Wife and daughter have been complaining about the front door deadbolt latch difficult to unlock. I sprayed some WD 40 but didn’t make much of a difference. Decided to open it up and spray directly into the lock mechanism. The lock mechanism is called “Motise” lock made by Baldwin.
Here I recorded how I fixed it:
Notes:
Installation Instruction
A visit to my rental property showed that the shower doors were stuck. I checked it out and found one of the two rollers that hung on the track was gone. I replaced the roller and got them moving again. This is a simple repair that cost around $6 for all 4 rollers and about 30 minutes. It’s amazing how people can live with wide open shower doors and not complaining about it. It’s no wonder that they saw the water bubble on the ceiling downstairs. Is it possible that water has splashed outside causing the damage? I wondered. Here is a quick video how I fixed the stuck shower doors.
I video recorded my effort to put up the outdoor Xmas lights. The even distribution of electrical load must be considered and planned or suffer the same fuse blow up and extra work I had to endure last year.
Happy Holidays!
Nothing like coming home from a long vacation and finding that water pipe leaking all these time. Well, that’s what happened to us yesterday. Fortunately, the water was leaking from the copper pipe joint due to bad/cold soldering and the leak occurred in the garage only.
I attempted to reflow the solder joint without much success. So I hire the pro to do the job. Learned a few things from this $150 lesson:
1. Can not solder with water in the pipe. Must drain the water first.
2. Reflowing the solder while connected to the pipe and others would not work due to the large heat mass. Must remove the union before reworking the solder joint.
3. Use a MAPP gas torch will work better due to its higher temperature.
4. Do a reasonable amount of prep work like sanding and applying flux before soldering.
5. Shut off the main valve before going on a long vacation.
6. Hire a pro to do that job before doing something drastic or you may end up spending more money. Besides, the pros have better equipment and more experience dealing with the corner case.
I will now be returning some of the stuffs to Home Depot now. Below is an edited video I recorded through out this experience.
A few quick tips I learned from this video:
My neighbor and I have been chasing down the root cause of the water leaving out from the water meter into the street. It’s a serious offence now we’re in a serious drought here in California. We originally suspected that it was coming out of his main faucet. The water company (San Jose Water Co.) came out to inspect in the summer and fixed some gasket. Now it’s happening again. I then noticed that water was leaking out of my sprinkler valve. So I decided to fix it once and for all. I thought it was a simple task of cleaning the diaphragm. After I opened it it, I determined that the diaphragm was pretty worn out. Upon checking out the price of the diaphgragm (~$8) and comparing it to a new valve ($14), I decided to replace the entire valve instead. No sense replacing a sub par parts when I can get a brand new one. The challenge is to adapting the valve to the copper piping as PVC pipe is much easier to work with. Then I discovered the adjacent value was leaking very badly too. And it got more interesting…
Check out my video how I got the valve(s) replaced here:
This video shows how I fix the common pump problem for the hand soap, face wash, detergent, and shampoo. The pump when first purchased is usually locked to avoid leaking during transport and in display. Often, the pump would get stuck in the locked position despite your best effort to follow the instructions in turning counter-clock-wise to unlock it. The trick is to hold the neck/shoulder of the pump tight and turn the pump in the direction instructed (usually counter-clock-wise). For this particular Clean and Clear Face Wash, I spent more than 30 minutes unlocking it – not easy when I first purchased it.
Just a quick tip for you all, saving you from breaking the pump like I did on the previous one I bought. Enjoy!
I have a fence door that tends to jam the floor on the bottom after a couple of years. I had to move the hinge screws and bias the screws up a bit to fix the problem. Here’s how I fixed it: