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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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Hi this is Andrew with ABT plumbing, electric heat and air, once again with the show: You got this. It’s a about DIY do’s and don’ts. And zooming in with my co host, Rosalie Brown, from my lovely home office looking at the garden right now and it’s beautiful morning, sunny and warm. And you’re in LA well warmish 60 degrees, that’s and you’re down in LA how’s it down in there?
0:42
68 degrees and what they’re calling cloudy, but that that won’t stick around?
0:51
It’s a great time of year to be in California.
0:53
It’s it is it’s early and plenty things could still go wrong.
0:57
As long as there’s not. There’s not much smoke. Unfortunately, we got that rain, so we’re not having to worry about it too much anymore. But yeah, but yeah, we’re just talking off air about your friends in Florida right now. Because today’s Thursday, so were we a day after? What’s the name of it starts with an I can’t remember. Because I’m gonna be having a little bit of a brain fart. So he thinks,
1:21
oh, so technically in for us. Okay. So Ian started at the southwest portion of Florida, right? Yesterday, which was Wednesday, the 28th. And overnight, it’s moved up through and it’s still moving, right. But it’s, it’s broken down and it’s weakened quite a bit. It’s now I think they’re calling it a tropical storm, where when it hit my friend’s part of Florida, it was one a mile an hour away from being called a category five. So it was almost category five. So if you saw any images on the news, the parts like Naples, Florida, where like essentially like the entire area got swallowed with water, that kind of stuff. That’s kind of where that’s not where my friends live. But that’s basically
2:09
where do you live? Are they in or Fort Myers or Marco Island or anything
2:12
like? So? Yeah, so yeah. So you know, one of the areas that you probably saw on the news for quite a bit, I was Punta Gorda. That’s where like, the I kept kind of going back and forth. That’s basically they live like two miles three miles up from Punta Gorda. So they were they were experiencing some real scary stuff on yesterday. And now today, you know, the After Effects and what’s what’s happening, they’re on a boil water alert, they have water coming into their house, they don’t have a way to you know, get that out. They don’t have a way to really get out. So
2:50
there are no electricity and they’re probably all electric house. A lot of the houses in Florida are electric, not gas. So you’ve got to deal with no way to heat things. Right? Well, water, no way to run back and cleaner to clean up the water. Yeah, no. And you know, and it’s it’s shocking, like we talked about water damage all the time on this show, because it is it. You don’t think of it like unifier. The majority of the the damage to the home is not from the fire or the smoke. It’s from the water to put the fire out. And when you’re talking about flooding, and in these places. I mean, you’re it’s devastation, your car is trashed, your house is trashed. And you don’t get it out quick. You got your old climate to begin with. So yeah, it’s it’s gnarly. Yeah. And
3:31
then you know, the thing that’s kind of a, in my particular situation, we all have friends who have faced, you know, disasters of some kind, but for my friend in particular, you know, they made it through the scary part, right, I finally was able to get a text in and out. I was watching the radar. So I need the power’s out. Anyway, I finally got the texting back. And, you know, the scary thing is that my friend stays with her elderly mom takes care of her. And so the moms had the house. I don’t I can’t tell you how long decades, and they don’t have anywhere that they can go and the mom’s house has now got water in it, and there’s no way to abate the water. And so, while I’m grateful that they’re alive, and you know, they’re how you treat and fall in their house, no one got injured in their specific, you know, family devastation is going to be I mean, this is no joke, you know, so if you’re just it’s yours, you live through this piece, right that the hurricane did not kill you. But what’s left to deal with is pretty bad. So I’m sure we’re gonna see on the news, I hope a lot of calls for like help, you know, Red Cross blood donations, money, whatever. And I’m gonna do what I can, but when I went so yesterday, we were going to record and then we had a schedule change. And so instead of me doing what I thought I was going to do, I was glued to the radar, you know, freaking out, which is a bad idea, bad idea. Don’t do that. So I went to bed last night and like, why am I so tired? I’m like, oh, because my body’s been clenched up for like,
