This electric glass kettle, the Hamilton-Beach 1.7L Electric Glass kettle, has been quite reliable over the last few years. It boils water quite quickly, faster than on our gas stove, which we have to turn on the fan and vent afterwards. It is also easy to clean. After a while the kettle stopped turning on, so I had to do a couple of things to it. Here is the user manual for reference. I did not see any replaceable parts available from Hamilton-Beach.
Bucket Head Wet/Dry Vacuum, disassembly and quality inspection
Thrown to the curb, this was, with its tail cut off. So sad, I had to take it home, give it a try and possibly a second life. This unit pleaded underdog, discarded and forlorn. Unremarkable in appearance, ’tis a vacuum, for sure, but where is the bottom? The Bucket Head wet/dry vacuum is meant to couple and sit on top of the standard inexpensive Home Depot 19L 5G bucket, sold separately. It just clips onto the top of the bucket, hence the name “Bucket Head”. The vac head even has slots for the bucket’s wire handle!
I recently had a maintenance call for my furnace from Enbridge/Enercare in Toronto, Canada. In the end they sent me an online survey of a couple of questions, which I dutifully answered. This resulted in this error message. It looks like a database insertion error.
An unexpected error has occurred!
Error Message: Invalid index (parameter 2) passed to Row function. Index must be less than or equal to the row count. Index Value: 1 Row Count: 0 Function: row(@rows,1)
Description: An unexpected error occurred during the execution of the page.
City of Toronto arborist and his chipper machine. They prune trees, then chip the downed branches. Toronto, Canada 2017, Don Tai
My neighbour’s tree dropped a large branch during a windstorm. A couple of days later the City of Toronto tree guys, called arborists, are here with their special truck and chipper to tidy things up.
Every spring the City of Toronto has their tree specialists, called arborists, that come around to inspect the city trees. These are trees that grow between the sidewalk and the street, called the boulevard. These trees are not owned by the homeowner. Any tree on the property of the homeowner is their responsibility.
Replacing fan and light switches on a San Yang Pai CY-760 range hood. Toronto, Canada, photo1 by Don Tai
My San Yang Pai model CY-760-A range hood came with our house. Overall it is a good range hood suitable for Chinese stir fry cooking. We did not buy it new, so I do not know exactly how old it is, but I estimate it to be about 20 years old. The on/off switches were giving trouble, and the left fan stopped turning on. These switches are in constant use.
Older American Standard Ballcock fill valve. Use Google Search images to find your valve type. There are many different ones.
Recently the water pipes on my street were refurbished. as a result a lot of gunk they scraped off was flushed through my water system. Shortly after my older American Standard toilet started acting up, like it was not getting water into the tank. While there are a lot of sites and videos that show you how to replace the ballcock fill valve there are none that show you how to repair it. Here is how I repaired mine. It was very easy.
Fanboy, I am, on the Aquaclear (AC) line of aquarium power filters, specifically the AC20 to AC70 line. Not only are they reliable and serviceable, they are very flexible and easy to tailor to your specific tank needs. While there are some issues with noise, if you do regular filter maintenance you will be rewarded with stellar performance. There are a few customizations you can do that will make these filters even more flexible.
Hate it, I do, when a product fails before I believe it should. I have ranted about such products here before and I stand by my rants. Specifically you see products fail mere months after the warranty has expired, seemingly on queue for you to purchase yet another replacement. The old one goes into the garbage and then landfill, and the environment takes an unnecessary penalty for our stupidity. Clearly this should not be. I purposely buy products that last a long time, if I can, and take measures to ensure they do last.
Recently a personal web site of a friend of mine was hacked by Mr.Moro the Moroccan Hacker. He had a cheeky message up on the site, which was then indexed by Google. It took Google a couple of days to reindex his front page. You would think that I would be personally very angry with Mr.Moro, but you would be incorrect. Mr.Moro was the first step in the solution.
