LittleJoe

How to replace a section of screen on a pool enclosure

We've been in our house for 4 years and had recently noticed that some of the screen around the lanai and pool area had started to rip. I searched the web for instructions or pics about how to replace a pool screen, but found nothing. It's not a difficult task, but it did take a little experimentation to figure it out. So in hopes of making this process a little easier for someone else, I've posted pics and instructions on this Flickr stream. We bought the supplies at Lowe's: a 25 foot roll of screen material, a Pool Screen Tool (spline roller), and a package of spline. The screen material comes in different sizes, different color shades, and with different size openings. It's therefore helpful to snip a little piece of screen from the existing enclosure and bring it along to the store. I'm sure someone who does this for a living would have a section of screen replaced in about 15 minutes; it took me about an hour :)

Wreath construction and lights at night

The first pic below (click a thumbnail image to see larger) shows Shirley as she was building the Peace Wreath. The second pic is our house at night ...probably should have used a tripod, but you can get the idea. More and more homes in the neighborhood are getting lights up, so the third pic is of a couple of houses across the street. The neighborhood's starting to look quite festive.

 

Replaced POS garbage disposer with a real appliance

We've been in our house for close to 4 years. It was build by Mercedes Homes. We had checked a lot of model homes from many builders over a couple of years before deciding to go with Mercedes. Overall, we think they do a decent job. But they did skimp on the appliances. Our dishwasher is, in the words of a plumber who repaired a leak for us early on, "below builder grade". That means it is about as cheap as you can find. Similar with our POS garbage disposer. The device that came with the house was a 1/3 hp InSinkErator. I could be wrong, but I believe that is the lowest horsepower disposer that is made. I can understand a builder wanting to keep costs down, so I'm not surprised. Well, this thing had started to leak, so it was time to replace this with a real disposer.

After checking reviews on ConsumerReports .org (and elsewhere), I popped on Amazon and ordered a Waste King 3300. This model is 3/4 hp (so just over twice the horsepower of what came with the house), gets very good reviews, and includes a 10-year parts and labor in home warranty. As long as we keep our receipt for the purchase, if anything goes wrong with this device, Waste King will send someone to our home and fix it. Free.

I did have to make a run to the store for some plumber's putty, but aside from that it was a pretty easy install. And the Waste King is nice and quiet!

Kidde smoke alarm: beep 4 times ...off and on

Man, this was driving us nuts. Sometime over the past couple of weeks, one of our smoke alarms started misbehaving. It would beep 4 times, each beep about 30 seconds after the prior beep ...and then stop. And then it would do this again randomly through the day and night. This would happen a few times a day.

The smoke alarms (we have 7 of them) are wired together with the house current, and each also have a 9v battery. We tried changing the batteries, blowing them each out with compressed air, testing them all, and nothing worked. So yesterday I bought a new one and replaced the offending smoke alarm. That made things worse.

Last night Shirley heard the thing go through it's little cycle twice within 1/2 hour or so ...conveniently at around 2:30am. So since she was awake anyway, she searched the web and found this posting from an electrician (scroll to the bottom of that page).

We had recently changed the batteries in the bedroom smoke alarms (4 of those), so for the other 3, we followed the steps listed by the electrician. For each smoke alarm:

1. Remove the smoke alarm from the ceiling (twist counter-clockwise, and then pinch the 3-wire plug to release the wire plug, freeing the smoke alarm)
2. Remove the old battery
3. Press and hold the TEST button. The smoke alarm started to beep and then the sound very quickly trailed off to near silence
4. Insert the new battery
5. Plug the 3-wire plug back into the smoke alarm and re-mount it on the ceiling

Our house is again nice and quiet :)

Garage hose - possible thanks to solar water heat

Back in April of this year, we completely disconnected our gas-fired hot water heater/tank, and had a passive solar water heating system installed. In the pic to the left, the silver tube hanging down is a vent hose from the old water heater. We'll need this if we hook up a tankless water heater as a backup to the solar system. Over to the right are the 2 water pipes for the solar water system. The nearest pipe (wrapped in black insulation) is the cold water feed, running up to the unit on the roof. The far pipe returns the heated water down to the house.

Well the installation included a spigot on each of these pipes, and given that there's really not a convenient outside spigot if we need a hose in the driveway (like to rinse the car off), today I picked up a hose and a hanger and hooked it up. Shirley's been wanting this for a while (I believe since April), so a few minutes time, and it's done. She only had to wait 6 months :)

Our banana tree has fruit!

