★ WELCOME ★

Guys and gals, it's getting really hard to get a plumber to come to your house here in the Valley where I live. We got put on two different waiting lists recently and we we're looking at months before we could get a plumber out to look at our problems. So I spent quite a few days on Youtube and tracked down exactly how to go about re-plumbing my crappy kitchen sink drain into an awesome drain that could handle one of them new-fangled automatic dishwashers. Anyway, one of the best DIY explainers I have ever seen on Youtube is this Pros DIY channel. He names all the parts, installs each part in sequence, one at a time, explains everything very well. So I highly recommend checking out this channel to see if he has a video to help you with your project.

You will also want to check the Got2Learn channel for videos regarding your plumbing projects. This guy has lots of topics and great advice on what to avoid and how to do things properly.

Bill from the Sparky Channel on Youtube is a great source to help DIYers get familiar with working with electricity. If you ever want to start tackling these types of projects here is a great place to start learning. In the course of an afternoon, you can pick up tons of safety and troubleshooting tips. How wiring in a house is supposed to work and problems you can run into. I've tackled several projects at my place and all of them have turned out great! All the tests I've conducted and everything I've learned about the electrical code, everything I've done is in compliance with the national standard.

One thing about testing for ground that I've learned. Sometimes electricians come across someone that has – I forget what they call it – but they jumper an outlet in such a way that it is not actually grounded all the way to the panel. So it's a good idea, in your home, especially and older home to take a day and trace down all the circuits that have outlets on them. Work one circuit at a time and following the advice of Sparky and other bona fide electrician's on Youtube and elsewhere, open up the outlets, test and make sure that each outlet is genuinely grounded all the panel. I think it's a really good thing to do in any house you are going to live in once you have researched how to do this safely and thoroughly. When you are done, you'll know that you don't have any fake ground that can potentially kill you or someone else.

Also, from what I understand, your grounding rods outside of your home are to dissipate lightning strikes only. Your grounding back to your main panel joins the neutral lines there and all power going through both your neutral and-or grounds should be going back to the electrical grid. Again, as I understand it, electricity is always trying to get back to its source and so everything that comes past your main panel is trying to get out to the pole through your main panel, even if you have some sort of short circuit. If you do have a short, what should happen is that the electricity that was supposed to travel back on the neutral wire, now should travel back along the ground wire, since it is easier for the electricity to return to the pole along the ground wire than it is through your body and the surface of the earth. Here are a couple of videos that explain what I am trying to say.

Project Farm is a Youtube channel that tests out a lot of different tools and handyman products (like duct tape, wood glue, sandpaper, etc.). Some of them aren't that useful, but quite a few are. I haven't ever had any luck with the couple of stud finders I have tried over the years. I came to the conclusion that they just didn't work. But maybe not, most of the products reviewed here look pretty good. Some appear exceptional even so far as to be useful for detecting wires and pipes behind walls?