0:03
Before you start your next do it yourself project. Listen to this. You got this is on the air you got this is hosted by ABT plumbing electric heat and air owner Andrew Twidwell and Rosalie Brown, with a helpful hand. here are Andrew and Rosalie.
0:18
This is Andrew Twidwell once again with you got this to show DIY do’s and don’ts and Oh, I forgot to say I’m the owner of abt plumbing, electric heat and air. And I’ve got Rosalie Brown. We’re kind of remote right now. We’re both remote. I’m down in Sausalito. You’re down in LA. And we’re recording this early because we have some scheduling issues this week. Both of us are kind of have this crazy week coming up, but all good things, but it’s just right. It’s just crazy. You got what you got people coming to your place or something. You’re hosting some friends.
0:53
I’m hosting. Yeah, I’m hosting people. And you know, it’s so funny. Last week, I had like, extra time and I had like, time to do things and I and then I woke up this morning and I’m like, Oh my God, everything is due today. Like all of a sudden, like the universe is like, Haha, like I just I could not have more things to do today and tomorrow and the next day than I had in months. So, so weird, right. But before we get lost in storytime, or you know, the topic. I just want to say Happy Birthday early. Cuz by the time this airs, it’ll be past your birthday buddy. Basketball. Yeah. Happy Birthday founder of abt plumbing. You’re the
1:37
minor minor ones. You just feel older. At this point in my life, though. Yeah. Every every birthday is like, Oh, yeah. Okay. I’m that much closer to the grave. Okay, fantastic. That’s one way to look at it. 30 years left in me. Yeah,
1:53
that’s one way to look at it. Yeah, you could also say, I made another year and like I should celebrate, but you’re one of those weirdos that likes to do like dry birthdays and healthy stuff. So I wouldn’t say I wouldn’t be posting it. You know, I tell you what, I will be posting you tomorrow. Even if you are not posting you. I’ll be toasting you.
2:13
Yeah. Well, I have. So yeah, I haven’t had a drop of alcohol since almost a month now. And it was just kind of yeah, my sister’s quit in January. And then my wife quit completely. And we were never really hardcore drinkers. But we’re just like, let’s see what happens if we just don’t drink anymore. And I’ve come to really appreciate good non alcoholic beers, because I love beer. And there’s some really good non alcoholic beers I had again this last night that was like, it was It wasn’t spot on. But it was close enough that you know, it had it was refreshing. And it was like, Alright, this is this is almost a Guinness. I was pretty. I was pretty impressed. So yeah. For all you all that have been listening to the Dr. Andrew Huberman report, Huberman report on this podcast before the alcohol mine. It’s like whew, man. All right. I gotta do something about that. That’s probably that one. I don’t want to if you don’t want to learn anything about the consumption of alcohol, don’t listen to that one. Because yeah, just like mind blowing. But yeah,
3:17
probably not what I want to listen to. But you know, I do have, there’s already been you know, you when you have people coming, you know, you ask ahead of time, like, Okay, well, how do you take your coffee in the morning, like, you know, just make sure you like you have stuff in your kitchen, and you put out the good bedding and all that. And so, the funny thing is that what came up the most was what alcohol do I have? And I was like, well, slow down. I’m like, liquor stores everywhere. We’ll we’ll take care of that when you get over the sticks. We’ll get you covered like calm down. So so I will be toasting me and friends will be toasting your birthday for you. But I mean, hey, like it’s just another trip around the sun and I just wanted to make sure I got it on the air that I said Happy Birthday of Andrew Twidwell and actually when this airs I think it’s going to be for those that observe it’s going to be like Good Friday the Friday right before Easter. Yeah,
4:11
yeah, it’s yeah, it’s freezing
4:14
the air finally Easter everybody Yeah.
4:18
And we’re actually seeing some sun now and I know it’s it’s sunny right now and but it depends on where you’re at. Right? I mean, they’re these little micro cells are coming over. Yeah, funny here. Not sunny there. You get rain to this this morning.
