Each year, thousands of Arizona residents email or call Rosie Romero’s 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: I have five or six lantana plants in my front yard, but every year, about this time, they begin to wither away. I’ve increased the water that I give them through my drip irrigation system to about a half hour every other day now that it is summer.
ANSWER: The problem is that you’re just teasing those plants by giving them those little drinks of water. You need to get the water to seep about two feet down into the soil. That should take an hour and a half to two hours of drip irrigation twice a week. Or you can run a hose on those plants once or twice a week.
Q: I live in Saddlebrooke in Pima County. I have a 28-year-old house and three 28-year-old live oak trees. It seems as if those trees never stop dropping leaves all-year-long, and I’m cleaning them up constantly. I want to know if that’s normal.
A: Generally speaking, these oaks should have a big drop of leaves in the spring, but they never really stop dropping some leaves, and they are never going to be completely bare like deciduous trees. They’re “evergreen,” but in a way that name is a misnomer because they’re constantly losing some leaves.
Q: I live in a two-story home and I’m having problems with a clogged dryer vent. I had someone out to unclog it, and they didn’t get it done. The problem is that the current vent has to run up the wall and then up and outside to the top of the house. I’d like to run the vent into the garage and then outside the house. Can I do that?
A: If you try to run the vent through the garage, you’d have to cut a hole in the wall that would violate the fire rating of the wall. You’d have to put in some kind of soffit to take the vent out the house through the garage. Before doing all that, you should probably try to call some dryer vent company that has really strong duct-cleaning equipment. They should be able to get the debris out of your vent.
Q: I had a new air conditioning system installed recently, partly because we had way too much dust in our house all the time. The AC people told me that I had only one intake for the HVAC system, and I needed two of them. But after they added another one, the dust got even worse in the house than it was before. So what do I do now?
A: You need to have a pressure test done on your entire HVAC system to see what’s wrong. It’s possible that you have a leak somewhere in your duct system that is taking in dust from the attic and then blowing it into the rest of the house. Ask the people who did your AC installation to do the test. They may tell you that you have to pay for it. That’s OK; just tell them that you will pay, but that if they find a leak, they need to fix it because they should have done it when installing the new system. If they can’t find the leak, they can still blow something called Aeroseal into your ducts that can seal small, hard-to-find leaks from the inside out.
