Home improvement: Heating & air conditioning

January 2, 2009

Take control of heating costs

Don't you love the advertisements where homeowners talk about saving $40,000 on furnishings they bought from some club-member warehouse? That's saving 40 grand. So let's see: if a good discount is about 20 percent, that means they were going to pay $200,000 for furniture but practically stole it for $160,000.

March 13, 2008

HOME REMEDIES

Getting zapped by static no fun

Q: We have a two-story home, almost a year old. When we moved in, we had a humidifier installed in one of the two furnaces for the lower level. Because of the cold winter so far, we have been experiencing static shocks on the upstairs level. About three to four weeks ago, we had a second humidifier installed in the other furnace. (I have changed the filter in the first unit and can see that there is a water flow in both units). I have been adjusting the humidity level per the manufacturer's direction but continue to get shocks. At one point, I turned the humidity all the way up to see if that would help, but of course I only got water condensation on the windows. I am back to adjusting per directions, but nothing seems to help. Any suggestions or solutions?

February 21, 2008

Give your attic a breath of air

Winter weather can find every weak link in a house to create drafts and raise utility bills. So how dumb is it to purposely let cold air into an attic or crawl space? Not dumb at all -- in fact, it's essential, and a component of each of the four building code systems in the country.

January 17, 2008

Take control of home heating

Thermostats used to be primitive on-off switches that required a lot of tweaking -- up a hair to ward off a chill, then down a hair to cool off.