Author Archives: Britton

If You Want Something Done Right, Do it Twice

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Well I’ve been working with the aftermath of the Honda overheating for a few days now.  I think a few things occured.  There is a hose that goes to the heater core that had been saturated with engine oil, and it sprung a leak.  I was able to just cut the end of the hose off and reattach it, leak fixed.  Thanks Dad for showing me that trick when the Corvette hose sprung a leak years back. 

Well I was driving in town the other day and when I got to my desitination I could hear a hissing under the hood.  I popped the hood and the top of the radiator was cracked.  I had put in some of that stop leak stuff they sell and it did plug the crack in the radiator, so it does work…At least temporarily. 


(click to enlarge) Cracked Radiator.

When I got home I remembered that I had an older radiator for the Civic as a backup.  I got it from a friend I work with who had it laying around.  So I swapped that one in.  It is pretty easy to do in this car.  I took it out today and drove around doing some errands.  I popped the hood and checked out the radiator to see how it was holding up.  This one, was cracked in the same exact spot.  Wonderful..lol.  The stop leak worked again however and plugged the crack, I drove it home with normal temperatures.

Well….I don’t trust the glue holding things together so I checked and apparently this crack is common on these Civics.  The suggestions in forums was to get an aftermarket radiator from one of the local auto stores.  I was able to find one for $80.  I picked it up and installed it.


Fancy New Radiator

So far this one has been holding up, but I am still checking the car after every trip for leaks.  It got up to 100 degrees here today.  The recent heat has put a lot of components under more pressure and stress than usual.  I actually think my radiator has been cracked for at least a year now, but during the cold temperatures it isn’t an issue. 

There is a lesson in life that I’ve had to learn over and over and that is that sometimes, if you want something done right, you have to do it more than once.   I suppose this is along the lines of ‘practice makes perfect’.   Cassie had come up with this saying when she was doing laundry.  She managed to come up with a lot of wrinkly clothes.  I was giving her a hard time about it and she responded with something to the effect of, “Well….If you want something done right, you have to do it twice”.  It has stuck as one of our sayings ever since.


Two Cracked and One New

The car has 280,468 miles on it now and I am not exactly sure how much longer it will hold out.  I’ve been looking around for a replacement, but if this one can hold out to 300,000 I think that should be enough and I won’t need to buy another car until Rincon!  Even if I do have to hold this one together with glue..lol.

 

And Fixing Houses and Saving Money

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There seems to be a theme lately. Things break and sometimes we fix them and sometimes we have someone else fix it. I suppose that I like to pick my battles.

We were over at one of the rentals and the current tenants are moving out at the end of the month. The management company we hired suggested that the yard be cleaned up a bit. Mulch, weed removal and turning on the sprinklers. All pretty basic stuff. When we were working over there, we noticed that they had the AC on (compressor outside was running). It wasn’t a very hot day, and we wouldn’t have had our AC on, but we just kept about our yard work and didn’t think much about it.   Cassie was a weed pulling, rose and tree triming machine!

One thing about Colorado is we have tenacious weeds.  They grow even when it’s hot and there is no water.  As a result anytime we put down rocks or mulch the standard operating procedure is to put down some kind of weed barrier.  The landscaping stores sell a fabric that is supposed to keep the weeds down.  And it does…For a while.  Then the fabric starts to break down, or the weeds just start growing in the fabric.  I’ve come to find that it’s worthless as a weed deterrent.


Plastic was used along the fence, landscape fabric on the left

Instead what I have found works really well is the thickest plastic you can find.  It seems to last years and NO weeds come up thru it.   I removed a bunch of rocks, removed the remaining fabric and put down the plastic weed barrier then put the rocks back.  It’s quite a bit of work, but it should be good to go for a number of years now.


After all the rock was moved back in place with plastic instead of the fabric

After we put the mulch down in other areas of the yard,  the fertilizer and replaced the fabric with plastic we noticed that the A/C compressor was still running!  I figured this indicated a problem so we took a closer look.  There was ice forming on the coolant line!  I have no idea how long it had been running for, but it needed closer inspection.


Ice Growing on the Compressor Line!

I found that the blower motor on the furnace wasn’t running!  This caused air to not move across the AC coil which meant that it just iced up both outside and inside! Who know how long that AC had been running and not shutting off! Good thing we just happened to be working at the property. The tenants were clueless!

I looked up some info on the internet and from previous experience I figured it was the run capacitor.   They are prone to failure, but also are the cheapest/easiest part to replace.  I pulled the capacitor and got a replacement at a local store here in Greeley.  Rick’s Appliance.  The guy who works there/owns it, Rick, is super honest and every time I’ve gone in the store he has been very helpful.  So for $6 I got a new capacitor.


Run Capacitor for the Blower Motor

I got to the house the next day and the ice had melted off the AC parts and I threw in the new capacitor.  Turned the furnace on and….fan still wouldn’t kick on.  The blower motor fan just buzzed.  I did get it to start by pushing it by hand once but it never worked on its own.  I figured the next part to replace was the motor.

