Hot and humid. Even here. Still sunny though.
Was hot and humid in Houston and here yesterday. I finally got up here around 430 and did a few small things, mostly cleanup. I did change a light fixture and found more questionable electrical work. Every fan and fixture so far had something sketchy. Old boy did not like wire nut, but he loved tape.
A/C stopped cooling about 530pm. Fans were fine after the sun went down, but the humidity is still unpleasant. I’m thinking about staying through Monday to deal with that, and get some more tasks finished.
It’s always something.
Stacks aren’t gonna help with the A/C as I don’t have my spare capacitors here. If I did, I’d swap one and see if that did the trick. As it is, I’ll have to call someone. I don’t want to call them on Sunday though.
Cash money is the best prep for this, at this time.
I did sell my one big thing and a couple of small things at my swapmeet, so it was worth staying in Houston for that. I am behind up here though.
I better get something done…
Stack it high. Body armor is next on the restricted list.
nick
A lot of DoD contractor jobs and consulting gigs in Tampa at the MacDill freak shows are at stake.
The Colonel Bat Guano Brigade is on the march!
Ron Paul isn’t going to win. Neither are we.
Praying that things don’t escalate to a nuclear war is about the best we can do for now.
And, please, don’t give me Tulsi Gabbard like the Vets do with my wife at the VA. She was in the same “young leader” classes as Mayor Pete and Wee Pierre, and Gabbard will put a pen to paper to enact Medicaid For All just as fast as the Shot Girl.
The value of Paul’s play is to get the issue in the news. I don’t mean the LSM. They are all in for plugs. Independent and social media will highlight the expenditure and hopefully turn more sheeple against the Dumbocrats.
Money wont save Ukraine. Putin will. It looks like Russia bungling has cost plenty in hardware and loss of flag and field grade officers. Cannon fodder, too. The Russian forces come across as green and untrained.
70 F here in the wilds of west Fort Bend County. Not gonna be wild much longer with 34,000 homes planned south of my house on 50 foot lots down in the swamp by Big Little Creek. I am having trouble envisioning all those cars on our new four lane road over the railroad tracks.
Got the office upstairs a/c fixed Friday night at midnight. I called two guys I know on Wednesday. One would not respond at all. The problem was a burned up motor controller for a zone fan. He apologized for charging me $450 for a new controller, said their parts prices have doubled. I thanked him for fixing the a/c as I had to put a fan in the stairwell blowing up.
He was driving a new Chevy truck that his boss made him buy as he puts 50k miles a year on his truck. I was his 17th call on Friday and he was exhausted. He stopped at the office since I was on his way home and I promised to be there. He tried to stop by Thursday night but it was 1am and wife was already upset.
If you need a job where the work will never stop, plumbing, electrical, and a/c work is always there. Don’t spend $300k on college. Spend $20k on tech school. We have one here in Rosenberg.
Commercial grade trucks are still decent at GM. Drive by the exit from the freeway for the factory in Arlington, and the Allison signs are prominent.
The 10 speed is not going into the commercial trucks. GM couldn’t make it work right, and the overdrive gearing doesn’t make a lick of sense when Mayor Pete is threatening 55 MPH.
Fedora and/or Samba messed something up continuing to deprecate SMB1 in the latest version of Fedora.
Please, IBM. I know what I’m doing.
The last major deprecation broke my scanner feed to the server for the better part of a year until I dug the right config file setting out of the Samba doc.
Now the printer served by my home server is not spooling jobs from the network. It will print local jobs, however.
Up!
Absolutely gorgeous day here. Sunny, clear, nice breeze off the lake… Gonna get hot later though.
Used the outdoor shower at midnight in the dark. I can’t recall the last time I was “skyclad” outdoors. 4 decades? Weird feeling.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table watching birds trying to get into my wife’s honda. While we are up here, there is a constant effort to fly in the side windows. They sit on the mirror, and try again, all day long. No idea what they could even see or want in there.
