We've had problems with ours, causing leaks by lifting the tiles up. So I've been researching solutions.
How to best remove the moss: "Dominic" on Youtube
How to keep it from growing back: This Old House Video
Showing posts with label houses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label houses. Show all posts
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Sunday, December 16, 2012
How to seismically retrofit a doublewide
Quake Safe Products
[...] QuakeSafe® foundation systems are specially designed to protect manufactured homes in the event of an earthquake. Standard manufactured home foundations are simply stacked cinder blocks that offer no stability in an earthquake. QuakeSafe bracing is engineered to fully support your home even if the cinder blocks fail. QuakeSafe foundations are engineered and certified to meet state earthquake resistance codes. [...]The site has a slide show of an installation.
Manufactured Housing Disaster-Resistant Pier Systems
[...] A good foundation gives homeowners peace of mind. For manufactured homes, one option is a disaster-resistant pier system -- stout members rigidly connecting the home's chassis to a slab, grade beam, or array of pads. Some systems incorporate lateral or diagonal bracing for greater resistance. Although often referred to as "earthquake resistant bracing" (ERB) systems, many also resist high winds, frost heaves, and floods. Not only are these systems cost-effective in reducing structural movement (compared to conventional manufactured housing foundations), they can save lives and property. [...]Most of the articles I've been able to find talk about doing the install while the double wide is being installed. I've yet to see one about retro-fitting, doing the install after the home is build without the bracing.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Smoke Detectors: Photoelectric VS Ionization
Our smoke detectors are over 10 years old now, and should be replaced. One of them has been "chirping" in the early hours of the morning, when the temperature gets cold, which led me to investigate why. So I've ordered two of these as replacements:
First Alert SA720CN Smoke Alarm Photoelectric Sensor with Escape Light
Most of the smoke detectors nowadays have both photoelectric and ionization technology. But I bought this one, which only uses photoelectric, because of this customer comment:
Ionization detectors DO NOT WORK
I've read that ionization detection is supposed to be good for detecting flash fires, like Christmas trees and waste paper baskets, that flare up suddenly with lots of flame an little smoke. The ionization supposedly detects invisible particles that these kinds of fires generate.
Perhaps they do. Unfortunately, they also detect dinner cooking, steam from the shower, your wood stove working normally, etc. The result can be too many false alarms.
I'm one of those people who pulls the battery out when the alarm goes off too often. So IMO, it stands to reason that, a properly sensitized smoke detector with the battery in it is going to be more effective than an overly sensitive one with the battery removed. So I've opted for the photoelectric ONLY model (Actually it's also the only one like it that I saw on Amazon.com; the rest all seem to be "duel" technology).
So that's how I came to make that choice. And just in case, we have another back-up system, too... DOGS.
First Alert SA720CN Smoke Alarm Photoelectric Sensor with Escape Light
[...] The SA720CN alarm uses photoelectric sensing technology, which is generally more sensitive than commonly used ionization technology, to detect large smoke particles. Large smoke particles tend to be produced in greater amounts by slow-to-burn fires (often caused by cigarettes burning in couches or bedding), which may smolder for hours before bursting into flame.
An added bonus, photoelectric sensing technology reduces false alarms like those caused by cooking smoke and shower steam.
As easy to operate as it is effective, the SA720CN boasts patented OptiPath technology, which provides 360-degrees of direct access to the smoke sensor. Additionally, a mute button quickly silences false alarms for up to 15 minutes and also doubles as an alarm test button. [...]
Most of the smoke detectors nowadays have both photoelectric and ionization technology. But I bought this one, which only uses photoelectric, because of this customer comment:
Ionization detectors DO NOT WORK
Folks,
Ionization detectors DO NOT protect you. The results and test methods are false due to the fire industy's cozy relationship with smoke detector manufacturers (yes, direct kick backs, look it up) and money for lobbyists in Sacramento and Washington DC. The profit margin on ionization detectors is much higher than photoelectric. Only photoelectric (required in commercial buildings - why not residential?) WORK. 75% of ionization detectors did not sound AT ALL in smoke filled rooms lethal to humans and have failed repeated independent tests.
