You need a funnel to direct a wild-flowing fluid into a barely-accessible opening, but you also need two hands to steady and hold the fluid container. If you can get the funnel to wedge in place so you don’t have to hold it, consider yourself lucky — otherwise you either need a helper or a tool like the UniFunnel.
Made from a glass reinforced polyamide, the bright yellow Unifunnel resembles a pair of spring-loaded pliers. When you release the handles, four stabilizing prongs expand to grip any opening from 1-1/4″ to 2-1/4″. Then just insert any standard funnel into the adjustable rings and pour.
A single UniFunnel will run you $15 shipped. Note: Not advisable for beer consumption.
Reader Jmillerid just built this sturdy set of steps, and rather than leaving them looking average, he decided to finish ‘em up with some bluestone. We like that he didn’t just stop after the hard part was over — he kept going and added a sweet-looking topper to each step and a brick layer for the landing.
The best porch I ever built was made from wood and siding, and it removed the desire to ever undertake such an endeavor again. If this is the end of Mr. Miller’s porch project, we say it looks great — however, we suspect there’ll be more to this still. In either case, its not every day you add something to your home that’ll be around longer than the house behind it.
Why carry when you can roll? A platform truck — some might call it a dolly or a cart — can come in handy hauling stuff around the warehouse, the shop, the office, heck, even around the house. What makes this version from Grizzly nice for less-industrial applications is that it has a continuous rubber bumper around the entire cart and a multi-position handle that looks like it might fold flat for storage.
The platform truck measures 35″ long by 24″ wide and can carry up to 600 lbs. The non-skid deck rides on four casters with solid rubber wheels. The truck retails for $50, but at 49 lbs. it’s going to cost you an extra $20 to ship it.
The Cool Surge Portable Air Conditioner “is a work of genius…so advanced that no windows, vents or freon are required.” With advertising copy like that, there’s no wonder folks are lining up to spend $298 to get one. (Cool Surge is a division of Heat Surge, the same folks that sell the Amish fireplaces.)
Once you’ve frozen the two “glacier packs” (no different from the keep-your-lunchbox-cool gel packs) and filled the unit with about a gallon of water, the Cool Surge claims to blast out “ice-chilled” air for hours, using only the power of a 60W light bulb.
Consumer Reports took the Cool Surge to task and found that during a four-hour test the device “failed to appreciably cool” a 227-square-foot room that began at 85° F and 57% humidity, common conditions for an average summer day. At “desertlike” 25% humidity, after four hours, the Cool Surge dropped the room by only two degrees. Based on these results, Consumer Reports has given the Cool Surge the “Don’t Buy: Performance Problem” rating.
If you’re in the habit of forgetting your keys, you may find this Schlage LiNK Deadbolt with Keypad to be a sound investment. Not only can you unlock your door by punching the numbered keypad on the deadbolt, you can also cause the latch to unlock from anywhere in the world using a computer or cell phone with Internet access.
You can buy an H2Glow for the safety of the little ones — though in the fine print of their installation PDF, Sector Labs points out that the H2Glow is not a safety device — or just because it looks really cool. It makes your water glow as it flows out of the tap, blue if it’s safe to touch and red if it gets too hot.
Installing crown molding can be the hardest part of remodeling or redecorating a room — one wrong cut, one misplaced finish nail, one incorrectly angled miter, and the entire project falls apart. To make things a little easier, SoSimpleCrown offers pre-cut DIY crown molding, eliminating all the hard parts and leaving nothing but the installation.
Here’s a great way to start feeling old: the Dustbuster is 30 years old this year. Of all the products to make it 30 years, I would not have picked the Dustbuster as one that would stand the test of time — however it has done that and more. Almost everyone has owned one at some point, and the 2009 model kicks the crap out of the old 1979 version both in power and also, thankfully, in style.
This is a prime example of why you need to pay attention when cutting anything that might be holding something up. Use your head in the manner not seen in this video –- think.
This video might’ve been a staged thing, but I’ve seen it happen where it wasn’t, and more than a little wood and debris fell on the unhappy worker underneath. Most remodelers don’t wear hard hats, but when doing demo, even if you know what’s going on, you might want to consider it. This guy is just lucky there were no nails sticking out of that board that hit him.
Every time a door slams shut in your kitchen you wince just a little, but if you want soft-close cabinets you have to redo your kitchen, right? Blum created Blumotion compact soft-close adapters for their own hinges, but there’s nothing stopping you from using them with your existing hardware.
Where I live, it’s already pushing 90 in the heat of the day, so a/c is your first, last, and only line of defense against sweating your ass off. Unfortunately, this frosty image means that my a/c unit wasn’t cooling much of anything, despite the ice on the outside of the coil. In this case, ice is not cool.
Now that I don’t have a basement,I miss the storage space — but I don’t miss the issues with water.Water can destroy appliances, furniture, carpet, drywall, and anything else in its path, and most repairs that require a contractor will run into the thousands of dollars.I found this Basement Waterproofing Kit in the back of a magazine and was wondering if it’s worth its salt.
These inexpensive little locks will secure a sliding window while it’s open, much like putting a nail in the sash keeps a double-hung window from opening far enough for someone to enter. Unlike a nail though, you can easily remove, replace, change their position, or even use them to keep the window shut.
I was reminded of Ben’s excellent post on vacuuming the ash in your fireplace when I was cleaning mine out a few days ago. I’ve always just waited till the ash was cold, then I bust out a brush and dustpan. With a price tag of over a hundred bucks, are ash vacuums really worth it?
I know that the regular old unmodified shop-vac will turn your living room into an ashen fallout zone, but can the specialized fireplace vac be used for other things? That’s an awful lot of space taken up to just clean the fireplace.
Is the powered way just that much better, or does your name need to be Casanova before you actually run that many fires through your fireplace for this to become worthwhile? Let us know in comments.
You want to install a ceiling fan in a room that’s not wired for controlling both a fan and a light. Sure, you can operate the fan with the pull chains, assuming you can even reach them, but then you have to get up off your duff. This RF remote control from Hunter has solved this problem for me and will hopefully help you, too.
We’re sure that most folks to the north never give it a second thought till later on in the year, but down here in Texas, March means the blast furnace we call Summer is looming ahead. In my case that meant I needed to get the AC fixed at the ole homestead. The Freon leaked out last year due to a faulty coil, and I’ve been without since September.
If we can take ReTherm’s claim at face value, by installing their device to recover waste heat that would otherwise go down the drain, we can save at least as much as we would with tankless water heaters, at a fraction of the install cost — which means the device might actually pay for itself in a reasonable period of time.
