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...
Shawn from Nepean, Ontario writes: "My mother wants to replace all of her baseboard heaters but has been told that all new heaters are 220v and her home has only 110v. My question to you Jon is how can I tell for sure if Mom's home is 110v and if so, what can we do to replace her baseboard heate...
When we string new wires through the house, telephone, cable, speakers and the like, it would be nice to be able to hide them. One trick is to remove the quarter round trim from the floorboards and if there is a space behind the rug or under the floor board, the wire can go into that space and t...
You will notice that wires that go into your breaker box are much longer than needed to get to their connection. This extra wire provides flexibility as to where to attach the wire as well as prevents possible stress on a too tight wire.When you curve a wire to put it under the screw head of an ...
We took our TV cameras out to look at some tree limbs that should be trimmed back to protect telephone, cable or electrical wires from extra stress with the weight of winter snow and ice.With or without tree problems, you should take a look outside at all the wires attached to your house. Eac...
For electrical appliances to be safe it is important that the power comes through a fuse or circuit breaker, into the wall outlet, then the plug must take that same wire to the on/off switch of the appliance. This way, when the appliance is turned off, there is no power coming to the applian...
You can use special shrink wrap sleeves to seal off electrical connections water tight. This can be very useful for outdoor low voltage wiring, outdoor sound systems, or anywhere you need something better than electrical tape.Shrink wrap sleeves of all sizes can be found most easily at automotiv...
Every week on my TV show I would demonstrate a simple but useful tool, this time a very inexpensive but essential tool for all household electrical work. When you have what we call Lomax wire, that is regular household wire with the plastic sleeve, it is always a problem to strip off the plastic...
If you need to bend wire for artistic or practical reasons, even fairly thick wire like heavy coat hangers or brass rods as I have in the photos, the wire bending jig is amazing.This is how I make supports to hold my one cup coffee filters up over the coffee cup, rather than letting the filter si...
Clothes hangers provide a ridgid, often plastic coated, wire that can be used to build or fix just about anything around the house. Even the new plastic type of clothes hangers can be broken up to make clamps and hooks.You'll have to catch the re-run to see the gadgets that I made in minutes wit...
