Each year, thousands of Arizona residents email or call Rosie Romeroβs radio show with questions about everything from preventing fires in their chimneys to getting rid of tree roots invading their sewer system. His goal is to provide answers that suit the specific lifestyle wherever someone lives in Arizona.
QUESTION: My water company is suggesting that we invest in expandable flood barriers in case of flooding in our area, which has happened in previous monsoon seasons. Is this a good idea?
Answer: These devices are often called quick dams because they donβt require the time that sandbags take to set up around your house. You just take out the quick dams and set them up outside in front of doors, windows and foundations. As water comes up around the house, it activates an absorbent powder or other material inside the barrier that swells up when it gets wet. The expanding barrier then prevents water from getting close to your home. The only problem, of course, is where you will store the barriers, which can be somewhat bulky. It can also be expensive to buy enough of these barriers to cover the entire perimeter of your home.
Q: It always seems much more humid inside my air-conditioned house than it is outside. The humidity inside is about 35 percent while outside it can be 15 percent. Is that OK, and why does it happen?
A: That humidity level is ideal. Your house is usually more humid because itβs all sealed up in the summer, and moisture produced in cooking or running the shower stays locked up inside. Your humidity level in summer could actually reach about 40 percent. If it gets higher than that β perhaps 45 to 55 percent β itβs actually possible that you have too big an air conditioning unit and it isnβt coming on and running long enough. In that case, you need to lower the thermostat a couple of degrees. Youβre better off with an under-sized air conditioning unit that runs a little bit longer.
Q: We found ants all over the vanity cabinets in our bathroom and got rid of them and cleaned up the area. The next day, we found them all over the kitchen; we followed the trail of ants and found that they were breaking in because of a crack in the grout on the kitchen tile floor. I suspect theyβre coming in from an underground area. What should we do?
A: Use a bait-type system to eliminate them. The ants will take the bait back to the queen of their colony, and that should be the end of them. Itβs possible theyβre coming in through a crack in the slab under the tile. But itβs very difficult to correct that situation. If you remove the tiles to do a repair on the crack, itβs going to be very hard to put them back again successfully.
Q: The master bedroom in my 8-year-old house gets very hot in the evenings during the summer because the late afternoon sun tends to hit that part of the house the most. So Iβve closed some HVAC registers in the rest of the house in hopes of having more cool air from the air conditioner blow into that bedroom. Is that a good idea or wonβt it work?
A: We donβt recommend doing that because it could create pressure problems for your heating and air-conditioning system. Instead, close all the registers in the house by about 60 percent so that theyβre blowing about 40 percent of their capacity.
After a couple of days you can then go into the bedroom that gets hotter and open the vents completely. That should help you cool off the bedroom.
