This is a quick summary table of all the common types of thermal house insulation. You can find details on each material by looking up "insulation" then "types".
There are over 2000 window manufacturers in Canada, and with all that competition, each one wants to make homeowners, renovators, and builders believe that their windows are easier to install than the other brand. This has led to a lot of very poorly built windows that are often difficult to ins...
Example: Styrofoam products by Dow (by the way, Styrofoam is a Dow Chemical brand name and not a generic term for foam insulation).Colour: Blue (Dow) or Pink (Celfort)Thermal Resistance: RSI - .035/mm R - 5.0/in. Very high.Cost: highCapacity to dry out if wet: Won't get wetFire Resis...
Darren Barrett from the Hardwood Flooring Store in Markham, Ontario and a long time expert in hardwood floors joined me in the TV studio to discuss the evolution of hardwood flooring. We set aside for this discussion all the plastic laminates with press board bases that have become so common. N...
To my mind old fashioned hardwood floors are far more trouble than they are worth, especially now that we have better and better Engineered Floors available. An engineered floor is not a cheap plastic laminate on masonite floating floor. It is a very stable, usually pre-finished, real massive h...
Ed writes from Ajax, Ontario : All 3 walls of my bathroom shower stall are finished with 4" ceramic tiles and are in good shape. When I had to remove one of them, I discovered that the drywall was behind it was so wet that I had to put a fan on it over night to dry it out before I could glue...
Radiant Heating and Convection Heating are the two primary types of ways we heat our houses. FORCED AIR HEATINGConvection heating means moving hot air -- what we usually call a forced air heating system simply heats air and moves it around the house through a system of fans and ducts. Forced air...
Many viewers ask if they can put carpet over a concrete floor. The answer is a qualified Yes.There are three different concrete floors to consider: those in upper floors of the house that are always high and dry, those in the basement that may possibly run into moisture problems and those outdoor...
In a previous show we watched the salvage operations of a group called Logs End from Bristol, Quebec, where they were fishing up old growth timber that had sunk to the bottom of the Ottawa river a hundred years ago.This week we visited the saw mill.That great stack of timber tells a lot of storie...
Gabe from Toronto wants to know if he can get a conversion kit to switch his propane BBQ to natural gas.The answer is NO.Unfortunately the propane hose and the natural gas hose has the same size threads so it is possible to simply screw one type onto a BBQ made for the other type. But that is qu...
