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.
Q: We have a 14-year-old pine tree in our yard that we bought as a tabletop tree for Christmas one year. Now it’s 16 to 18 feet tall and the lower branches are really filling out and covering up large portions of the yard. Can I cut off some of them at the trunk in order to keep the tree at bay? I want to get behind the tree to prune another bush.
A: Of course, you can do that with the lower branches. But don’t get too aggressive and prune the branches too high up on the trunk. Many people don’t realize how well pines can do in Southern and Central Arizona. Many of the most successful species are trees that were native to Afghanistan and Syria.
Q: I have an attic exhaust fan that runs about eight or nine hours a day in the summer. But I recently heard that you don’t like attic fans. So what’s wrong with them? Doesn’t my fan help cool down my attic in the summer?
A: The truth is that there are no cost savings or improved cooling when you have a fan like this running all the time in the summer. Attic exhaust fans create a negative pressure situation in your attic. They can actually pull the conditioned air out of the house and draw it into the attic so that your AC starts running again. If you have the proper type and amount of insulation in your attic, you will be doing the best you can to keep your attic cool. Actually, a hot attic is only a small factor in your summertime energy costs. Scientific estimates are that the heat in your attic represents only 10 percent of your air conditioning bill in the summer.
Q: I have a master bath shower that’s about 70 to 80 feet away from the water heater in my garage. In the morning, when I get up and have a shower, the water that comes out of the spray head usually has to run for a while before I can get hot water out. I probably waste four or five gallons of water. How can I resolve this problem and eliminate the waste?
A: You need to put a recirculating pump — with a timer — on your water heater. Set that timer for when you take your shower so that you can get hot water out of your faucet at just the right time. The pump will send any cold water in the pipes back to the water heater. You need that timer though so that the pump doesn’t run continuously all day and waste electricity. Some people collect the extra water in buckets, by the way, and use it to water plants.
Q: My back patio is mainly made up of a flat concrete slab that was laid by the developer. Later I had another section of concrete added to that, but the new part has a little bit of a slope and when it rains, water washes onto the old concrete and pools up in cracks and ridges. It’s a constant problem. What should I do about this?
A: You don’t need to rip out all that old concrete, you can have pavers laid on top of the old patio. They can correct the drainage problems and make your patio look a lot more uniform and attractive. If you buy light-colored pavers, it will make the surface cooler in hot weather as well.
