Home Economics Tips and Questions

Modern furnaces are 95% efficiency. They didn't actually have minimum standards until 1992, when it was 78%. Figure, what, 66%? On top of that efficiency drops over the life time. It'd guess a replacement furnace will cut your bill by at least third, with no telling what the upper bound is.

If you do the energy audit thing they can at least give you a good estimate on what the return-on-investment of replacing it and other upgrades would be.

Does the cleaner have instructions on the back label?

You could set the temperature to maximum and wait an hour to make sure the smell goes away thoroughly.

Ah, yeah, that's a horse of a different color.

You edit that post right now with the appropriate wordplay and I'll delete this like nothing ever happened. I will not let this crime stand.

You're gonna have to let the crime stand, I do not see what I'm being accused of. Did I miss the opportunity for a pun or something?

Yes.

"house" of a different color would've been stupid.

I drained my water heater and it was strange. A tiny bit of red water at the beginning, then clear until empty. Then when I would repeatedly just barely fill it and drain it about 30 gallons of red water. Strange.

This week is the inaugural recurring inspection; I need to have them pull out of the anode and see if it's dying, because I have better things to do.

Copper fittings?

All plastic. The internet says it could be either normal boring sediment or the anode givin' it up.

I just found a container of unidentified medication in my medicine cabinet. It's an old bottle of mine, but the pills in there aren't the ones that were originally in the bottle, and they're totally unmarked. Once I figure out what they are, how does one properly dispose of leftover medication?

Grind them under the bottle, wrap them in a wet paper towel, eat.

Or this.

That's a good question. My community does an annual drug recycling program, where the county police partner up with the local hospital to take them in, no questions asked. You may want to look around and see if your community does something similar.

Take them to a pharmacy and they should have teh facilities to dispose of them.

Arise, thread!

The other shoe dropped this weekend when the temperature was in the 90s and the AC was just blowing hot air instead of doing what it's supposed to do. A tech came out yesterday. (Last night, at 8pm actually -- I guess we're not the only people in town with AC problems!) He showed me how to change the filter (it was where I thought it probably was, behind a panel that you just wrench off, and which I didn't have the cojones to pry open because it looked permanently affixed). He also messed around with wiring in the cooler unit and it works again.

He also wandered around counting air vents and the like and we're waiting on an estimate for replacement of the whole system (too old to replace just one or the other component). Rough guesstimate approximately $6000 for an adequate system, $8000 for a fully modern, high efficiency, etc etc.

eek

How long have you lived there? Changing a filter is something you should be doing several times a year.

Yikes. Our big upgrade for efficiency would have been to get our ducts redone as well, but unfortunately lack of crawlspaces meant ripping out the ceiling. So it turned out closing the ducts nearest the thermostat let the temperatures be managed more normally.

Seven years. I know, I know! I was complaining that I couldn't figure out how to do it despite poking around the cabinet, opening everything that appeared to open, and getting a somewhat-similar manual (I couldn't find one for the actual model) from the Internet. It's been bugging me that I couldn't do it, but since it was working I just vacuumed the underside of what I thought was the filter area (I was right) and hoped for the best.

...really?

I, uh. I think I'd better go figure out where my filters are.

Yes, really. Different filters claim different lifespans but they're usually between 1 and 3 months. When I got my new furnace the installer recommended getting the really cheap filters and change them more frequently rather spending more and changing them less frequently.

The only place I've had on my own with central air had a reusable filter. We cleaned it about once a month, because CATS.

We don't have a furnace, but I do have AC and a dryer, both of which need--I assume--filter replacement. So. Must track down those suckers. (And maybe figure out if there's any way to clean a filter on a dishwasher without calling in a plumber, because damned if I can figure out how to do so.)

The filter on a dryer is usually just the lint tray that you should be cleaning after every load.

I can't remember which of a string of forgettable college and post-college roommates it was, but I once moved into a shared house which had a washer/dryer and found the lint tray completely, 100%, ridiculously packed full of lint. Apparently the roommate had missed the lint trap memo somehow.

When we moved into one of our apartments, the tenant before us apparently had no idea where the lint trap was in the dryer (it was embedded in the back of the drum, which is strange to me) and he didn't change it for AN ENTIRE YEAR.

I'm amazed that nothing caught on fire, and it did take quite a bit of work to clean the whole thing out.

Oh, yeah, that I clean all the time; but I thought people were saying there was some Magical Secondary Filter that needed to be cleaned periodically to keep the house from catching on fire.

I am still not very good with this whole Owning A House thing.

That's the thing: sometimes there is a magical secondary filter. In my case, there's a box with a tiny porthole on the duct leading out of the back of my dryer, which has an awkward but functional means of being opened and cleaned. I didn't find it for a year or two after living here, because I'd never had such a thing.

Right, air conditioners have filters, let me make a note... this is the best thread for making sure I don't destroy our house.

Inform Rapunzel that I have a comfortable couch for when you burn your home to the ground.