I'm a 20 year veteran of the fire service and a paramedic. I can guarantee you will DIE from smoke inhalation before an ionization alarm EVER goes off. No one dies from being burnt, you die from asphyxiation due to smoke and poisonous gases. Read this and only buy photoelectric. There's too much information for me to go into it here. Be sure and follow the World Safety Fire Foundation link. If that doesn't convince you to go photoelectric you're playing with death. Email [...] and if you send a SASE I will send you a dvd proving much of these assertions to you. It includes a show from Canadian TV that is ILLEGAL to show in the US as well as other information. BE SAFE! My dept's Chief's message is below:
BD
Chief's Message
Warning: Your smoke alarm may not detect smoke
Currently, there is great confusion regarding the topic of smoke alarms. There are two types of smoke alarms used to protect residents in the event of a fire; photoelectric and ionization smoke alarms- both respond differently to smoke and flame.
Ionization smoke alarms react poorly to deadly smoke but faster to flames while photoelectric alarms react much faster to smoke. Ionization alarms are present in over 95% of homes in America and have a high failure rate when it comes to detecting smoke. The problem is, most deadly fires are smoldering fires and not fast flaming fires. By now, most people understand it is deadly smoke and heat that kills you before the flames even reach you. Ionization alarms should be labeled flame alarms and not smoke alarms.
An example of a fast flaming fire would be a Christmas tree fire, which certainly have claimed their share of resident's lives, but nowhere near the number of lives claimed by smoldering fires. Other fast flaming fires would be kitchen fires, which are the leading cause of residential fires, but rarely do they claim lives. I implore you to watch the following videos and audio clips: video 1, video 2, video 3, video 4 (University of Cincinnati presentation), audio clip 1.
Arguably, a greater problem with the ionization alarm is the number of false alarms it renders, thus leading to residents disconnecting the alarm all together. I must include an interesting story - a couple of years ago, with my infinite knowledge, I installed a combination ionization/photoelectric smoke alarm in my living room. Because my home is not large, the house is heated by a wood burning stove. After numerous false alarms (initiated by the invisible smoke) started by my stove, I gave up using the hush button (as it did not silence long enough) and disconnected the battery and remained disconnected until I went to bed.
Finally after one season, I placed the combination alarm in my bedroom (replacing the older alarm) and placed a new photoelectric alarm in my living room. Do I need to tell you the results? Not one false alarm. So my point is, how many residents (worldwide) give up and just permanently disconnect the ionization alarm and expose themselves to a potential lethal smoldering fire? Moreover, there have been many fire deaths worldwide with working ionization smoke alarms present but failed to detect smoke. Regrettably, the fire industry has yet to take an official stand to eliminate ionization smoke alarms once and for all.
Sincerely,
Marc McGinn
Albany Fire Chief
P.S. I urge you to immediately replace your current ionization smoke alarms that do not detect smoke, with photoelectric smoke alarms, and for more extensive information please visit [...]. If you have any additional questions or need assistance I welcome your phone call at [...].
[...]
I've read that ionization detection is supposed to be good for detecting flash fires, like Christmas trees and waste paper baskets, that flare up suddenly with lots of flame an little smoke. The ionization supposedly detects invisible particles that these kinds of fires generate.
Perhaps they do. Unfortunately, they also detect dinner cooking, steam from the shower, your wood stove working normally, etc. The result can be too many false alarms.
I'm one of those people who pulls the battery out when the alarm goes off too often. So IMO, it stands to reason that, a properly sensitized smoke detector with the battery in it is going to be more effective than an overly sensitive one with the battery removed. So I've opted for the photoelectric ONLY model (Actually it's also the only one like it that I saw on Amazon.com; the rest all seem to be "duel" technology).
So that's how I came to make that choice. And just in case, we have another back-up system, too... DOGS.
Monday, August 03, 2009
People Leaving San Franciso-Oakland Area
America's Abandoned Cities
It's funny how prices in the SF Bay Area never seem to go down, regardless of how the economy is doing. The cost of living is so high there, it's difficult to drop the price of anything, because none of the other prices ever drop. It's just plain expensive. Overpriced and overcrowded. I'm glad we don't live there anymore.
[...] San Francisco boasts balmy weather, seaside diversions and the best baseball stadium in the country.
But despite the perks, the Bay Area is losing people at an even greater clip than Miami--and ranks second on our list. Rental vacancy rates swelled from 4.7% to 7.1%; homeowner vacancies more than tripled from 1.1% to 3.4%. Why the dramatic change?