One of the things I got started yesterday was the irrigation pump. I finally jumpered and worked around some electrical and got the pump to start. It’s not actually drawing up water though, and now I need to read the manual. Just figuring out how to get the angry pixies to it felt like an accomplishment. Having it do what it is supposed to – pump water- will be even better. THEN I can start to find all the issues with buried pipes and sprinklers. It all needs to be re-configured to work with the new septic field anyway.
I better get moving.
n
Don’t borrow $20k for tech school. Make it work without debt.
Student loans can’t be discharged in Bankruptcy. If you hate a field, you’re stuck until the loans are paid off.
Sure, nurse anesthesiologists make $300k/year, but those are always the guys (and girls) who burn out early and head to the Bahamas to run a sailboat or scuba charter at 40.
Well, I don’t. I have an old (2015?) version of Mint on an offline box. I seem to have lost the Samba password. Is there any simple way to retrieve or change it? I would like to access this computer from Windows, but can’t. I can access the Windows computer from it easily, because all I need is the Windows account password. Help?
>> So I’ve ordered a “smart” gable vent fan. I’m not actually a big fan of the “smart“part, but it’s also a 10 speed ECM motor and can be remotely controlled.
You mean remotely controlled by the local power authority when requests for voluntary usage are ignored, right??
smbpasswd didn’t work?
$ sudo smbpasswd -U username
where username is the account ID used to access the file share from Windows.
Samba is fairly straightforward to configure. Everything goes into /etc/samba/smb.conf. If smbpasswd doesn’t work, dig into smb.conf – AFTER making a backup copy – and find the section for the share you want to access. From that point, the online documentation and OReilly Samba book are generally helpful.
Windows 10 might not like SMB v1 which is something to keep in mind once you get the password on the share changed. You may have to enable SMB v1 CIFS which is something I just looked up this morning so I know that lots of pages have info on doing that.
That version is not installed by default. SMB v1 must be installed manually. Windows Features.
If you’re running central air, get an opinion on the gable vent fan from the AC contractor who provides your regular maintenance. They can create a serious mold hazard when used together unless you are very careful.
I’ve written before about my mother being another War Baby generation female who got obsessed in the 70s with having a gable fan installed “just like on Big Mamma’s (grandmother) farm”, and none of the contractors she had out to the house to quote the job would take the work since it created a mold liability problem and, IIRC, was against code in some parts of Florida.
My mother was never deterred, but in 20 years, she never found anyone to install the fan.
I’m confused. I figured venting the hot, humid air from the attic would decrease the cooling load. How does that lead to more condensation and mold? (assuming a properly insulated house and no silliness like bathroom vents directly into the attic?
Serious question, not nit-picking.
Oh, and when I lived in Spokane, WA, I didn’t have air conditioning at all. I had a whole-house fan mounted in the ceiling, and we used to run it during the cool nights with open windows, and then shut up the house to maintain the cool all day. I only missed A/C a couple weeks out of the year.
But mold isn’t a big problem in the high desert.
I am not an HVAC guy.
But it would seem that an attic (gable) fan should draw air from the outside, through the soffit vents (the vents under the bottom edge of your roof near the gutters) out through the gable fan. Or out through the various roof vents – multiple low-profile vents in the roof, or even a vent at the top ridge of the roof.
Drawing air from the house into the attic area, without having a place for the houses’ probable humid air to escape (via the gable vents) is probably a good source of potential moisture and mold inside the attic.
Even a whole house fan (I had one in my 2nd house in Sacramento; it was great) should have a sufficiently sized gable/roof vent to allow air to escape the attic.
It may be that the soffit vents are not properly constructed. You need to make sure that any attic insulation is not covering the soffit vent area. (This happens due to improper installation of the insulation.) There needs to be an unobstructed ‘air flow path’ for outside air to come in through the soffit vents out through the gable/roof vents. There are formulas that can be used to determine proper sizing of the soffit and gable/roof vents.
Proper airflow is what will reduce the heat in the attic. And properly remove any moisture laden air out of the attic. Even with a whole house fan.
