Recent content by cornutt

Two prong receptacles It's still okay to install them as long as they are protected by a GFCI receptacle or circuit breaker. In theory, you are supposed to put a sticker on them that says "GFCI protected", but no one ever does.

'California officially has a war on natural gas and that includes HVAC systems." The ironic thing, which a lot of people don't understand, is that the electric power for the devices that they wan to replace them with is largely generated by burning natural gas. So now, they are burning gas to...

HAI (RIP) thermostats controlled by an OmniPro II. I wrote a whole bunch of fancy code to do day, evening and night setpoint changes depending on a zillion things. Now I'm 100% teleworking, and I don't use most of that anymore.

Yes, lug the damp clothes outside and hang them on the line to dry. Or, get your 8-year-old grandson to do it. Ask me how I know this.

My maternal grandmother had a 1950s Roper four-burner gas range. It had an individual pilot for each burner, plus one for the oven. And to add to that, a Servel gas fridge. The kitchen was small and it never needed heat in the winter. In the summer, the kitchen's door to the (covered) back...

There are good photos of Gansky's '61 in the thread I linked to below. There's also a photo of a '66 panel. https://www.automaticwasher.org/cgi-bin/TD/TD-VIEWTHREAD.cgi?83900_52

The rot has been setting in for a while. Back in the '90s, I had a furnace issue. I had to call several techs to find one that could fix it. One tech literally said "You need a new unit" as he was getting out of the truck. I invited him to get right back in the truck and leave. (One thing I...

Gas space heaters When I was a child, we spent a lot of time in the houses of relatives that were heated in part with unvented gas room heaters. They weren't considered particularly unsafe. However, everyone that had them knew what the flame was supposed to look like. I remember my...

Mopping up That's why the floor in my maternal grandmother's laundry room (she would not buy an automatic) eventually rotted out.

Try to find "A Christmas Movie Christmas". It's wonderfully meta.

These were used where I live, from the 1960s up until about 1985. I'm not exactly sure when they stopped using them as I was not living here when it happened, but I voted in at least one election on them. Back in the '60s, some of the higher-traffic polling places would have one set up, away...

Growing up in the Southeast USA, I saw basically two patterns. Pre-war homes put the laundry equipment wherever it would fit, and the plumbing/electrical could be extended. My paternal grandparents enclosed a small back porch off the kitchen and made it the laundry area. Most of post-war...

When I was a child, in our neighborhood, the postman walked the route. Houses all had a mailbox next to the front door. If you had outgoing mail, you indicated it by leaving the lid open, or you had the option of taking it to the free-standing box on the corner. The lower half of that box was...

Same basic design, but it preceded the LG Hydrowave.

Found a video I got reminded that the changer is called the Zenith Microtouch. This video is from a 1963, but it's basically the same mechanism. Fast forward to 1:30 to see the 45 spindle being used.