House Renovation Tips

1. Turn the system off and let it cool.
2. Close the valve to the expansion tank to isolate it from the rest of the system.
3. Place a bucket underneath the drain valve or attach a hose to it that terminates in a bucket or drain.
4. Open the valve on the bottom of the expansion tank and let it drain. (You may need to open a small vacuum breaker plug on the tank to get it to drain properly.)
5. Once the tank is drained, simply reverse the process to fill it.
Check your owner’s manual for more specific instructions.

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To flush a hot water heating system, follow these steps:
1. Turn the system off and close the water feed valve to the boiler. Let the system cool.
2. Connect a hose to the drain valve that’s located on the bottom of the boiler, and run the hose to an indoor or outdoor drain.
3. Open the air vent on the highest radiator to break the vacuum.
4. Now open the drain on the boiler and let the entire system drain.
5. Once the system drains, close the radiator valve, open the feed valve, and flush water through the boiler until the water runs clean.
6. Close the drain valve on the boiler and let the system refill.
7. Start the boiler (even if it’s summer) to purge air out of the system.

Finally, consult your owner’s manual for more specific instructions before you start. If you feel uncomfortable attempting this maintenance, let your service contractor do it the first time while you watch and take notes. Depending on how old and dirty the system is, you may want the contractor to “power flush” it using special chemicals.

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These heating systems use pipes to distribute hot water to radiators located in various rooms of the house. Modern hot water systems use an electric pump to circulate the water. Valves control the amount of heat that is distributed to each zone. The heating cycle is completed as the water gives up its heat in the radiator and returns to the boiler. Each of the components listed below requires periodic maintenance for peak performance.

Boiler
At the start of each heating season, it’s smart to draw a bucket or two of water out of the boiler to remove sludge.
Make sure the system is turned off and cooled down before you start.
Close the valve that feeds water to the boiler; place a bucket underneath the drain valve that’s located near the bottom of the boiler; and open the valve. After you’ve drained a bucket or two from the boiler, close the drain valve and re-open the water feed valve.
If there is a lot of sludge present, flush the entire system.

Expansion tank
Boilers are fitted with an expansion tank (typically mounted above the boiler) that lets the water in the system safely expand and contract. Modern expansion tanks come equipped with a special diaphragm that prevents water and air from mixing. These don’t need to be drained. Older style expansion tanks have a drain valve on the bottom. Drain once a year.

Radiators
Clean your radiators periodically for best performance. Use a soft brush or vacuum with a brush attachment. On some baseboard radiators you may have to remove the top or front plate to clean between the fins.
Leave a few inches of clearance between radiators and any nearby drapes, rugs, furniture, or electrical cords. This eliminates any chance of fire and lets the radiator work better by letting room air flow freely up through the fins.
At least once each heating season, bleed the air out of each radiator. Hold a container under the radiator valve and open it with a radiator key. (You can pick one up at a hardware store.) When only water comes out, close the valve.

Pipes
To prevent wasteful heat loss, consider insulating the pipes leading from your boiler to the radiators with wrap-around tubes of foam or compressed fiberglass. These are available at hardware stores and home centers for 30 to 80 cents a foot. Some types are self-sticking; others are taped or glued in place. To prevent condensation and dripping, you can wrap the return pipes, which bring water from the radiators back to the boiler. Wipe the pipes clean before you insulate them.
Never place the insulation near pumps, valves, pressure relief devices, or vents.

Safety
If you find a white, cloth-like sheathing wrapped around your pipes or boiler, it could be asbestos. Don’t attempt to patch or remove it. Call your heating contractor immediately. If asbestos is disturbed, it will disperse microscopic particles into the air, a potential respiratory hazard.
Check the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health for additional safety instructions.

Money-saving tips
During periods of relatively mild weather in the fall and spring, you can save money on your fuel bill by lowering the setting on your aquastat (the boiler’s control device) to 140°F on the high limit and 120°F on the low. (The typical settings for cold winter weather might be 180°F and 160°F, respectively.) If you don’t know where the aquastat is, consult your owner’s manual or ask your heating contractor.

On some older style boilers, the motor and pump assembly need to be oiled periodically. (Newer models are self-lubricating.) Consult your owner’s manual to see if oiling is required.

Oil-fired boilers should be professionally cleaned and tuned once a year. Gas-fired equipment needs to be checked once every other year.

If your boiler has a tankless coil inside that supplies your house with hot water, you can enjoy substantial summertime savings by installing an indirect tank or conventional water heater to replace the coil. Ask your heating contractor for details.

