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My home has air returns in all three bedrooms, the living room, the upstairs hallway and the kitchen. Only the bathrooms and the laundry (which contains the furnace) lacks return air. Ironically, the very HVAC company I now work for installed my HVAC when my house was built in 2004, nine years...

I remember having a Whirlpool ThinTwin 27" laundry center in my apartment in college a few years ago. Those were direct drive until recently. It appears that the direct drive went away based on the signature cycle indicator on the control panels of their new laundry centers. I really liked that...

Had a call for a frozen evaporator (actually the call was about water "dribbling" from the front of the furnace, normally a condensate drain issue), the renter called on behalf of the landlord which authorized and paid for the call. The house was an older cabin-like structure in poor condition...

I almost considered getting a window AC for the bedroom to avoid having to run our central AC overnight, but my wife wouldn't like the noise or aesthetics and the quality (or lack thereof) of window ACs available today is just sad. It would probably be more cost effective to just run the central...

I have to laugh at the styrofoam evaporator chambers of the Walmart specials on the shelves (actually, even the "better" ones sold elsewhere seem to have them too). Evaporator chambers used to be made out of sheet aluminum or galvanized steel with foam insulation in between. The styrofoam evap...

Whatever you do, make sure to err on the side of using less detergent rather than more if you are using a front loader. I'm not sure how HE toploaders would react and I'm sure older toploaders would be fine either way. The foam in the pillows will create tons of air pockets as it tumbles in...

@iej - I almost thought it was an overhead ground wire due to the proximity of the metallic piece bent outwards and "gapped" a few inches from that specific line, but the gauge of the middle conductor appears the same as the gauge of the conductors on the crossarm and the insulator on the middle...

South of my hometown in rural MO there is a three-phase, ~60kV secondary distribution line, running alongside the highway for some distance until it deviates east to a substation. I think the original poles in this run are about 50-60 years old. There are a few replacement poles due to storm...

Sad, sad, sad. Never in a million years would I have thought that a titan like GE would have ever been delisted from the NYSE, with a retail drugstore taking its place in the standings. Now I'm wondering if GE as we know it will go away. I mean, the GE name will obviously live on, but will the...

My carpets aren't actually dirty, I clean them for a hygiene/maintenance thing if anything. My wife and I never wear shoes in our homes (neither does the visitors) and it certainly helps that we don't have kids or pets. I've thought about hiring a carpet cleaning service but a few of those...

Used my PowerScrub Deluxe the other day and discovered that the brushes on the bottom wouldn't turn. Ah, I've been down that road before. Another broken turbine, the mechanism that drives the brushes in most Hoover carpet cleaners via the exhaust air from the suction motor. I've replaced it once...

$50k is walk-in money, installed! I know Smeg is pretty high-end, but $50k for a domestic refrigerator is out of this world. Wow, to think that a built-in KitchenAid or SubZero, or a good commercial freestanding reach-in (a Traulsen or Victory now that McCall and Koch/Hobart is gone) are...

I live several miles south of Seattle and our water is as soft as it can get. I never have to de-scale the coffeemaker and the acrylic (or fiberglass?) shower enclosure never has deposits on it (though I do use auto wax after cleaning it). None of our faucets have any evidence of scale either...

Samsung, LG, Hitachi and Mitsubishi are eventual candidates to be what GE "used to be." They all are large conglomerates and are very similar to GE's (soon to be former) diversification. It's always sad to see a American company becomes a former shell of itself, even if I don't hold any shares...

Maybe California will have no need for draconian regulations like this. People are going to get fed up and move away, and then there will be enough water. I think my wife and I (and it's just the two of us) are pretty easy on water usage, even though we each take showers twice a day (I shower...

I have a Windmere desk fan in my garage. It's from the '90s. My grandma bought it for me for my 9th birthday from a place called Pamida (kind of like Walgreen's or RiteAid. They were bought out by ShopKo). It was made in China but it is well-built for what it is and runs like a top. Actually...

So, I purchased a no-frills Lasko stand fan to run overnight when it's not warm enough to turn on the AC but not cool enough to sleep comfortably (I'm very a warm-blooded sleeper). Well, a fan is a fan, but I noticed something when I turned it off. It was making a very noticeable scraping sound...

Outdoor panels never make any sense to me... One home I went to for a heat pump replacement was supposedly gutted and remodeled in 1997, including the electrical, yet had an outdoor panel. I am not an expert when it comes to all the nuances of the NEC, but I'm not sure how this would have...

My MOL Whirlpool convection is self-cleaning (AquaLift) and I've never used it. It's supposed to be lower heat to avoid killing the control board but I find it quicker and easier to just wipe it out as needed with Simple Green and hot water. I guess my preferences to keep doing it the old...

Definitely go with the hood. I actually removed the Whirlpool OTR that I installed after about 2-3 years and replaced it with a 400 CFM Broan hood. I should have gone with a straight hood from the start, but oh well. The performance is SO much better. OTR vents have a complex internal airpath...