Home Improvement Show
Hour 2 - Electrical problems and history
At your service, it's the Home Improvement Show presented by Mosby Building Arts. To ask a question, call 314-436-7900 or 800-925-1120. Now, the host of the Home Improvement Show, Rich Horace, on the voice of St. Louis, King of Oaxx. All right, guys, we are back second hour of the Camel X Home Improvement Show. I'm Rich Horace, like he said, and we've got a full another hour here for everybody, whatever you need, whatever help question, thought, comment, concern you have around your house. I'm right here for you, and I want to welcome in the 97.1 FM listeners to this. So, guys, same phone number, same thought, you can call in, get your home improvement, maintenance, whatever you need, questions answered right here today with me. 314-436-7900, no matter where you're listening from, that number will get you right to me, and we can get you in. Phone lines are wide open here, and plenty of plenty of time. So, in the past hour, we had a few good conversations and questions. I want to thank Sue, Betty, and Dorothy for calling in and talking about their questions, comments, and concerns, but we also went over, we did a lot with the Fire Safety Week Awareness of Smoke Detectors Awareness of Making a Plan, and actually Betty called in, and when she called in, she was talking about training your pets to go to the door, or go to a door when the smoke alarms go off. What a great thing to train your pets for, because if it did, and you trained them to go to the front door, but maybe you climbed out a window, you can run around and open that door, and they can come out and get with you, so what a great thought that is for sure, and I did have one last little story on the Fire Safety, and it's really kind of a crazy thing, but it's definitely something to think about and just be sensible with what you're doing and be careful with what you're doing around the house. It's great to read and understand your barbecue grills, your smokers, everything that could potentially bring a hazard, make sure you're following how far away from the house it should be, and have fire extinguishers around the house, but this particular person, it was a story in the paper, so this is straight out of the Washington Post, so that's my source, I'm not spreading anything crazy, but it is a crazy, crazy story that this homeowner in Maryland tried to use smoke to battle snakes that were infested inside his house, so this Maryland homeowner attempting to rid his house of a snake infestation, so he accidentally burns his house down, it was in November of 2021, and so this person set a bunch of sequence of little small fires in metal containers in their basement, and was hoping that the smoke would drive away the snakes, so, and snakes, they basically say they are sensitive to smell, and experts have kind of noted that maybe with the cold weather it made the snakes kind of sluggish, less responsive to smoke maybe, but unfortunately this fire spreads, it destroys an entire house valued at $1 million, so it took 75 firefighters were needed to extinguish the blaze, no humans were hurt, they're not sure about the snakes, but they did, they only found one snake and it was found alive, so really didn't work for him at all with the smoke or the fire, but you know, you get to that, and of course myself and all the experts out there are going to advise against using smoke for snake removal and recommend professionals instead, obviously, and so just consider and think about and be sensible with what you're doing around your house, we talk every week about remodeling it and the importance of maintenance and keeping up with it and doing all this, but just be careful and just really think about every little thing that you're going to do to just try and make sure that it doesn't have some sort of catastrophic problem like that particular one, I've often wondered when I've, the first time I talked about this story and even now, like how his homeowners insurance even handled that, I mean I guess that's still like an accidental fire, I don't know, that's up for question and I don't have any information on that whatsoever and I can tell you that I have been a part of trying to battle snakes in a home that, because they're, once they're in there, they find a spot and they can get around and of course when they breed, they're very, very small so they can come in through little small cracks and stuff, so years ago I had a condo, kind of like a townhouse that had snakes in it and we went around and tried to seal up some stuff from the inside and tried to think about all these different areas where snakes could make their way from outside underneath the basement concrete floor through the foundation all that and in to the home, so we did a lot of different things to try and help battle that and we weren't alone, as she had I believe it was Rotler working also from the outside, but the hard part for them was this was a multi-family building, so generally they'll go around your house and they'll try and find how they're getting in or where they might be getting in and close that up from the outside, because snakes are opportunists, they look for places to go, they don't create places to go, so when you're ground sinks and there's an area underneath your front porch, they'll then find that, they'll get to it and they'll start breeding under there, but they don't dig like a rabbit or an animal that creates their own kind of area home to be in or moles or voles, things like that, so that's very hard to do on a building that has six units or so on it and it could be basically coming from the neighbor and then into yours because the basement floor is kind of one big basement floor, running between them and everything's connected, so they can get around underneath the foundation, walls and footings