EmptorMaven

Corner protectors aren’t just for homes with little kids running around constantly bumping into things: I have learned through painful experience that the sharp corners on melamine-coated fiberboard easily rip through fabric and skin.

I run a round-off router bit over all my exposed woodwork edges whenever possible, but with glued melamine and some finished furniture you can’t do that. A few years ago I found some soft plastic corner cushions that unobtrusively provided excellent protection against scrapes and dented foreheads.

Recently I built a bunch of new shelves with exposed corners that I wanted to soften and I spent weeks looking for the same corner protectors. It turns out that my preferred solution is also by far the cheapest of the many competing products ($3.50 for eight), and that these are available only at Babies R Us.
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I just remodeled two 18-year-old bathrooms. In one I replaced a cracking fiberglass tub with an American Standard Princeton “Americast” tub. I considered cast iron, but Americast is a durable porcelain-coated composite offering much better insulation against temperature and noise — not to mention being significantly lighter than cast iron.

The bigger project was our master bathroom, and when it came to finding a new bathtub I had several goals. I wanted something big enough for my 5’9″ wife to stretch out in, but not so big that it would never get used. I wanted a massage feature that didn’t use waterjets because of all the cleaning and hygiene problems associated with running bathwater through an enclosed pump system.

Kohler’s BubbleMassage line sounded like a good solution: These are acrylic tubs with 120 little holes around the base perimeter through which a motor blows heated air. After the bath is drained the motor blows any residual moisture out of the system to prevent mold growth.

A 6′x3′ drop-in looked like it would be the right size so I bought and installed a Kohler Mariposa BubbleMassage tub (just over $2000 from Home Depot). At 72 gallons to the overflow I thought that would be ample capacity for a luxurious bath.

It turns out things aren’t so simple.
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I have been busy renovating a house I recently bought. One of my biggest challenges has been coming up with bathroom surfaces that are impermeable and impervious to water and stains. Porcelain and ceramic tiles are a good start, but traditional tile grout absorbs water. Sealers can temporarily prevent that, but eventually grout lines are going to form a breeding ground for mold and mildew. My goal with all my construction is zero maintenance, maximum durability, and minimal effort to keep things clean.

For bathroom walls acrylic solid-surfaces are a good solution. The cheapest I could find are Swanstone and U.S. Marble, but those are still at least $20/sq.ft.

I was getting ready to go with vinyl for the floors when I started hearing mention of epoxy grouts, which are truly impermeable and never need sealing. Combining that with the $.77 square-foot porcelain tiles Home Depot was selling sounded like a winning combination. It took some research but here’s what I found:

Laticrete makes an epoxy grout called SpectraLOCK, which consists of a two-part epoxy cement (“Parts A and B”) and a third “Part C” sanded filler. Lowes is apparently the only retailer that carries SpectraLOCK, and they only stock the smallest “Mini” containers. A Mini is good for about 25 sq.ft. of tile but costs $23. For anything bigger it is better to go online and buy “Full” A-B units, which are equal to four Minis. The epoxy is the expensive part but it’s very light. StoneTooling.com delivers Full A-B units for $45. You can then go to Lowes and get 4 Part C containers in whatever color you want for $12.

Laticrete sells “Commercial” units of SpectrLOCK which are equal to 4 Full units. StoneTooling.com delivers Commercial A-B units for $134. Lowes doesn’t usually stock the 16 Part C containers you would need in a single color, so at that point you would either have to special order or pay to ship them.

At a recent home trade show I was intrigued by a company (KVAR) pushing a $400 capacitor that, when wired into a residential electric service panel, promises to reduce energy consumption by 6-10%. They even had a neat demonstration consisting of a large fan motor and multimeter wired through their capacitor. Sure enough, when the capacitor was enabled the amperage shown on the multimeter declined.

I was a little suspicious because I happened to own an air handler that used the exact fan motor they were demonstrating, and I know that it is always installed with a large start capacitor of its own that was conspicuously absent in their circuit.

They claim their savings are due to their capacitor increasing the “power factor” of a home’s inductive electrical load. Well I didn’t know anything about power factor, but I thought it would be unusual in the age of Energy-Star appliances for manufacturers to be omitting capacitors that could increase their energy efficiency.

Having studied up on power factor correction it seems clear that a fixed-size capacitor is not going to consistently improve the power factor of a residence. And even if it could that wouldn’t result in any savings on the electric bill.

Energy Star confirms that the promises of KVAR’s residential product (and knock-offs) are a scam. Michael Bluejay gives a more detailed explanation. My favorite explanation was found here:

Residential customers are not billed for kVA, they are billed for kWh. These devices, when they are working properly, have almost their entire impact on reducing kVA, not kWh. Some commercial customers can save on their electric bills by improving their power factor, but residential customers can’t. In residential, the devices can in theory achieve a very small savings by reducing losses in the wiring, but that impact depends on the PFC device being properly applied to the specific load, not a generic whole house device.

If such devices worked as advertised, then energy efficiency research and advocacy groups would be promoting them throughout the country and many electric utilities would be giving rebates for their purchase.

Cleaning primer pockets of fired cases is part of the ritual of preparing accurate, reliable reloads.

RCBS sells a $15 Primer Pocket Brush Combo (Part #9574) for this purpose, consisting of a threaded handle and two threaded stainless steel wire brushes for each primer pocket size.  It is the first tool in the following photo:

The second tool shown is Lee’s $2 Primer Pocket Cleaner (Part #90101).  It is just a small blued steel cylinder with a squared-off blade on one side for small primer pockets and on the other side for large ones.

