My business has a swamp cooler (evaporative), but none of the windows open so I have no way to vent air. There is a vent in the alcove (?) over my front door facing downward. The vent is about the size of a box fan. I have been thinking about putting one face down on top of the vent.

If this is not a good idea is there a better option? I have an outlet not too far from the area, but do not think that there is anywhere near to hard wire. I could run a wire out the vent for a solar panel, but the awning is north west facing.

Vent opening:

With fan laying on top:

New home owner, I assume it is for my air circulation system but unsure how to use it to the best of its abilities. Does More Humid make the house more humid, or should I turn it to that setting when the house is humid to negate it?

Hey folks,

Apologies if my questions are ignorant, first time home owner and don't know much about these things. I am looking to find out if my idea is possible or suggested. Bought a house last year and noticed the house gets pretty warm in the summer.

We have what looks to be a mini-split system - wall mounted unit that shoots out cold air. There is no central air (not common in this area or when these houses were being built), but we do have an air circulator system.

The wall unit is located at the top corner of the central stairwell but the way our house is laid out, it doesn't do a good job of getting cool air into the upstairs bedrooms or the mid-level main bedroom because it is around the corner of the stairs and then opens up into a much bigger room.

I have noticed that all the rooms (aside from the main bedroom) have an exhaust for the air circulator system. My thought are, is it possible to leverage those ducts and connect the mini split system to it, that way cool air can flow through the air circulator system into the bedroom.

It doesn't really solve the main bedroom issue, for that we might need to add another wall mounted unit directly in the bedroom since summers are humid here and a fan doesn't often cut it.

What do you think?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/30403895

I'm trying to wire Shelly 1PM gen 3 to my wall outlet. Is the diagram correct?

This is really RV improvement, not home improvement, but I figure you would appreciate this.

We have a 1995 Airstream travel trailer that we bought in 2011. It still has the original rooftop air conditioner, which still cools very well.

During one trip, the air conditioner seemingly stopped working, but when I turned the thermostat down all the way, it cycled on again. After some trial and error, we found that it was now about 10 degrees off - if we wanted 72 degrees inside, we had to set the thermostat to 62. "Well," I said. "This thing is probably on the way out, and we'll be buying a new AC soon."

That was August, 2013. It continued to work that way until this January, during a trip to Disney World in Florida. It was cold enough early on that we didn't need the AC at all; in fact we got a picture of ourselves in the Magic Kingdom wearing our winter coats.

Later in our stay, it did warm up enough to need the AC, but now, with the thermostat on the lowest setting possible (60), we were only getting down to about 78 in the trailer. I had the trailer on a trip a few weekends ago, and had the same thing then; the problem didn't magically fix itself. Both times, it cooled and cycled on and off perfectly, as though 78 was the temperature I had selected.

78 isn't too bad, but it's like, what's next? When will it decide that, say, 90 is low enough? We travel with pets, and it's just not something I want to deal with. And neither of us sleep well in warm temperatures - and inevitably the cats and dog will curl up with us in that situation, making matters worse.

Maybe I'm cheap, but I hate to toss a working AC unit. And I like how that unit works - it's quieter than many new ones (not at all quiet, but quieter), and it can either run the fan constantly or change the fan speed as needed. It also has a heat strip, basically an electric heater, whereas newer ones have a heat pump instead - more efficient, but they don't work below about 45 degrees (I know home units can do much better than that, but RV units do not).

Note for this, the thermostat is right on the unit in the ceiling - it's not a separate part on the wall like in a house or even in newer RVs. Or even in some other RVs of that era, really. The actual control to set the temperature is a slider with markings that run from 60 to maybe 90.

Anyway, I figured the problem had to be either in the slider to set the temperature, or however it sensed the temperature. The slider seemed unlikely, because the issue is extremely consistent, and you'd think the slider wearing out would mean it would work sometimes and not others, that sort of thing, especially in a vehicle that gets bounced around on the road a lot. So that left the temperature sensor. I learned what a thermistor is - a variable resistor that changes resistance based on the temperature, and I realized one was mounted on the control board, with a section of the board carved away around it to let air get to it easily.

I ordered an assortment of thermistors from Amazon. I guessed it might be a 10k ohm thermistor, but I really didn't know for sure, and if the old one is bad, I can't trust the readings from it. I still can't find any documentation that states it either - it's 30 years old, and RV air conditioners tend to be disposable, and even if someone did diagnose it, they'd probably just replace the board. So, figuring I had nothing to lose, I desoldered the old one and soldered in a new 10k thermistor, and I put the board back in the AC.

IT WORKED! With the thermostat set to 70, it cycled off at about 72, which is good enough for us (and within the bounds of measurement errors on the thermometers I was using). Putting the thermistor in the cold air flow for a moment caused it to cycle off immediately. I'll have to test it more to see if the thermostat is roughly accurate (there are different 10k thermistors), but it's definitely usable, even if the thermostat isn't perfectly accurate.