and all of that, so yeah, it's definitely a hard thing and that's why we were also called in to kind of look at the inside and see if there's ways we could kind of keep these from getting into the interior living space from there, so it was quite the challenge we did our best and hopefully it ended up working out well enough in the end for her, but so hey, we're going to take our first quick break, Tom, if you could hold on through a quick short break, we'll get to that and then we will get to Tom's phone call and anybody else's phone call that you may have, any questions, 314-436-7900, finds me, don't touch that dial. You're listening to the Home Improvement Show presented by Mosby Building Arts on King Amo X. Now, once again, here's Rich Ora's. All right, we're back. Hey, remember? Don't be shy, whatever you need. I'm right here for you, anything about your house, 314-436-7900, finds me. We've got Tom on the line. Thanks for holding through the break, Tom, are you there? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear you. Awesome. Thanks for calling. Yeah, so my question is kind of a crazy one. So I was using like my paper, I have a, you know, diet, eating kitchen and I have a paper shredder in on one side of there, so I was shredding some paper and on another one of my outlets, we have a floor fan. It's plugged in, but it's not on. Don't have to turn on. Whenever I was running my paper shredder like right at the end, the fan blade starts turning on our floor fan. And it's not in the own position. Okay, yeah, it's kind of weird. Yeah, that is kind of weird. So it does lead me to believe one that those outlets are in a sequence, you know, in the same sequence with one another. And somehow, yeah, there must have been like some kind of arching or when that shredder is going, it's drawing a lot of power with that motor. There's, as it's pulling the paper through, there's probably a lot of, of ark and stuff with that. So I had a lot of outlets and this is, you said this is in the kitchen, right? Yeah, it's in our eating kitchen. So you know, it's got multiple outlets in there and they're all in separate ones. I was like one on one side of room and then one's like in the middle of it. So I know they're, I'm assuming they're pretty much running off each other. Hey, yeah, and you know, and they should tie them together. Probably be GFCI protected, but not maybe necessarily arc fault protected, but I can't even positively say if that would even do it. Did it? How much did it turn? I mean, because the only other possibility is if there was a breeze, if someone like air movement, if someone shut a door down the hall and just a little bit of air pressure and maybe had nothing to do with the power per se. And I thought that and I even thought vibration, you know, from the you know, everything. Yeah. It's just it's weird because it moves right at the end of the cycle. And I think it's probably when those amps are up the highest yeah, that it's but what what it means to me is it's not even on. So how you know, I mean, the power button has not been pushed. And I just couldn't understand how they could still feed power and pass that switch. Yeah, I honestly don't know either. And so you've seen this more than once and you've kind of noticed like when in the in the shredding system that it's happening. Well, pretty much I saw my wife was crazy whenever she told me one time, probably a year ago that the fan moved on his own and I never saw him move on his own. Yeah, you know, and then all of a sudden the one day, you know, the other day she goes, see, it moved. I'm like, what are you talking about? So family moved. Yeah, so I messed with the shredder and and sure enough, it did right at the end and it was very small amount, very slight amount, but it was starting to move and probably about not even a quarter turn. Yeah. And yeah, so I would definitely guess that the the amount of because the outlet will have power. So there's power going through the cord to the switch at the fan. And that power is probably when you're running that shredder, that power is kind of fluctuating how much it's getting. And then something with the fan, the on off switch is just letting some of that power slightly get through it or it's jumping a little bit to that, you know, not in the off position, it's jumping power in a space maybe even. So I would, I would probably think it's something with the fan, the switch and the fan. And I would start with a new fan. Yeah. And I thought that too. Yeah, I thought that too. And I matter of fact, I have the same type fan downstairs, and I brought that up. And I put it in and that will move too, but not as much as the other one did. Oh, well, other ones. Yeah, it's kind of like it could be, I don't know if it's that fan. And you know, you're talking about surge protection, where these plugs are at, I don't think they're tied into that because they're not on that back wall. I mean, I'm not positive, but I don't think those are because they're not around the sinks or anything. Yeah. But that surge fluctuating because of that is definitely probably something to do with that on off switch on that fan. And I would have to guess like a newer fan, a different fan may not do that. Yeah, I agree. Okay. I was just wondering, you know, some of the throw out there. Yeah, no, very, very interesting. And there are so many weird things like that that happen in our homes and with all these different devices and just utilities and things that we have and the appliances that we have in our kitchen and all of that. And that electric can kind of kick hand in hand with other ones. And that's also why now today, the codes have changed so much to getting so many things on dedicated circuits where the kitchen countertop outlets are on a dedicated circuit. And the outside outlets are on a dedicated