The only type of dehumidifier that is any good at all during the winter is a fresh air ventilation system. Mechanical and chemical dehumidifiers are not only expensive and bothersome, but they cannot generally reduce the relative humidity to less than 50 per cent -- not low enough to keep frost ...
Every paint is formulated to maximize some special characteristic, and that often means sacrificing other desirable characteristics in that particular paint. No one paint can be everything to everybody.One of the most common trade-offs in making paint is "ease of application" vs. "durability".Pl...
To my mind old fashioned hardwood floors are far more trouble than they are worth, especially now that we have better and better Engineered Floors available. An engineered floor is not a cheap plastic laminate on masonite floating floor. It is a very stable, usually pre-finished, real massive h...
A comment from a reader:"I notice in your section on self leveling concrete that you mention about needing to let the water out before putting anything on top of the new compound. (Self Leveling Concrete) This is a common misconception about concrete, in fact the water does not leave, it becomes ...
In Canada, other than on the lower mainland of British Columbia and on Sable Island, it is impossible to maintain a comfortable level of humidity in the house and not have frost on single-pane windows most of the winter.Using two panes of glass allows the inner pane to be warmer than the outer on...
Any wood product will expand when it gets wet, some worse than others. Today we have a wide variety of wood or wood like flooring products.Massive HardwoodFirst you should understand that even massive hardwood, if allowed to stay wet or overly humid for too long will swell up and potentially buc...
Olive Taylor from Calgary, Alberta opened her home to our cameras and then amazed us with her self engineered improvements to her furnace humidifier.She didn't like the idea of stale water just sitting in the bottom of that drum type humidifier so first she scrapped the cheap float valve for a be...
Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) does not recommend the use of any blown-in insulating material inside "enclosed vertical cavities" (that's a fancy way of saying "walls that are not open"). They feel that techniques of installation and verification during installation are not good ...
Last year we shot a special Spring Clean-Up show and in that show we cleaned up some mould on the lower walls of one of our viewer's basement. Recently we went back to permanently solve that problem by installing an exhaust fan that would draw the cold moist air off of the basement floor, doing ...
Tony from Montreal has problems with cracks in his walls. All of the cracks followed drywall joints just above the corners of windows and doors. Tony thought it was his electrical radiant heating in the ceiling that was causing the problem. This could be partially true, but more likely it is rel...