The following picture shows eight large-primer cases.  The left two have not been cleaned, showing the importance of this step of brass preparation.  The top three were cleaned with two twists of the RCBS tool, and the bottom three with two twists of the Lee tool.  I thought the RCBS would be more comfortable and easy to use, but after prepping a batch of brass I became much more concerned about what it was doing to my primer pockets:  As you can see the steel brushes leave noticeable gouges in the brass.  In contrast, the Lee tool keeps the pocket face square and relatively unscathed.

I can’t see any good coming of marring primer pockets to this degree.  Especially over repeated uses the RCBS brush is removing measurable amounts of brass, and if you didn’t need it the first time it will almost certainly be needed on subsequent cleanings since the primer pocket floor is no longer flat enough for a tool like Lee’s to make full contact.  Therefore I recommend against the RCBS tool. Lee’s much cheaper tool is a perfectly functional solution to primer pocket cleaning.

Home Depot now has these for $50. Given my past experience with cheaper laser levels I picked one up half expecting to return it. But this is a really cool device! It really does grab onto walls. Its bright lines really are self-leveling. It’s easy to micro-adjust to exactly the point you want it.

It made it so easy for me to hang shelf tracks and nail up chair molding that I decided it belongs on my tool shelf (in its neat soft-sided storage case).

ToolSnob has an early review.

Hammer drills are fine for making small holes in masonry for 1/4″ anchors and screws.  But they are not up to the task of anything more serious.  They use a friction plate to generate the impact force.  I literally burned out two hammer drills trying to move a 1″ masonry bit through cinderblock before learning the limits of that technology.

For serious drilling or chiseling into stone, masonry, or concrete, you need a rotary hammer.  I bought the bargain-priced Hitachi DH24PF3 a few years ago (available for under $170 from many online resellers) based on a comparative test published by Tools of the Trade, where it won their 2005 Editors’ Choice Awards.  Their summary:

Hitachi’s powerhouse DH24PC2 rotary hammer wins for being unstoppable. In our January/February 2005 issue, our tool tester reported there was little he could do to slow this rotary hammer down drilling and chipping in 3,000-psi concrete. From recommended pressure through extreme force, the unit relentlessly and quickly sank 1/2-inch-diameter holes and blasted a bull-point chisel 3 inches deep. Add to that good comfort, low reaction torque, and a competitive price and the result is a tool that can tough it out in the roughest conditions. The DH24PC2 weighs 5.5 pounds, delivers 2.1 foot-pounds of impact energy, and has three modes of operation [(drilling only, hammering only, and drilling plus hammering)].

I subsequently used this rotary hammer for hours straight to bore through a concrete slab, footer, and compressed shale beneath as I was installing a sub-slab suction system for radon control.  It also easily blew through 10″ block walls to make a 4″ opening for the PVC vent.

The tool uses standard SDS-Plus bits.  An excellent source for bits is Bullet Industries.

Even though you realize your home is not an impregnable fortress you probably still put locks on your doors and windows.  They won’t keep a determined intruder out but they should slow him down and/or force him to make some noise to break in.  However, if you didn’t pay a premium for your locks then odds are they can be opened in seconds by even an unskilled child using a simple method known as bumping.

Granted, locks alone don’t secure a house, but they should at least put up a fight.  If you are robbed and there is no sign of forced entry you will have a hard time getting an insurance payout.

Bump-resistant locks will cost at least $100 apiece.  I bought a set of Medeco Maxum deadbolts here at that price.

I don’t think this can last, but local stores are still selling watch batteries for around $5 apiece.

I’ve been buying them from http://batterybob.com where I can typically get five of any type delivered for under $4.

Most of us find it hard to imagine living without hot-and-cold running water.  Well I can’t imagine why anyone would want to live without filtered instant-hot and cold water in their kitchen.  And the only solution I have found that combines a cartridge filter with an instant-hot through a single fixture is the $500 InSinkErator HC1100 system.

This system is actually two separate components: a $300 faucet, and a $200 filter and heater-tank assembly that mounts under the sink.  Now I’m not generally prone to spend $300 on a plumbing fixture, but this one is worth it for its peerless convenience.  The faucet has two handles: the cold handle (which can lock on) delivers a full-pressure flow of filtered water; the hot handle delivers a low-pressure stream of filtered water heated up to 200 degrees F.

If you haven’t lived with an instant-hot fixture you probably can’t imagine just how useful it can be:  We use ours not only for tea, but also to make cup-of-noodles and instant oatmeal — truly in an instant!  We save time cooking by adding nearly-boiling (and filtered) water to pots.  Bullion or corn starch dissolves much faster in the superhot water.

The cartridge filters are a cinch to change: The in-line adaptor is self-sealing, so you just twist out the old one and twist in a new one without having to shut any valves.  I have been getting 10-12 months of use out of the $40 F-501R cartridges before I notice a tap water taste returning.

The system is backed by InSinkErator’s oustanding in-home-service warranty.

2010 Update: The new enhanced filters are designated F-601R; F-501R cartridges are no longer made.

Apparently the faucet is only good for a few years before the shut-off springs start to stick. InSinkErator has extended the faucet warranty for new purchase to 5 years, but after that I would expect the handles to start to stick open — as mine did a few years ago. At that point InSinkErator suggests the entire $250 faucet needs to be replaced. However, I and others have successfully restored functionality when this happens by spraying water-proof lubricants into the handle bases and working the handles back and forth to free the springs.