where they used to be hooked in with the kitchen in the bathrooms. And so now each bathroom is a dedicated circuit because you would get people say, yep, I kick on my hairdryer on my master bath and it trips an outlet in another room or, or this doesn't work in the other bathroom when I do that. And so we've the separation there, they're separating that stuff. And now we've got panel boxes that have 40 and 60 spaces to spread out and separate all these outlets and all the power going to all the different places specifically because of issues like this going on for everybody and weird electrical things happening and too much power and power surges and having too much on one circuit. And so yeah, they've really been changing that code in the past 20, 30 years. Now it's, it's almost everything's dedicated in every different area just to minimize all those sorts of issues and weird things going on for everybody. But hey, I think we're going to take our, let's get into our middle hour break here. And again, for everybody out there, we got a whole another half hour for you. So feel free to call me, find me, ask me anything you got going on around the house three, one, four, four, three, six, seven, nine hundred, we'll have plenty more to come after this. We'll be right back. The voice of St. Louis news radio 1120 K a m O X. All right, guys, we are back. We got plenty of time for everybody. You can find me once again, three, one, four, four, three, six, seven, nine hundred. And Sharon has done exactly that and found me. So let's get to the phones. Sharon, are you there? What do you got going on? Yes. Okay. I have electrical issue. I heard you just talk it to the last caller and I thought, Oh, perfect. I'm going to call and ask my question. Okay. I have a living room light in a fan that, you know, overhead. It's on the same circuit as a light switch. If I plug in my cell phone charger in that outlet, after a while, I'll notice the living room light goes out. The fan in the light will, you know, it'll go off completely. And I unplug my cell phone charger and the light comes back on. My question that I'm thinking that outlet is bad and it just needs to be replaced. Well, I haven't had a chance to do that yet. So I've been flipping the breaker off when I leave the house because I just don't want there to be any kind of electrical issues. Could there possibly be an electrical issue because something's bad like that or would it flip the breaker? Well, so how old is your home? It is built 1993. 1993. Okay. So, I mean, there can definitely be an electrical issue. And the biggest reason I say that is because, and I don't know exactly when the some of these codes came into place and when things got kind of changed up on how they did it. But I believe 93 should be pretty close to it should be that way where most of your your electrical outlets and your lights are on different circuits. So a lot of far yet I have several different breakers down the face. So that kind of leads me to believe that somebody might have added something or changed something. Have you lived in the house since it was built? Yeah, I'm the only owner. Okay, you're the only owner. So it was definitely something from original or the builder. So in the breaker, if something's going on, breakers do fail sometimes. So, and my son already replaced the breaker itself, the individual breaker. And that didn't fix it. And another thing that's funny is like, my grandkids were here like we would we slammed the door not on purpose, but like we were just slamming the door for another reason. And the light would flicker with just the door being slammed down the hallway away from the living room about, you know, yeah. Yeah, and that kind of sounds like a loose connection on the switch or in the lights, the wire to the fixture. Somewhere in there is is probably a loose connection. And I get what you're saying because I do the same thing all the time where I'm kind of closing the door with my foot because I'm coming in with something in my hands and it's kind of a slam. It's not really, but it is. And and yeah, so that I would say you might have some loose something loose going on with the outlet in your phone and in the other lights. You could try changing that outlet. That's an easy next step to rewire get a brand new outlet put in. If it does it after you change that outlet, I would get a licensed electrician in there to start investigating what's going on with that and with the other flicker. Because loose connections are where things spark and arc and and that's where where fires start is on loose connections with electrical. So my question is, so I mean, like, is there a loose connection? There was something going on like that. Wouldn't it flip the breaker? Isn't that what's the purpose to that breaker sport? Well, I mean, it it won't always it should. But there's older breakers and breaker boxes that have a lot of issues that have high fail rates that we when we find these these breaker systems, we need to change them out. That's not yours because you're from 93. But breakers in those systems, they are only so effective. And they do have a fail rate. Now they should be like 99.7 or something percent effective. But it still means that point three could not be effective. And so yeah, I would definitely recommend that outlet because the other outlets that once the sun was in town, we changed some other outlets and the wires were they didn't know that they didn't leave a lot of extra wire to hook up the outlet. Yeah, it was real tight. So it definitely could be a bad connection. Yep, it could. Yep, I would start with that. And then immediately and on the other one, the switch, the hall lights, you can take the switch, make sure everything's tightened and there's no loose connections, take the fixtures down, make sure there's no loose