Total cost, about $12 and a few hours, most of that sitting in an air conditioned trailer to see what would happen. Versus probably $1500 for a new AC installed. And I learned something and practiced my rarely used desoldering and soldering skills!

Now I just have to find a use for the other 99 thermistors...

I have an patio like the one on the example (not actual photo) of which I want to rebuild the glazed area into an outdoor kitchen for all-year round usage. The "only" requirements are :

• work area
• placement of a charcoal grill ( likely to be replaced by a kamado style one)
• a place for my ooni (wood heated).
• open in summer
• shelter from rain/snow (it's Sweden we talk about)
• some shelter from wind

I thought about building something against the sliding doors so you can stand outside in summer and inside when the weather is bad. But also of making something on wheels.

Internet searches gives many photo's but not much on the last two wishes. Anyone built something for all-year usage in the northern areas? Photo's will be much appreciated!

• thank you for all the votes and comments! -

A followup to my "kitchen completed" post a while back. After 6 years of completely rebuilding this place by myself, we finally moved in. Im very happy.

More pics here.

I live in a 1960s-built single-story ranch in Ohio. The house was originally built with a covered back patio, floored with concrete. At some point, the original owners closed it up into a large sunroom.

The sunroom conversion was done extremely haphazardly - the exterior siding doesn't match, carpet was laid with no padding on the concrete, the hood in the kitchen vents into it, and the walls are uninsulated and undrywalled - wainscoting panels attached directly to studs. I don't know what the plan was, but at some point they must have been tired of it being so cold back there because they added a woodburning stove in the middle of the room (without properly screening off the chimney, so a few times a year a starling or a squirrel falls in and either breaks their neck or starves to death) and it must have too hot as they also ran wiring to install a large through-wall A/C unit.

I'm sure it's obvious from my description but the room is impractical to use as anything but storage at this point. In the winter, it gets colder in there than in my garage but I'm not about to run that woodstove and burn my house down, and in summer it's so leaky and humid from the poorly installed a/c unit and ancient single-pane sliding windows that every attempt to habitate it has resulted in having to clean blue mold off the walls and furniture in there. Thankfully the old patio door seals it all off pretty well, and that's what we've done for the last few years since we realized just how bad the situation in there was.

I'd like to make the space functional again, especially as it would increase my square footage by around 40%, but don't really know where to start.

How can I unscrew and remove this from my tub drain? It won't loosen when turning by hand or flat head screwdriver. It cracked when I tried a wrench

I have recently purchased a home with solar panels. The previous owner didn't have a ton of information on them as she inherited the house from her mother who passed away. She has the purchase agreement, but the company that did the installation in 2014 has gone bankrupt (in 2020).

I'd like to somehow figure out how much energy I'm getting out of the panels. I got information from the previous owner on their electric bill, which shows me I won't be paying much. But that doesn't really answer my question about electricity generation.

Looks like I have 14 solar world Mono Black panels with model number 275.

Any advice on how I can go about figuring out exactly how much energy generation I'm getting?

Ancillary Information: the panels are owned outright. They were originally purchased with cash so no loan or lease on them.

Useful infographic design

What’s this thing inside my drip irrigation tube? 🤔

The center slab is pretty thrashed and has some failing previous repairs. A couple of other slabs have more minor damage. At the very least, I'm interested in removing and repouring the center slab, but a contractor recommended against doing anything less than a full demo/replacement of the whole patio based on foundation/structural reasons.

Beyond aesthetic reasons, is this advice legit or just an upsell? If I need to do the whole thing and not just one or two slabs, I might consider pavers instead of concrete, but any suggestions are welcome.

Thanks!

First off, if you aren't currently treating for termites with a soil treatment and/or bait system, start now. It will save you thousands in the long run, and you won't have constant fears of termites like I now do.

Anyway, about two years ago, I was sitting with my partner, watching TV in our basement. My partner got up to do something, and noticed that at the bottom of our basement bathroom door frame, there was what looked like dirt. A closer inspection revealed that it wasn't dirt, much worse. This was termite frass, further confirmed by the termites visible in the frass.

I quickly did research and bought termidor foam (It should be noted that Termidor foam only lasts 6ish weeks, and is meant to be applied directly to areas with active termite activity), dominon, and boracare off of domyown.com.

I applied the foam, dug trenches around the house to treat soil with dominion, and waited about three months before fully demoing the bathroom. Inside of the wall closest to where my partner noticed the frass, there was a huge mud tube that seemed to have multiple chambers inside of it. This tube chamber was probably about 4 inches by 5 inches. This tube stopped about 4 and a half feet up the wall, and did not appear to go into the upstairs area. The sheetrock's paper between the paint and gypsum had been eaten away into tunnels as well.

