Driving Ground Rods

Some people have never seen a ground rod driven with a jack hammer.  Until today!  I made a video to show off my favorite tool, the jack hammer.  This has driven over a dozen ground rods now, at times that it is impossible to drive them with a sledge hammer.  It is also good because I am by myself most of the time, and a sledge can be almost impossible on your own, you need someone to hold the ground rod steady.  Here's the vid of it.

Drilling A Hole In Bees Nest

This is a recent job, putting a new service on this house, with the attic bees nest.


I also had to stick my hand in to put a nut on the other side of the mast clamp, also get a wrench on it to tighten it up. I was happy that I never got stung. I hear that Epcore came and gassed the attic when they hooked up the power that I installed. Sad really the bees are good to have around, and the owners were happy to let the bees live in their attic.  Here is the link in case you want to see other recent Youtube vids of mine, and as usual the embeded video

http://www.youtube.com/user/pacificcloud?feature=mhee

China LED Pot Lights

I stand behind my recommendations to buy put lights, direct from China and Hong Kong, online, but there is costs associated with doing so.

Buyer Beware!  I have purchased a lot of lighting products direct from China, through Ebay and other sources.  I usually get good products for very good prices, but in many cases there is no quality control.  In this case both pot lights work and look great, they just wont look good together, as seen in the video

My first bit of advice is MAKE SURE YOU GET THE CORRECT VOLTAGE for your area.  twice now I have mistakenly ordered 240v lights, which do me no good in Canada.  240v tends to be a lot less expensive, because they don't need as many rectifiers in the light bulb to run the LEDs.

I have returned light fixtures, which turned out to be not worth wile at all.  I paid 40% of  the original cost, in shipping to return the items, then somehow the refund turned into a 70% refund, and even that, finally agreed upon partial refund, has not been credited to my account yet.  If it ever gets credited I will get $0.03 on the dollar refund after I paid return shipping and all.

Frozen Pipe Repair

As almost everyone knows, I managed to dodge the only real week of winter in Edmonton, at -35 Celsius.  I was hiding out in Victoria for their worst week of winter with -5 deg weather and lots of snow.  The trip was planned perfectly, as I was on the plane home, the weather was warming up in Edmonton.  Michelle heard a funny noise in the Edmonton house, and eventually found a water pipe burst, that blew water through the basement drywall.  Home at midnight I didn't deal with it till morning, but here's how that went down in the video.  In the future I expect I should get rid of all this copper pipe, replace it with pex, and run it through the basement ceiling, not on top of the concrete foundation wall, or even in an outside wall at all.  That was what I was going to do originally, but then my phone started ringing, and I had to go to work.

Intake Manifold Back Firing

My 1989 Chevy Astro van with the rebuild engine, developed this intake manifold back firing in the last few weeks.  Its not like exhaust pipe back firing, where it makes a loud bang, but rather it just makes a popping sound, muffled by the air cleaner.  The problem is it burns everything in the intake manifold, and you lose power for that second.  2 intake manifold back fires in a row and you can stall out in the middle of a U turn or what ever.  Hit the gas to pass someone, it pops a couple of times and your right back behind them.

This was ridiculously easy to fix, when I figured out what the problem was.  The cause can be a sticking, bent, or burnt intake valve, valve timing out, or ignition timing out.  Or I read bad fuel that is still burning through the exhaust stroke and into the next intake stroke as the intake valve opens.  Basically an intake valve is open when  the spark plug is sparking, or burning.

I thought the timing belt had stretched, but I've read they don't stretch like the old chains did.  So I thought I was going to have to pull the heads and do the valves.  One last ditch effort was to address the spark plug wires.  I went to the wrecker and purchased 4 spark plug wires for $4 of f a newer astro van.  Mostly I wanted the extra wire dividers, and extra loom that came on them , but I did replace the one wire that was arcing before.  I spaced all the spark plug wires evenly 1/4" apart, eliminated wire crosses,  put loom on them where anything touched them, and clipped them all up securely.  This fixed the problem of cross sparking, as seen in the video.  Hopefully this helps someone.

Propane Fork Lift Trouble Shooting

The propane fork lift wouldn't start at the bottle depot behind my house.  They come to my house now when they have problems, which is funny I think.  I was pretty happy I fixed it in bout 10 minutes.  I have a propane truck out on the buggy farm, the propane system is always the reason for the thing not started.  Trouble shooting propane vehicles basically goes:
-Propane in the tank?
-Propane regulator iced over?
-Power getting to the propane solenoid?
-Vacuum getting to the propane vacuum switch?