"One of the things we're noticing is that rents are still high," says Ken Shuman, a Bay Area-based spokesman for real estate data provider Trulia.com. "What we're also seeing is the economy. San Francisco, of all cities, is the most transient. People flock here when times are good--they don't mind paying high rent as long as pay is high. Now, in many cases, wages are frozen or reduced."
And that's if you're lucky enough to still have a job. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' latest reports, Bay Area unemployment has more than doubled since last year, up from 4.6% to 9.4% as of April. Many laid-off workers aren't sticking around.
"People are migrating. It happened after the dot-com bust too," says Shuman. "As much as it's a beautiful place to live, you really have to think about lifestyle. There's no point in being here if you can't enjoy it." [...]
It's funny how prices in the SF Bay Area never seem to go down, regardless of how the economy is doing. The cost of living is so high there, it's difficult to drop the price of anything, because none of the other prices ever drop. It's just plain expensive. Overpriced and overcrowded. I'm glad we don't live there anymore.
Saturday, July 25, 2009
History of Old Houses; If walls could talk...
Well actually, they sometimes do. Andy and I have spent the past couple of months working on one of our rental properties, an old cottage built in the 1920's. Here is a view from the kitchen floor, while I was repairing cabinets:
The former tenants trashed the house, then moved out, owing us three months rent. Trying to fix the damage they did uncovered numerous other long term problems that were not the tenants fault, but had to be repaired none the less. So we had contractors in to do some of the work, while we did much of the painting and smaller repairs and refinements ourselves.
Three rooms in the house had been done out in a beautiful dark wood paneling, installed decades ago. Some of the panels were now ruined, and we could not find compatible contemporary replacements to match them. Rather than rip out the remaining paneling, we decided to paint the damaged walls in a lighter, contrasting color, which has brightened the damaged rooms and given them an interesting chocolate/vanilla, yin/yang effect. Not everyone would like it I suppose, but we like it, and fortunately, so does our new tenant.
Here are some photos. The camera had automatic exposure, and it adjusted for the brightness of the windows. The room interiors are actually brighter than they seem in some of the photos:
Old houses have a past, and when you work on them they reveal glimpses of that past to you. Old wall paper behind wood paneling; windows that were turned into walls, doors and windows that were added or changed, bad repair work, good repair work. Everything that was done by former tenants and owners, that left it's mark behind, adds to the house's story.
We added a front door with a window in it, which has let in more light. We had a glass shop repair person come in to replace some cracked glass in some windows that were painted shut. The new glass is so perfect, it looks like there is nothing there. The old glass panes around it are that old, imperfect sort of glass that shows slight distortions, which only old houses have anymore. I grew up in an old house, so I'm fond of that old glass. As I painted the window frames in the kitchen, I had to admire the craftsmanship that went into the old wood window frames. Try as we might though, we can't get them un-stuck.
When we had the ruined carpets ripped up, it revealed an old wood plank floor, solid and level, but raw, unfinished wood. It would have been nice to finish and restore the wood, but it would have been too costly. We opted to have it covered with modern linoleum, which is easy to clean and looks great.
There is a small bedroom with high windows, that looks like it was meant as a nursery for a new baby, or a bedroom for small children.
In other areas we put in new ceilings and new moldings, and new wall panels and paint where needed. The moldings were tricky, as the walls and ceilings in old houses often aren't perfectly as straight and even as they look at first glance. You have to be creative sometimes and work it to get it just right, which we did. I have to say, I think the overall effect looks great.
If future generations uncover the layers of work we've done on the house, I'm satisfied that those parts of the house's story will be good ones. We've left some of the best features of the past, like the real wood cabinets in the kitchen, and replaced sensible things like the bathtub/shower with modern, leak-proof upgrades to prevent the dry-rot we had to repair this time.
Working on this old cottage brought back memories of the 100 year old house in Connecticut that I grew up in, and the many older homes I've lived in during the years since. Presently we live in a very new house, my first new home. While it doesn't have a colorful past or the "character" that age can bring to a house, a new house does have it's own charms. It's like a blank canvas, waiting for you paint it with your paint, your wishes, your life as you live it. Then perhaps many years after you have passed on, it will then be an "old" house to someone else, who may find the changes you made and think "what a nice old house, it has character".
The former tenants trashed the house, then moved out, owing us three months rent. Trying to fix the damage they did uncovered numerous other long term problems that were not the tenants fault, but had to be repaired none the less. So we had contractors in to do some of the work, while we did much of the painting and smaller repairs and refinements ourselves.