5:07
worried about your friends? Yeah. So,
5:09
you know, hopefully, everyone that you know, and whoever might actually hear this, hopefully, if they have people down in that part of the country, they’re they’re okay, as well. I mean, it’s tough. Yeah. And,
5:21
you know, we talked about all the problems we have in California, the fires, earthquakes, we don’t have tornadoes, and we don’t have a hurricane. That’s like, there’s, you know, I mean, everybody’s got their their natural disasters that can that can take you out or destroy your property, you know, and it’s scary, but we’re just talking off air, it’s like, yeah, thicken quicker in any day, because it happens pretty fast. And the damage, you know, I we both made it through the 89 earthquake, and I helped, but you know, fortunately, my house was pretty good. But I wasn’t Embarcadero force was little scary being down downtown San Francisco. And seeing the devastation, but you know, it was a you were able to clean it up and get back to some normalcy pretty fast. These hurricanes, it takes years to get back to normalcy, years,
6:08
and beings and people being displaced from their houses, you know, and, and the other thing too, and this really speaks, people
6:15
are still displaced from New Orleans, right, and you’re still living in Dallas in places because they just never went back because they couldn’t well,
6:22
and looking at you know, Florida, I was like, so the flood zones in Florida are insane, right. And you know, that when you purchase a house, or you you know, if you’re from Iran or whatever, but, you know, they don’t have home insurers that are willing to offer flood insurance anymore. So essentially, in my mind, and this is not an insult, and someone who knows more about insurance than I do, like our good friend, Kevin, maybe could speak to this more, but let me just say this, if you cannot get insurance for flood, and you live in a place that flood, I mean, you guys like look at that. Yeah, was that?
6:58
Let’s let’s, let’s take that back a minute, because we live in an area where sometimes you can’t get fire insurance. I mean, I went through that myself here in Grass Valley, and we’ve got a fire hydrant in our driveway. And I’ve got, you know, we’re like, maybe we’re about a couple 100 yards outside of the metropolitan area of Grass Valley. And still, we couldn’t get fire insurance. And we had to get to California care. And it was ridiculously expensive. Fortunately, we were able to re up after a I think it was only two years that we had the California care but man, that’s that’s expensive. So yeah, I’m live we’re living through in California, right? Because you can’t get fire insurance and a lot of places.
7:40
Right? So I mean, it’s, it’s so it’s a tough world out there. So the good news is yeah, in our in our infinite wisdom, well, in your infinite wisdom, I put you in charge of a few topics. And you came up with some real real doubters. Real uplifters. I literally looked at you. And I was like, Why do you want to make people cry? But okay, that’s, that’s what happens when you put Andrew in charge of a show. So well,
8:07
then you kind of started thinking about what what am I? What have I learned recently, and this is something that I picked up in training last week, from one of the trainers that came in, I didn’t realize how pervasive it is. But he was talking about gas lines, you know, natural gas, and propane to be specific. And come to find out that 70% of all gas lines leak from the source all the way into your house. 70%. I mean, it’s huge. So I started going down that rabbit hole and reading some articles about it. And come to find out like I just there was a article in The Atlantic about it. That was the when was this 2015. So it’s been a little while. But about the fact that so there was this guy who is a reporter, and he actually had a summer job going and looking for leaks. So it was right up his alley, right to write about this. And the thing that he thought he was really doing a service and the thing that he came to find out was that the leaks that are 15 feet away from a structure, they kind of keep an eye on. They don’t necessarily do anything about it, they go back and check on it. So this is this is the utility so this is you know, we’re in our area, pg&e but also, you know, I mean, if it’s if you get LP that’s it’s all your fault, your problem anyway. But PG knees infrastructure, if it’s within 15 or 20 feet width from a structure, they’re like, Yeah, it’ll dissipate, because you have to have that magic. You have to have that