Found 47 results for the keyword(s) ‘Mystery’

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  Gumbo Clay and what it does to your house.

  For those of you who have move into the area spreading roughly from Winnipeg to Regina, but you have not grown up in this area, the living nature of the soil itself may surprise you. Clay soil under and around a house can cause problems anywhere in Canada, but in this region there is a special cl...
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  Protecting shower tiles from hand held shower scratches

  When mysterious problems arise in a house the task is to track down the cause – and sometimes encapsulate it.   I built a beautiful new tiled shower, only to discover a hole starting to develop in one tile a few months later!  When I inspected carefully, there was nothing that touched the ...
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  Measuring magnetic fields inside your house

  All electrical currents give off electromagnetic radiation when there is any change in the current flow, which means that our standard AC current is giving it off all the time. (DC current only creates an electromagnetic field when it goes on or off or changes magnitude.) Transformers tend to giv...
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  How do you balance a ceiling fan so it won't wobble?

  Oh how many times has the wobbling ceiling fan driven you crazy. Sometimes it is acceptable on one speed but not another. Sometimes it just click, click, clicks so badly that you can't get to sleep. Fixing it is easy, but not fast. There are a large number of things that could be wrong so work yo...
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  Silencing a strange buckling noise in the floor.

  Bruce from Chatham, Ontario had a peculiar noise problem with his floor. His heating ducts were made by simply nailing sheet metal to the floor joists, and every time he walked on the floor the sheet metal would ripple, sending rock-music-like sounds throughout the house. He solved the problem b...
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  Water oozing up through floor tiles.

  Stephanie saw a show where we were tracking down what was causing water to ooze up through floor tiles laid on a basement floor. She wanted to share her very strange experience with water oozing up through floor tiles on the main floor of the house. She finally discovered that the clothes dryer ...
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  The mysterious toilet that drains itself

  Several years ago when we had my live hot line TV show across Canada, I got a call from a homeowner who had a toilet that functioned perfectly except that every night when he came home from work, the water in the bowl had dropped low enough to let the sewer gas smell into the bathroom. He ha...
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  Is R-24 paint for real?

  A while back Glidden Paints had begun marketing Ceramic InsulCoat paint in Canada, claiming R-24 insulation values for a coat of paint. Does this new high tech paint really provide the equivalent of an R-24 insulation value to your Canadian home?No! In Canada, even the best reflective paint wil...
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  They say I can't replace the electric heaters in my Mom's house.

  Shawn from Nepean, Ontario writes: "My mother wants to replace all of her baseboard heaters but has been told that all new heaters are 220v and her home has only 110v. My question to you Jon is how can I tell for sure if Mom's home is 110v and if so, what can we do to replace her baseboard heate...
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  A bathroom fan switch in the downstairs hallway?

  Chris & Dorie from Richmond Hill, Ontario write: "Last summer we moved into our new home. About a month ago, I discovered that the mysterious switch in our front hall operates the fan in our second floor bathroom?! Is this a fire code regulation? Why did they not try to "hide" the switch i...