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
0:19
Hi, this is Andrew Twidwell, owner of ABT plumbing electric heat and air, here once again with the show, you got this, the show of DIY do’s and don’ts. And I did that nice and slow this time, didn’t I? I kind of moderated my coffee today.I had a half Caf latte with breakfast this morning. So hopefully I won’t be too amped up.
0:36
So yeah,
0:37
I feel like my text might have made an impact because I texted you last night. I slow down on the caffeine man.
0:47
We’re doing this a little bit earlier than normal because I’ve got my son is visiting from Mexico City and needs to zoom on a work call for himself. So yeah, we’ve only got so much bandwidth. So the reality of the Zoom life these days is kind of weird right?
1:02
Now I think the bandwidth thing is kind of funny that’s subjective I could say on any given zoom that you and I have my bandwidth is a little bit low but that’s a different kind of job. Layer you’d have to know me to understand that.
1:18
My tolerance and bandwidth is very low. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, and Sorry we missed you guys. Last week I was out in northern Minnesota and the Boundary Waters canoeing and sleeping on the ground and carrying all we had in a boat and then having a move said things off the boat across land with the boat. And two other lakes it was it was a it was an adventure.
1:48
It sounds like you guys were just saying I mean you’re making it sound like it was like the journey of the pilgrims. I mean come on everyone in that group because I knew who they are. I saw I saw the picture so my my confirmed guests was right and I say this about lovely people. Y’all are experience backpacking, outdoor people quit acting like it’s me and my group. Come on, we
2:12
kept talking about the northern queen, you know that movie? Frank Sinatra enough. Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn slogging through the marsh. People it best if you saw that you saw the group of people and these are all people that are kids all went to school together. And we were the families that always kind of hung out and took care of the chairs and signed up for boards. And so it was like a well oiled machine like we all kind of fell into our roles. And yeah, they weren’t kind of you know, normal roles. Most of the women clean most of the guys were moving boats and setting up the bear the food from the keeping it from the bears and setting up the latrine and all that stuff. But it was just everything was dialed
3:00
two important things, the bear thing and the latrine Those are both like look if you guys want to take care of that. I’m okay and agenda shelter
3:08
was great. It was like there was nothing. The camp was tidy, tight. I mean, everybody there was never a moment anyways, like sitting around going, Hey, can you go do that or something? Like everybody pitched in? It was really it was it was good.
3:20
Well, I mean, look in your defense, all of you. The age you are just slightly my age range by a smidge. You’ve all watched 20 Something seasons of Survivor, you know that if you want to stay on the island, you got to do your parts, maybe something
3:34
right at least filter water
3:39
which is going to be voted off and
3:41
we’re on an island at one point. So yeah, you don’t want to be voted off. And they were we’re in we’re in the middle of frickin nowhere. I mean, there was we didn’t see any signs of any major wildlife other than like some moose poop. I didn’t really seen the bear scattering thing but there are wolves up there. The wet with a we didn’t go with the guy but the guy had set us up with all the gear and all that stuff because most of our friends flew out from from California. So they had the boats and the food and the packs and the beds and the tents and all that stuff. But the guy who was talking about all lives and my Minnesota has the largest population of wild wolves than any other state because it’s you know, there’s no ranching and stuff so there’s really no conflict there’s a lot of wilderness up on the boundary of Canada and United States. And after we were talking about him, he was driving back and saw one but we missed it we didn’t see it but he saw it on the way back to his to his the their little outfitter place so they were out there but millions caught some fish caught my first pike and that was kind of my bucket list thing. I wanted to catch a pike and that was that was their big and they fight so I was that was fun and they just stop on top Waterloo or so. Oh my God, it was it was glorious. It was so fun. And it tasted really good too. So
5:05
yeah, see feel like you really went out there and conquered nature? Yeah, no,
5:09
no, we did not conquer because we’re all waking up every morning like, oh, oh,
5:14
okay. Let me reframe that.
5:16
The youngest ones that I’m 55 So you know, go figure. Yeah.
