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The other day, my 4-year old son was playing in the kitchen and accidentally launched a brand new $1.50 Ferrari under the refrigerator. It was imperative that I retrieve this Ferrari immediately so I popped off the lower front grille and started swooshing a ruler back and forth. In the process of trying to retrieve the famed car I was stunned to see that the underside of the refrigerator had turned into a fuzzy dungeon off lost receipts, pieces of food and a crap-ton of dust. As I slid the ruler back and forth, I managed to push the car further back into the fuzzy dungeon and realized I was going to have to move the whole darn refrigerator. No problem, I thought. It’ll just take a minute.

… sigh.

That 2-minute job turned into a 2-hour job. The fuzzy dungeon of paper receipts from years past and pieces of food were of such quantity, it would be a mistake to simply re-cover it by pushing the refrigerator back in place after retrieving the car. It was time to clean. At first, I got the vacuum out and started sucking up all that I could via the front grille. In doing so, I discovered something profound … there’s a water pan under the fridge. For some reason I had assumed this was a relic of the past and newer technologically “advanced” refrigerators didn’t require a pan. Luckily, it was totally dry and appeared that it had never been wet in the past. But that got me thinking. I know there’s a fan somewhere under here too, because when the refrigerator is “on” I can feel warm air coming out the front. So I started sucking up more of the fuzzy dungeon and discovered there is a “W” shaped wire mesh cooling coil under the refrigerator too! Unfortunately, I couldn’t gain complete access to the wire mesh cooling conductor, so to finish the job I had to empty the refrigerator and tip it on its side (this is what took the better part of two hours).

Come to realize, the fuzzy dungeon that forms on the heat conductor meshing under the refrigerator can greatly, and negatively, impact the performance of your refrigerator. The purpose of that wire mesh grille is to remove heat from the coolant and conduct it to the air. Well, if the air can’t interact with the grille because of the fuzzy dungeon, then the refrigerator has to work longer and harder to remove the heat and thus cool the refrigerator. It ends up wasting electricity and can burn out the compressor much earlier than designed.

I don’t know how dusty your place gets, but it might not be a bad idea to clean the underside of the refrigerator once a year. This was the first time I had cleaned mine since moving into the new house 5 years ago, so it was incredibly nasty. However, since the cleaning, I have noticed that the refrigerator runs for a much shorter period of time when it kicks on.

Most of the new hot water heaters are pretty efficient and don’t need any additional insulation. However some of the older tanks, or less efficient newer tanks, could benefit from some added insulation. They way to tell if you need more insulation is to simply touch the side of your hot water tank. If it is warm to the touch, then some of the heat is escaping which is a sign the tank isn’t that efficient.

You can buy a hot water insulation blanket for a 45 to 55 gallon tank at Home Depot or Lowe’s. It’s nothing more than fiberglass insulation with a plastic outer coat. Most come with tape already attached to the blanket, but you might want to add a bit more. To install it, simply wrap the blanket around the exterior part of your tank and tape it in place. At the top, there will be strips of tape so you can secure the blanket to the top of your hot water heater and prevent it from sliding down to the ground. However, before you tape it to the top of your heater, get a rag and clean the surface so the tape will stick better.

There are two things you must make note of, otherwise you can damage your hot water heater or worse yet, start a fire. Most tanks have an opening near the bottom of the tank near the dial that controls the temperature setting. You must not cover this hole. This is most likely where the pilot light is and it requires a steady supply of air so as to remain lit. The other thing you must not do is extend the blanket all the way to the floor. Air for the combustion of the natural gas feeds in through the bottom of the tank which is why the tank is raised off the ground a few inches. If you obstruct this supply of air, the flame can go out and natural gas may continue to leak into your home. If at any time you smell gas or you no longer have hot water, turn off the hot water heater AND any other ignition sources (such as a furnace) immediately and open any windows. Simply turning off the hot water heater is not good enough as your furnace could still ignite the gas that has escaped into the room.

The other thing that is advisable is to insulate the first 3 feet of cold water piping coming into the hot water heater and as much of the hot water piping as you can. If you feel the cold water pipe coming into the tank you will notice that it is slightly warmer closer to the tank. The hot water pipes should be insulated to retain as much of the heat as possible. There are several different types of pipe insulation products, but I found the foam tubes to be the easiest.

Since I installed our hot water heater blanket I haven’t noticed much of a difference. But if I stick my hand between the insulation and the tank, it is warmer than had the blanket not been there. According to the instructions, the blanket is supposed to pay for itself in about 18 months, but this is hard to verify.

When we had our house built, DR Horton installed the crappiest windows possible. To make matters worse, the windows were installed poorly and rain water leaked down through the walls causing quite a headache. I waited 6 months for them to come out and replace the windows the first time. Well, the second time they leaked I decided to take matters into my own hands. No, I didn’t take them to court. The money I would of spent in court fighting them to replace the crappy windows with the same crappy window was instead used to buy brand new windows. Top quality windows.