Would an attic vent draw in pollen, spores and dust that would cause problems with cooties in the attic?
But, are talking a location with no attic? That might work. The last house I lived in that had a vent was a rental house in Leavenworth, KS. Two story with no attic. The vent was a big rectangular vent that would flop open and closed. It worked, but summer was pretty mild. I guess it was balanced to open when the air differential was hot enough.
Was hot and humid in Houston and here yesterday. I finally got up here around 430 and did a few small things, mostly cleanup. I did change a light fixture and found more questionable electrical work. Every fan and fixture so far had something sketchy. Old boy did not like wire nut, but he loved tape.
Using electrical tape on a connection should be against the law. It dies with age. And in any case the connection should be in a grounded junction box.
The exception to that is 2,400 volt three phase motor connections and larger. I have tape wrapped a few of these. You bring boxes of rolls of electrical tape and wrap all freaking day long. If you do a good job then you do not get a phase to phase jump on a nice hot August day.
Hollyweird “stars” are out in Kalifornia protesting the RvW leak. I don’t know what they think they can accomplish. Intimidate the Judges or plain kill them? Usual PLT lefty stuff. “We didn’t get what we wanted, so, BURN IT ALL DOWN!”
I can’t wait for SCOTUS to rule. If RvW isn’t overturned or just dropped like it never was proposed by SCOTUS, Justice Thomas is right: game over, man, game over. I better lay in the popcorn while it is still on the shelves.
I can’t wait for the trans-women to weight in about their reproductive rights. LoooooooL!
I have disabled the display of avatars to see if that affects page loading time – and page timeout errors.
Also, comments are now paginated into 50 comments per page. (This value may be adjusted.)
The latest comments are displayed by default. Use the comment pagination controls to view previous/next comments.
The line from the contractors who visited the house was always the same: If you exhaust the warm air out of the attic mechanically you will draw cool air out of the central AC “envelope” through the relatively porous ceilings, into the (assuming) insulation, where moisture due to condensation accumulate and create an environment for mold to develop.
Again, talk to your AC guy for his opinion. My parents house was built in 1976 using that era’s materials and never remodeled significantly as long as my old man lived there. He would just duct tape the siding to hide termite damage.
If you’ve ever been to the “Dallas” house and gone inside on the tour, the real kitchen is Southern Living magazine 1976. That’s my mother’s kitchen too.
But if you have properly operating and sized soffit vents (and attic/roof/gable vents), then the air should be drawn from the outside, not from inside the house.
Nah. It’s nice to get a ride to and from and I hear that air support is a fine thing to have when you need it (no experience myself with that but I’ve heard from others that Warthogs or Apaches appearing and stomping a dug-in group of bad guys makes the day go better) but there’s one really really good thing about being a ground pounder: You aren’t stuck in place when there’s a shortage of avgas. You’re not left sitting there like a few tons of scrap metal because a hose split.
Not only that but some of us ground pounders are adept at procuring transportation so we don’t have to walk everywhere. There’s the unofficial requisition of anything not nailed down, of course, as well as repurposing the vehicles and other gear of people who don’t need it anymore. There’s also simple scrounging. I never requisitioned a pickup truck, for instance, but I saved myself a long walk through the scrubland in Summer, while carrying a heavy load, for the low cost of a pulled-out beer and a soda.
I’m still futzing with the Master Closet. at our house, and it will probably go another weekend. If I had to guess, Gidget had Geezer remove most of the brackets from the dress length hanging storage in order to maximize the amount of bridal gowns she could keep at the house at one time.
Unfortunately, 25 year old brackets are slightly different than modern Hecho en China so I’m scavenging brackets from other places in the closet system to make something work and have the rod sit on a uniform height on the side that fell.
Electrical work horrors? Geezer dry wall taped a junction box for a heavy light fixture in place in our upstairs bath and painted over the thinset. The first time I went to replace a light bulb, the fixture fell and nearly landed on my head, held in place only by the electrical wire.