magic mixture and it was in this article and I’m looking for it. I can’t remember it, but anyway, you have to have the right air to gas mixture for the ratio to actually concentration between five and 15% for it to become combustible. So there is this kind of like Yes, it can be too rich too much fuel and it’s not gonna blow up or too little, which is typically the case when you have a leak outside. What really becomes an issue though is when that leak is inside. That’s what I kind of want to talk about here. Because it is, you know, it’s a safety concern. It’s a health concern, because you know, natural gases and propane are something that you necessarily want to breathe because it’s a petroleum product, right? So you’re, you’re getting all these nasty chemicals and things into your into your lungs. And the fact that so many gas lines leak that we’ve actually taken upon ourselves, I started buying all our guys gas sniffers, so that when they’re on a job, they can check all the gas piping that’s within visible reach, they can at least do a spot check up in a crawlspace or inside a house on the outside of the walls. And it got me thinking about, you know, can homeowner do this. Yeah, homework can do this. And it’s actually not that it’s not terribly expensive and not that hard to do. I went on Amazon and just started checking for for gas sniffers and I found one for 30 bucks, I gave it to one of my guys just to kind of try it out and see see how it works. He hasn’t I just gave it to him Monday, so he hasn’t had a chance to use it yet. But I mean, you think about 30 bucks. And the potential savings of you know what your homeowners deductible, grand, probably five grand or 30 bucks that can potentially save myself from homeowners insurance claim or something worse, right. So you can buy one of these gas, it’s a combustible gas sniffers, what they’re called. And like I said, you can get them, you can get them on Amazon, or you can get them anywhere. Some of the nicer ones there, you know, they’ll cost you 100 bucks. Again, not terribly expensive. And what you want to do is just kind of go along wherever you have a gas line. So if you’ve got a raised house that’s run on a slab, you can crawl your house or walk underneath your house, and just spot check all the fittings. Just go in around and spot check every gas fitting. And that will tell you whether or not you’ve got a gas leak. What are some of the bad things that can happen if you have a gas leak? Well, natural gas, fortunately, is lighter than air. So it does a puddle it doesn’t stick around. So it does tend to dissipate pretty quickly. But you know, in concentration, if you’ve got a close room, it’s in, you know, if if it’s in a closet or something that doesn’t have any ventilation. Fortunately, most of our crawl spaces and attics have ventilation, so they breathe pretty well. So it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll have a concentration of natural gas. That works pretty good. But if you do have an under closet or something or a confined space that has the potential to get to that 55 to 50% ratio. And all it needs is a spark. Static spark will do it. Yeah,
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ironically. So one thing that could read this is kind of interesting. So he was saying that one of the things you can tell you can you can find a gas leak if you have a pervasive brown spot in your lawn. What?
13:12
Yeah, explain that.
13:14
Especially if it gets burnt marks on it. And he said it was shocking when he was walking around through the neighborhoods. And he could see these spots. And he would go to him and with his Sniffer, because that was his job. And he would find a leak underneath it. And no matter how much fertilizer you put on or how much solid or how much seed it’s going to be brown because there’s natural gas coming up on it from underground and lighting on fire ever once line burning up gas. So
13:41
yeah. Okay, that like seriously, I’m not even kidding you that to me, now you know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna walk around the neighborhood. I’m gonna be looking at people’s lawns. Oh my god. Really? I never heard of that.
13:54
I just learned that today from this article in The Atlantic. That’s kind of wild. So yeah, so if you do have a little brown spot, and you do have a guest sniffer? Yeah, just for fun. Go see. I mean, again, if it’s going to be 1520 feet from your house, you’re probably good. But that that spot that’s been the bane of your existence because you want a green lawn. And you for some reason that spots just will not stay green. Yeah, take a look and see if there’s a gas like it may not be your dog.