4:34
It’s super cloudy and there is talk of rain. So we’ll see. 53 and gray gray gray skies. So we’ll see
4:42
down here it’s 44 right now so yeah, it’s chilly. It’s definitely it’s been a cold spring. But at least we got sun so I’m happy about that and actually able to get outside for a little bit.
4:54
Okay, so we might actually we might winter might actually come to an end this year, and if it does, there are some Some things that you can do in your DIY plans. That would be easier if it was probably warm and sunny out. But
5:08
yeah, we can actually start talking about irrigation again and cleaning up the yard. And we’ve been kind of holding off on that just because it’s, it’s kind of mean, you know, when it’s snowing and talking about gardening, little passive aggressive kind of thing, like, oh, we want it to be sunny. But you know, it’s not wishful. Wishful thinking. Yeah, it’s so fun to be working outside when it’s 35 degrees or 40 degrees. And raining. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it’s been, it’s gonna be a crazy week, like you said, I got, we just hired a new manager. So I got to bring him on board, and I gotta get everything ready for him. And then we ended up deciding to buy a new travel trailer, because you know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree kind of thing. Yeah. Not that I’m poor white. Anyway, but yeah, sort of kind of that way. Anyway, so yeah, we’re gonna do travel trailer. Coming on Thursday. So that’ll be fun. So yeah. Could we come in ahead? Well, I mean, fun stuff. But crazy.
6:08
I mean, you got more than a manager you hired, you hired? You hard to see oh, like you?
6:14
Yeah, yeah, we got to the point where I needed some help. In, we’re growing so fast that I don’t have the time to completely manage everybody. So we’re bringing in a high level CEO. So yeah, it’s been good. And then I want to thank everybody out there and listening, that, you know, you guys have really helped us grow. And it’s, it’s, it’s been really fun. And it’s fun to give that opportunity to somebody to help us grow even more. So yeah, we, we’ve had quite a few meetings with this guy. And he’s really excited. And he has helped grow a couple other smaller companies into much larger companies. So that’s the goal here, we want to, we want to be able to take care of as many customers as we possibly can. So that’s the goal, and 2023, and 2024, and 2025, and so on and so forth. Yeah, just keep keep growing this thing. Keep getting opportunities to technicians to you know, we’ve got quite a few kids that have come in, and that were working menial labor jobs, or, you know, food service jobs, and have trained them on how to work in the trades, and they’ve moved on into trucks and are killing it, you know, taking care of customers, getting five star reviews and making much more money than they were buying houses. And you know, I hate to say it, but even going to the dentist, a few of them have gotten new teeth, which just, you know, unfortunately, it is what it is in our area. Just for dental care. Now, I got health insurance and a couple of houses even in California. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. So looking forward to continuing on this path and growing and giving, giving more people opportunity to grow themselves and taking care of customers.
7:59
Well remind me when we finish this recording for me to submit my resume for it to be a technician because that all sounds really good.
8:09
Patients do really well. It’s yeah, I mean, they can do really, really, really well. It’s it unfortunately, you know, it is not a young it is not an IT is a young person’s job business. I know for myself and my back and my knees and stuff. It’s like woof, working eight hours a day out there 10 hours a day in the field. I can’t do it at this point. It’s rough. I got a couple guys that are my age that are that are doing it. But I don’t know how they do it. Because it’s it’s really hard. It’s really hard. But I think they lean on their their apprentices more than they used to. But you know, which is a good thing, because now the apprentices are learning. So yeah.
8:51
So you’re saying that I’m not qualified for the job? Yeah. I’ll be the judge of that. Where are you?
8:59
Not qualified. I’m just giving clarification what is involved in the job?
9:04
All right. Well, I mean,
9:06
if you want to deal with you know, you poop and mud and rain and snow working us. Yeah.
9:14
Like that’s, like, that’s all we do anymore. Right is, is deal with the weather. All right, well,
9:19
soon to be will. They’ll be like they’ll be working in heat, heat exhaustion, we’ll be having our safety topics about drinking enough water and getting enough electrolytes and making sure to use easy yes, if you’re digging in a hot day, but right now it’s you know, make sure you’re bundled up so that you don’t get frostbite.
