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: It seems to take forever to get hot water from my water heater in the garage to run through the pipes in my bathroom shower. How can I speed up that process so Iβm not wasting so much water?
ANSWER: There are a number of different solutions in the marketplace to this problem, some of which were only developed in the last 10 years. Probably the best idea is to install a hot-water recirculating pump. A pump like that rapidly pulls hot water from your heater and sends it to you while simultaneously sending cool water back to the water heater to be reheated. But make sure you install a timer so that the pump runs only during those hours when you need that hot water. You donβt want the pump to run water through the system continuously, or your energy bills could really go up.
Your problem is one that many other homeowners seem to face. A lot of people say they put 5-gallon buckets in the shower to catch the otherwise wasted cold water. Then they use it to water plants or even flush toilets.
Q: I have an older water softener, and I donβt think itβs operating properly because my water doesnβt feel βsoftβ to me anymore and the soap doesnβt suds up the way that it used to. But the water softener repairman did a test of the water with a few drops of chemicals, and he said it was fine. But I donβt think heβs right. Can I test it myself or take the water somewhere to get it tested again?
A: Yes, you can test the softness of your own water. Water hardness test kits are sold online or in hardware stores for less than $20. You can put test strips into a glass of your water and then compare the color change in the strip to a chart that gives various colors for levels of hardness. Other more-expensive kits have you put drops of water into a bottle to see what change it makes in the color of the test liquid. For even more money, you can send off a sample of your water to a testing lab.
Q: I have a skylight in the roof of my home. But the glass in the skylight broke recently, and I put a temporary fix on it to keep any rain or cold or warm air from coming in. Someone is coming to repair the skylight soon, but I was wondering if I can use that skylight opening as a way to open up the roof and put a deck on it so I could go out and look at the stars at night. Is that possible? I have a pitched roof, not a flat roof.
A: Since your roof has a pitch to it, building a deck outside that opening in your roof might be fairly difficult to do. Youβd have to build some kind of platform on the roof, and that could get to be an expensive job. Then youβd have to have some kind of ladder or stairway under the skylight so you could et to the deck.