I guess Geezer didn’t want to pay to have the job done right, but he was an architect who worked with local builders. If anyone “knew a guy” it would be him.
Not enough, apparently. Florida has to consider hurricanes when setting code for the vents, and high pitched gable roofs are already a bad idea on the Peninsula due to wind probabilities.
Too much vent and your roof will go airborne.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSXvcveNSTQ
Cat 5, but the Tampa Faux News used to have a video of a pool cage going flying during one of the Cat 2 storms we had cross through in 2004.
Talk to the AC guy. He’ll know.
Sure. But it’s cool as for cooties. You’re in San An freaking tonio Texas. Turn the fans off for a week this time of year and the heat will kill any moldy type of spores.
The house in Austin was a Hip Roof. I think that’s the name. Just a couple of turbines on the roof and soffit vents around the edges.
Come about 9 or 10 PM the heat starts coming through the ceiling insulation.
I bought a couple of “gable fans” but not the usual 18″ size. Twelve inches. I’ve never seen them for sale again. Mounted under the turbines to exhaust. When their t-stats went wonky, I re-wired and had a switch above the laundry room door. Easy peasy, Hit the switch to turn the fans on and then the garage door opener button. Turn the fans off at bed time. No more “dang, I’m burning up” at 8 to 9 PM.
I forget, maybe $40 for the fans. About $20 off the a/c bill…. per month.
As a bonus, when the house was empty, they kept the thieving a-hole neighbor’s kid from getting into the house. How can I say so? Just lived there eight years and neither turbine ever “fell off” the mount. Kid was skinny enough to get in that way.
I’m still stumped about the coffee cans full of pee in my little tin shed. But I’d toss that stuff over the fence into their backyard. Just weird.
The house had well built foam board air ducts. Oh, so while painting the ceiling, take off the metal vents and clean them up. Scrape off the the old foam weather stripping and right into the dishwasher. With heat dry. A few drops of oil on the pivots and then spray paint. Look like new. Back to the air ducts… they didn’t exactly reach the ceiling. Several had 3 or 4 inch gaps. Expanding spray foam to the rescue. THAT little expense of $25 for a few cans canned foam paid for itself the very first month. Basically had at least a full size vent blowing into the attic.
If this is happening, you have things to fix. Perhaps more soffit vents. But first check if the vents can vent…. Bubba blowing in attic insulation probably covered your vents.
This is why you get on a ladder. Seal however you wish, spray foam for ceiling fixtures where the wire comes into the box or aluminum tape to cover the adjusting slots once you have your recessed lights adjusted.
Bonus, the scorpions in the attic can’t get into the house. (They come from somewhere.) (And it’s not through wall outlets.)
Seal your ceiling.
And door and window gaskets.
Thanks for all the comments, lots to think about.
This is the attic gable fan I ordered:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08CVSC7F6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1&tag=ttgnet-20
Smart, but not smart enough to be remotely controlled by the PTB.
Basically I wanted (1) cooling, (2) energy efficiency because of the high electrical costs here, and (3) quiet – years of keeping a radio or white noise generator running to drown out the neighbors in town have left me with easily triggered tinnitus.
Having a variable speed unit that I can control should help with all of that. Acting as an exhaust vent it should improve on the soffits natural effectiveness.
Mold isnt much of an issue here: the relative humidity was 7% yesterday.
The soffit vents are partial. They appear to cover the cathedral ceiling portion of the house, but NOT the other half – master bedroom included.
The eaves on the garage have the soffit exterior linear mesh and covering – but the garage is unfinished and the blocking between rafters is present, which means it has absolutely no effect. Except to make me wonder if there are more blocked soffits on the main portion of the house – I just checked the one.
Still musing over the swamp cooler upgrade.
There is no central air.
Since the Peoples Republic of California seems likely to simultaneously run out of water and electricity and affordable diesel this summer it may be moot.
The only sure solution is stand alone PV generation, batteries, and mechanical air.