9:38
So crazy. So crazy. All right. Well, I have some thinking you do. Okay. All right.
9:43
Let’s talk about Yeah, so so it is springtime and you got a nice list for you know, spring and earthday coming and all this stuff. And oh, we’re going to be in. We’ve got a couple events coming up right and we may as well plug those so can you remind me what we’re doing? I’m birthday in Lincoln,
10:02
I’m gonna be honest with you know, there is an event in Sun City or something that I don’t I’m not gonna lie. I don’t know anything about that’s happened that is
10:11
the Earth Day. So? Oh, no, I think it is it’s a home service. Yeah, we’re just we’re down in Sun City in Lincoln on the 11th. And then I think we got a birthday in Sacramento. Yes,
10:22
on the 23rd of April, we are part of a festival. And we do, we will be sharing that we shared it, like once already, but there’s a big, really cool festival happening on the 23rd I believe it is of April, down in Sacramento. And we’re part of that. And so we’ll be kind of plugging that a little bit and cross our fingers for good weather, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be safe. April 23. I think it is in Sacramento, we should have good weather. We’ll see. Yeah, fingers crossed.
10:51
Yeah. This year, you never know. So anyway, so So you gave me a good a good outline, or a good list of things for Earth and DIY stuff. And these are gonna be mainly energy saving DIY projects. So here we go, you know, the installation of weather stripping, inspect the doors and windows for gaps and leaks, and install weather stripping to vent air leaks. The other benefit that you have by installing weather stripping is it keeps the little critters out of your house a little insects and bugs and stuff. I know we had some issues with like lizards walking in at some point too. So you know, if you got that gap underneath your door, things will come in, you know, especially you know, when you got to come into a whether they want to kind of hide and so, seal up all your door, seal up all your windows. And also remember that, you know, mice can get in through a hole the size of a dime. So it doesn’t take much space for the vermin and stuff to get in or the air. So weatherstrip really important, really, really good. And it will save you a bunch of energy, especially if you do it yourself, it’ll definitely pay for itself because it’s weather stripping and stuff is pretty cheap. Use energy efficient light bulbs. This crazy thing is talking about replacing traditional incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know how many people still have incandescent light bulbs, because it’s one of those things where you can still buy them. But there’s really no need to use incandescent light bulbs, they don’t last long. You’re gonna spend more money in the long run, both in energy and the fact that you gotta replace them every couple of years, an LED light bulb uses a 10th of the electricity that incandescent light bulbs does. And you can just, you know, it’s obvious, like, what was the Easy Bake Oven, remember, the Easy Bake Oven, what did it heat with an incandescent light bulb, that’s how much heat that those light bulbs put off an LED, if you tried to do that with an LED, they they burned, so cool, there’s so much there’s so little energy loss and heat, that it makes them so much more efficient. So they’re so much more efficient and even more efficient than an incandescent bulb or excuse me in an incandescent but a fluorescent light bulb way more efficient than a fluorescent light bulb. I know in our office, we’ve replaced all of our tube lights with LED strips, and seeing a major, major decrease in the amount of money that we’re spending on electricity in our office space. So if you still have incandescent light bulbs, or even fluorescent light bulbs, it’s really good idea to change that to LED. I mean they and they last a long time like new LED or new light fixtures, a lot of them don’t even come with light bulbs anymore. They just had the lights built into them, because they will last you like 10 to 20 years. So they’re not even they don’t even have replaceable bolts anymore. You just replace the whole fixture. So I mean, that’s how long these things last. So if you do have any kids think of light bulbs at this point. Yeah, definitely changed in the LED. Question.