connections. But I would and then if it still does it, I definitely get an electrician. Okay, I'll do that. I appreciate your show. I appreciate you. Yeah, no problem. I appreciate you calling in Sharon. Great question and interesting thing for sure. But let's jump over to John and see what's going on with John. Hi, how are you? I'm good. How are you, John? I'm living somebody's dream. Yeah, yeah, this should be yours. Well, maybe. So you can do my dream with me for a few minutes here. How's that? I'd love to. Thank you. So in new, new water heater installed, gas water heater, it's only the hot water side and only for the first few minutes, it runs not, I don't know how to describe it. Dirty, murky sedimentary kind of, the installers, they came back out putting the new water heaters, you know, same 40 gallon water heater, gas, same things happening. And now they're mad at me. They don't want to believe that I'm having the problem. Oh, wow. Um, yeah. Boy, the how old is the house? Um, early 90s, maybe 89 90 right in there somewhere. Okay, so you should have copper and all of that in your pipes and everything because I mean, the only other thing would be if it's something around the pipes, the fittings that is, it's kind of due to the change of the water heater, but not due from the water heater itself. And so that's kind of why you're still seeing it and it's trying to like it loosened up and it's flushing this stuff out. But I don't know that that would be necessarily, I'd be more concerned with that if it was a much older house and then maybe checking the lines between the water heater and the fixture itself. So you could try and just flush the water heater out and see if it changes it at all. And then if it does or restarts afterwards, then you know it's probably definitely something with the water heater because maybe it's a defect in the brand and something that I haven't seen or heard a lot of this one with water heaters going in though with new ones. But that would probably be the step that I would try is to and look at what's coming out of that water heater too. I would flush that water heater out. And there you can find online too just kind of like a guideline to shut off the gas, do all that. Kind of hook up a hose to the drain at the bottom of the water heater and just flush that whole thing out, run some cold water through it, flush it out. I would look at that water, put that water in a bucket if you can and see what's coming out or filter it and then kind of restart and see if it still happens. Okay, that sounds like a plan. I mean, it's better. I mean, at least it might be an answer whereas I haven't got any other answers. So yeah, yeah, I would start with that and see what happens and then if it because it might kind of clear it up and then you if you start to see it again, you're like, okay, there is something going on more investigation with the plumbers. Okay. Yeah. Okay, sounds like a plan. Okay, perfect. Thanks, John. Okay, thanks for your help. Yeah, you're welcome. You too. You have a great day too. So, and yeah, that's something I'll have to kind of look at and maybe we can schedule next week or the week after we could talk again about flushing out the hot water heaters and exactly all the steps and how to do it. I have had conversations a lot in the past about that and it is something that the people waver on, should you flush out your water heater or should you not. And basically, I think the consensus I've heard the most is it's a good thing to do if you do it. And if you like John just got his new water heater. So if you flush that water heater like once a year, it would be good maintenance and help keep it clean and get out any deposits and calcium deposit and stuff. And then I think the main consensus on top of that is if you've had a water heater for three, four, five or more years, 10 years, then maybe don't start doing that, that flushing out and everything until you get your next water heater and start from scratch. Because I have had some people and some plumbers that I've discussed with and interviewed and stuff saying, well, once once you get so much flushing it out could start to cause more problems than it could resolve if you haven't done it in 10 years and all of a sudden you want to start doing it. So start doing it. Good advice for John would be do that once a year and just flush that out and clean it out and fill it back up and let it heat back up and you can get all that stuff out of there once a year and kind of help. It should help the life expectancy and maybe make that water heater last a little bit longer. Those things don't last quite like they used to. It's kind of amazing. The shorter and shorter life spans, but those water heaters are 10, 12, 15 years. And definitely you get the 15. I would start considering your next water heater, what you're going to want and what you're going to select and everything because you'll get close to needing it at that point without a doubt. So we're going to get into our final break here. We will have time for anybody's questions, comments or concerns in the final segment three one four four three six seven nine hundred get you there and don't touch that dial. We'll have more to come after this. Now back to the home improvement show presented by Mosby Building Arts on Kingdom OX. Once again, here's Rich Auras. All right, we're back. Final segment of the home improvement show. Do you have something going on? We've got a couple minutes to get you in three one four four three six seven nine hundred. But I think what I'll do for now been I've had this on my list for quite a few little quite a few weeks here. A little bit of of history with the home improvement innovation. So I know you and you've all probably heard Sue Thomas host history of the Lou and airs right after the home improvement show. So I'm going