Isn’t a new dishwasher like $700+?
I’ve been looking at factory outlets that have them a lot cheaper. 45-50% off for dinged and the like.
If you’ve put in new circuits, this is just removing circuits from the panel and splicing in wires to go to the new subpanel, so you should be good. It will be messy as you’ll have wire splices in your panel. Which is OK.
What I did, because the room where my panel is at is not finished, is I put in a subpanel of 20 circuits with a transfer switch in between the two. I was able to re-route all my existing runs into the new subpanel, so I avoided having to splice in the wires and ran a 60A wire through the transfer switch.
So I hook up the generator to the transfer switch, flip it to run off the gen, and then I have to manually toggle each individual circuit based on how much I hear the generator chugging. Over the years, I’ve gotten pretty good so I know what it can handle (turn on well & septic only occasionally but never together).
With only a 5K, you’re going to have to juggle quite a bit but the layout on that panel will make that nice.
Yeah things like the septic pump (runs 2x a day max) and well won’t be left on unless needed. I figured it wasn’t that much more of a challenge. I will probably give it a go this summer. But I will price it all out myself, then maybe get an estimate just to see how much i’d save. Thanks @Tman
Hey Rich, if you have a Habitat for Humanity Restore nearby that might also have something for you. The GF landed a washer/dryer pair there for a steal of a price.
Interesting how many washer/dryer problems are mentioned/solved in this thread! Just noticed it because last week, my washer quit draining. My first thought was to replace it since it is nearly 20 years old. But then I remembered only a couple of years ago when my dryer stopped working. Because money was tight, I found YouTube videos which diagnosed and explained that I needed a new motor. Although I was certain I’d mess it up worse, I bought the new motor and installed it myself in only a few hours (replaced the belt, and little plastic drum guide things, too) for around $100 bucks.
So, with this past victory in my mind, and with YouTube’s help, I was able to find that one my daughter’s bra pads was small enough to get itself sucked in and lodged in the motor, preventing drainage. I removed it, was somehow able to put the thing back together, and it is now fine. Cost was zero dollars, and a few hours of watching YouTube and fiddling around. I told my daughter she needs to grow bigger breasts so she’ll need bigger bra pads and this kind of thing won’t happen again!
Having a child has awoken some kind of protector/nesting urge in me that has manifested as a much higher willingness to do home projects.
I understand that these are pretty small potatoes, but I was still immensely proud of myself. Also, these are all problems that we’ve had for YEARS, fixed in a grand total of maybe six hours between all of them.
In the last month, I’ve replaced:
- Two bathroom sinks (the existing ones had bad gaskets and tons of buildup which caused low pressure).
- One shower head (existing one had similar buildup problems).
- One front door doorknob (existing one was chewed up by our dog two years ago, no joke).
- One old-school thermostat (nothing really wrong with it, we just wanted a Nest so we could manage the temperature via phone while holding a child).
Some of the boards on our deck were rotting and needed replacement. I’m not exactly the handy sort and this was the first time repairing a deck for me. But I learned some lessons from this experience. Seven boards needed replacing. Our deck is built with the boards running at about a 45 degree angle from the wall so each board needing replacement was a different length. Off to the local Lowe’s where they had a sale to get to get four 8-ft and three 10-ft boards.
First lesson. The boards at Lowe’s varied from really nice to rather curvy and cracked. You really need to pick through the lumber. Others had already done it, so the most easily accessible boards were all crap.
Second lesson. Demolition is hard without the right tools. I thought I’d just wack the old boards off with my hammer. Tearing stuff apart looks easy on all the home reno shows. Nope. Parts of the board came off easily where it was rotted, but parts where it was in good shape held very firmly. Trying to pry them off with a claw hammer wasn’t working and I didn’t have a crowbar.
Third Lesson. The plunge cut is your friend. After a short youtube viewing on how to perform plunge cut, I wielded my circular saw and did mightily cut the boards. This allowed me to get some leverage with my hands and pull them out peice by piece. It was still a total bitch to pull the nails out because they were super long suckers. This leads to the …
Fourth lesson. Deck boards are easier to deal with when screwed rather than nailed. When we had a our deck built, it didn’t occur to us to ask it to be screwed rather than nailed. Taking off the old boards would have been a lot easier if I could have just unscrewed them.