For the second test, he pulled out a 300 BTU thermal lamp to simulate the sun (the kind you would find in a bathroom to warm you up). He put a single pane window in front of the lamp and the BTU meter read 280. Virtually no change. He then put a double-pane window in front of the lamp and the meter dropped a bit further to 220. Then he put a triple-pane argon filled window and it dropped considerably to about 120 BTU’s. For the final test, he put the Champion Window in front of the heat lamp and the meter dropped to an amazing 40 BTU’s! I was really impressed. You could barely feel the heat through the window.

For those interested, the specifications on the windows were as follows: Double-pane, argon-filled, vinyl frame, double-glazed Low-E, 0.29 UV, 0.31 SHGC, 0.55 Visible Transmittance, 0.005 Air Infiltration. They also come with a lifetime warranty for anything that goes wrong. And I mean anything. If my son puts a baseball through the window, it’s covered. You only have to pay a $45 service fee, and that’s it.

The windows were a bit pricey. As an example (call them to set up an appointment and take measurements) our 42″x36″ double-slider cost about $1,300. They have specials going on all the time, especially in the winter right around January.

The windows are very well made. They use thick vinyl for solid construction and the interior portion of the frame is foam filled. Both the windows and the screen slide back and forth for easy cleaning and also eliminates the need to remove it. The windows themselves slide very smoothly in their tracks with very little effort. They roll on bearing wheels and don’t simply slide on a vinyl insert.

Since the windows are custom made, it took about 1 month before they were ready. The installers were very nice and did a very thorough job. It took them about 6 hours to install five windows which considering the amount of work involved, was actually pretty good. About half way through the installation, a representative from Champion Windows came by to make sure everything was going OK. We were very impressed.

It’s been about a week since the windows were installed and we have noticed a big difference in our family room. In the past, with the thermostat set at 68°F, the room would get to at most 68°F but would then quickly fall back down to 63°F or lower. With the new windows, the room stays at about 69°F and can hover around 73°F if the rest of the house needs heating. So we are seeing an increase of about 8°F.

A couple years ago I installed a furnace humidifier because the air in Colorado is extremely dry, especially when the cold winter air is heated to 68°F. When you heat cold dry air, the humidity level drops considerably. Our first solution was to run three small warm mist and cool mist humidifiers throughout the house which meant changing a lot of filters and re-filling with water. Even still, we would average about 11% humidity which meant every light switch, doorknob and button we touched produced a 1.21 gigawatt lightning bolt. That’s when I decided enough was enough and I needed something bigger. Either one of those big whole house humidifiers that looks like a small refrigerator and is a serious eye-sore or a furnace humidifier that is out of sight, out of mind. I chose the latter.

If you don’t have a accessory hook-up you can still install the humidifier, but you will need to do a little more work such as adding a transformer and wiring the humidifier in with the blower motor so the humidifier doesn’t spin all the time. This may also void any warranty you have on the furnace so its best to check with the manufacturer.

To install a furnace humidifier, you have to cut two hole in the duct work. One in the plenum and one in the cold air return as seen here. You will also need to tap into a cold water pipe for the water supply. Tapping into the cold water pipe was easy because they provided a little valve that clamps onto, and screws into the pipe. This was very easy and no tools were required. To cut holes in the sheet metal, you will need sheet metal clips. The humidifier manufacturer should provide a template to make the cutting easy with little to no measurements.

Since installing the Auto Flo 97, we have notice a huge difference in humidity and comfort level. Instead of averaging 11% humidity, we now average around 25%, but it did take about a week for the humidity levels to start increasing. This seems to be a perfect amount because we no longer get shocked when touching light switches, doorknobs or buttons on electrical equipment. The comfort level is so much nicer we really feel a difference between a friends house that doesn’t have one and our house. We also have installed a humidistat to control the amount of moisture entering the system. We don’t want too much because the moisture will start condensing on the cold windows.

We have a DirecTV Dual Tuner Tivo in our bedroom, but unfortunately we only had one coax cable jack. So we couldn’t record one show and watch another at the same time unless we ran another cable into the bedroom from the basement. A daunting task because I didn’t want to run the cable around the baseboards and I didn’t want to run it all the way around the house and in through the outside wall. That leaves just one option, and that was to go up through the interior wall.

So my solution was to buy a 72″ flexible drill bit extender and a wire puller (called a glow stick at Home Depot). The sub-floors are made of a high density plywood so a battery powered drill will have some problems punching a hole through it unless you’ve got an 18 volt drill. Getting through the 2×4 was no problem. Using the flexible drill bit is a bit of an art, especially if you have to flex it. It takes a bit of muscle so it’s almost a two person job until you get better using it. Lucky for me, I had a straight shot up from the basement to the master bedroom which made it very easy. I then used the 15 foot cable puller and pulled the coax down through the wall.