to maybe steal her thunder just a little bit when it comes to the history as it pertains to home improvement innovations. But we all know the 1904 World's Fair brought us the hot dog, the ice cream cone, iced tea, and I just realized it found out it brought us Dr. Pepper, which is really cool thing. I didn't realize that that was on the list also. But one of the things that it also brought us was the first public building using air conditioning. So so they built this building. It was called the Missouri State Building. And it was the they built it for the fair and they used a mechanical refrigeration to cool that building. It was 35,000 cubic feet of air per minute to cool this thousand seat auditorium that they had built. And it marked the first time the American public was exposed to the concept of comfort cooling air conditioning. Now the sad fact to that building was it was built in June. And apparently in November, it had an explosion from I think it said a water heater explosion. And it destroyed the building. And we have talked about water heaters and boiler tanks and under pressure. And and they do and can have bad enough issues to explode like that. So some some different interesting facts with all of this is that so in general, right now, 48% of all of our energy consumption in American homes is a direct result of cooling and heating in the home. So after that, Missouri State Building was built and then so sadly exploded. The biggest use of the air conditioning was movie theaters. They were the first to really bring in that technology for their spaces. Some earlier refrigerants that they used very, very early on way back then were extremely bad for us and even deadly ammonia and sulfur dioxide. They had all this how they how they made it work was really was some bad chemicals. So the the first domestic air conditioning system that was installed in in Minneapolis was in 1914. And of course, the name that did it was Charles Gilbert Gates. And that was a big giant unit that was seven foot high, six foot wide and like 20 feet long, these things were were massive. And then the packard. So the car, the first car manufactured, offered air conditioning in 1939, their 1940 model year cars had air conditioning in them. And then of course, carrier Willis carrier design the first modern air condition system in 1902 in July, there was the smaller modern ones. So we all recognize the the name carrier of course. So that lasted a super long time. So when we look at air conditioning, and what we do and how it works, the so basically, it is interesting how it works because we do not make cold air. We actually remove heat and then things become cold. So there's a compressor and expansion valve. There's a hot coil on the outside and a chilled coil on the inside. There's a fan inside and out. And so we're removing heat to create this cold. So as that refrigerant enters the compressor as low pressure gas, then it's compressed to a high pressure when that high pressure gas flows through the condensing coil. That's where it condenses into a liquid and it releases the heat to the outside air. So when you go outside in the fans blowing on that unit outside and there's always really hot blowing out of there, that's what's happening. We're taking the heat out of it. And then the fan on the inside is that liquid refrigerant moves through the expansion valve and then the evaporator coil. That's where the fan on the inside runs past all that and it's blowing that cold air through your house. So it's kind of interesting how we don't actually produce cold air. We just remove heat from what we need. And there's now, I was talking about the actual systems that they used and the fuels that they used to make this. Well, they're changing that again in our systems. So they're changing the type of refrigerants that we can use to make this happen. So in 2025, there's going to be another change. We're going to have, unfortunately, coming up another price increase on how much these units cost and getting them changed. And so there's a lot of people recommending if you're thinking about an air conditioner, doing it right away, this year to get ahead of that change. Because I don't know how much it's going to change, but there's rumors that anywhere from 10 to possibly 25% increase in new air conditioners in 2025 and beyond with this new refrigerant that we're going to be using. So we'll still be able to get the old one. So if you do change it, that's going to be around for as long as you need, we can still get all the old ones now if you still have it. So that will be there. So don't worry about if you can or can't get that and how that works. So another interesting thing is if we all remember the heat pump, remember the commercial from the cleat glass way, way years back with old vern in the commercial heat pump, sheet pump, he'd say. And that whole thing was just kind of the cleats gas way of saying they want to stay inside your house and they're just trying to kind of put out some things about electric heat that, you know, gas is better and all of this, but the electric heat, the heat pumps, there are some really good systems that can work really, really well when installed and maintained and performed right. So hopefully this was just a little cool thing about the history of when we started all this and how it began in St. Louis. I think it's really cool that it started here. So maybe Sue Thomas will cover some of this and talk about that Missouri building sometime because that's another interesting little thing of what happened with that and everything. So there's some cool stuff going on in St. Louis. And obviously you can hear a lot about that from the next show with her after this. So we're good. We're done. Hey, be good, be good to each other, be good to your homes. And I will talk to everybody next week.