Fifth lesson. Count your screws. I had bought big box of screws for fixing the fence a couple of years ago. I was sure there still lots of screws in the box. That is until I actually looked in the box and compared them to the pile of nails I had pulled. I suppose it was a nice rest break to drive back to the hardware store for more screws.
Sixth lesson. Measure four or five times, cut once. I did know to be careful about measuring but depsite this, I still managed to mess up on the length for two of the seven boards cutting them short. Luckily, I had the foresight to know I screw up like this and was working from longest board to shortest board. The messed up cut boards were still long enough to be used on the next board.
It took a lot longer than I anticipated, but now our deck is safe to walk on again.
I’ve been looking for a deal on planer on Craigslist for a long time. This weekend a guy with a shop was giving away a DeWalt 735 planer because he said the motor was shot and DeWalt wanted $300 to fix it. This is a planer that normally runs between $500-600 new, something far nicer than I would ever buy for myself, even a used version.
The shot motor turned out to be a busted bearing in the motor. It took a lot of time to get it all apart but once I did it was obvious the bearing was bad (literally had the seals coming off and some of the ball bearings missing). I’ve never done any electrical motor repair before so I was glad to see it was something mechanical.
$10 worth of bearings and a $17 bearing puller from amazon later (thanks free 1 day delivery!) and I have a perfectly running planer!
GENIUS!
Seriously, this sort of thing occurs to me about one time out of three, and I’m always immensely pleased with myself when it does.
I’m not sure what they call that but it must have a name, I use that trick over and over again. Using screwup larger pieces to make smaller pieces. I’ve used that trick tiling amd in woodworking many times.
So awesome! What a great planer. It’s a bit loud, but the blades last a long time (they are double sided, so flip it when it gets dull) and no fancy magnets to align the blades.
I did eventually sell mine when I upgraded to a 20" planer off of craiglist, but it always had a fond place with me.
I attempted to repair our bathroom sink, but ended up calling a plumber. I wasn’t home when he came over, but my wife reported that he gave my patch job a “C+” because I was doing in the right general job, but every single thing I did had 1 small thing wrong with it which added up to kind of a mess.
She also reported that he said “it was clear a lot of cursing went into it”.
I’m going to commend you. We go through this at work a lot. One of the hardest things to do, strangely, is to know when to throw in the towel and ask for help. Further, to accept the help and learn from it.
I know I’ve been there in home projects before, it is really hard to swallow your pride and get assistance.
20" is a beast! I’m limited to a 1 car garage so this is pretty much the top end of quality and size for me. With this tool I feel like I’m done upgrading everything. I really really like fixing and restoring tools though. Woodworking tools are a great combination of simplicity and lots of heavy metal parts that are hard to screw up too badly.
Please share what you did wrong so we can all learn from your mistake!
I’ve learned when doing any kind of sink repair, to replace as much as possible, re-use almost nothing.
From what I gather, I had a couple of bits that fit together but that weren’t really supposed to be used together, so they didn’t form a proper water seal. I resolved this by basically making a gasket out of plumber’s tape, which i knew was wrong, but I also knew it would kind of work.
In another place, I simply had a gasket on backwards, which I also solved with additional plumber’s tape. I still have no idea how to tell which way a gasket goes.
I think that the existing hardware was just kind of wonky, as it was connecting a 1-1/4 inch sink drain to a 1-1/2 inch waste-flow. So, there was another piece that was reducing from 1-1/2 to 1-1/4 which was also fairly precarious. I believe that the plumber just replaced the entire drain assembly so that it’s1-1/2 inch everywhere now.
The original problem was that the sink wouldn’t drain, which he solved with an air blast, which I wouldn’t have known to do to begin with.
As lordkosc said, I believe this is key to all good plumbing changes. You don’t want to build on top of somebody else’s mistakes.
I was looking to replace two bathroom sinks a few years ago, hopefully without damaging the tile it sat on. It took several plumbers before I found a guy who said he would do it, and he did it without any damage to the tile.
I also replaced the broken wheels on the bottom rack of our not that old dishwasher. $100 for 4 freakin plastic pieces, each with 2 wheels attached, which just snap onto the existing frame.