Or move.
The lasagna looks like it will be good. I added some dried bell pepper to the meat sauce this morning and a sprinkle of red pepper flakes. Still “off” but much better.
I’m putzing with Top Secret Recipe’s knock-off of Olive Garden’s lasagna. Just using it as a guide, I haven’t been to Olive Garden for about 35 years.
The big thing is the cheese. It’s not just slop on some cottage cheese or ricotta between the layers.
Some grated parmesan, some grated romano, a cup of each. A couple of cups of shredded mozzarella. Mix it together. Add some salt, pepper, oregano, basil, and parsley. Then dump in a 30 ounce (because raising the price so you can have 32 ounces is BAD!). Mix it all together and then beat a couple of eggs and mix that in.
In the middle of it all, a couple of handfuls of shredded cheddar.
I could have used a few more lasagna noodles just to have an extra layer. But I made two 9×13 throwaway foil pans. One is in the fridge and will be frozen for later.
All of the parts taste good.
That’s a nice looking fan EdH.
The tinnitus stuff is interesting. Sometimes it’s just a buzz in one ear.. Sometimes it’s full blast cicada season with crickets and tree frogs added. And a chainsaw…. plus a couple of lawn mowers. I just ignore it all.
The kind of fan my mother wanted installed was bigger. IIRC, 3-4 feet. The historical society had one installed in an old relocated homestead house at their “heritage park” exhibits.
The first light bill in the 70s above $100 was a huge shock to my parents.
Weird, but Olive Garden. A Darden test kitchen probably had lots of cheddar around trying to solve the labor problem of the biscuits at Red Lobster.
I don’t think they ever solved it before getting rid of the chain, ironically, the company’s original concept.
>> A/C went out. Fans are working ok tonight. Compressor isn’t running and IDK if it’s the pump itself or the starter cap.
Good resource for DIY HVAC repair parts and associated info: Arnold’s
Been, there done that.
When we moved into the house, after having been given flying colors by the inspector, we found the buss bars in the breaker panel were rusted. Significant expense to have that replaced. Turns out the inspector that was hired was friends with the selling real estate agent. They conned me. I file charges against both of them. I filed a complaint against the real agent with the parent company. Shortly after they were both fired, and the real estate agent lost her state license. I was certainly not the only one to file complaints.
In the process of removing and replacing the drop ceiling in the basement apartment. Found lots of crap the inspector missed, ignored, or knew and just didn’t bother to report.
Discovered two circuits feeding one junction box in the ceiling. Thanks for non-contact voltage tester. Found another box with no cover and several wires going who knows where. A couple wires went upstairs, two stayed in the basement apartment. Separated those into two junction boxes. Found another junction box, wires in the box, followed the wires, they were all cut, basically nothing coming in or going out. Removed that box and the offending wires. Found another box, open with several connections, the ground and neutral were missing wire nuts. No GFCI on the outlet next to the bathroom sink, installed new GFCI. Outlet near the stove was just hanging in the wall. Old hard plastic box with a nail in the side for no reason. Had to break the box up to remove and install an old work box. All the outlets, backstab which I hate, have been replaced. New switches, dimmer for the overhead LEDs. Now dual switch with dimmer and speed control for the ceiling fan.
Idiots everywhere. The stuff that people do to “”make do” with shortcuts is amazing. Some of it downright dangerous. I have even seen it in new construction. Just watch Mike Holmes and see some of the really expensive horror stories.
Basement apartment ceiling is installed, LED surface lights are installed, looks really good. 2×4 grid was replaced with a 2×2 grid. Tomorrow the A/C guy comes to install new ceiling vents and attach to the existing ducts that have been cut. He will use flex duct for the final few feet after attaching to the old rigid metal duct. That will be the last thing that needs to be accomplished.
Was watching a webcast of the SpaceX launch of the Starlink satellites from Florida.
