Water heater maintenance; pack rats; e-piping
Get tips on making fixes around the house.
Q: I own a rental home where the storage shed in the yard is completely filled up with my stuff. Now I’ve found out that there are a couple of…
Q: Two years ago, I bought a home where the previous owner enclosed a single-car garage to turn it into a fourth bedroom. He put drywall insid…
Q: My one-story home was built in 1965; now my house’s cast-iron drain pipes are deteriorating and might need replacing. However, the plumber …
Q: I need to replace all my windows in my stucco home. There are a number of different installation methods and I need help determining which …
Q: How often should I drain my water heater?
Q: Is there any way to keep sediment and calcium from building up in your water heater except for installing a water softener?
Q: I have laminate counter tops in my kitchen that have a triple bullnose edge. They also stick out pretty far from the counter. Is it possibl…
Q: I want to install laminate wood flooring over a concrete slab that has a 14-foot-long crack in it that is about 1/8-inch deep. What do I ha…
Q: My master bath shower has a “snail” entry with glass blocks comprising two sides of the entry. A few of the glass blocks on the bottom row …
Q: I have a major grub problem in my yard. My flowers always die and when I pull them out of the ground, I always find lots of grubs among the…
Q: I want to put an addition on my garage in order to put in a workroom plus extra storage space. There is an existing concrete slab next to t…
Q: I’m buying a 1,700-square-foot house that is being constructed by a builder. The builder has made me an interesting offer. For just $600, h…
Q: I have a beautiful Texas ebony tree; it’s very large and has a lot of thick foliage. Short of getting a chainsaw and cutting it down, how c…
Q: I live in Sabino Canyon and have two large dogs that live in my backyard and keep digging holes in the pea gravel. I keep filling the holes…
Q: I’m a renter, but I’m interested in buying my own home. Recently, I have been looking at houses for sale owned by people who originally bou…
Q: We are in the market for a new water heater and wondered what you think about heat pump water heaters. How do they work?
Q: I’m a renter, but I’m interested in getting into vegetable gardening. Would it be all right to build a 4-by-8-foot raised bed on top of par…
Q: A large mesquite in my backyard has grown to the point where its roots are lifting up the concrete paving all over the yard. What can I do …
Q: We bought a 17-year-old house recently and removed the old carpeting. We want to have tile instead. But when we pulled up the carpet, we fo…
Q: My home has a 100-foot-long driveway with a 10-degree slope. It now has six very large cracks in its surface that range from about a half-i…
Q: People sometimes tell me that if you fill a big container with water and use it once a month to flush your toilet, you’ll never have clogge…
Q: I have a rental property where a toilet seems to be clogged off and on. Is this the kind of repair that I can do by myself?
Q: There’s a gas water heater inside my house, but it creates too much heat and I want to move the heater out of the house to the garage. But …
Q: I want to remodel my kitchen, and part of my plan is to move the sink to another wall about 20 feet away. Can I move the water line without…
Q: I live in a 15-year-old house where the master bath shower only produces hot water if you first turn on the cold water in the bathtub and l…
Q: We’re thinking of building a house on a lot near an old capped landfill. The landfill is about 600 feet away from the site. Is there any in…
Q: Recently, we had a lot of water come flooding up through our bathroom drains and toilets. Plumbers came out and ran a device through the dr…
Q: I have an older concrete block home and on some walls inside the house, I often find condensation building up on exterior walls. I want to …
Q: I have trouble getting full pressure at my kitchen sink when I use the spray hose to clean off dishes. In fact, I have a lot of problems wi…
Q: I replaced my windows in the early 1990s with dual-pane windows that are still under warranty. The windows have argon gas between the panes…
Q: I have a gas clothes dryer that was having a problem drying clothes – possibly because lint was building up in the unit and the vent. We tr…
Q: I live in Tucson but have a second home in Show Low. It’s a two-story unit that’s half of a duplex. Recently, we found a crack in the slab …
Q: If I have insulation blown into my attic, what is the recommended amount I need to have?
