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Home 'Improvement'

Clean at last

September 12, 2019 by Lloyd 9 Comments

Well, for years now, Lauren has been coming home and saying that, “Our house smells like an old house.” Personally, I don’t smell it, but I have a pretty poor sense of smell. A poor sense of smell comes in handy when you teach middle school, but isn’t much use in diagnosing OHS.

Now, there are only so many years of hearing Lauren express a desire for something that I can take before I feel that it is my duty to do something about it. And so, about 2 months ago, I began to research air purifiers intensely.

The research took about a month, and the conclusion I came to was that the amount of money that it would cost to buy an air purifier that would have even a remote chance of doing anywhere near the job that Lauren wanted was way out of her price range. Not so much out of her price range in the, “I can’t afford that” sense. More out of her price range in the, “No way I’m going to pay that much” sense.

But I also learned that basically all we needed was a ordinary pre-filter to catch the dust and cat hair, a HEPA filter to catch basically anything down to your medium size bacteria and an activated charcoal filter to catch any remaining smelly molecules. Okay, the real reason for the activated charcoal filter is to make people say, “Dang, Lloyd, that thing has three filters.” I decided that we could do without any negatively charged ions fields or ultraviolet light nonsense.

The basic design was going to be 2 inch prefilter -> boxfan -> 6 inch HEPA filter -> box fan -> 4 inch charcoal filter. Naturally, the filters and the box fans are 20 inches by 20 inches, which would give me a 20x20x20 cube of air purifying goodness.

So I ordered my charcoal filter and my custom made HEPA filter online and figured we could pick up the pre-filter anywhere. In fact, we picked it up a week or so ago at a thrift store. My charcoal filter had arrived after about 2 weeks, but I hadn’t seen the HEPA filter yet and we were going on a month of waiting.

Now, as cruel fate would have it, there were a couple of air purifiers at an auction I went to last weekend. They were nice, but they were going to be the last thing to sell and I couldn’t stay until the end. So I asked my auction buddy Matthew if he would bid on them for me. I told Matthew to bid up to $250 and I would like to get at least one air purifier and one of the replacement filters. Matthew called me three hours later and said I got 2 of them for $50.

With a little help from Sam, I got them home and in place without Lauren seeing them. I present you, as I presented Lauren, with the RxAir 3000 Air Purifier:

“Rx3000 is used in over 400 hospitals and is FDA-cleared as a Class II Medical Device. Priced at less than $5,000 per unit to service a 1,500 – 3,000 sq. ft. area, Rx3000 is very cost effective… The Rx3000 combines powerful germicidal ultraviolet (UV) light with a patented 5-stage HEPA filtration proven in independent EPA- and FDA-certified laboratory testing to destroy on first pass over 99.97% of airborne viruses, bacteria and other contaminants.  

Needless to say, Lauren was absolutely thrilled –once she learned that they were only $25 each. I believe that in less than a month, our house will go from smelling like an old house to smelling like a hospital.

Oh, and my 6 inch HEPA filter arrived today. Does anyone need a HEPA filter?

Filed Under: Gadget, Home 'Improvement', Lloyd, Prototype

Ready for the zombies

August 9, 2017 by Lloyd 4 Comments

I was driving to the computer store to pick-up some iPads for Lincoln Lutheran students, when traffic came to a stand still. I was right at an intersection, so I thought I would just make a little jog to bypass whatever craziness was taking place ahead of me.

I went about a block and came to this house:

logs2

They are clearly working on their preparations for the Zombie Apocalypse, and who can blame them. I was impressed with their efforts thus far.  They are not yet completely around the house, but the stack is about 6 feet thick, so you could walk around on the top and pick zombies off without being in any danger of falling off the wall.

Also, I may have been playing too many zombie games this summer.  Also, there have been other posts about zombies.

Filed Under: Home 'Improvement', Lloyd Tagged With: zombies

Light Log Stardate 92351.67 (Supplemental)

September 30, 2014 by Lloyd 8 Comments

Last week we had 5 major lighting technologies represented in our house: incandescent, florescent, halogen, compact florescent and fire. Today I’m proud to announce the addition of LED lighting.

I tricked Lauren into doing most of the shopping on Sunday by standing in front of the light bulb display and pretending to carefully read labels. As a result, roughly half of our grocery bill was for light bulbs. I’m sure I could have bought them online for cheaper, but I wanted to buy them somewhere where I could take them back and indignantly demand my money back when they don’t last as long as they said they would.

Since this is a serious science program, we will be using two different types of bulbs. The “cheap” $7.94 (11 watts 800 lumens) Wal*mart brand Soft White General Purpose LED (non dimmable) bulb with the 3 year warranty and the $12.94 (11 watts 800 lumens) G.E. Soft White Dimmable* bulb with the 10 year warranty. AND, now that I take a closer look at the packaging and receipt, also the G.E. $9.94 (10.5 Watts, 800 lumens) Soft White Dimmable* bulb with the 5 year warranty.

To ensure that this a fair test of the bulb’s ability to fail exactly one day after their respective warranties expire, I will be mixing the bulbs in our (convenient for testing) 3 bulb lights.

bulb1

Lauren has written the purchased date on each of the bulbs (a step that has no doubt voided their warranty already) and the plan is to use a combination of cell phone, manila folder and blog post to try to save the receipt for when the bulbs break.