One way to increase your comfort, and possibly save money, is to install thermostatically controlled heating valves on your radiators. These enable you to adjust the heat in each room or area of your home individually, or to turn the heat off entirely. This is not a do-it-yourself project. Ask your heating contractor about the comfort and cost advantages that thermostatically controlled radiator valves might offer you.

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Basic warm-ups
Maximize the effect of passive solar heat in winter. Keep all the curtains and shades open during the day on the side of the house where the sun comes in. (This is all day on the south side, morning on the east and afternoon on the west.) The warmth from the sun warms the floor and furniture. After sundown, close all the shades and drapes.
If you have the old type of storm windows that need to be installed each winter, it can get confusing figuring out which window goes where. To avoid this, use a screwdriver, a hammer and Roman numerals to mark each window frame. Tapping the screwdriver lightly with the hammer, indent the blade in the wood just enough to make any number needed. Then make corresponding marks in an inconspicuous part of the appropriate windowsill. Even if you repaint later, your marks will remain intact.
Before winter arrives, make sure registers and convectors are open, unblocked by furniture and rugs. Keep furniture from blocking off the flow of air to and from radiators.
For some additional winter heat and humidity, disconnect the exhaust to your clothes dryer and put a nylon stocking over the machine’s air outlet. The nylon will trap lint while releasing hot air and humidity into the house. (Be careful not to direct the hot air onto a wall or other potentially flammable object, and make sure you’re not creating a moisture problem.)

Dodge the draft
Stone foundations can be drafty when winter winds blow. In the fall, place a row of hay bales or bags of leaves snugly around the outside of the foundation; these will conserve heat come winter. It’s critical that your “banking” doesn’t come in contact with the house’s wood siding. If it touches the siding, it will conduct and trap moisture, damaging the wood.
A small crack under a board or at the sill line of a house can cause significant heat loss. Before winter arrives, inspect all around your sills and seal all cracks or holes with a caulking gun and flexible caulk. Flexible caulk remains pliable even at very low temperatures.
To repair big holes at the sill line or holes in hard-to-reach places, use expandable foam, available from hardware stores and sold in a pressurized can. Squirted into a hole, it expands and hardens to fill the spot.

Heat loss from the ground up
If you live in an older house, drafts may come up through cracks in the wood floors and even through your room-size rugs. To avoid this and create a useful vapor barrier, roll back all large rugs and lay down 4-mil polyethylene (plastic sheeting, available in rolls from hardware stores). In each instance, cut the polyethylene a few inches smaller than the rug. After installing the polyethylene, replace the rug. The room will be warmer, and the rug will hide your new insulator.
You can put 4-mil polyethylene under wall-to-wall carpeting, too. But don’t try this under scatter rugs; the plastic will make them slip around.
Perhaps the greatest source of heat loss in some homes is the sill plate, where the house meets the foundation. To prevent this, stuff fiberglass insulation between the joist ends and along the sill plate parallel to the joists.

Plug the leaks
In many homes, plenty of heat is lost through switch and outlet holes. To stop a lot of leaking, remove the switch plates and seal behind the hardware with canned foam insulation, available from hardware stores. It’s easy to remove the dried foam if you ever need to work on the outlet or switch later.

Strip joints
Weather strip is an obvious but effective tool for sealing in heat. If you’re not sure what kind to use around your windows, try the rope like coils of semi-soft putty. They’re easy to use and inexpensive. Around doors, install felt weather strip, which is very durable.
Silicone caulk is more expensive than most other types, but it’s the best type to use for weatherproofing because it stays flexible at just about any temperature. Most other caulks get hard and crack. Use silicone caulk around windows, along sill lines, between the cracks of a log cabin- virtually anywhere you need weatherproofing.

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Big or small stove?
Are you trying to choose between one large wood stove and two smaller ones? Usually one large one works better. It takes larger chunks of wood, can burn longer fires and cuts maintenance and cleaning time in half. In some cases, though, such as in a ranch-style house, two stoves are necessary because the heat from one won’t circulate throughout the house.
On the other hand, don’t go overboard and get a stove that’s too big for the space you’re heating. If the stove is too large, it won’t have the opportunity to burn at a high enough combustion rate, and creosote will collect in the chimney. A smaller stove operating at a higher burn rate will provide better efficiency. Choose the smallest single stove that can adequately heat the space.

Backup heat
If you burn wood and need automatic heat backup when you’re away, have a heating contractor take a hot-water loop off your domestic hot-Water heater and run it through a fancoil unit mounted on or in your living room wall. It won’t heat the whole house, but it will help keep the temperature up until you get back home.

