Home Improvement

The wash cycle is broken. Just after the tub fills, it does a high-speed 2 second spin, as fast as it can get in 2 sec before pausing. Then it pauses for at least a minute. Then it tries again, repeatedly. It’s really strange. Why would it try to do a high-speed spin with a tub full of water? Normally in the wash cycle it just spins very slowly in one direction, then changes direction periodically.

Edit: Ok no worries guys it was definitely just the tub leaking! It just took several hours for it to stop dripping afterwards which is why I was confused at whether or not it was the tub or something else. All is well! It's a very infrequently used shower/tub so I hadn't noticed anything prior.

Renting a room in an old house. The landlady is one of the rare good ones and cooks for me somtimes so I'm trying to be handy where I can.

I have a Vaillant ecoTech Plus combi boiler. The central heating works fine. But the hot tap water became intermittent. If I got lucky and hot water would come from the tap, it never went cold as long as it was running. So I think it’s likely a flow switch because there were times when it simply did not seem to detect that hot water was on. I heard no boiler fan and the faucet icon did not appear on the display on the times it failed to produce hot water. The moments where it would work are now history. Now it’s cold water every time. So it was a gradual manifestation.

I fixed my roof a few years ago, and have part of a roll of tar paper sitting in the basement. I’m now re-laying some hardwood flooring. Can I use that leftover stuff as underlayment, or is there some subtle but important difference between “flooring” tar paper and “roofing” tar paper that means I ought to go buy some other product?

Hello!

I work in a basement office. There is a below-grade egress window, with a 3-4ft ladder and a large plexiglass dome that you can push out of the way.

I'm currently working on my sprinkler valve box. It sucks ass. It's dug in the ground. I'm on my knees trying to replace a Hunter valve. This is the second time I'm back here this week because replacing the diaphragm didn't fix the leak. I think I'm gonna have to replace the whole valve, but the stupid valves are in the stupid valve box. So now I have dig out the box anyway (which is something the valve box is supposed to save you from).

So it’s currently 100 degrees F in my garage today. I’m sure it will only get worse as the summer goes on. I added some of those insulated garage door panels, but I don’t think they did anything.

This is probably a dumb one, but here goes.

I live in a pretty old house in the midwest, built 1929, bought in '21, single-story, ~1300ish sqft, and with a large, spacious basement. Every time summer comes around I've had issues with the basement getting MUCH colder than the rest of the house (like >10 degrees F difference), presumably due to poorly-insulated floors and cold air sinking. The HVAC is still capable of keeping the main floor at the temp set on the thermostat, but the temperature differential indicates it's working quite a bit harder than it really needs to be, and is probably wasting quite a bit of money.

There are a few spots I've neglected to replace old brittle sealant (around the kitchen sink) or never sealed at all (new faucet I installed 8 months ago). Now there's black gunk accruing under and around the sealant.

We have a couple big projects that I'm not comfortable doing myself (mainly roof/foundation repair).

Hi all. I have a 2 storey, ~1200 sq ft home in a hot climate. I have a single HVAC unit...central air and ductwork, electric AC/heat. There is no zoning to the system. The thermostat is downstairs.

I'm framing up a non-load-bearing wall that has two closet doors on it, close together (the king studs for the two openings are 13" apart). Unfortunately, they are aligned such that one of the 16" OC common studs would fall within that gap. In fact, it would only be 1/2" away from the left king stud, so not even anywhere near the middle of the space.) Is it still normal/expected to include that stud, or can I omit it?

Id do it like this but two people told me other way... Not sure?

I had a heat pump installed about a year ago. It came with one free service and the installing company has been calling me almost every week to come out and do the complimentary tune up. I know that I obviously should take a free tune up, but it made me wonder. How often do I actually need this done? What are they actually "tuning up"?

I am very much a DIY'er and doing my own HVAC repairs have never been out of the question. Actually, I have rebuilt a couple of systems, less the pressurized parts of the system.

