One morning the oil furnace and boiler companies woke up to discover they were the Canadian bad guys -- everybody was condemning oil burning heating and the government was even paying people to scrap them. The oil furnace and boiler companies had to admit that they had been pretty contented and l...
Putting a sink in an island in the middle of the kitchen presents some plumbing challenges. Generally the venting for a sink goes upward in the wall while the drain water flows downward towards the floor – but in an island, going up is not an option.
To have a large sink that drains properly y...
Often promoted in southern Ontario, this theory has never, to my knowledge, been proven by any government agency or independent researcher in the insulation field. On the contrary, the unanimous opinion seems to be that it will cause, not prevent, condensation. Even efforts to drain condensation...
David writes that he recently installed a double sink but it gurgles and backs up. It is 10 feet away from the plumbing stack and goes through a garbarator. What did he do wrong?
When you attach a large double sink on a long horizontal run, the drain pipe will tend to fill up with water ...
The basic message to remember is that Radon is a dangerous cancer causing gas and if found to exist in high concentrations in your house the problem can be solved permenantly and at a reasonable cost. So we don't want to ignore the possibility, we need to test every house in Canada.
7% of homes...
The best way for air to move through a duct is to have a straight duct with a smooth inside wall and a round form will have the smallest surface area to cause the air to slow down. That straight smooth round duct is what is considered the benchmark for good ducting.
Everything else is measure...
Some rooms are colder than others, or a forced air system works well for heating but not air conditioning. Although such problems may require repositioning ductwork, or adding booster fans -- the first thing to check is that the ductwork is balanced and balanced differently for the two differ...
In my experience, heating ducts that run through attics cause serious problems in snow country. Don't let a contractor talk you into it.
In warm climates it is common practice to run heating and air conditioning ducting through attic spaces simply because it is easy to do. Unfortunately this ...
Evert from Brownsburg, Quebec has the problem of a sewer odour in his bathroom but isn't sure where it is coming from and whether or not he needs to change his toilet.
It can in fact be difficult to localize the source of sewage odours and hence which fixture or drain is guilty.
One technique ...
When plumbing pipes and chimneys have to go through sloped roofs, they are always cut fairly large just to make sure that the pipe will pass through. The problem is that a 3 inch round pipe needs an oval hole in a sloped roof. There is an easy trick for drawing out the hole.
Hold the p...