The slow burn
If you’re using a new cast-iron stove, light only small fires for the first week or two to season the metal and reduce the risk of cracking the cast iron.
It’s a good idea to line the bottom of a wood-burning stove with an inch or two of sand or ashes. That will reduce the heat reaching the stove bottom and extend its life.
If you’re building a fire that you want to last all night, it pays to know that one large log will last two to three times longer than the same volume of smaller logs.
If you want a long-lasting fire, carefully choose the wood you’re going to burn. The best woods for this purpose include hornbeam, hickory, white oak, rock elm and apple.

Save energy, money and space: clothes drying
For a cheap, energy-efficient way to dry clothes, place drying racks near the wood stove or wood furnace. (Don’t place them too near, though; you want to dry the clothes, not burn them.) To save space, hang the rack overhead and attach a rope and pulley. That will allow you to lift the rack out of the way after you’ve hung clothes on it. If you have a grate for heating upstairs rooms, place a rack near the grate, too.

Keep your stove in shape
To increase efficiency, seal the joints in old cast-iron stoves once a year. You can make stove cement inexpensively by mixing 2 parts wood ashes and l part table salt, then adding just enough water to make a thick paste. With a putty knife or trowel, apply this mixture to the seams inside the stove. (Newer stoves are still manufactured in sections but are less likely to have problems with cracking seams.)
Before repainting a wood stove, go over it lightly with a wire brush. Then dust the stove with a rag moistened with paint thinner; this removes any dust without creating rust. When it’s dry, spray-paint the stove with enamel stove paint, which is made to withstand high temperatures. The paint is available from wood stove and hardware stores.
As an alternative to repainting a wood stove, you can restore it with traditional stove black applied with a rag. Stove black is available from wood stove and hardware stores.
Before storing a stove for any length of time, wipe it with kerosene to prevent rust from forming. Be sure to store the stove in a dry place.

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Neatness counts
To keep a linoleum or vinyl floor clean, vacuum or dust mop it often. That way you’ll pick up loose dirt before it scratches the surface.
Don’t use a rubber, or foam, backed mat or rug on a linoleum or vinyl floor. Rubber and foam can cause discoloration.
Add 1 tablespoon of vinegar to a pail of rinse water when cleaning a no-wax floor. This will prevent soap buildup and will keep the floor from looking dull.
If you’d rather avoid commercial floor wax removers, you can mix your own alternative. Combine 1 cup of laundry detergent, 3/4 cup of ammonia and 1 gallon of warm water. Apply with a mop.
Sometimes adhesives are put down to keep carpets from skidding as you walk on them. If you have adhesive left on your floor after you remove carpeting, pour boiling water on the adhesive. Let the water work into the adhesive for a couple of minutes, then scrape with a putty knife. Wear heavy rubber gloves to avoid being burned, and work on only a small area at a time.
Turpentine or kerosene will remove stubborn marks from linoleum. Rub the solvent into the linoleum, then wipe up all that you can, removing the mark at the same time. The rest of the solvent will evaporate quickly, but you’ll probably want to keep a window open to dissipate the smell.

Perfect Patches and Other Repairs
Never sand old vinyl or linoleum flooring or the backing or lining felt of such flooring. These products may contain asbestos fibers that are not readily identifiable. Avoid creating dust, and make sure to wear a mask when working with these materials if you think they may be old. Inhalation of asbestos dust is a serious health hazard.
To flatten a tile on which the edges have started to curl up, try this trick. Warm the tile with an iron or blow dryer, applying just enough heat to soften the adhesive underneath. Lift up the edges of the tile and dab adhesive under the curled edges. Press the edges back into place and weight the tile down flat for several hours, or until the adhesive dries.
To patch a damaged area of continuous vinyl or linoleum flooring, tape your new piece of flooring over the damaged area. Cut through both layers of the floor (the new patch and the old flooring material) well outside the damaged area to create a patch that will fit perfectly. Remove the new piece and pry up the damaged piece of flooring. Clean the floor underneath the tile as best you can with a putty knife. Apply a thin coat of linoleum cement to the floor, keeping the cement 1/2″ from the edge of the patch; you don’t want it to ooze up through the cracks. Press the patch into place. You can walk on it right away.