13:50
I want to put you Yes. Yes, sir. As a question, I want to put you on the spot about something that’s related, maybe, to saving energy. So I have someone coming tomorrow in the midst of everything, of course, to install a nest thermostat. And so listen, I feel like I should know what the benefits of this are. But I don’t. So I NASA was
14:16
the landlord putting that in for you. Are you putting it in? Oh, I’m not. Nice. Excellent. Yeah, cheap. Yeah, well,
14:23
good. Because what I pay isn’t cheap either. But I have something above that, as far as I’m concerned. But what what would I so from a user perspective, it’s just going to be just as easy for me to use as whatever I have now. But what is the benefit to like the NASS Why do people do that? Is that supposed to help Linux
14:39
is cool because it learns your habits. Okay, so, but it is kind of big brothers. I mean, like nest is a product that has an exceptional value because of the information that it’s gathering. It’s more it’s more valuable not on the product, but it more valuable because the information isn’t information gather. But any of it, what are some of the benefits to you it does learn your habits. So it knows when to turn it on. And when to turn it off, you can program it, when to turn on and when to turn off. So if you’ve got a schedule, it works really great. You can set it to, to set back the temperature at night, down to 65 or 68, whatever you like, and then come back up to back up to 6970 72, whatever you want during the day, or during the times when you’re home. The program will will think didn’t really work so great in our lifestyle with my wife because my wife was home sporadically. And I kind of programmed it for my schedule. And she didn’t like it, she got kind of mad at it. So she just started coming up and down. But one of the nice other nice things though about nest or Wi Fi thermostats, they are gathering information. But one of the nice things is you can load the app onto your phone. And you can actually turn your thermostat up or down when you’re not home like I’ve got, I’ve got them in. We’ve got them in our place in St. Paul. And we’ve got them in our place in Grass Valley. And I can remotely check the temperature and make sure that thermos heads down like our place in St. Paul, we rent. So you know I am Big Brother, I can see where the because we pay for the electricity on that rental because it’s kind of we do it through the traveling nurses. And I can see where they’re, they’re setting the thermostat or if they’re not home, or if they’ve left the building, I can turn the temperature down. So just make sure that keeps the house warm enough so the pipes don’t freeze but not heating the place. You don’t turn it down like 45 degrees. So that’s really nice. It’s really cool to be able to you know, if you go on a trip and come home, you can turn the temperature up, especially in the winter, it’s nice to be able to turn the temperature up and give it like an hour or two to heat up. And so it heats up the couch and heats up the tables and heats everything up so that when you come home, especially in Nevada County where the inside temperature can get down to it depending on where you set it. Like I said ours are 45 It’ll get down to 45 during the wintertime inside. And then it takes a couple 234 hours before the couch and the and the tables and everything else start to heat up. So it much it’s much more comfortable. So I really I really liked their Wi Fi thermostat. So I’m actually with this new trailer, I found a Wi Fi thermostat for the trailer and I’m going to put in just that makes sense. Not much of a
17:32
dork. Yeah. So I had a I have a brother in law who his his teenage son is he’s now not a teenager, he’s moved on. But when he was staying at the house, right, Don would be at work and he could see what Dustin was doing with the thermostat and he would get off. So I was like, that’s kind of I mean, for that perspective, I think that’s pretty cool.
17:55
Ya know, I’ve done that when when our kids were home by themselves, and come to find out that they you know, turn the AC down to like 65 my No, no, turn it back. Back up the 72 to 73 to 75. Somewhere in there. Like it’s summertime. You don’t need to icebox, you know, yeah. So yeah, so that’s, that’s pretty cool with teenagers. And actually, you can actually could be a friend I put a tankless water heater in for a friend and his son was a teenager and he was taking really long showers. And so he would, after about 10 minutes, he would have a remote thermostat and he would just turn the temperature down on the on the water heater. So it got cold and cut them out of the shower. As as parents, these Wi Fi thermostats and stuff. They’re amazing, you know whether it’s on the tankless water heater or on the each HVAC system heating and air system, so yeah, so cool. You’re getting an S That’s fantastic. While you took one of the things Okay, yeah, so that’s that was the next thing. You you must have read this. I even wrote this.
