52
votes
Accepted
How can I heat my home further when circuit breakers are already tripping?
Insulation and air-sealing
If you heat less of the outdoors, more of the heat stays indoors.
Caulking or foaming cracks & gaps, putting window film over windows you won't open until spring or ...
- 201k
38
votes
How can I heat my home further when circuit breakers are already tripping?
The #1 thing you need is insulation and leak sealing as Ecnerwal discusses at length.
You should also review the performance of your heating system. I had a gas boiler growing up. It needs to refill ...
15
votes
How can I heat my home further when circuit breakers are already tripping?
The first thing is to optimise your gas heating. It should be sufficient. Here are some steps in the order that you should try them, and in increasing order of difficulty/cost.
Air
My radiators (...
- 5,993
15
votes
Accepted
Why is my oven unable to achieve baking temperatures?
Why is the temperature still rising slowly while I read 0V around the element?
Most likely, your oven preheats with both elements. Usually they alternate so you should hear the "click" ...
- 1,220
14
votes
How can I heat my home further when circuit breakers are already tripping?
Before anything else: STOP USING YOUR CURRENT SOLUTION.
If your breaker is tripping, that means a circuit is overloaded. End of story. Overloaded circuits are the number one cause of electrical fires ...
14
votes
What can I do to cool down the room?
First of all cardboard is not a good reflective insulator.
Second, hanging cardboard on the inside will not help much since the heat has already entered the room through the glass.
Get some aluminum ...
- 16.9k
13
votes
Temperature Pressure Release (TPR) Valve Leaking
After a couple trips to Home Depot I learned that I'd have to cut a section of the pipe out, and re-attach it with a SharkBite coupling
The guys at Home Depot told me another alternative was to un-...
- 349
12
votes
How can I heat my home further when circuit breakers are already tripping?
Unless something has been really wrong for a long time, presumably your heating system used to work sufficiently. That leaves two main possibilities:
The house is letting heat out/cold in. That is ...
11
votes
How can I improve insulation on a lower level floor without modification?
Carpet/rug pads will add some insulation value.
The math of insulation is such that throwing rugs over as much of the floor as possible (use small washable ones for potentially wet areas like kitchen ...
- 201k
10
votes
Accepted
Water temperature in upper shower
Single handle shower valves normally have some way of adjusting the "all the way hot" stop of the handle. In many cases it's just a toothed plastic ring under the handle that can be moved to the next ...
- 27.7k
9
votes
Meausure the temperature of a fridge
There are special thermometers for refrigerator & freezer use.
I have a Rubbermaid thermometer (amazon link) in my garage fridge compartment and another in its freezer. This showed me my freezer ...
- 3,393
7
votes
What can I do to cool down the room?
You need to do your best to cool the whole building overnight, then keep it cool with shade during the day. External shading of windows (and walls if not well insulated) is better than internal, but ...
- 5,993
7
votes
What can I do to cool down the room?
We have used two techniques on one of our properties.
Retrofit Double glazing (Secondary Glazing) - Where another window is installed on the inside of the existing one. The outside were sash windows,...
- 5,090
6
votes
Accepted
How to heatproof an eastward sliding glass door
The blinds absorb energy from the sun, but your problem is... they're inside. So the sun just heats the blinds, which then heat the room. Blinds or curtains make the room darker, but they do nothing ...
- 8,767
6
votes
Why is our addition so much colder than the original house?
It's an incorrect assumption that insulation above the joists is inherently wrong. Many commercial buildings, for example, have large gaps between the finished ceiling and the insulation envelope. In ...
- 129k
6
votes
What can I do about the one room in my home with much higher temperature swings than the rest?
The reason for the temp. differential is in your question.
3 outside walls = more area affected by outside temperatures.
windows = poor thermal resistance.
End of the forced air run = less volume, ...
- 25k
5
votes
Accepted
What exactly do the range of numbers (1 to 7) mean on the temperature knob/dial on a basic window air conditioning unit?
The numbers are completely arbitrary, and are whatever the product manager or artist at the manufacturer decided they should be. They might be standardized within a company's product line. If these ...
5
votes
Accepted
Is it useful to paint outdoor conduit white to reduce the temperature?
Elevating the conduit 7/8” or more off the roof surface will be more effective than painting but yes white is the least heat absorbing color. Why 7/8” elevation? That is what code requires or a ...
- 102k
5
votes
Accepted
Why does my home continue to warm after sundown?
People think the need for A/C comes from the air outside being hotter than the air inside. No, it comes from direct sunlight. Sunlight is 300 BTU per square foot. And most roofs have an albedo in the ...
5
votes
How can I improve insulation on a lower level floor without modification?
Your thinking is somewhat flawed. If there's heat escaping around the rug, the lower layer of air will always be cool, and therefore so will the rug. You need to insulate the entire floor, or close to ...
- 129k
4
votes
Accepted
How do I read circuit breaker temperature ratings?
60/75°C Wire — All circuit breakers rated 125 A or less are marked for use with 60° C, 60/75°C or 75°C only wire. This marking indicates the proper wire size for termination in accordance with Table ...
- 4,813
4
votes
Will adding a gas line wick heat out of my house?
Keep in mind what the pipes were made of and what they were full of.
Copper is nearly the best conductor on earth, and the pipe was full of water, which is literally the best heat transfer fluid ...
4
votes
What exactly do the range of numbers (1 to 7) mean on the temperature knob/dial on a basic window air conditioning unit?
From GE Appliances Customer Service:
There is no specific correlating temperature for each number setting. The TEMP control determines the compressor run time. The higher the number, the more the ...
- 41
4
votes
Heating mystery following replacement windows
OK Let me try. Originally you had your single zone heat on. My experience is first floors are usually warmer than second floors. Hot air wants to rise but it can't unless there's some cooler air ...
- 78.7k
4
votes
Accepted
Heating mystery following replacement windows
That's easy. Thermostats don't work by duty cycle. They work by sensing the temperature in the room. The upstairs is cooler because the upstairs is now (let's say) 10% better insulated, but the ...
4
votes
Electric stove burner starts and stays on high on lowest setting. Infinite switch passes ohmmeter tests
It's likely that your switches have gone bad and need to be replaced. I had the same problem on a similar model last year.
The way these switches work is with a bimetallic strip (similar to the way ...
- 2,632
4
votes
Electric stove burner starts and stays on high on lowest setting. Infinite switch passes ohmmeter tests
Appliance tech here. I agree with the previous comment however
Also check the knob itself. I can’t tell you how many situations exactly like this one I’ve come across when it turned out the knob ...
- 41
4
votes
Why will my basement room be one temperature all day but then will be different overnight?
You're not taking into effect the heat generated by the human body. Normal surface temperature of a body runs about 95 degrees and there are two of you and breathing for two adults adds about 3.5 to 4 ...
- 78.7k
3
votes
Is there any reason (code or otherwise) to not vent one room into another?
There is no code against ventilating your closet into the other room. There are all kinds of crazy things I have seen to take a room that has great ventilation and move it to another room. If you ...
- 47.8k
3
votes
Accepted
AC not turning on until well over 4 degrees of set temp
Thermostat controls will always have some hysteresis between the ON detect temperature and the shut back off temperature. This is necessary so that the AC unit wouldn't be toggling on and off all the ...
- 64.1k
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