Home & Garden

By: Kyle Thomas Haley Category: Interior Design There are many businesses out there which rent furniture by the month. You need a couch? Rent one for only $40 per month. Need a lamp? You can get one for $12 a month. Now, lets see, in one year you woul…

In the UK, some buildings carry restrictions on whether TV aerial or satellite dishes may be mounted on them. These buildings include blocks of flats, and “listed” buildings, which are usually buildings of historical interest than must not have their external appearance changed significantly without proper assent for the regulating authorities.

Before the advent of satellite TV, everybody would have an analogue aerial mounted on the roof of the house – often lashed to the chimney. This was usually necessary because buildings, trees, and higher land would block or reduce the quality of a received signal. Consequently most people have become used to the need to have an aerial mounted high up.

So when satellite dishes came along, they immediately assumed that they needed to be mounted on or near the roof of the house. This is of course, totally untrue because of the way that the signal [Read more...]

A quick note for all you DIY enthusiasts in the UK. I just thought I’d bring to your attention the fact that Wickes have a 4-day sale on this weekend (starting today – 23 September 2011), with savings of up to 30% on selected items.

So if you have any DIY projects planned, why not head over to Wickes to see if you can save yourself some money.

This offer includes 2.5 litre cans of paint, which I thoroughly recommend. In fact I personally think that Wickes’ paint is better than the big-name brands such as Crown and Dulux.

By: Adam Peters Category: Interior Design Have you ever thought about the many different furniture styles? Probably you have ever watched a program TV, where they showed people how to update an entire room of your house; lets say the living room or be…

Obviously, a solar water heater creates hot water by absorbing energy from the sun. But what happens in the winter when there is less sun, or on overcast days?
Well, to some extent, the heater will still work, but the chances are that you will accumulate less heat, which means that you will probably need an alternative form of heating.

Many hot water cylinders have two independent heat exchangers. One is connected to the solar heater and the other connected to a conventional boiler. Additionally, many cylinders have an aperture for an electric immersion heater.

How you use the hot water that you create from your solar heater is entirely your choice. One idea I had was to create two heating panels supplying different parts of the house (bathroom and kitchen). In the bathroom, we would obviously prefer to have a constant supply of hot water, which means [Read more...]

I recall helping my father fit additional loft insulation to our house when I was a child. The material we used was an orange, fibreglass matting on a roll. It was really nasty stuff to handle. If you got any of it on your skin, it would be very irritating so we wore overalls, long sleeves and gloves. We also took care to wear masks so that we didn’t breathe the fibres.

One thing that I found interesting about it was that it was compressed on the roll, and after laying out, it expanded up to a thickness of about 2″ (50mm). At the time, this was quite normal, and with this additional layer, we had increased the insulation to 4″ (100mm).

Nowadays, the Energy Saving Trust recommends a minimum loft insulation thickness of 10.6″ (270mm) – more than 2.5 times what we had in our house.

As [Read more...]

By: Charles Mohaney Category: Home Improvement Shower curtains are often the focal point of a bathroom. A wide variety of fabric, pattern and styles are available to compliment the design of your bathroom or home. These range from simple, elegant desi…

By: Johnathan Bakers Category: Home Improvement Dry indoor air causes a wide variety of physical symptoms including a stuffy nose, dry cough, nosebleeds, dry skin and brittle hair. A warm mist humidifier will relieve these symptoms and help you sleep …

By: Charles Mohaney Category: Home Improvement Imagine the home of your dreams. Is the old colonial style home that has historical significance but could use some updating? Perhaps it is the 1960s rambling ranch that gives you more single floor living…

The solar collector for my solar water heater project is going to consist of an array of copper pipes enclosed in an insulated box of wooden construction. The top of the box will be glass to retain heat – the “greenhouse effect”.

I found an online calculator for determining the size of collector required to provide enough hot water based on the number of family members. There was no criteria specified for the type of collector, the spacing of the copper pipes etc.

The formula they used was about 2 square metres each for the first 2 people in the house, and then 0.8 square metres each for every additional person.
So for a family of 4 people, that would work out at 5.6 square metres. I have seen a lot of commercial units fitted to houses in my neighbourhood and they don’t appear to be of that size, although [Read more...]