19:04
It’s been a couple of weeks. I don’t remember what paper I don’t remember.
19:08
That was good. This one is one of the this is a this is a level like five on the on the maybe even eight on the DIY thing. Seal air ducts. Seal any air ducts in your home with duct sealant or metal tape to prevent air leaks. If you’re if you can access them relatively easily. Yeah, do it. Most of them are in crawl spaces or in attics. So if you’re not comfortable with you know, crawl spaces and attics, you probably don’t want to do it. But you know if you’re if your heating and air system is 20 years old or older, it’s probably not installed very well to speaking from experience because when I was in the when I was in the field and installing heating and air systems we He screwed the ducks together as if tied the ducks together and put some tape on him. And that was that was this then extent of our installation. And that was just industry standard. Now, we have to, when we install a new system in California, we have to have a duck seat or duct testing company come out a third party to come out and actually test the ducts for leakage. And we have to make sure that all the ducts are sealed. So we do that anyway now. And you know, back in the day, they we didn’t didn’t really matter, you can have a huge hole and they wouldn’t ever know. So it’s not a bad idea to kind of at least the best thing you can do is go look underneath. If you can’t crawl underneath your house, call underneath your house, and take a look at all the ducks and make sure none of them separated, because that’s pretty common. Make sure there’s no vermin in them. We’ve had quite a few situations where rats were raccoons who have gotten into the ductwork and make nests. You don’t want that stuff inside your house because you know what they do when they’re chillin. But if you do decide to do this, it’s a it’s a big job, but it is something that DIY high level DIY person can do. This one is one of the things that you know, it’s, we don’t really utilize these window films, we don’t really utilize them much in California, it’s more for really extreme others like in the Midwest and even the southeast where you got really hot, humid days. But window film, applying window film to your Windows to block out heat in the summer and retain heat in the winter. You can do that your best bet is really if you haven’t if you don’t have double pane windows yet, yeah, if you’ve got double pane windows, you’re not gonna you’re not gonna realize much of a savings because your windows are probably doing a pretty good job. But if you do that single pane windows it is it is an inexpensive way to get around. Not having them. And if you’re a renter, that’s pretty good, especially if you got single pane windows if you’re a renter, definitely do this because it’s huge. But in summertime, it’s not really great for us because you know, the fact that we open our windows during the summertime, typically because at night cools off in the foothills, so you do lose that ability when you put the film on. But wintertime, it’s great, you’re not gonna open the windows. Insulating hot water pipes wrapping hot water pipes with insulation to prevent heat loss and reduce the amount of energy needed to heat the water. It doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of energy to heat the water, but it does reduce the amount of energy that is dissipated from the pilots. So, it is a it is code now when we do a when we go and do a new installation of plumbing or or rehab of old plumbing, we have to insulate all the hot water pipes. You will you will realize the savings and especially if you have hot water loop. So like if you turn the tap on and so people always complain we always get like it takes five minutes to get hot water at my my bathroom faucet. So we’ll put in a loop where the hot water is circulating and recirculating loop in the entire plumbing system. So you’ve got hot water that’s in the pipes at all times that you will see see a huge savings if you insulate the pipes because of the fact that if it’s not insulated, all you’re really doing is building a nice little radiant loop. Like that’s what we build for us how radiators work is exposed copper pipes with fins on them work cools off. And oh my gosh, yeah, we’re at the end of our show how that happened. I got I got the time to kill it. All right. So if you need any help with plumbing, electrical, heating and air, you can reach us at 530-230-9092.. You can reach us on the web and we’ll try this and not flub at this time at easy as AP t.com That’s easy as abc.com or you can also find us at Abt plumbing.com. Like us on Facebook, we share a lot of this information and you can see us if you want you can like us on Facebook, and you got this and abt and you can actually see these videos and yeah, I actually watched a couple and I realized I scratch my head a lot, so try not to do that anymore. Anyway, thanks for listening. I’ll catch you guys next week. Bye.
24:24
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rose Lee. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on TNT on Newstalk 830