Three rooms in the house had been done out in a beautiful dark wood paneling, installed decades ago. Some of the panels were now ruined, and we could not find compatible contemporary replacements to match them. Rather than rip out the remaining paneling, we decided to paint the damaged walls in a lighter, contrasting color, which has brightened the damaged rooms and given them an interesting chocolate/vanilla, yin/yang effect. Not everyone would like it I suppose, but we like it, and fortunately, so does our new tenant.
Here are some photos. The camera had automatic exposure, and it adjusted for the brightness of the windows. The room interiors are actually brighter than they seem in some of the photos:
Old houses have a past, and when you work on them they reveal glimpses of that past to you. Old wall paper behind wood paneling; windows that were turned into walls, doors and windows that were added or changed, bad repair work, good repair work. Everything that was done by former tenants and owners, that left it's mark behind, adds to the house's story.
We added a front door with a window in it, which has let in more light. We had a glass shop repair person come in to replace some cracked glass in some windows that were painted shut. The new glass is so perfect, it looks like there is nothing there. The old glass panes around it are that old, imperfect sort of glass that shows slight distortions, which only old houses have anymore. I grew up in an old house, so I'm fond of that old glass. As I painted the window frames in the kitchen, I had to admire the craftsmanship that went into the old wood window frames. Try as we might though, we can't get them un-stuck.
When we had the ruined carpets ripped up, it revealed an old wood plank floor, solid and level, but raw, unfinished wood. It would have been nice to finish and restore the wood, but it would have been too costly. We opted to have it covered with modern linoleum, which is easy to clean and looks great.
There is a small bedroom with high windows, that looks like it was meant as a nursery for a new baby, or a bedroom for small children.
In other areas we put in new ceilings and new moldings, and new wall panels and paint where needed. The moldings were tricky, as the walls and ceilings in old houses often aren't perfectly as straight and even as they look at first glance. You have to be creative sometimes and work it to get it just right, which we did. I have to say, I think the overall effect looks great.
If future generations uncover the layers of work we've done on the house, I'm satisfied that those parts of the house's story will be good ones. We've left some of the best features of the past, like the real wood cabinets in the kitchen, and replaced sensible things like the bathtub/shower with modern, leak-proof upgrades to prevent the dry-rot we had to repair this time.
Working on this old cottage brought back memories of the 100 year old house in Connecticut that I grew up in, and the many older homes I've lived in during the years since. Presently we live in a very new house, my first new home. While it doesn't have a colorful past or the "character" that age can bring to a house, a new house does have it's own charms. It's like a blank canvas, waiting for you paint it with your paint, your wishes, your life as you live it. Then perhaps many years after you have passed on, it will then be an "old" house to someone else, who may find the changes you made and think "what a nice old house, it has character".
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The Farm House of my Dreams?
At least it is when the weather is cold and nasty. Behold, the House-Barn:
Uncle Howard's Barn-Homes, "Great Western" floor plan:
Here is more details and photos about the "Great Western" model:
THE GREAT WESTERN STYLE
Barn Kits, Horse Barn Kits, Barn Home Kits
I told Pat and Andy about it at lunchtime, and how I thought it would be energy efficient, having everything under one roof. Pat said we would end up smelling like the livestock!
I was thinking, I could take care of the animals without having to go out in the rain. But the smell, that would be something to consider, especially in the summer.
If you look around their site, they have all sorts of designs for barns and buildings of many different sizes. Some are Barn-House combos, others are barn-like houses, or free standing barns, garages, or small multi-use buildings. Have a look around till you find something you like.
Uncle Howard's Barn-Homes, "Great Western" floor plan:
76' x 80' Custom Great Western Barn and Home Conversion
4 Bedrooms, 3 1/2 Baths, Office
Here is more details and photos about the "Great Western" model:
THE GREAT WESTERN STYLE
Barn Kits, Horse Barn Kits, Barn Home Kits
I told Pat and Andy about it at lunchtime, and how I thought it would be energy efficient, having everything under one roof. Pat said we would end up smelling like the livestock!
I was thinking, I could take care of the animals without having to go out in the rain. But the smell, that would be something to consider, especially in the summer.
If you look around their site, they have all sorts of designs for barns and buildings of many different sizes. Some are Barn-House combos, others are barn-like houses, or free standing barns, garages, or small multi-use buildings. Have a look around till you find something you like.
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