As winter approaches people are asking how to get more heat out of those very old hot water radiators. A few tips.
Bleed the air out anytime they don't feel hot enough. This will usually be only one or two that have problems while the rest are hot. If they all are cold you may need to check the ...
Air-change ventilation systems exist that take stale air out and bring fresh air in so as to not rely on cold air drafts for the entry of fresh air to the house. They are simply a box with two fans. In a few of the warm spots of Canada these are legitimate systems on their own. In most of Canada ...
There are several non-destructive ways that we can see what is going on inside the walls, ceilings and roofs of our homes. Simply watching the melting patterns of a light snow on the roof will tell you where you have insulation and where you have heat losses. In the first photo this was an unheat...
A minimum filter is designed to protect the furnace fan from large dust balls -- not to protect your health.
ONE INCH FILTERS
You can start upgrading from there. One of the best of the 1 inch filters is called Filtrete from 3M. It's an electrostatic filter that becomes charged as the air pas...
OLD BASEBOARDS
Baseboard electric heaters are notorious for providing uneven heat -- cycling hot and cold -- with thermostats that are quite unreliable. Whether looking at them for the whole house or topping up the heat in difficult to reach corners of the house, most contractors see baseboar...
A fresh look at household wiring may change the wire sizes we use in some residential lines.
The electrical code establishes wire sizes based on fire safety considerations. When an electrical load is run through a wire, the resistance in that wire creates heat. The maximum amperage for a given w...
Heat pumps do not create heat. They simply pump it from one place to another, either raising the temperature or lowering it in the process. It's much like a water pump: that doesn't create water, it just move it to wherever you need it. Heat pumps are valuable because it takes less energy to move...
Some door latches are just not installed snugly, while some doors warp with the seasons and are too tight part of the time and too loose the rest of the time. Typically, the strike plate needs to be moved over a fraction of an inch for a good fit. The best way to do that is to fill the existing s...
What is GREENWASHING? How to avoid it as a consumer and how to avoid it as a legitimate business.
Greenwashing is a term that dates way back to 1986, when a New York journalist complained about the cost saving tactic of hotels to get their clients to use the same towel for more than one day by a...
Here is one that I answered one year , and found a better answer a year later.
GETTING THE HEATER CLOSER TO THE FAUCET
In 2003 a viewer asked me about how to get hot water to that back bedroom because they have to run the water for two or three minutes before the hot water arrives from the b...