5:23
A little stretching in the morning. There was quite a
5:25
few of us that were in the 60s. So yeah, with both ThermaRest pads on hearts on hard ground with roots and rocks and stuff. Yeah, there was some some bruised hips and current next and achy backs. And yeah,
5:40
I mean, like you’re describing my typical day, and I’m not even in Minnesota Outback or whatever. I do want to talk about the wolves for a second before we get into our show. So you had to go all the way to the upper, you know, parts of Minnesota to kind of possibly have that wolf encounter. Yeah, listen, I got to beat man. I literally took the dog outside yesterday at I don’t know what time too early to be up and about, but it was laid out. It was laid out and got to the back property and he’s just doing whatever he does. And I look and I’m like, Oh, looky alone, Coyote stirring right. Now, again, there was fencing between me and said, Coyote J, but it was right there. And I just kind of was like, alright, well, he’s not taking an aggressive stance. I was trying to figure out like, is he Young? Is he injured is the old just the one and, and he probably just stared and looked at me. I mean, I can’t imagine what I look like at this hour of the day. I mean, actually, I could but he just kind of looked at me for good. I don’t know three four minutes and Theo was like not feel the dog not feel your son could he just didn’t get he just was like What’s up, chump like no aggression? Say anything? Didn’t bark didn’t alert didn’t even
6:51
you like right on the interface, too, right? I mean, you’ve got like, wide open scrub brush.
6:57
I do. I do have some. I mean, right behind us is actually. So I’ve got a little bit of a green belt, but it’s very small. And then actually, we really drive the house of the famous LaBianca murders from the 1960s is actually right behind me. Um, but Griffith Park is kind of just like a block up. So I mean, we definitely have like, I would say, I’m more. I’m more rural Los Angeles, so to speak, then I’m not right in the heart of like Koreatown, which is like, everywhere and all that. So I definitely have more sightings than the average resident, but it always fascinates me because I look at them. And I’m like, God, they really were. They’re not sickly. And they don’t have like, you know, like, they’re just this incredible, like an animal. Right? Pretty. me having a thing for Huskies. I’m like, it’s kind of a similar dog. I’m like, so anyway, so that was my big,
7:50
like, and they’re really good. They’re really good. Adapt, adapting. I mean, I know, they’re clearly seen in downtown San Francisco and downtown LA. Yeah.
7:58
Oh, yeah. So that was my wildlife encounter. So not quite as magnificent as yours. But, you know, there’s always There’s always tomorrow, there’s always who knows what’s gonna pop up in the backyard. So. But while you were away, I just want to say this real quick. Hopefully, when we were not on the air people were, they weren’t gonna be listening anyway, because they were at the Nevada County Fair is fair week. Right? It was it was so I hope that was successful for the nonprofits and for the folks. The one thing I do miss about the Nevada County Fair, is that was always kind of the end of summer and my my daughter always had such a fun time at the fair and then you have like a day or two to recoup and then boom, you’re back in school. So right so it was kind of a nostalgic thing right like the quote unquote end of summer so to speak, in school starts up so hopefully, the nonprofits made a ton of money on high grade because I haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve been too busy focusing on other news of the World, but I’m hopeful that it was successful and
8:59
I looked like all my friends said it was great everybody that went said it was awesome. So hope everybody enjoyed themselves out there and had a corndog and
9:09
at least one right oh my gosh, I missed those corndogs
9:14
a couple of years COVID kind of stopped that but anyway, so yeah, we should get to our show so we you got a nice list because yeah, I’ve been kind of a wall and came back to a nice little list of things that we can go over and I’m just gonna jump right in because that’s what we do here
9:30
is your show sir I just watched buttons that I just put
9:34
you gave me the content which is nice. No clue like they were calling me last night going so what are we gonna do? I’m like I’m trying to avoid work for one more day.
9:44
Yeah, I’m busy on vacation.