I was out mowing the lawn Saturday and when I was mowing by the side of the house I noticed that our dwarf banana tree has babies! The first banana tree we ever saw was in Hawaii. Next was in the Cook Islands. So to me, seeing bananas growing just screams that we are in the tropics. I've no idea if these babies will ripen into something tasty, but I sure hope so. There's not much to compare to picking and eating fresh fruit and veggies from your own plants. Hmmm... I bet with a fresh banana or two and some rum and maybe some coconut and pineapple ...I think we may be doing some recipe experimentation in the not-too-distant future :)

Timer for outdoor compact fluorescent lights

A year or two ago we replaced the 3 lights outside our garage with compact fluorescents to save on energy use. That's good, but sometimes we'd go somewhere and not return until after dark ...with the lights still off, so that defeated the purpose of having outdoor lighting. And sometimes we'd neglect to turn them off in the morning, and they'd end up being on all day. Well I finally located a timer (from Swylite) that works with the low current draw of compact fluorescents. I figured this would be a pretty easy install - maybe 5 minutes. Wrong.

The switch for our garage lights is in this strip of 5 switches. The one on the far right is a timer for the 'holiday' lights (we string up a number of LED lights around Christmas, and they are all connected into outlets that are controlled by this timer). The second switch location in from the right is where the garage light switch was, so this is the location for the new timer for the outdoor compact fluorescents. This would have been a quick install, but one of the wires I needed for the connection was, as fate would have it, located behind the left-most switch. Sigh. So I had to remove 4 switches and do the hookup and then squeeze all of that junk back into the proper locations. Ugh! It probably took me 30 minutes to do this little hookup, since getting things to fit in there and to all align properly with the switch plate was far more involved than it should have been.

Ah, but all's well that ends well, right? It finally all went together and now the lights turn on and off at the proper times. One nice little feature of this timer is that it allows us to set a 'variable' mode. This means that the lights will come on and be turned off within 15 minutes plus or minus from the times we set. So there is not an exact time every day when the lights go on or off. Just a little more security. And some energy savings and convenience :)

Florida Building Code: Clothes Dryers must vent to outside

Well that was pretty easy to find. Yup, it does appear that our dryer vent is in violation of Florida Building Code 2004 Residential Section M1501. The first sentence of this section of the building code is:

Dryer exhaust systems shall be independent of all other systems, shall convey the moisture to the outdoors and shall terminate on the outside of the building.

We had hired a private inspector who caught a number of things that needed to be corrected during the construction of our home. And this is fairly common, really, since at the time there was so much construction going on and each construction manager was responsible for many simultaneous builds. It appears our inspector (with whom we are very satisfied, and will continue to recommend highly) ...missed this one item. There's so much to check, and he did find and document plenty of items. I absolutely would never purchase another home (new or used) without having the home inspected thoroughly first.

So I'll probably contact the builder on Monday and see whether this will be easy or difficult to resolve.

Sigh.

Dryer vents to open attic!

In preparation for a few things we're planning to do soon (solar water heater and some Solatubes), I was up in the attic area today to scope things out. I wanted to make sure that the areas where we'd need to be working will be accessible, and that we'll be able to position the Solatubes where we'd like to have them. While crawling around, I noticed that the vent from our dryer discharges the warm, moist air into the open area of the attic! Nice. In other places where I've lived, that is illegal. Our house is only two years old, so things should be up to pretty recent code standards.

So...I'm going to research and see what the local building codes specify and decide whether to mess with getting the builder to correct this, or maybe just add a rooftop vent myself. Sometimes one gets better quality by doing the job oneself ...even if someone else should have already done the job.

So THAT is what was wrong with our water pipes!

For several months we'd been noticing air in our water pipes. Once or twice a week, we'd get up in the morning and when flushing the toilet or turning on the sink or shower faucet, there would be air belching out with the water. Neighbors did not have this problem. Our water bill was normal, so no leaks.

The culprit was the water softener drainage hose. The water softener is in our garage. The drain hose goes up from the softener, over across part of the attic area, and then down into the utility room to share a drain with the washing machine.

Here are pics of the water softener in the garage, the spot where the hose empties, and what I found when I crawled up in the attic to have a look:

...and here it is after I used some good ol' duct tape to hold the hose up next to a stud, allowing a more gentle curve:

This was all discovered while we had a guy from Culligan here. The softener had quit working, and during the US$235 repair, he got things working (had to replace a worn piston, a circuit board and a switch), but said that the drain hose should have a lot more flow to it. He was a big guy, so I took my little runt self up into the small recesses of the attic to see if something was kinked. They had done the original install a couple of years ago, but the warranty on that was over. Anyway, the kinked hose (no doubt got soft and fell over during the hot summer) had caused some other failures, which led to the softener pulling in air instead of the brine that it would normally pull. They sent another guy out (a little guy) on Friday to do a more permanent fix than my duct tape workaround :)

Oh well. Things are working well now, and Culligan is giving us free softener salt and completely free maintenance for the next year (which is normally US$209) ...so it kind of evens out. Kind of.