How To Operate Your Home Articles

Tom Feiza aka Mr. FixIt has posted a number of excellent articles on house maintenance. It sounds like these are largely excerpted from his book, How To Operate Your Home.

Update (3/25/11): I bought Mr. Feiza's book and gave it a read. It includes lots of good tips and diagrams. It's definitely worth the money. One thing I learned: I might be able to reduce the water hammer noise from my fancy front-load washing machine by installing a water hammer arrester, which is a tube attached to the water line half-filled with air to cushion the sudden changes caused by my washing machine.

Damn Ice Dams

The first winter in our house wasn't bad---temperatures and snowfall lingered around normal and snow often melted within a week or two of when it fell. My major concern was reducing our heating bill. Since then, we've replaced a leaky window, removed a leaky in-wall, window-style A/C, and added insulation to about 1/2 of the house walls. These improvements have helped reduce our oil usage by about 25%. But, I wasn't prepared for this year's surprise: ice dams.

This winter hasn't been so kind. We received about 6 feet of snow in little more than a month. And, for a span of 20 days and 4 1/2 feet of snow, the temperatures have stayed low enough that almost nothing has melted. The piles are high enough that's its getting difficult to clear my driveway.

Last Monday, my wife called me to say that there was water leaking into the house around a window. Ack! I knew we had significant ice build-up around the gutters, but I didn't think it was that bad. I scheduled an appointment for Thursday (since it was supposed to snow Tues & Wed) to have our roof cleaned and decided that I needed to do some roof cleaning myself. So, I dragged my shovel up on the roof with the help of my wife and I started shoveling. Four hours later, I had the roof mostly clean. I was afraid of damaging shingles and/or gutters by trying to break/remove ice, so there were still patches of ice on the roof and plenty of ice in the gutters, but I figured getting rid of the snow was at least a huge improvement. On Thursday, Willard cleared the snow that had fallen Tues/Wed and also cleared off much of the ice. After the recent warming and rains we've had, my roof is almost completely clear of snow and ice.

I knew that our low-pitch roof, cathedral ceilings and recessed lights contributed to ice dams. I now realize that skylights, vents and chimneys also contribute---anything that allows heat to come in contact with snow on the roof contributes to ice dams. This is the best article I've seen about ice dams. It provides a good explanation of how they form, why they lead to water in the house and how to prevent them.

Snowblower Repair

A year ago, a clutch cable partially broke on my Craftsman snowblower. My most excellent neighbor helped me rig a fix that worked for a year. But, last Tuesday, it slipped out again and a push nut fell off, making a spacer handle come loose. I was able to put the handle back together and applied the same fix to the clutch cable. But, I think it's only a matter of time before things break badly enough that I'm not able to hack them back together.

My neighbor told me about a power equipment and supply store across town in West Natick. But, I wasn't able to find it the one time I tried to find it, and, with two kids, it's hard to find the time to go searching again. Lucky for me, today I discovered Sears Parts Direct. All I had to do was enter the part numbers from my snow blower manual, pay for the parts and $8 shipping. And, voila, they're on their way to my front door! I know what you're thinking---that sort of thing was exciting 5-10 years ago, but today? C'mon, Amazon has just about everything. Sure, but have you tried buying a snowblower part online? Search for the part number and manufacturer name and you're likely to find... nothing. There just ain't sufficient volume in snowblower parts for Amazon to start selling them and many manufacturers just don't have the incentive to create a web site that makes part buying easy. So, I'm pleasantly surprised that Craftsman/Sears makes it so easy.

Does my house have lead paint?

Lead paint was not banned in the United States until 1978 so homeowners and contractors making modifications to homes build before 1978 are often required by law to take extra precautions. When we owned a circa 1900 condo, we (rightfully) assumed that lead paint was a problem. While other countries banned the use of lead in paint in the early 1900s, it wasn't until decades later that the United States paint industry cut back on lead use in paint, and 1978 before it was completely banned. Now that we own a house originally built in 1959, we have a more laid-back attitude toward lead paint. And, it sounds like such a stance is not unreasonable since the use of lead in paint was greatly reduced in the 1940s and 1950s. It sounds like pressure to reduce lead in interior paint was especially strong during that time. However, as late as 1971, a study done by New York City found that 10% of paints tested contained significant amounts of lead.

Why is my Water Yellow?!?!

That was my question when I poured a bath for my daughter. The obviously yellow-tinted bath water made me realize that the water I boiled for pasta also had a yellow-ish tint. Ack! We ate pasta boiled in yellow water? I checked the Natick web site to see if there had been any hydrant flushing or other water-disturbing activities lately. No luck. It was Saturday night so the town offices were closed, so I gave the police a call to see if they had heard anything. They took my information so that an on-call water guy might call me back, but he hasn't yet.

