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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
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Andrew Twidwell, owner of ABT plumbing, electric heat and air, once again with our show, You Got This. It’s a show of DIY do’s and don’ts. And I’m zooming in with Rose Lee Brown. And I’m actually looking back at Sunshine right now. It’s kind of crazy. It’s been kind of rainy and gloomy, which has been great, because Yeah, finally fire season’s over. So how’s it how’s it your neck of the woods? La,
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some looking out the window. It rained last night. It was raining this morning a little bit when I when I took the dog out. And I’m trying to decipher I it’s 65 right now. I think we’re gonna get the sun I think I think the weather’s past. But yeah, it feels a little bit like fall. It’s kind of nice. And it also for some reason, I don’t hear traffic as much when it’s wet. So it’s kind of that or they’ve all like not using my street. I don’t know. But it’s
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once a trip because like I know, we live like near Condon Park and we’ll hear highway 20 Sometimes, depending on the temperature, the air and stuff, and sometimes we don’t hear it. So it’s really weird how that kind of happens, depending on the temperature, the humidity, all that stuff. And I know. Yeah, I know that I’ve known that’s been true. And other places I’ve lived as well. No one really trips me up there because it’s like sometimes and sometimes we’ll hear like music festivals and assumptions. I’m even when they’re in sometimes we won’t even though we know there’s a music festival going on. So it just kind of depends on the way the airs. I don’t know.
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People that are much smarter will be able to explain to us why that happens. And if anyone wants to send me an email and explain it, I would love to be the one who brings that fact to the table.
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I will my nose you’re not hearing you’re not hearing that the traffic is much right. Yeah,
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no, no, I like that. But a little funny Theo’s story, my fear not your Theo. I mean, I guess it’s kind of funny, but I was a little irritated last night. So as you know, because you’ve known me for you’d knew me pre Theo. And you’ve known during Theo and you’ll know he posts the out because you know, the life won’t go on forever. But so Theo, the dog is half husky. And the reason that that’s important is because the Husky part of the dog is very stubborn, and very vindictive, I would say. So, if he doesn’t get his way about something, it’s kind of like a toddler who you say no, so they throw like a crane at you when you turn your back. So imagine that, you know, he weighs, you know, a lot of pounds, and he doesn’t like to be ignored. So I had just kind of feeling good about myself. I had just finally got my pink slip from the DMV. You know, that’s what happens when you pay off a loan. And
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I saw this on social media today.
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Yeah, so I was I think I was probably crying in my beer last night. I posted it. And so I I was kind of happy about it. And the funny thing is that
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just a backup, the pink slip is you got the pink slip, because your car’s paid off. Right. So now we’re sending it, you managed to pay off our car, and I was gonna get a big slip, like, winning, right? Yeah,
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I mean, it does kind of feel like I’ve reached a achievement, you know, unlucky to certain badge. And so I’m just excited, you know, to have the pink slip. And so initially, I had it in one place, you know, and then I was, here’s where I screwed up. So I had a lot of things going on. And I thought, You know what, move this to this place. And then the next the final destination is going to be I have kind of a lockbox and I keep like birth certificates, passports, all that stuff in and so it was going to get to the final destination, but I was distracted and hit pause on that. So anyway, I should show you a picture of where he dug it out from I mean, he really had to like he had to move books, he had to move an iPad, he had to move and he got his nose in there and pulled it out gingerly and then took it out into the living room and searched to shred it with his paws in his mouth. And so
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like I look like literally knew that that was an important piece of paper for yes he
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went and looked for it and so yeah, I like I started like come walking in the room and I’m like, What in the hell and so yeah, so there’s my pink slip shredded in his in his face and I was like, um, you know, the car I just paid off is a lot more expensive than this dog. I had a moment where I was like, You know what? One was a good investment one was so good So I had I also had a little like, Okay, here’s where we are. He’s destroyed books before, like when I’ve left him in a room he doesn’t strictly care for he’s found every book he could get. And he’s like, you know, done the toilet paper. He’s got a thing for paper. And so, gratefully, he hasn’t like shredded any my books in the last few years, last three years at least. But I was like, What the heck? So then anyway, I looked online, and I found out okay, look, it’s not the end of the world. You can it’s gonna cost like 23 bucks and fill out a piece paper or do it through the mail. You don’t have to go to the DMV, but I was like, you know, the thing is, though, after I paid like 25 grand for the car over time, like, I had a $25,000 pink slip, and now plays it.
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pink slip. My dog ate it. Yeah. And literally, I
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was like, literally, I ate it. I googled that exact thing. What do you do when your dog ate your pink slip? Right? Because I thought it was a search term there. Yes. And there was a Reddit thread on what to do. So there is something out there for that alone. Yeah. For everyone, for everyone. So anyway, I love it. When
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you do those obscure searches, and all of a sudden, like just pops up on Google, you’re like, wow, people actually search this.
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It kind of makes you wonder like, oh, so my life isn’t my life isn’t the dumpster fire. I thought it was where there’s other people with this dumpster fire issue. So that was, that was a big one. So that’s my big, you know, kind of, if you were to say what happened in your world this week, I’d say well, actually, this is my story. Where the rest of the week goes from here. I don’t know.
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It can only go up from here. Right? We go up.
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God dogs if I had a cat Well, I do have a cat. I was gonna say the cat doesn’t show up my stuff. But anyway, pets just read your skin. Yeah, pets, kids. You know what? It’s all hard.
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Yeah. Pets can be. Yeah. Can be fun.
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Pets. Employees.
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You know, my joke. wasn’t even really a joke. It’s, it’s more real. But yeah, my life would be so much easier with employees and customers. But yeah, it’s a whole other thing. Right? Right. I
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totally got it. I got it. I totally got it. I tell you all,
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I love all my employees. But you’re just like, wow, this is really hard.
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You know, my, my, my blanket response is I love both my pets. And I love both my children. And that’s Period End of sentence. Don’t allow. Don’t ask me to elaborate from there. Let me just love them both. That’s it.
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Oh, we dug ourselves into a hole. Let’s move on. So we do have this you came up with this great list of things because I could do nothing. And yeah, I spent the last two days kind of was laying around not feeling well. So finally feeling a little bit better. Stupid, called two weeks. Still not picked it up while traveling and still got it? Like nonstop. Anyway, so what do we got? We got a list of things for getting ready for 15 projects to do for the fall. So these are some good ones. Just kind of reminders of things to do around the house to get your house ready for said winter. Because Winter’s coming. One of the first one is upgrade your furnace. Well, yeah, we’re gonna that’s number one for us as well, right? We’re gonna tell you to replace your furnace. Yeah, but I will I say that in jest. But also, if your furnace is in the 10 to 15 year range, it is time to start saving money and thinking about replacing said furnace because they if you use it on a regular basis, life expectancy is about 10 to 15 years. And I hate to tell you this for everybody, but the majority of our appliances in our house about 10 or 15 years water heaters, eight to 10 years, dishwashers, 1015 years disposers 10 to 15 years, all these things are designed, they have a design obsolescence, right, they’re not supposed to last forever, you can keep a furnace going on. You can keep a furnace and HVAC HVAC system going for much longer than 10 or 15 years if you maintain it properly, and replace all the parts that need to be replaced in a timely manner. And and Or maybe you’re not using it very often because during the winter, you mainly use your fireplace so you can make these things these appliances lasts longer. But generally speaking 10 to 15 years is about the life expectancy of a HVAC system. The next one is check all those important installations, sites, sides, you know all your weather stripping, make sure you can’t see the light through your doors, make sure you can’t see the light through the windows. Go around replace any kind of weather stripping that may have compressed or fallen off or something like that. And that’s something you probably want to do during the summertime anyway as well because you don’t want to be cooling the outside. Same ways you don’t want to be heating outdoors. Check and make sure all those things are good because you can save you can save some bucks I mean, you know just a 10% increase in efficiency of your home can save you You know, 100 bucks over the season so, or more depending on how big of a house you have. So if you’re spending 234 bucks a month on heating, you know, 20 to 40 bucks a month right there, so you can save it up pretty quick. Again, depending on the size of your house, if you’re living in a small one bedroom, 900 square foot house, you’re probably not spending $4 a month. But if you’re in a 5000, square foot house, you you’re spending about that, or even 3500 square foot. Another one is seal any air leaks in the attic, we’re kind of talking offline about this one, so your air leaks the attic. This is kind of a poor use of words for air leaks, because your attic should breathe, you have attic vents. And hopefully, you know, if you got newer house, you got a ridge vent at the top, so that the adequate breathe and keep the humidity levels down. So you don’t get mold and stuff. But what they’re really talking about is any kind of gaps or holes in your attic that you can see light through that is not covered by a quarter inch screen. or smaller. Those areas where critters insects can actually get through. And we were kind of talking about i with a good friend. They’ve since moved out of the area and have kind of lost contact with them. But in any event, they had a house out on off new town that they bought. And suddenly, some bats moved into their attic. And first, they didn’t really think much about it. And then they come to find out that these bats did ridiculous amount of damage to their property in a very short period of time, I think it was just like one season did close like $15,000 worth of damage to their property. Because, you know, bats are mammals, and they pee and poop and it gets through the insulation and then also got through to the sheet rock. So all that had to be pulled out and replaced, some of the framing had to be pulled out and replaced because that was completely saturated. So you know, an all you need for bat to climb in. If I’m not mistaken, if you and you guys can correct me if any of you
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guys out there people that deal with bats on a regular basis, my understanding is they can fit through a size, a hole the size of a dime. So it doesn’t take much because I know a mouse can get through the size of a hole through the size of a diamond, they’re about the same size. So you got a hole that’s, you know, gosh, it’s not even an inch round, they can get through that. If you got something greater than that, they can definitely get through that. So you want to go through and make sure you seal it with either some foam and or some wire screening. Make it so that the bats can’t get up inside of there because they will resist. They’re great to have around I’ve got a couple of bad houses on my property and and that bats have moved into I’m really, really stoked about that. But trying to keep them out of my house. So I’ve gone through and sealed up all the holes actually had somebody come out and who was much smarter than me on these things. And like I see that little hole right there. They can click through there. I’m like, Alright, cover it up. You schooled me on it. I didn’t even realize it like oh, yeah, I guess I can get through these really tiny holes. So
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you say you had said something interesting too about your bat house and how they kind of wriggle up right through a small little. Yeah. Okay. So when you said that I was thinking about when I was just in Texas, we went out into like the back by the pool or whatever, in the backyard and went to open up a umbrella. And literally like saw this, this little tiny bat stuck itself up in the air stuck inside the umbrella. And what was really plus Yeah, what was really weird was, well, I don’t know if it’s weird or not, but it was shaking. So then we felt horrible. So we were like, Oh, if we like we’ve got him totally like, like freaking out right? So we closed it. We closed it. After we showed the kids were like, hey, you know, there’s little kids there and so they were like totally unimpressed. I was very impressed. They were a bat they a bat a bat and like it’s I don’t know, I guess they were kind of picturing like Disney bathrooms. Right? Yeah. So they were kind of like, Yeah, whatever looks like a you know, dead mouse kind of thing. But so then we closed it. And then later when we open it, it had gotten itself out in whatever manner but when you’re talking about how your bat houses had those, that really narrow kind of Yeah, it’s Yeah, to me.
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Well, I made a couple of them before. And I messed up. I didn’t design them. Right. Then I did some research and found that Yeah, I mean, it’s literally two pieces of plywood that I used a piece of a one by in between, and it’s literally like a three quarter inch gap and they climb up in between that three quarter inch gap. And it’s about 18 foot about a foot deep. So they climb up into the top of that, and that’s where they like to hang out these little crevices, but if they can find a way into your house, they’ll move into your house. So you want to definitely keep damage out of your house because of the fact that they can do damage. It’s not like rats or mice where they’ll chew things which they can do more damage, but just fact that they’re eating and drinking and then coming and hanging out in your house and doing their business on your, in your insulation and on your ceiling. Yeah, keep them out. That was a good topic.
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I was getting excited when we get to talk about that.
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And you know, I you asked me like when we were talking about this offline and she’s you asked me Have I noticed a decrease in the amount of mosquitoes in the house and like, I don’t really but then when we first moved in there, we had our neighbor had a hog and some a bunch of goats next door. So we have a lot of flies, and a lot of other insects, but when they moved that kind of, you know, we don’t really have that issue anymore. They’ve, the new owners just have chickens. But I haven’t really noticed any decrease but we could have seen a decrease because I don’t know we’ve got anywhere from four to 20 bats in these houses. But I can’t really you know, I don’t I’m not that diligent and patient to sit there and watch a desk to see me fly out. Nor I’ve taken a flash like try to look at it but it’s literally a quarter inch gap so you can’t or three quarters of an inch gap. You can’t really see much so you try to look up
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you haven’t attached a GoPro to the bat to see what’s going on. I got it.
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I got Oh, that’s a good idea. I could put a I could put a GoPro on the outside and count them or anything like that. Well, I mean, yeah, I haven’t done that.
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It’s just for your own personal interest right we’re not actually making it but I only
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reason I know that they’re there is because I see their poop. I know. I know it’s occupied, you know,
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I and that’s what got us on the topic really. So you can deflect so you were talking about how you created something to kind of deflect their, their, their excrement? Yeah, I was trying to just employ the whole word. But you had
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I had it. So it was just they were pooping, and it was landing on a piece of molding on in the middle of the house. And I was like ascaris. So I just took a piece of sheet metal on and angle it off and pushed it out about six inches. So now when they do that it kind of bounces off of that and rolls out further into the yard and fertilizes the lawn organic. Yeah, it’s organic. There we go. All right. Speaking of organics, the next one is clean out those gutters. You’ve probably got some organic material up there. That’s that’s nice and moist. Now that it’s been raining, and decomposing, and kind of stinky. So get up there. And if you haven’t already clean out your gutters, now’s the time to do it. Get this stuff out of there. Number five, they talked about replacing single pane windows. You know there’s there’s a couple benefits more than there’s a couple of benefits with double pane windows more than just the energy efficiency. One of the things that I you know, I haven’t lived in a house with a single pane windows since I was a kid. But one of the things that single pane windows don’t offer that double panes do is double pane can really cut the noise down in your house dramatically. I know we stayed in a couple hotels on our trip. And one of them was literally on a really busy street. And when you open the window, it was really loud. When we close it, you could barely tell there was anybody outside. And people were walking back and forth and screaming and having a good time. And we could block it out. So there’s a noise factor but also you have a humidity factor. You know single pane windows tend to you’ll get if it’s humid inside. When it’s cold, it’ll fog up on the windows on the inside. That’s another benefit of double pane windows. So it’s not just the energy saving, they’re just a lot easier. They stay cleaner, quieter humidity, they’re just really great. We have time for a couple more. This one right here. Prepare your fireplace. So we’ve talked about this in the past, but we mainly talked about wood fireplaces, but even gas fireplaces like I just turned ours on this weekend for the first time. It’s starting to get cold and landing the pilot making sure that thing fires up making sure that I went around make sure all the carbon monoxide detectors were working. That sort of thing you want to you know be prepared for the season when you light even the gas fireplaces, make sure that it’s you know, go outside and make sure you see the little water vapor coming out of the heat vapor coming out. Make sure that the flue is actually working and not you know dumping byproducts combustion inside your house. So give it a thorough cleaning, give it a thorough inspection. If it’s something that you haven’t had inspected in a long time it was installed like 20 years ago, you may want to have a professional come out and take a look at it. Make sure that you don’t have any cracks or anything like that because your carbon monoxide detector will detect large quantities of carbon monoxide. But even low level of carbon monoxide can make you feel dizzy and not so good. So it’s a good idea just it’s a gas burning appliance. So anytime you burn gas, you have the potential for carbon monoxide poisoning. So just have it checked out. If you A wood burning stove. If you haven’t already had your chimney swept policed should have that thing cleaned out. If you use on a regular basis, you want to make sure you clean that thing out at least once a season if not twice, just speaking from experience having had a chimney fire when we first moved up here, and I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And that was really fun when you come home and their fire departments there, and the fire department turns out to be a childhood friend of your wife’s, and you look like an idiot. So yeah, because you told her what to do. And she did it. And that didn’t quite work out. And it was wrong. And it was wrong. Yeah. And then that that same individual was on his son was on our swim team. So yeah, I got to hear about quite a bit.
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Never gets old, never gets
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never gets old. So yeah, in small town, right? That fire department comes and tells you what it is. And you may just know them. So it’s a small town. It’s something she grew up with in the peninsula too. So the whole thing. Here’s another one, switch the ceiling direction, ceiling fan direction. So now’s the time of year, where you want the direction of your ceiling fan to be pulling air up. And so it cascades around the walls sides of the walls of your house. Because fans are really handy for especially if you got a high ceiling during the wintertime if you’ve got a high ceiling and you’re don’t feel warm enough where you’re sitting down low, it’s just because the heat stratifying up in the upper levels. So turning a fan on will help circulate that air and mix it up so that it’s the same temperature throughout its whole column. Because you can have I’ve gotten into people’s homes and they complain about it never really gets warm and their ceiling fan is off. And they’ve got 20 foot ceilings, and you put your hand up and you can physically feel the difference in temperature. I mean, it’d be 510 degrees warmer, up above and sometimes even greater than that. So you want to switch that fan so that it’s not blowing air on you just moving the air inside the room. During the summer you want the air moving on you because it’ll help keep feel cooler. So you can you can turn your thermostat up a little bit. But during the wintertime you want the air to be moving the opposite direction. And there’s just a little switch on the side of him if you haven’t, if you don’t know what it looks like it’s a quick Google search. How do I change the direction on my ceiling fan. I would say 99.9% of all of ceiling fans have that little switch I haven’t seen one that has it but I don’t want to say there aren’t any. But I personally haven’t seen any of that didn’t have the switch so now’s the time to be switched on that. And last but not least, clean up your your lawn and other yard tools. now’s a great time to go through. You know all your gas appliance or your gas burning lawn mowers and trimmers and things like that. Drain out the fuel. Run it till the carburetors cleared out so that you don’t have any gas it’s sitting there throughout the wintertime. It gets funky and it can destroy the carburetor. So you want to get all the fuel out of it. Not a bad time of year also just to change the oil. Check the sparkplug make sure it’s clean, recap it, do that minor stuff clean up all the metals, tools that you’ve got, put a fresh coat oil on, so they’ll be good for you in springtime. This those little things will make those things make your tools lasts so much longer and save you some time and some headaches come springtime when you try to start the thing and it won’t start because you forgot to drain the fuel out of the carburetor. Not that I’ve ever had had that happen to be absolute carburetors in one freaking tractor. But yeah, anyway. With that, that’s our show. Hope you guys found some of this information useful. And it’s for entertainment value only. By the way. If you have any plumbing, electrical heating or air problems that you may need some help with like replacing that furnace. You can call us at 530-230-9092 That number again 530-230-9092 You can also find us on the web at easy zbt COMM or abt plumbing.com. You can find us on Facebook. Like our Facebook page. We do have we share all this information with every week and more. Pretty good stuff. And with that, we’ll catch you guys next week and thanks for listening. Bye.
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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 Cancio Newstalk 830
Transcribed by https://otter.ai