Many utilities are buried just underground on residential properties.
--- Water supply pipes
--- Water drain pipes
--- Gas pipes
--- Electrical supplies
--- Telephone, TV and Web Cables
--- And sometimes even more as neighborhoods move more and more away from overhead wires.
Some of the...
Here are a few tips when it comes to re-wiring an old lamp.
Use the existing wire to pull the new wire through. You need to join them in a way that does not create a lump in the wire.
Avoiding a lump
On the old pair of wires, cut one wire shorter than the other and s...
In the spring of 2004, a young and dynamic company in Quebec got a new radiant heating cable out of the laboratory and onto the market that has almost no electromagnetic radiation. "FlexTherm" from Longueuil, Quebec came out with what they call their Green Cable.
With a sensitive professional...
A fresh look at household wiring may change the wire sizes we use in some residential lines.
The electrical code establishes wire sizes based on fire safety considerations. When an electrical load is run through a wire, the resistance in that wire creates heat. The maximum amperage for a given w...
In some ways, the old fashioned fuse is actually better than the circuit breakers. To make sure I got my facts right on this one I visited George Brown College in Toronto to talk to one of the instructors in the electrician's apprentice programs.
Fuses are 100 % reliable. When they get hot, the...
Ever had your door bell die and don't quite know how to go about fixing it? The first graphic shows the standard layout for the mechanics of a doorbell. There is the button, a transformer and the bell. The transformer reduces the household voltage to a 24 volt low amperage system that makes the w...
My friend Keren has been keeping mice at bay with essential oils of peppermint on cotton wads -- she now swears by this clean remedy in a multi-lodgement building. Her new pest problem is that her son has pigeons on his 6th floor balcony in Ottawa and has discovered that the fake owl didn't d...
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Update Dec. 2019: The US Supreme Court just rejected an appeal of a lower court decision maintaining the legality of the city of Berkely, California’s ordinance passed in May of 2015 obliging all retail seller...
People ask me for professional recommendations and I shy away from doing too much of that. But the company Electrika is worth a special mention. First they are competent at doing things right. Second they are great at trouble shooting and figuring out problems. You will be won over by thei...
If for any reason you have turned OFF the main breaker of your household electrical system, do not simply turn it back ON. In fact in many cases it will simply not turn back on, especially if you have baseboard heaters all on all over the house. Powering the main breaker while all the circui...