(Slight side note, at this point, I was confused as to what type of termite I was dealing with. I knew that usually, subterranean termites don't create frass as they use that to build their tubes. I now know that they can actually create frass piles when they accidentally break through the wood. This can cause the frass to spill out. If this hadn't happened, we probably wouldn't have figured out that we had termites until it was too late.)

I could not identify any damage to the studs, and they seemed very sturdy. Boracare was applied. We sheetrocked and fixed up the bathroom over the next little while. I'm unsure about their entry point. During the repairs, I found a relatively large crack in the slab, right underneath the wall for the bathroom. I'm guessing this is how they got in, but can't be sure. I pumped it full of concrete silicone, used at least 3 tubes worth.

Maybe about a month later, I found more evidence of termite damage, this time behind my furnace which is in the center of my basement, maybe about 10 feet away from where I found the original tube. There was frass along parts of the very old, 1940's baseboard. I have no idea how they got there, and still am not sure how long they had been there. Nonetheless, once I noticed the frass, I immediately got my extra can of termidor foam and filled the void between the wall and the baseboard. Since doing that, there has been no new visible frass, and we haven't found any swarmers. I'm honestly too scared to cut a hole into the wall to assess the damage, and might ultimately have an inspector come out and check it for us.

I'm increasingly paranoid about them. I constantly think that every squeak in the floorboards upstairs is caused by termites. Any dip in the flooring, no matter how slight, sends me into another bout of paranoid reading about how termites are eating away at my home. Maybe about an hour ago, after another one of these spirals, I bought a pack of 10 bait & monitor systems which I plan on putting around the soil outside.

I guess, to sum up, you should be treating your soil for termites, even if you have never seen signs of an infestation. If you live in an area with a lot of subterranean termites, buy baiting systems so you can monitor if your property is having any termite activity, on top of the soil treatment. If you're not comfortable doing it yourself, hire a pro. It's worth it to treat for termites as if an attack is inevitable.

I hope that one day, I feel confident that I got them. Unfortunately, without tearing out all of my walls and floors, I can never be sure at this point. It's a horrible feeling, and don't want anyone else to experience it. I've lost countless hours of sleep.

I'm unfortunately not there physically to help, but my mom has this light switch she needs to remove temporarily and replace the plate. Her "handyman" installed it 'brand new' within the past few years. I told her it looked like it was from the 80s haha. Anyways, she apparently cannot remove the knob for the life of her, shouldn't the knob be able to simply pull off without breaking?

Hurricane Helene crushed my 38" mower, and it just barely fit in the bed of my 93 Ranger. My options now are the dumpy looking disposable 30" riders, a 42" that won't fit in the truck, or a push mower that I'm too lazy to walk behind. I've decided that a single blade larger than 30" must be impractical because the spindles can't handle the Mandingo of a blade, and dual blades smaller than 42" total must be too many RPMs to hit target tip speed.

Insurance is paying for it, but I want something that fits in the truck. Any ideas?

I wrecked the ceiling/ wall bringing down a sofa. I’m a new home owner so not sure how to fix this. I have the paint since we repainted everything.

Not sure if I should use the pink stuff or something else. Any suggestions?

EDIT - Thanks all for the advice and suggestions. I was able to rebuild the corner using spackle and have sanded it. I put on the first coat of paint and am quite confident this will look as if there were no damage at all.

I'm in the middle of a whole house remodel. First half of the house (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, hallway) is almost done and we hate the wall texture. It sounds so stupid, but the old and new look dramatically different. Part of the house was crows foot so i went with it thinking it would be cheaper and easier. How hard/expensive is it going to be to change it?

I've got creeky floors under carpet (relatively new building). I don't own the place but the creeks and squeaks bother the hell out of me at night when I'm trying to not wake up the pup.

Didn't see any particularly useful advice online so any thoughts are appreciated.

I'm moving into a house with a pool in a couple of months. I have a 20# dog who is blind and I'm trying to think of ways to keep her safe. The area from the back door/patio to the pool is all concrete, so installing fencing would require drilling holes. Looking for something temporary that could be removed during parties. I suggested wooden planters spaced every 8+10 feet with a bracket to hold a board. Husband didn't like that. I'm still leaning towards that, but looking for other ideas. Thoughts?

It's a long story, but I need the aluminum trim replaced around a garage door. Just basic white aluminum trim.

I don't want to do it myself...but I have no idea what kind of contractor I even need to call to do it. What kind of contractor would I call to do this? I'm in Maryland, US.

Google searches either lead me to garage door replacement or siding replacement, neither of which is what I'm actually looking for.

Is there a site where I can post a picture of the project and dimensions and get contractors to bid on it, or at least express interest on it? Angi (formerly Angie's List) seems to require me to figure out what kind of contractor I need, and this doesn't fall into the usual categories.

Thanks!