9:49
Absolutely coming down off my high being gone. So anyway, this is a really good one. It’s got these are things that we’ve shared on Facebook before and will probably share them again. Good, we recycle a lot of the content, because you may have missed them. But there’s some really good stuff in here about different types of products. So I’ll just kind of go through them as a list. And one of the one that I really leaned on too, is because I think it’s really important, I was just reading about these with another situation, somebody else was, I’ve been for stress, I tend to research things. And right now I’m on a kick up on building an RV, building a van, and talking about the benefits of having a GFCI in your, in your van, and in your camper in your RV. And, you know, why would you want a GFCI? What is a GFCI? What is a Ground Fault Interrupter? Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter actually do for you. And if you’re not familiar with a GFCI, it’s that outlet that you typically see in a bathroom, kitchen or garage in a wet environment that has that button. And when they they click, there’s a little red light that comes on and when they’re on there’s usually a green light, at least the newer ones. What are these things actually do? Well, the reason we have them in there, they’re amazing device, because how sophisticated and how inexpensive they are. They can literally save your life. So what it does is if it detects any differentiation in the electrical circuit, it shuts off. Why would you want that. So let’s say you’re brushing your teeth and you touched an outlet, you’re plugging something in, and your hand is in the water, you’ve got a direct a direct contact with ground. Electricity takes the path of least resistance. A lot of times that’s our body, because we are conducted. So it will literally go from the outlet to ground, cross your heart and could potentially electrocute you and potentially kill you, this device will shut the electricity down. And let people ask well, you know, we have circuit breakers, what what’s the difference between a circuit breaker those things that are in the service panel in the garage, you know, or the sub panel that’s in the in the hallway, those are the those devices aren’t there for to interrupt the circuit, if there’s a ground fault, if there’s electricity jumping through somebody’s body or something like that, they’re there for overloads. So they’re designed like you have a 15 or 20 amp circuit. If that line has an excess of 20 app, we want to shut that down. Because then what happens if too much electricity goes through a wire that’s not big enough, it’ll get hot and as potential for catching fire, completely different safety device. This, the GFCI is literally there to save you from being electrocuted. So in a circuit breakers there to save you from fire. So it’s a complete or a short circuit. So it’s it’s a completely different product. So if you don’t have GFCI is in wet environments, say garages, kitchens, or bathrooms. If you’re an older home, definitely think about having an electrician coming in and stalling. If you’ve got one that is temperamental, like I just we’re out here, still out here in Minnesota for another couple of weeks. And the GFCI in our bathroom was popping every once Well, they do tend to get tired. You know, it’s like any any device that is on the side of the wall that you can kind of see typically has a life expectancy of you know, 10 to 20 years, eventually they do wear out. And that one was actually wearing out every time we turn a light on everyone’s pop and then all the lights went out in the bathroom and the fan would go off. So I had to replace it. So they’re one of the things that do get replaced. And since we’re talking about GFCIs, and the benefits, also talked about some of the problems with them, actually, it’s not necessarily a problem. But if you if suddenly you have no electricity in your bathroom, lights, kitchen, or some other place, electrician, what we’ll do as electricians will literally run circuits through the GFCI. So it’s not just the GFCI that’s protected, it’s everything else that’s beyond the GFCI. So we can have like a bank of outlets, or we can have run our lights and run different than the bathroom fan and a few other things. And if that GFCI outlet goes out, you won’t have any lights in your bathroom, potentially, depending on how the electrician ran their circuit. A lot of times it’s just a matter of pushing the button. So if you do have a bank of outlets that are out, try to find try to find the GFCI and, and and reset it in ironically, you know specially if you’re in Nevada County, I bought a house up on Bender mountain and the GFCI in the bathroom. also ran the kitchen. So when the outlets in the kitchen went off, I’d have to I finally figured out that I went upstairs to the second floor to the bathroom. That’s where the GFCI is, well
14:28
that’s the logical place. Right? That’s worrying obviously,
14:31
