When two apartments share the same heat source and only have one thermometer, someone is always unhappy. If the thermostat is upstairs, the downstairs people are too cold, and if the thermostat is downstairs, the upsatirs people have to open the windows, to keep from getting cooked although thos...
Radiant Heating and Convection Heating are the two primary types of ways we heat our houses. FORCED AIR HEATINGConvection heating means moving hot air -- what we usually call a forced air heating system simply heats air and moves it around the house through a system of fans and ducts. Forced air...
Few furnace filters, except expensive HEPA filters, do much about trapping or killing germs. Electronic air filters will reduce somewhat the air born germ count because the high electrical voltages do kill some of the bacteria passing through them and probably all that is caught on the plates. ...
The minimum control for a bathroom fan is a simple wall switch.Sometimes the bathroom lights and the fan will be tied together. Now when you have a noisy fan, this can be quite tiring, so to avoid the noise you use the bathroom in the dark.The biggest problem with the simple wall switch control ...
You cannot use a dimmer switch on a fan motor, but you can find fan speed controllers.Why? A regular dimmer switch simply reduces the voltage. That works with lights, but will burn out a motor (and maybe burn down the house).A fan speed controller is a much more complex electronic device that re...
Rebecca from Cold Lake, Alberta wants to dim her three-way switchs. Can she do it? No and Yes. I know you like that kind of an answer. So read carefully. In fact I don't think I was perfectly clear about this when I did the segment on the TV show, judging by the confusion I heard after it wa...
Last year we shot a special Spring Clean-Up show and in that show we cleaned up some mould on the lower walls of one of our viewer's basement. Recently we went back to permanently solve that problem by installing an exhaust fan that would draw the cold moist air off of the basement floor, doing ...
Styrofoam (which is actually a Dow Chemical brand name of extruded polystyrene) is a fairly good vapour barrier. It will not cause problems in the Canadian climate if you put on at least 1-1/2 inch thick and preferably in 2 ft. x 8 ft sheets applied horizontally. This actually permits some ...
Joan from Armstrong, BC is having trouble adjusting the ventilation system in her new home to keep condensation off the windows. She told us the kind of system she has and said that it was required by the building code. Actually no specific system is required by any of the building codes. ...
Installing a dimmer in place of a regular light switch is very simple. The one wire that the dimmer has that you will not find in the light switch is a green wire that is meant to go to "ground". You simply secure this wire under the head of one of the large grounding screws that are in the...