Scan Sep 28, 2014, 8_10 PM-page1

As Wal*mart requires the original package for a return, we will be saving those as well. G.E. graciously only requires the Proof of Purchase (and the bulb). Wish us luck as we boldly light where no man has lit before. Was I trying too hard to tie everything back into that star date reference in the title? It felt like I was trying too hard. I’m just going to leave it.

 

*Dimming performance may vary. Go to: gelighting.com/dimming for more information.

Filed Under: Eco-Freaky, Gadget, Home 'Improvement', Journal, Lloyd, Nerd Tagged With: bulbs, led, light, lighting light bulbs

Cleaning, Lloyd-style

March 15, 2014 by Lauren 5 Comments

I told Lloyd that I’d like to have a Day of Fun, and he punished me for it.

“I’ve got some Tom Sawyer-type fun for you!” he said, and in the end it was a good idea. Two rooms in the house are really pretty clean, including washed windows.

Lloyd showed me some of his cleaning secrets – get all the supplies together, have boxes for Upstairs/Downstairs/This Level stuff, and most of all: Don’t Get Sidetracked. Ugh. It was hard.

Luckily, after the first room it was lunchtime and then naptime, and then it was on to the guest room, also known as the Dumping Grounds Room That Is Never Opened During Winter.

20140315-202920.jpg

Not too shabby.

20140315-202949.jpg

Filed Under: Home 'Improvement'

Zippity doo dah! (That is a terrible title.)

August 4, 2013 by Lauren 4 Comments

I’m certain that I have written of my love for L-brackets before, right? My standard joke that if God had used L-brackets, Creation would have only taken four days? (Hmmmm…. Is that lightning getting closer?)

Well, I have a similar love for zip-ties now. There are many, many uses for zip-ties. Not pretty uses mind you, but they are right up there with duct tape in usefulness. (Oh, I like duct tape, too.)

Well, I have two zip-tie stories from this weekend. The first is from the cable running. The group that was pulling in the basement had a section of the drop ceiling break. There were already a bunch of phone/computer cables there, and the weight and movement was just too much. The bracket that holds up the drop ceiling panels was bent and wouldn’t go back in place. There needed to be a way to hold the weight off the broken part and also hold up the bracket.

You know what this situation called for?

20130804-205840.jpg

Our custodian happened by at that moment and just about busted a gut. He asked me to send him a photo ofmy handiwork but I don’t think my ego can take it. Besides, it was just temporary…. until I got a couple of coat hangers involved to do the real work!

The second is also a temporary fix. Sam and Rachel are staying in a rental, and the shower has a grab rail inside for the former resident. There used to be an adjustable, spring-loaded shower arm holder attached to the grab bar, but it was broken. Their landlord put a different holder on the wall, but it’s very low and awkward.

Brad sent a text that his Home Depot had a grab-bar replacement.

20130804-211648.jpg

Woo-hoo! I checked in Lincoln, but no. I went to Menard’s and asked, but the gentleman kind of sneered at me like I was making it up. “I’ve never heard of that.” Hmmph.

Well, ok. I had other options. PVC, a regular shower arm, and ……. zip ties!

(When Sam sends the photo from his phone, I will insert it here. I hope that happens before the morning or this post is significantly less funny.)

Why am I not sending these to my favorite website?

Filed Under: Home 'Improvement'

It’s called multitasking,

May 19, 2011 by Lauren 4 Comments

…. and it is FABULOUS.

I bought some impatiens last weekend, because it is the only thing I ever plant – in honor of my mother. Well, that and it’s the only plant I can reliably identify. I actually went to buy some a month or so ago, but Wal*Mart didn’t have any. I wasn’t exactly sure, though. I stood looking at some other kinds of flowers trying to convince myself that they weren’t impatiens. “Maybe they’ve changed. Who’s to say?”

Anyway, these flowers have been sitting on my counter in a pan of water (see, I can nurture) for about a week, so I decided it was time to plant them.

In a rainstorm.

With a spoon since I don’t know if we own a trowel.

Here are the ‘before’ pots. Please note that the rain just misses them, and that does not speak well to their survival if I forget to water them.

That is some poor planning on either my part or the house builders.  I choose him.

The pots aren’t actually full of potting soil – it’s a little bit of potting soil and then all the past carcasses of previously planted impatiens. I was shocked at how dry the ‘soil’ was. I thought I should water it, but wanted something that held more than a Big Gulp cup – my watering container of choice. I went with a plastic cereal container that had some generic Frosted Mini Wheats dust in it, or as I called it, “pre-compost”.

That soil was DRY. Each pot took three cereal boxes of water and each time I’d stir it, it would still be dusty.

Don't eat cereal at my house.

Anyway, dig dig, throw throw, but no ‘pack pack’ because by this time I was getting cold, wet and bored.

Good enough.

I had to shield my camera from the rain.

Those plants will just have to be happy that I’m not taking care of them, because we all saw how that went for the robins.

Filed Under: Home 'Improvement'

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