may not be where they’re supposed to be. I mean, we most electricians don’t do that. But sometimes subcontractors they do that if they’re wearing it themselves just to save a little bit of money. Or sometimes we found them I had one friend that was how to think about LEDs that were out in their kitchen counter. And she didn’t have a GFCI and she’s like, where do I look? I’m like, go everywhere and she literally found the GFCI in the pantry behind the box of Cheerios. It was this outlet that she never used because it was in the pantry behind it on a shelf behind her cereal, her kids cereal. So look around the house because it may be there so that you know, before you call the electrician, we’ll look around for the GFCI. Because that may, it may literally just be pushing a button and it’s fixed. We’ve had a lot of it, you know, it doesn’t make us feel good to come out and have to charge some money to push a button. So if you can figure it out yourself, you know, everybody’s happy. A couple other ones. This one I really like to. So we’re gonna move away from electrical, right? Do we have any other electrical, we can do this one electrical, this is a good one to ceiling fan. Everybody’s probably running their ceiling fan this time of year. I know I’ve got ours running constantly. Whether it’s hot in the house or not, I just got him running just to move air to kind of keep us a little cool in the 90s and Grass Valley. So in Nevada City, so ceiling fans are working. If your ceiling fan is all wobbly, when you turn it on at a certain speed of it starts to swing, that’s not good. It can put stress on all the mechanisms and things you really want to balance if you’re looking up and looking
16:07
like Andrew, I need to
16:11
like the pole chain. Be back at the glass globe when it goes ding, ding ding. Yeah, yeah. If it’s wobbly you could actually be if you go to the hardware store, they make these little sticky metal weights to balance them. And they’re really inexpensive. So you go up to your your ceiling fan, try to figure out which side is leaning out, that’s gonna be the heavy side. So then you want to compensate that by putting weight on the other side of the light side. And you can it takes a little while I’ve done it a couple of times. And it can be a little you know, it’s trial and error. You put one on and it still walks or you put it on someplace and it makes it worse. You just move them around. They’re not that sticky. And you get it to the point where you can actually have the fan not going when wink wink wink wink can potentially falling from the ceiling. I’ve seen some that, you know, they’re just going crazy. They’re moving like six inches each side and you definitely don’t want that. They’re designed to move a little bit. But with any movement, you have potential for things to wear out. Right. So if it’s been there for 20 3040 years, and it’s been walking around, yeah, that potential but I think the drop, so especially if it’s off a pedestal bar or something, you definitely want to fix that. So that’s a nice. I’m envisioning my trip to the hospital now. I’m gonna get on that, sir. Thanks for the reminder. That’s not fun when they fall. Yes. Or blade flies. Alright, now we’re gonna get into a couple other ones that this is one that we’ve talked about before. Actually got painters here right now. Because I used to be a painter. I actually used to paint houses in my younger years. But it really it’s a physical job and
17:56
I don’t like doing it just didn’t it didn’t stick save up the toilets. I got it. I totally get Yeah,
18:01
to be honest, I’d much rather do plumbing than paint. I mean, the painting is kind of nice, because it’s you kind of get into you kind of get into that zone. music on and it can be kind of a just it’s repetition. It’s repetition. So you kind of get into that kind of work zone. But like an exercise, but it’s it’s physical and you’re hurt after the after the day’s work anyway. But why am I talking about painting so there’s this tool five and one painters tool, and we’ve talked about them before. If you don’t have a five and one painters tool when you do DIY stuff, you really should get one. And then I found one off that list that you shared one time of tools that you should have around the house. And it’s a folding one that can fit in your pocket because I like to sharpen the the edge of these things so it can cut paper. And I’ll take a grinder and really sharpen it. So it’s a really good scraper. You don’t want that things flopping around in your back pocket. So like a pocket knife, it folds down and won’t rip your pants. These things are great. They’ve got everything from you know, a nail pole or a roll scraper. So we’re cleaning the payrolls, it’s got this nice little halfmoon shape, it’s got putty and putty scraper, and can also be used as a knife. It’s got a nice metal handle. The most of them are designed so that if it’s not a folding one, if it’s a regular one, the metal goes all the way to the end. And you can actually tap on it when you don’t put too much pressure on but you can tap on it with a with a hammer. So if you’ve got something that’s really stubborn and doesn’t want to release that you’re trying to get off, it’ll work also has a nail puller and some of them have bottle openers. So for the end of the day, you can have your beer. I think they’re they’re a fantastic tool to have around. I’ve probably had like five of them floating around in my different toolboxes. But of course I forgot to bring one here.