Starting over
If you want to lay a new tile floor and don’t want to go to the bother of removing the old one, here’s an alternative. First, level the surface of the old floor; fill in the low spots with a leveling compound such as Top-n-Bond, available from hardware or flooring supply stores. Cover the entire floor with an underlay - a smooth, stable, clean surface such as Masonite or 1/4″ plywood. Nail the underlay down every 4″ with ribbed underlay nails. (Be sure the nails are long enough to reach most of the way through the subfloor.) Then lay the new tile floor directly on top of the underlay.
To remove old linoleum from floors, insert a putty knife at one edge and pry off all you can. To get off the felt and adhesive that are left, mix together xh cup of white vinegar and 1 gallon of hot water. Using an old paintbrush, apply the mixture to the old adhesive. Put on enough so that it soaks in and softens the adhesive. Wait 10 minutes, then scrape off the adhesive with a putty knife. If necessary, repeat the process. If you’re at all uncertain about the age of the flooring, be sure to take the precautions listed earlier; there’s always a potential health hazard in working with old linoleum, which may contain asbestos.
One way to remove old asphalt or vinyl floor tiles is the freeze-and-chip method. (Remember that if the tiles are old, you should be sure to take extra precautions to avoid breathing in the asbestos they may contain.) For this technique, put dry ice in a wooden frame of your own construction. Place the ice and frame over a tiled area until the tiles freeze, then chip the tiles off with a flat chisel or putty knife. Move the frame to the next area and repeat the process.
An alternative method for removing old asphalt or vinyl floor tiles is the heat-and-lift technique. For this procedure, which most people find easier than the freeze-and-chip approach, warm a small area with an iron or blow dryer. Then work the tiles off the floor with a broad-bladed putty knife. Repeat the process for the rest of the tiles.
After removing old tiles, always scrape off any dried remnants of adhesive left on the subfloor. Make sure all loose material is removed before new tiles are laid.

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The sequence of stair assembly is this:
- First, put up the stringers.
- Second, nail on the risers.
- Third, put on the skirt boards - the baseboards, cut to fit the stair steps-tight against the risers.
- Finally, put on the treads, starting at the bottom so you can reach behind the risers and nail them to the treads as you work your way up the stairs.
It’s not hard to mark the stringer (the support to which the risers and treads are nailed) for your staircase once you’ve determined the dimensions of your risers and treads. Use a framing square, which has inches marked on it. Lay the square on the board for the stringer, positioning the square according to the riser and tread dimensions. Mark the cuts you’ll need to make, then slide your framing square to the next position, keeping the riser and tread dimensions at its edge. Repeat the process until you’ve marked the full length of the stringer.
If you want additional support for your staircase, nail the triangles of wood you cut out of the stringer to a 2 x 4 to form a center stringer.

Save the treads for last
When you’re building a house, standard procedure should be to tack scrap boards onto the staircase for treads until the rest of the house is finished and the floors laid. Then the staircase can be finished properly. This avoids unnecessary wear and tear on the final treads.

Too much spring in your step
If your basement stairs tend to spring up and down when you walk on them, you can reinforce them by nailing 1″ x 3″ strips of wood along the bottom edges (not the side) of the stringers. Stagger the nails about 1′ apart to avoid splitting the strips.

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Before sweeping a large concrete floor or patio, sprinkle slightly damp coffee grounds on the surface. They will keep the dust down and pick up the dirt.
To get dried raw egg off a concrete floor, scrub the egg with a scrub brush while pouring on boiling water. Wear heavy rubber gloves for this process and be very careful to avoid burning yourself.
To clean grease and oil from a concrete floor, sprinkle TSP (or other product containing trisodium phosphate) over the area, add a little hot water to make a thin paste and scrub vigorously with a stiff bristle brush. Allow the paste to sit for 20 minutes, then rinse with water. Repeat the process if necessary.
If the oil spill on a concrete floor is a small one, you can treat it by covering it with a prewash spray designed for fabric stains. Let the cleaner sit for a few minutes, then sprinkle on a cleanser such as Comet. Scrub with a stiff brush or broom, then rinse with the hose.
Oil on concrete can also be removed by soaking the stain with paint thinner for 20 minutes or so. Then scrub with a stiff bristle brush as you add more paint thinner. Cover the stain immediately with fresh kitty litter or dry sawdust. As soon as the litter or sawdust has absorbed the oil, vacuum it up. Repeat with fresh kitty litter or sawdust until most of the oil has been absorbed.
If any residual stain is left on your concrete floor after one of the above approaches, you can get out the last of it with a solution of 1 cup of laundry detergent, 1 cup of household (5%) bleach and 1 gallon of cold water. Be sure the concrete is dry, then scrub the solution into the stain. When the stain is gone, rinse off the solution with the hose.
Remove superficial rust stains from concrete with 4 ounces of oxalic acid (available at hardware stores) dissolved in 1 quart of hot water. Oxalic acid is a strong poison; keep it out of the reach of children. Brush the solution on the stains and let it dry. Repeat if the stains remain. Oxalic acid is expensive, but you use only a little at a time.

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