Over the past 20 years the telehandler has become a somewhat transformative job site technology. Initially used for conveyance, it's now often used by highly skilled crews to prefabricate entire assemblies.

I don't even like DeWalt that much. Like a dark ages vassal pledging allegiance to a single battery platform

A new hire did this at a company my friend works at and when they asked him to fix it he quit

New substack on improving household resilience to the threat of annihilation via mirror life docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Daughter just described her armpits as "Chewbacca-coded"

I was talking with my son and his gf about how to guess the age of houses and it's fun to overlay this with some of the economic history they're learning

Almost got the new rig laid out how I want

Really good HVAC account. Here Adam Chitwood explains the invention of the mercury barometer www.instagram.com/reel/DTbYN6m...

I suspect that many people who hold fringe political ideas are partly motivated by a lazy desire to play by an entirely different ruleset designed to specifically sidestep reasonable engagement. This often makes it difficult to start from agreed upon principles or history

In my late teens I had a job applying fireproofing to steel beams. Years later one of the central tenets of the 9/11 conspiracy theory was that jet fuel burns at 800F and steel melts at 2500F and thus a fire couldn't cause the collapse

I have a love/hate relationship with Mitsubishi but they deserve credit for transparency with technical information. Anyone can view products and manuals from their website. Also their design software (diamond system builder) is free (but clunky) mitsubishipro.com/catalog

First time I saw a molding pry bar was probably in the early 2000s. I've been running almost the exact same bar in my carpentry rig ever since. Now adding another to my HVAC toolbelt

What's the most compelling explanation for why housing starts failed to get back on their trendline after the 2008 crash? This isn't adjusted for population so for the past 17 years we've built houses at a rate that's unprecedented outside major economic downturns

Fixed an extremely annoying ducted minisplit today that required multiple trips over several weeks. I'm glad it's over but I'm very unhappy with how things went

Last year my kids were in the same classroom for the SAT and my daughter was waiting in line because the teachers won't let anyone leave. She watches as my son walks by everyone, opens the door and leaves. The kid next to her whispers reverentially "that kid doesn't give a fuck"

My son is in some of the smart kid classes but idk about the kids he hangs out with. Apparently a close friend is at the votech hs and wanted to do HVAC but he was too dumb so they had to bump him into plumbing

My BJJ coach is leaving for vacation today and the last time he went away one of the teenagers got pretty bad cauliflower from the adult class (unrelated to me)

In carpentry we often use the terms proud or shy to describe cuts that are slightly long or short. Anyway I used proud with my dentist to describe crown height and she immediately recognized it as construction idiom and loved it

Tfw condenser coil cleaning is included in your $125 annual tune-up

90F run at lunch today so people don't stand too close when I fix stuff on their house in the afternoon. Kept them mostly under 8s

Spray foam has high toxicity while it's being installed but its noxiousness diminishes quickly over the course of several hours. We've been fairly successful with ventilating spray foam during installation. Our protocol is:

Many HVAC technicians use improper refrigerant charging techniques which introduces contaminants. These are picked up by the filter drier (pic 1). As the filter drier becomes clogged the temperature difference across the inlet and outlet rises An acceptable temp delta is ~0-2

Wondering what to do with that crappy screwdriver that came with whatever hardware you were assembling?

Fixing furnaces after the handyman tried to install a new thermostat be like "I put it all back exactly like it was!"

Was reminded today that Gord Downie responded to a terminal brain cancer diagnosis by scheduling a final Tragically Hip tour

Traditional heating design places ducts and radiators to warm windows to prevent nearby occupants from feeling cold air currents from nearby glass. As we people move towards high quality glazing (u<.2) this is unnecessary

I've had many conversations where someone asks what my wife does (doctor) and they subsequently correct this to nurse or physical therapist. Eg they say "so your wife is a nurse?" My guess is that it's a class-based quirk but it almost always predicts them being awful

Yesterday a friend asked for my help with a bathroom fan motor he'd replaced. The fan worked when plugged into power but not when mounted to the fan housing

Growing up in the 70s and 80s it was common for children to die of leukemia. A hs friend's brother died on the side of the highway as his mother held him. She had been racing from our town to a city hospital but had pulled over. 35 years later and I still feel her desperation and grief

Honeywell has a MERV 13 media filter that fits in a ceiling return register. If you're retrofitting you'll want to be certain the boot behind the register is appropriately sized, but it will work in many cases. Also worth sizing registers and boots on new work accordingly

Troubleshooting a 20 year old ground source heat pump today and I'm fairly confident that the control system was initially set up to heat the house mainly with backup electric heat. For 20 years I can't even blame the installer - the control choice was "faster" or "normal"

It seems telling that the aliens and space travel conference doesn't bother to put directions for UFOs on its website

Martin Holladay is retiring and has written a nice reflection on his career. He had an influence on many of my trades practices through his articles and forum posts on carpentry and design. He's always been very generous with his time, responding and arguing with whoever posted to the forums

If you're opening bathroom walls remember to provide solid blocking at ada prescriptive locations and heights as well as for towel bars and the tp holder. The coolest kids also know to run a GFCI outlet for a bidet near the toilet

HVAC manufacturers often have approved installation methods for extremely expensive equipment that eliminate most of the features the customer paid for. It's also somewhat difficult for technicians to understand that an installation technique is bad

Minisplit manufacturers dogged insistence on not adopting propress fittings is creating a substantial barrier to minisplit adoption and indirectly responsible for endemic refrigerant leaks, ceaseless callbacks and system failures. It needs to stop

I got fired up watching my daughter's track meet and wanted to see if I could still crack 20 for a 5k

Prefab houses are very popular in Japan. Site built homes there use a hybrid timber & stick frame. It seems likely that the popularity of prefab in Japan is partly due to site built being slow and requiring advanced skills

Guy whose only HVAC knowledge is that oversizing is bad: "Be careful you don't oversize!"

Air conditioner and heat pump manufacturers often reuse the same unit across multiple capacities and put limits on the control board. Want to switch your 2 ton air conditioner to 3 tons? Easy as flipping a switch

Whenever I take duct systems apart I look for opportunities to install turning vanes. This trunk 90 will go from >80' of equivalent length to <20. If you don't know about turning vanes that's fine, unless you design or install HVAC systems, in which case you have some homework

People often think optimal duct design has dedicated systems for each floor to limit duct runs. This is almost entirely misplaced. A floor might add 10' to both the supply and return. Fittings near equipment are often equivalent to >100 and boots >40. Chase bigger numbers

Lessons from air sealing ~2000 houses 1) Replacing windows won't make your house tighter it usually makes it leakier 2) You can air seal or you can run blower doors and IR but you can't do both at once. Put down diagnostic tools

I feel like a lot of people think they're walking around with their mouth completely closed but nothing will disabuse you of this notion more than pulling a dead mouse out of a sump with a disconnected pipe

Pov you're a wall oven and you don't want to be reinstalled

I made a simple spreadsheet to help people size replacement heating systems based on their historic fuel billing data. I see many problems with new systems related to oversizing which you can avoid by using my spreadsheet. It's free. I don't even have patreon docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Someday all of this will be yours

BJJ gym had smoke/CO alarms going off this morning so here's how you do a basic spill test on a natural draft water heater. Spillage can be driven by intermittent fan cycling which I'll post about in the future. But this is a starting point for understanding spillage

Pre-zip wall exterior foam was difficult. High performance building legend Bill Hulstrunk visited us ~2010 and laughed at our over the top flashing details

Might make a test chamber for determining the filter efficiency of fuzzy blankets to help mitigate the risk of mirror bacteria killing everything. Ama