hot enough to scald someone so legi...
Judy from Stoney Creek, Ontario is baffled by the fact that her cold water is hot, at least for the first few seconds of running.Faucets that combine the hot and cold water to come out of a single spout are of two basic varieties: two completely separate valves each feeding the spout, or a combin...
I get a lot of questions about choosing and applying a finish to a hardwood floor.First understand that there is no one right answer -- there are a lot of products that each has certain advantages over the others and you need to select the properties that are the most important to you. There are...
A dual flush conversion kit for toilets -- saving water.The problem with existing toilets and existing drainage systems is that they were designed and tested using lots of water. When we try to reduce the water in the existing toilet it may not even get the solid waste out of the bowl. Even ...
As we so well know from the Walkerton experience, municipal and rural water supplies can become contaminated. Municipalities do have testing mechanisms in place. And although they were not applied in Walkerton, because of that experience we can probably feel even more confident that municip...
Margaret has a balcony over a porch and has had some house movement. The water no longer flows off over the edge, but pools back near the house. She is looking for some way to solve the problem without having to rebuild the balcony.Years ago a company on the west coast made an outdoor carpet...
Peter wrote: I recently moved into a new house, and the builder put in a drainage swale at the bottom of my backyard. Since I am at the end of my street, whenever it rains I get all the runoff through my backyard to the street. The drainage swale runs across my back fence as you can see in th...
Moreno from Port Colborne, Ontario wrote : I recently built a wine cellarThe area I live in allowed me to pour the footings on bedrock and has given me a bedrock floor. This lets the room take the coolness from the rock to help keep the temperature down. The problem I am having is that there...
Annie has three roofs on her house, a shingled roof in the front part followed by an asphalt and gravel flat roof and then an elastomeric membrane flat roof over her back porch. They all seem to leak. The asphalt roof is only six years old, installed by someone who advertised in the local paper...
In many regions of the world water is scarce or polluted and in mountainous regions the populations often live higher in the mountains than where they have to walk to in order to get water. But in many of these regions the clouds billow over the top of the mountains, keeping them shrouded mu...
