I nearly impulse-bought an electric lawnmower last weekend. The Husqvarna I have right now works fine - better than ever, in fact, since I switched to ethanol-free gas - and the Honda engine will last forever. But not dealing with gas, noise, pollution, it’s kind of appealing.
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I just signed many, many pages of documents for the build of my new house.
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It could be an ailing/undersized air-handler system or improper ductwork. If a cleaning doesn’t fix the issue, your airflow issues could get very expensive to rectify.
I have several numbers for people who can help you with that.
Which is why I’m starting with this. I won’t be surprised if I need a new ac unit. Heating isn’t too bad since we have the fireplace but the ac unit just cannot cool the upstairs. The ac unit is from the 90s and was installed prior to th previous owners building a 900sqft addition, so it’s very possible it’s just undersized. But if I’m going to get a new one I’ll be looking into a geothermal heat pump. More expensive at the outset but the energy savings can be amazing.
But hopefully it’s just dirty ducts. They did construction, I’m doing construction, and they had a very large very hairy dog. So hairy that I’m still finding wads of it’s hair in the house - like when I pulled the baseboards down. 
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I’ve always had electric - corded Black and Deckers since I was mowing my parent’s yard as a pre-teen up until I got my Ryobi
But I love not fighting the cord, and the self-propelled part really has taken a burden off my hands and wrists.
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New PV system almost ready to be commissioned. We only need to put the panels on the roof.
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Sing it, sister.
Electric mowers were a thing when I was a kid, but very much a rarity. I had an 80 year old reel mower at our old house, but when we expanded the yard I got a Troy-Built (cordless mowers weren’t quite there yet) and now I’m using a mower my in-laws dropped in our garage when we were on vacation one year because they didn’t need it anymore.
Knowing how I operate, I’d forget to charge the battery after each use, so it’d never be ready when I am.
It seems kind of silly that the electric mowers down at Lowe’s are priced such that (apparently) the price goes up $100 for every 15 minutes of battery runtime, but it’s the same mower otherwise. Kind of tempting to buy the bottom end package and then a second battery, probably come out ahead that way.
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Second PV system commissioned. Works better than the first one.
We plan to run the fridge on the old system, and the freezer on the new one, should give us some sort of redundancy should one system go titsup
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We’re doing up our house to rent seeing as we now live in my parents ex-stables. Arrived today thinking something was amiss, but fortunately an ambulance arrived shortly after to blare its siren.
How I don’t miss living in a town! …except the pizza here is almost worth the 160mile round trip it’s that good…
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Same here bro. I definitely don’t miss the noise, light pollution etc.
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We had our previous realtor come by to take a look at our place to give us a ballpark figure of what he thinks he can get for us. His estimate was 222% (repeating, of course) of what we paid 12 years ago. Way less than the area we are looking to buy in. Oh, it’s going to be quite a change. This could happen in about a year.
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I mean I’m biased of course, but you really want to move somewhere sticksy, ideally with an acre or two of good arable land. I genuinely think that towns are over now…
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That’s Mr. TM’s and my plan for retirement.
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Ours as well. We can get a larger place with most of the amenities we enjoy here on the East coast for about 2/3 of the sale price of our place. This is the way.
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Yeah, I’ve been thinking about NS as well, but Mr. TM wants to stay in Ontario. We have at least five or six more years - unless we win the lottery - until we have to worry about it, so we’ll see.
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Huh, so here’s a head scratcher.
The circuit is thus: mains > timer > transformer > light.
The light was off this morning. Checked the timer (we get a lot of power cuts so the timer loses phase rapidly) but it was good. Checked the fuse, and swapped it. No dice. Transformer hums though. Swapped in three different bulbs, still no dice. Annoyingly we can’t check the bulbs since we only have one BES-type fitting.
I’m guessing from our tests that the transformer is dead somehow. Gonna have to get a new one soon or that’s everything in our Wintergarden (okay, a small room with a big south-facing window that we grow exotics like pineapple and grapefruit in) withering away to nought 
So on Tuesday gone I became a landlord, first time doing anything like this. The estate agents were really nice though even if they did charge in blood for it.
I find it a strangely unreal feeling that a building that used to cost me to heat and light and plumb is now going to make me money. The concept is perfectly sound to me but the fact it is happening is quite alien and not what I expected. I think it’s probably because I lived there for six years, maybe; that I’m not so much weirded out at the landlord element as I am the some woman I have met once and her husband and dog are in my house so it makes sense that I’m feeling unreal I guess.
Sorry, rambling. A classical sign of unease! 
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We’ve finally accepted an offer on the old house that went on the market in October. We seem to have missed the Great Wave of buyers by about a month, and I’ve been paying 2 mortgages and 2 sets of bills since then. We’ve been living off of credit cards and a line of credit, and it has to stop.
We know that we’re never going to get what we’d hoped when we started this crazy trip, but at least we’re getting a pretty good deal. There has been no interest for quite a while. We’ve dropped the price twice and only gotten offers from remote buyers from southern Asia. I really needed to put some more work into the house while we were there. There are some cosmetic issues.
Anyway, after all that there was a sudden flurry of activity this weekend and 3 families started a small bidding war on the property. We hope to have a good price by the end of the week and to close by the end of March! That will be nice.
So nice.
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