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i Wow. I’d never Yeah, because that’s the first thing I think of as animals, right? Because we know what they do the lawns right? But my dad does his fair share
14:36
as well mine and mine have a habit of liking to dig up the lawn and eat the mud for some reason. I don’t know why. But I think they’re bored but
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there’s all kinds of reasons don’t get me started. You know, there’s a thing where dogs actually will will chew up roots and they like the bark. So it literally breaks down to something as basic as this your dog literally is craving fiber in their diet. So then I mean, that’s that’s literally what I’m like, wait, what I need more than I know.
15:08
You know, read soils, are they deficient in iron? I don’t know. All I know is that he walks in with little clumps of mud and grass on his feet and leaves around the house and baseball, his water bowl is full of little spots of red mud. It could be it could be a gas leak
15:29
could be you might want to use the little checker on the dock. I mean, they’re pretty good. Well, they’re pretty gaseous Nevermind,
15:39
I mean, it will it will detect methane so we have I won’t go any more detail but it will find that those those evenings at bars and lighting people’s hearts on fire anyway. So aghast like so. So natural gas tends to you know, not be as de as dangerous as propane. When we’re talking about propane leaks, now we’re talking about some scary stuff. Propane is heavier than air, so it tends to puddle. So for all y’all that have any experience on boats, or my reading about this a lot when I was younger, and boats exploding because they had propane stoves, and then the propane would settle inside the bilge, and then ignite and blow the boat up. It’s pretty common in boats. But it’s also pretty common in houses for propane to settle. It’s so common that by code, we’re supposed to put in a propane drain and a foundation, which is literally a pipe that’s at the lowest point of the foundation wall that leads to the outside. If you’ve got one of these pipes, it makes sure it hasn’t gotten overgrown. So look, look around your foundation, especially, you know, if you’re in a hilly area, which who’s not in Nevada County. And you’re you have propane in your house, look for a hole that’s at the bottom of the foundation at the lowest point. And make sure it’s not filled up because you know, sometimes critters can climb into it. So people might want to clog it up or something. No, it’s doing a job. You know, it’s there, because it needs to drain the propane. So if you’ve got an older house that doesn’t have a propane drain, like I don’t have propane in this house. But this house was built in the 30s. So you know, we didn’t put those in in the 30s. And probably didn’t even start putting them into like the 70s. To be honest, because the majority of the homes up here before that weren’t really even doing really have permits. So check and see if you’ve got if you’ve got propane chicken, see if you got a propane train. Next is yeah, you definitely want to go through and check every line in the propane line. Propane again, it’s scary gas, it also has more potential energy per square foot than natural gas, it has about close to twice as much potential energy per volume than natural gas. So it can make a big boom. Oh, yeah, yeah. So yeah, by the end analyzer, and then go through and sniff around. If you don’t want to buy an analyzer, or Sniffer, you can also just use soapy water. Because natural gas is an a pipe that is pressurized. It’s a low pressure. I mean, it’s you know, we’re talking two or three pounds per square inch. But it’s enough that if there’s a leak, it’s pushing out. And if you spray soapy water on it, it will actually bubble. So that’s one way we use to pinpoint a leak. But if you know I’ll use a sniffer, and then I’ll go back and confirm which side of the thing I’m actually having problems with using soapy water. So you can’t just use low tech. Unfortunately, low tech soapy water. If you don’t have the mixture, right. It may not bubble like you know, having done this for so long. I kind of know how much soap to use and what soaps to use. You know, UK, a good dishwashing detergent works good because it suds up a lot. And with that don’t get this is the reason why you can’t use regular dishwashing detergent inside your dishwasher because it suds up so much. The soap that we use in a dishwasher doesn’t say it doesn’t bubble. And I’ve seen people do that and literally flood their house because of you they ran out of dishwashing detergent and use the dishwashing soap that’s on the counter.
19:30
So I have a little funny story, but it’s kind of the reverse of that. So you know we have a we have pockets for the washing machine. And we have pockets for the dishwasher. And one day my child got those rivers so let’s just say that things didn’t turn out as planned. But so
19:51
now, pretty snazzy.