Including the landing of the first stage on the ‘drone ship’ … which is called “Just Read The Instructions”.
https://www.floridatoday.com/videos/tech/science/space/2022/05/14/spacex-launches-47th-starlink-mission-cape-canaveral-florida/9779695002/
OK, caught up!
The powered venting question is like 45 cal vs 9mm, lots of online and published ink spilled, lots of “but I’m sure it must work this way….”
I put power vent in my garage and it keeps it 20F cooler in summer.
I put power gable end vent in my rent house when we lived there and it helped a lot. Noisy, but really noticable cooling effect.
To my mind, if the attic is hotter than ambient, the venting is not sufficient.
FWIW, painted drywall is considered to be a vapor barrier, so I think “porous” isn’t the word you’re looking for. It’s the other penetrations that let the indoor conditioned air into the attic. Condensation shouldn’t be a problem when cool conditioned air enters the hot attic. Might be a problem in winter if warm moist air enters a COLD attic, that will condense.
@greg, we call that type of big fan a “whole house” fan, because one giant fan cools the whole house. They were popular after the oil crunch, as you mentioned. In the right climate they were very effective. Florida builds houses out of concrete and discourages wall to wall carpet because of their mold issues and bugs. Florida does many things the rest of the US doesn’t.
My personal feeling is we are trying to build houses too tight. There are soo many failures on the East coast when they were climbing the learning curve with super insulated, and super tight. Much of the failure in NOLA, in the “Brad Pitt” houses happened because northern architects built super tight houses that needed A/C and mechanical ventilation for people who couldn’t afford to run the A/C, LIKE having windows and doors open, and didn’t understand the new spaceship features of the houses. The old houses stood for a hundred years without mold.
n
I’m still at the lake so I’ll get a great view of the eclipse if the sky stays clear.
I decided to stay to deal with the A/C. I have done some more testing, and everything is working but the compressor. I can hear it try to start, but it doesn’t. I’m guessing starter cap. I have a reference for an A/C guy, but if he can’t get here, I’ll go to town and try to find the right cap myself. I don’t mind having the system actually checked out, I just didn’t want to pay anyone’s Sunday rate. Condenser unit was manf 2009. It is an American Standard with a Trane nameplate. Probably due for replacement by some standards but I’d rather repair if possible right now.
n
The moon was golden right after sundown. Gonna check again in a minute.
I have a clear view of the moon, it’s about ¾ covered and pretty freaking cool.
n
There’s a moon? Or a sky? Couldn’t prove it by me. 100% cloud cover. I have a nice reflection of the city lights from 10-15 miles south of us, but nothing more interesting than that.
The moon is just about 100% covered in a totally clear sky here in the wilds of Fort Bend County.
The concrete block is about termites and cost. Those exterior walls are actually lousy in hurricanes when debris starts flying.
My parents house was stick frame, but the foundation was poured in 1976 so the termite chemicals worked well for about 20 years. The house still stands 46 years later with only minor remediation necessary, mostly due to neglect.
Most of the overpriced stucco shacks get built with wall to wall carpeting. Cheap. In the 70s, houses would even have the pile carpeting in the bathroom, but, fortunately, that fell out of favor.
I’m off to bed after one more look at the moon, just to make sureit’sa coming back, and that I didn’t actually see navigation lights on it. 🙂
N
Stack it high. Body armor is next on the restricted list.
Won’t be legal without an act of Congress which will never happen. Of course, that won’t stop them.
Still gone, no lights..
N
I swear I remember them being against code. Of course that didn’t deter my mother.
Fortunately she never found someone willing to put one into the house.
My parents did install “mushroom” vent fans. Long before they were against code, the convention was to avoid installing those in hurricane-prone areas, but Florida has been in a historic lull for storms since the 50s and people are stupid.
>> I have a clear view of the moon, it’s about ¾ covered and pretty freaking cool.
Saw pics of it online – good enough for me. 🙂
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ADDED: And it works as described. Thanks Rick. PS miss the avatars.
Only a little bit is left of the Moon’s lunar eclipse. Cool, way cool.