I just visited some web galleries of bathroom remodelers in the US, and it looks uncommon to have external shower fixtures. They tend to bury as much of the fixture as possible in the wall. From the photos, I don’t get the impression they are using thermostatic mixing valves. But it’s hard to tell. Can anyone confirm or deny?

We have a motion activated sprinkler to deter deer from eating our tomatoes and I'm looking for a timer that will shut off the water flow during the day. The ones I've seen at the store seem to only want to water intermittently, instead of completely off/on. Does anyone know of one?

So my home office is in our basement while my wife’s is in a finished attic space. We have a mini split system, but it has to be all heat or all cooling, and many days it’s cold in my office, but hot in my wife’s office.

General info: Looking to get current attic ventilator fan replaced. The attic is about 1400 sq. ft. Current attic ventilation fan is a foot from the ridge of the roof. Live in USA.

It's on everything, my fingernails are glued to my skin underneath, I hate everything and most of all I hate spray foam.

So I was using a wood sealer (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01AQTX3XU) on my newly built catio. Unfortunately I didn't notice how much I had sprayed on the adjacent window.

Looking for help in solving a problem where the lower door hinge pin on my entry door keeps creeping up and causing the deadbolt to become slightly misaligned making it more difficult to lock. Reading online, I keep coming across suggestions of tightening a screw that’s supposed to lock the pin in place but my hinges don’t seem to have that screw.

Wondering if anyone has done this.

As house problems can manifest in many ways, I recall reading some basic advice “if water is ending up in the wrong place, it’s in the plumber’s domain”.

Currently installed is a recent (about 10 years) Harbor Bay 5 blade ceiling fan with 44" blade diameter.

There are a lot of mixed messages about plumbing with dissimilar metals. Mainstream local plumbing shops sell brass manifolds. They say I can connect the brass manifold to steel pipe. Copper is very dissimilar to steel, and fittings for copper are brass. So if it’s okay to connect brass to copper and brass to steel, why couldn’t a copper pipe be connected to a (steel) hot water tank simply using a brass fitting? It’s supposed to be a dielectric fitting that insulates using rubber so the metals don’t touch.

I am currently redesigning my kitchen in a 1930's Midwestern USA house. The kitchen has a decent floor area but the floor plan is oddly restrictive.

This is not the first time I've ranted about the previous owner's wiring jobs, though I think they were on the other site (and I had a different username there).

There are a few youtube videos where someone suggests using sulfuric acid to clean a secondary plate-style heat exchanger (for example). Yet I’ve heard sulfuric acid is extremely corrosive to metal, so something seems off about that advice. I certainly would not want an internal leak to cause radiator fluid to enter the tap water. I saw a drop of sulfuric acid land on a galvanized steel pipe once and within minutes it was rusted on the spot.

My #Vaillant combi-boiler *was* working fine for both central heating and tap water, then suddenly there is no hot tap water. These are the clues that seem to imply the secondary heat exchanger would NOT be the problem: * radiators heat up fine, which I think must prove the radiator side of the secondary heat exchanger is clear (OR does the secondary heat exchanger get bypassed when central heat runs)? * the “hot” (cold) tap water flows with good pressure, which seems to suggest the tap water side of the secondary heat exchanger is probably clear as well. * new secondary heat exchanger was installed in February 2019, which would be unlikely to clog this early. * when I last showered the hot water was good and continuous. In 2019 when an exchanger clogged shower water would alternate between hot and cold. But in the case at hand I had solid hot tap water one day and not the next.

A top-floor room that’s not currently used has mold from excessive dampness. For a month I have been running a dehumidifier as it’s too cold to open the window.

I have this:

My façade is highly absorbent of water. I think the water even passes through the wall (effectively a leak). I plan to render some lime on top of it. It’s the kind of lime that turns to chalk if it oxidizes over the span of a year. The stuff I have is about a year old, so I have to use it up anyway.

The whole [email protected] community is *gone*… out of the pure blue, all content and history vanished. WTF happened? Anyone know? This is seriously a grave weakness of #Lemmy.