for Cold Climate Housing and much more

Found 127 results for the keyword ‘Problems’

  • Venting the plumbing in an island sink

    Putting a sink in an island in the middle of the kitchen presents some plumbing challenges.  Generally the venting for a sink goes upward in the wall while the drain water flows downward towards the floor – but in an island, going up is not an option.  To have a large sink that drains properly y...
  • How to find where leaks enter the wall.

    A caller from Ontario has a leak that keep's coming in through the wall despite the efforts of two contractors. It is often very difficult to find the place where water gets into the wall, when it is not something obvious like a crack in the caulking around a window. You need to make a careful i...
  • How do you fill cracks or holes in a driveway?

    Angela from cyberspace (you really have to tell me where you are from when you write in, it helps me to know things about your climate, even about your soil) wants to seal her driveway but needs to fill up the cracks first. How to do it? If we are talking about interlocking bricks, start by fill...
  • Good and bad techniques in insulating basement walls.

    The national building code requires a minimum level of insulation in a basement that reaches about two feet below the outside grade level. The objective is to make this storage space a heatable space. Hence some materials and techniques have developed that satisfy this minimum code requirement th...
  • BASEMENT: INTERIOR OR EXTERIOR INSULATION?

    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...
  • Removing rust stains and toilet brown stains

    (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...
  • What is Radon and should I be worried?

    The basic message to remember is that Radon is a dangerous cancer causing gas and if found to exist in high concentrations in your house the problem can be solved permenantly and at a reasonable cost.  So we don't want to ignore the possibility, we need to test every house in Canada. 7% of homes...
  • Balancing Forced Air Heating & Air Conditioning Air Flow

      Some rooms are colder than others, or a forced air system works well for heating but not air conditioning.  Although such problems may require repositioning ductwork, or adding booster fans -- the first thing to check is that the ductwork is balanced and balanced differently for the two differ...
  • An alternative to ducting through the attic in a cold climate.

      In my experience, heating ducts that run through attics cause serious problems in snow country. Don't let a contractor talk you into it. In warm climates it is common practice to run heating and air conditioning ducting through attic spaces simply because it is easy to do. Unfortunately this ...
  • Tracing the source of nasty plumbing odours

    Evert from Brownsburg, Quebec has the problem of a sewer odour in his bathroom but isn't sure where it is coming from and whether or not he needs to change his toilet. It can in fact be difficult to localize the source of sewage odours and hence which fixture or drain is guilty.  One technique ...