19:46
I have a lot of bottle openers sitting around to Oh, you meant Okay, sorry. What’s What’s the next one?
19:53
What’s the five and one painters tool? So if you don’t have one, go buy one. I really I think they’re a great tool very underrated. added, especially if you’re not a painter. So let’s talk about all. This is really good. And I actually haven’t used this, but I’ve had situations where I should have. So if you’ve got a really wide gap somewhere where you’re trying to fill with cocking, so if it’s an excess,
20:20
talking, okay, because remember,
20:23
so like tub and tile caulking, window caulking, silicone caulk, and those sorts of things. You even use caulking on concrete these days. Do they give me a thickness? Well, let’s just say you got a gap that’s in excess of a quarter inch. And you try to fill that with caulking. And if especially if it’s like on wood, or dissimilar materials, like if it’s a tub to tile kind of situation. And it’s a big gap, that caulking may not actually hold, because that gap is so great, because there’s going to be some thermal expansion and contraction between the materials. And the copy will release on one side. How do you deal with that. So they make this product called, it’s a backer rod, and it’s literally just a round piece of styrofoam, just like a pool noodle kind of styrofoam that you press into the crack. And the you gotta get one set slightly larger than the the gap that you’re trying to fill. And press it back in there a little bit, and then apply your caulking on top of it. So then it gives us this nice hourglass shape. So it gets really good bonding on both of the ends. And that thin part in between has the chance to expand and contract so that it doesn’t pull and pull off of one of the materials that you’re trying to seal. So it’s a really great, simple, simple problem. So if you got that issue where the cocking just keeps breaking, you’re like, why is that being just keep releasing up my tile, or if it’s a big gap, or somewhere else, you know, the counter to tile, your counter to sink or something window to to to steal those sort of things. Try this backer rod, you can get them in most hardware stores, I’m sure a to z and b and c and hills flat has all this product. And some of the big box stores will have it. It’s really great because I’ve had it I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen that. And it’s happened to me and and knowing this now, I didn’t know this until a couple years ago and like who this is, this is good stuff. We’ve got time for one more. Let’s just go with the toilet leak because we’ve talked about this one before. And this one I don’t even really need to link to read. So how do you you got a toilet that seems to run at night? How do you find the leak, put some dye in the toilet, don’t flush it. If you get the dye inside the toilet, you know you got a flapper leak, a little filled out the flush your valve flush valve on the bottom is leaking. So you’re pushing you put that you put the drops in the tank. Now this drops in the tank. And I’m not saying that not what you just said put it in but I did it really fast. Yeah, put it in the in the tank, and then sit your bowl for a couple hours. And then if you’ve got any color in the bowl, you know you got a flapper leak. And it’s not a fill valve. So it’s not a water leak coming through the fill valve. So just replace the flapper. You know, I say that, like just replace it. It is my nemesis toilets are really difficult. So you get ideally pull, turn the water off to go to the toilet, pull the flapper and take the hardware store and get the OEM flapper and spend the bucks to get the proper one. And with that, hopefully you guys kind of understand that one. We’ve gone over a bunch of times, so and we’ll go over it again. Because we always see that’s one of those things that I know a lot about. I hate working on toilets. But if you need a plumber to come and fix a toilet, if you need an electrician to come up with a GFCI and or replace it. If you need somebody to caulk that line between the tub and tile, we can help you in that phone number is 530-230-9092. Once again 530-230-9092. If you liked some of this content, please like us on Facebook because this is all stuff we’ve shared on Facebook. And if you want to find it on a print form, just go back on our Facebook page. You can find all this stuff. You may have to scroll back through some of our funnier stuff. entertaining stuff, but you will find all this information on our Facebook page. And I think even our website, we have some stuff on our website. We didn’t want to website. So cool. All right. And with that, thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you guys next week. Bye.
24:17
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rosalie. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning at nine o’clock on Cancio News Talk 830
Transcribed by https://otter.ai