I guess I was on my own. What next? Well, what else but Google? Google led me to I bought a duplex, the author of which had seen this problem before. He referred to water authority sites which noted that the color is most likely from small amounts of rust being disturbed. Also, they say it is completely harmless. I bet it's harmless because (1) the concentration is very low, and (2) iron is something our bodies need anyway. Might even be a good thing for pregnant women since they need higher iron amounts than most people (but don't quote me on that!) The Massachusetts Regional Water Authority has a FAQ on water quality including a paragraph about yellowish water:

MWRA water, which comes from the Quabbin and Wachusett Reservoirs, sometimes turns yellowish from low levels of dissolved iron picked up from old iron pipes in both our system and your community's water system. This mainly occurs in winter, when water usage is low, because the water sits in the pipes for a longer period of time. The water may not be aesthetically pleasing, but according to the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), increased levels of iron that produce yellow water are not public health threats. Hardware stores have inexpensive products to remove rust stains from clothing and household surfaces. MWRA and customer communities replace or rehabilitate old pipes a few miles at a time, an expensive and time-consuming process. Long term solutions take time, but we are constantly cleaning and replacing as much pipe as we can.

So, it's official---yellow water is a minor issue and can be ignored except for stains it might leave on fixtures and clothes.

Spiders, Earwigs and Centipedes, Oh My!

When we moved into our new house just over a year ago, we noticed some bugs. The house came with .6 acres of land and lots of trees and vegetation, so we figured the few bugs might have been a trade-off of moving to the suburbs. Our previous place was a 2nd floor condo in a 4-unit building with asphalt covering all land surfaces. The bugs varied from spiders, to earwigs, to centipedes. The earwig freaked me out---not an easy to do. But, some searching revealed that they were harmless. Harmless or not, neither of us wanted to share our house with bugs, so I began searching for solutions. At first, it got worse, from a bug every few days, to multiple bugs each day. At some point, we had a bit of an ant invasion even though we keep our house clean. Ack! What had we gotten ourselves into!

We tried bug sprays, ant traps and ultrasonics. All of them helped, but didn't really solve the problem. The summer after we bought the house, I invested in a basic pump sprayer for an outdoor caterpillar repellent. Later when I was searching for bug sprays, I noticed Ortho Home Defense Concentrate which works with my pump sprayer. I used two gallons of dilute to spray my foundation, the perimeter of my deck and, especially, the area between my foundation and house frame (under the shingles) where I figured the bugs were entering. Not long after the concentrate spraying, I did a half-application of Scotts summer fertilizer with insect control.

I'm not sure which of the two things did the trick, the concentrate spray or the fertilizer, but not long after those, we saw a decrease in bugs that has continued to this day. This time last year, we were squashing bugs every day. Now, they are few and far between. Another factor may have been the cellulose we had blown into walls which would have made it a little more challenging for the critters to get inside, but the drop-off seemed strongly correlated-in-time with the concentrate and fertilizer, so I'll be using those in the future.

Comparing Natural Gas versus Propane

A year ago, I moved from a condo with a natural gas supply to a home with no natural gas supply. We installed a propane tank for our kitchen range and recently hooked-up a tank water heater to the propane supply. Now, I'm curious to see how natural gas and propane compare on a cost per energy output basis.

Natural gas is often quoted in therms, which is an energy output value corresponding to 100,000 British Thermal Units. A cubic foot of natural gas yields approximately 1,028 BTUs meaning that one therm corresponds to 97.3 cubic feet of natural gas. Propane is stored as a compressed liquid and is typically measured in gallons. Each gallon of propane yields 91,690 BTUs. So, 1.09 gallons of propane provide equivalent energy output to 1 term of natural gas. Then, prices of propane and natural gas are at parity if 1 therm of natural gas costs 9% more than one gallon of propane.

FWIW: My propane delivery company is EnergyUSA Propane.

Update (10/15/10): For reference, a gallon of Diesel provides 128,700 BTUs, appx. 31.7% more than propane per volume. Note that #2 fuel oil (the oil typically used for home heating in the U.S.) is equivalent to Diesel (except for a colorant).

Update (10/21/10): After checking my utility bills, it looks like we paid appx. $1 per therm for natural gas while living in the condo. At the house, we pay appx. $3 per gallon for propane. So, natural gas is easily the cheaper option, costing appx. 30% of the propane price to provide an equivalent amount of BTUs (!) Too bad natural gas isn't an option for us...