Q: We have a relatively flat roof on our house that is covered with foam but that needs to have an elastomeric coating put over the foam every…
Q: I live in a house that I bought in the 1970s, and I have out-of-date green laminate countertops in the bathroom. Recently, I went to a home…
Q: We have a two-story house built with a back patio that is covered by a tar and gravel roof. Now when I look out on that roof, most of the g…
Q: I have a 5-year-old electrically powered air conditioner on my roof as well as having an electrically powered, forced-air furnace. Lately, …
Q: I live in a 1970s-era house retrofitted with can lights in the ceiling. Now I’d like to blow insulation into my attic, but I’m worried that…
Q: What would cause a house to creak and pop when it is only two years old? We have tried to stop this problem by putting air vents into the r…
Q: We bought a fixer-upper that has 2,300 square feet of Saltillo tile flooring that we’re going to replace. After remodelers removed the kitc…
Q: If I install photovoltaic solar panels on the roof of my home, and the electric power grid goes down in my area, will the solar panels stil…
Q: I have a lot of mold on some of my baseboards and I think it’s because I have a lot of rain water seeping into the house due to a crack in …
Q: I have an older house with a water pipeline that goes through the house before going out into the backyard so that I can use its water to i…
Q: I’m a new homeowner doing renovation work on an older house, and we are removing the popcorn ceilings. About four months into the job, we h…
Q: I live in a subdivision that was built on a slope, and my neighbor’s lot is slightly higher than that of my house. A concrete block wall st…
Q: I have a water softening system and it works just fine, but I always have a pink-colored ring in my toilet bowl. How can I stop that?
Q: We are renting an older house where the owners had previously installed green indoor-outdoor carpeting inside the entrance way in a 10-foot…
Q: I would like to save money whenever I can on my energy bills. Can I turn off the circuit breaker on my electric panel that controls my air …
Q: I have a 45-year-old house built with adobe bricks that originally had black mortar used in between the bricks. Over time, the mortar faded…
Q: We are getting ready to rent out a two-bedroom townhome that has four hard-wired smoke alarms with battery backups. Would it be a good idea…
Q: A large mesquite in my backyard has grown to the point where its roots are lifting up the concrete paving all over the yard. What can I do …
Q: For the past couple weeks, the water coming out of our kitchen faucet has been steadily decreasing — both hot and cold. I tried cleaning th…
Q: There is a shut-off valve outside my house on the water pipeline, but when I use it, I turn off both the irrigation line and the water line…
Q: I have a polished concrete floor with tiny cracks in it; what can I do to fix it?
Q: I live in an apartment, but love to do container gardening. Because of the small space I work with, it doesn’t seem possible to do composti…
Q: Can you plant a tree in the soil on top of a septic system?
Q: We have a sunken family room that was built about 4 inches lower than the rest of the house. For various reasons, we’d like to bring it up …
Q: I just replaced the hot water heater in my house and did the job myself. Now we’re getting hot and cold flashes of water coming out of fauc…
Q: I’m doing a bathroom renovation and wondered if I could remove the old fiberglass panels for my present shower and replace the whole thing …
Q: Our heat pump went out a couple of months ago; the compressor broke down. It’s going to cost us $5,000 to $6,000 to replace the whole unit.…
Q: I’m trying to decide whether to install carpet tiles or laminate on the floor in my children’s bedroom. Which would be better? And will cha…
Q: I have completely turned my garage into a workshop area. On one side, I have my tools, workbench and all my projects going on; on the other…
Q: I have a 30-year-old concrete tile roof that needs replacing. After taking off the tile, the roofers want to put new peel-and-stick roofing…
Q: I have a 2-foot-tall mesquite that sprouted in my yard that I’d like to move to a new location. Is it OK to do that and will it survive?
