Builder Tips

It came to my attention while doing a home inspection, many people do not understand the Winter/Summer switch on their ceiling fans. Well let me give it a go. I live in Ohio the winters coldish and the summers hot and humid. In the summer air moving across your body helps with evaporation thus cooling you down. So in the summer you want the fan blowing air on and across  you (fan turning clockwise). Now in the winter this would be silly so we just turn the fan off till summer and then start using them again. Now all makers of ceiling fans put a switch located generally above the light and below the fan blades. By flipping this switch you reverse the rotation of the fan and “wowsa” you are now in winter mode. As hot air rises the fan moves the air across the ceiling and down the walls bringing the arm air back down to people level keeping the ceilings cooler and the floor level warmer. Now go flip that switch.     

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When purchasing laminate flooring, remember that price is not everything.  We recently installed the floor shown above.  Having installed many systems before, I found this product took 3 times the man hours to install.  Well, the purchase price of $0.89 a square foot was a great price.  The material was very hard to snap together (we had to use rubber mallets) and the edges where the boards fit together left me thinking that moisture is going to find it’s way in and cause the floor to swell.  All in all, this floor made my client’s home look great, but my concern is the great look will be short lived: 3-5 years, and maybe less if used in a home with lots of children.

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Today at my client’s home we ran across a situation where non-adjustable cabinet doors hit each other and wouldn’t close easily.  This was caused by one of the cabinet doors wedging against an adjacent door casing and bending the cabinet door hinges.

To bend the cabinet door hinges back into alignment, insert two thin wood shims between the cabinet doors and gently push the doors shut (see photo below).  This reshapes the hinges, so the cabinet doors will close easily.

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This is a product I’m investigating.  The Power-Save 1200 claims to save as much as 25% on your monthly electric bills.  From the vendor’s website:

The Power-Save 1200™ reduces the amount of power drawn from the utility by storing electricity otherwise lost from the motors in your home.  The unit supplies this stored electricity back to your appliances, decreasing demand from the utility.  Decreasing demand means less usage and lower electric bills.

I’ll be discussing this product in more detail and share my personal experience with it.

Power-Save 1200

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I was a green builder long before the term “green” meant “good.”  Back when I started building homes, green usually had a negative meaning to describe inexperience (“Keep an eye on him, he’s a green plumber”) or illness (“You’re looking green today, do you need to go home?”)

One of the clearest definitions I’ve seen for “green” is by the Skyscraper Museum:

GREEN is a term now widely used to describe buildings designed and constructed with minimal negative impact to the environment and with an emphasis on conservation of resources, energy efficiency, and healthful interior spaces.

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