19:52
It got pretty weird. My life got a little weird. Life got a little weird. So it was kind of an interesting lesson and now those two are actually in very good But spots in the house so that there is just there’s no reason ever swipe the wrong way. So yeah, you do that one wrong one time. Doesn’t matter doesn’t matter which direction you go, because you also imagine what happens to your clothes, like with a washing machine, right? So you only make that mistake once. So yeah, we have we have our pods now separated.
20:24
So it is so there’s good example. So it is you gotta make sure you use the right so to be able to find it. So we can, you know, it is one way to find it. But again, 70% of gas lines when I was literally blown away, we I mean, we were in a classroom of about 30 people we’re all like, and we’re all plumbers right or at the train. Yeah. And to electricians. And we’re all like, what,
20:50
I don’t know, we look it up. But
20:53
holy moly, it’s true.
20:55
It’s not just, it’s not just a scare tactic. But it’s very scary. I mean, like when you told me I was, oh my god, like, so the world’s very explosive. I don’t I don’t care. Oh my God.
21:09
And so not to mention the fact that the danger aspect of it. But you know, I don’t know that you but natural gas, and LP are kind of expensive these days. So you don’t want to be just injecting that into the atmosphere, you’re not even getting to use it. So you know, granted, if you don’t smell it, it’s probably not much. But you know, you’re still probably talking about 20 bucks a year. bucks a year, sure. loss and loss energy costs, you know, I mean, so why not try to find it. And if you got a big leak, if you got if you got a big leak, if you can smell the gas, call your call your utility company, call you’re hoping company call utility company, they will come out and check it. But if you’re not smelling, it’s probably a small leak. And I’m gonna be honest with you guys, you probably have a leak in your house, if 70% of all Now if all piping is leaking. You got to think about to like when was the gas line installed in your house? Yeah, if it was installed in the 60s, which a lot of the 70s A lot of the houses up here, you’re talking about gas pipe that is 50 years old. Yeah. 30 years old. That’s all I mean, I’m 55 I’m in my slow down, but my bones and my hearing in my head. Like stuff doesn’t sell to ever people eventually break down, you know? rude, rude, vintage,
22:38
retro, retro. So you
22:41
probably know, if you’ve got an older house, you probably got leaky gas lines to go by the gas detector sniffer. And go around and check if you don’t want to buy the gas. And if you don’t want to deal with that, hey, we’ll come out and check it for 79 bucks, you know, we have a $700 diagnostic charge gets our technician out to the door, once we have a chance to take a look and see what’s going on. We can tell you what what it is and then give you a price to give you a couple of different options to be able to fix it. That’s one thing that we do differently than a lot of companies we actually don’t just say here, this is how much take it or leave it we actually give you five different options typically on how to solve your problem. And then if you choose to go with that option today, that $79 is waived. So you know you may be out nothing for the diagnostic for finding that leak. Because even if you find it yourself, I probably wouldn’t you know, I would not recommend you fixing it yourself. Gases is an incredibly dangerous substance and you have the potential of really hurting yourself. Speaking from experience having blown myself up more than once in my younger years because I was you know cocky and thought I knew what I was doing and and it was engulfed by a ball flames and lost my eyebrows eyelashes. Here on my arm. My bangs. Yeah, it was not fun. Passage,
24:03
is there a number we’re supposed to call? Is there a number number for us? It’s 530-230-9092
24:07
That number again, 530-230-9092. You can also find us on the web at easy as ab t.com or abt plumbing.com. And you can find us on Facebook where we get a lot of interesting fun facts. We just had one about how to fix it this disposer with graphics and stuff so you can actually see it. So it’s cool stuff. So take a look at it and like our page. And on that note. Catch you guys next week. Thanks. Hi.
24:32
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Rosalie. Now let’s get that project started. You got this. We’ll be back next Friday morning and nine o’clock on TNT on Newstalk 830