Finding HVAC parts is I think, intentionally hard to do online.  It’s as if they have their own club and if you’re not in it, you aren’t going to find what you need online.   They want you to pay someone to fix your stuff. I found a motor at a place near work.  It cost $80 and is a universal Mars motor.  I was a bit skeptical about using an aftermarket part; I almost always want to get a direct original equipment manufacturer (OEM) replacement.  This causes less hassle with things that don’t fit correct or that might have small differences.  In this case however it was nearly impossible and would have cost ~$400.


Blower Motor in the Furnace

I put the motor in, wired it up and turned it on.  Worked like a charm!  It did take my time and $86 total (plus tax) but I learned a lot in the process and I had time to do it.  There was no great rush or pressure since the weather here is between seasons and we don’t need AC or Heat. Estimated cost to hire an HVAC person to do what I did: $500!

And it was quite apparent what had caused the motor to burn out: the furnace filter hadn’t been changed in a year! The filter was all bent and sucked inward. Remember to change your filters often, monthly even, if you use your furnace year-round.


Yep, back in the garage on the floor with my blue shirt on..lol

All in all it was a productive few days.  We saved a lot of money by doing things ourselves and we had the time to do it.  I think I want to turn the old motor from the furnace into an electric wind generator.  We’ll see.  As is I am learning all about furnaces and that’s something I won’t need in Rincon…but it never hurts to learn.

The Honda Civic is small but can hold quite a bit! (removing debris from the yard)

Fixing Cars and Saving Money

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When you do it yourself, you can definitely save money. But before I take on any project, I try to determine whether it is 1) something I know how to do/fix and 2) whether I really want to do it.

In this case it was  a broken heater core in Cassie’s car (her 1989 Oldsmobile). I knew how to fix it because the exact same thing had happened to my Buick years ago. She was driving around and noticed a huge leak coming from under the car. It was green, so she knew it was an antifreeze leak but not much more than that. At first I thought it was just an overflow issue, but when I saw that it was pretty much completely depleted of coolant I knew it was the heater core.

A heater core is important because it takes hot coolant from the engine and circulates it in the passenger cabin, so your heater has hot air. In the summer this isn’t quite as big of an issue but in Colorado’s extreme winters, life without a heater core would not be pleasant -at all. Also having this leak was draining the engine coolant which could have totally destroyed the engine. So, it was important to get it fixed.


Taking the dash out

I knew how to do it, but it still sucked because I had to completely take the underside of the dash out. With my Buick I had to take the dash out as well, but it’s always a little complicated when you don’t do something very often. Why car makers require you to completely remove the dash in order to get at this core is beyond me. Seems like a better engineering solution could be found. In fact in my 75 Corvette, you can change it from the engine side of the firewall. Much easier.


In the process

At least I had most of the tools necessary and the parts store still carries the part for a 23 year old car in a discontinued brand (Olds).


My tools

After I removed the bottom dash and console, I had to get under the car to install the new heater core. It turned out the old heater core had plastic tubes that had broken and that’s what had spilled the antifreeze. The new heater core I bought had metal tubes that are much less likely to break and spill.


Old core with plastic parts versus the new metal version

The total cost of parts was $40 to fix it. It took me about 4-5 hours to scout for parts, take apart the whole dash, install the new heater core and put all back together.  I called a shop just to see what I had saved and they quoted me at $500. So that made me feel pretty good. My time was worth about $100 an hour! It also made me realize how outrageously high the mechanics charge.

I don’t always try and fix things myself, but sometimes it makes you feel good to know I can and the money in my pocket can pay for a ticket to Puerto Rico and back.


Under the car

Our WordPress Blogs Were Hacked!!

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Over the past few days, some of you may have seen a pop-up from Google notifying you that we may be distributing malware!

Well….As it turns out a hacker got access to our web host. They gained access to all the core files that run this web page as well as our other blog http://fruitfulista.lifetransplanet.com. They were able to insert some kind of redirect that only happened occasionally on certain pages.

Google “crawls” webpages nearly every day for content and in turn this is how they feed their search engine. In addition to scanning for web content, if their Googlebots happen to come across a page that redirects them, they flag your site as having malware. This is bad for a few reasons.

Google, for the most part, controls the internet. If you get on their blacklist for any reason, traffic will simply stop flowing to your site. This is what happened to us. Some browsers like Chrome or Firefox will display a warning based upon this blag flagging by Google:


DANGER!

This was the first time I had this happen to our websites. So it was again, time to learn about it and figure out how to fix it. In some ways I enjoy a good challenge, it seems to be what my brain was tailored for. I checked our webhost and since there were multiple sites that had been hacked I figured it had to be compromised. I updated all the passwords on wordpress as well as on the host. I then moved all the sites from the host back to the Linux box in the basement that I used to host from.

Google’s webmaster page allows you to have them recheck your site for the malware once you’ve done something to try and correct it. So after I moved everything off the host I had it re scanned. Well….Still infected!

At this point the next step was to replace all the core word press files. It’s unlikely that the content was hacked (pictures, music, etc) but was just the core PHP files that run WordPress. So I downloaded a fresh version of WordPress, then copied in all of our content and re uploaded the package. Google re scanned and, it came back clean!! So we are safe to browse again and actually I am not sure if we ever weren’t safe. I never did find the code that was compromised, but rather took a shotgun approach and just replaced it all with new. 

If you’ve noticed that our style looks a bit different, that’s why.  I still have to go thru and add some stuff back in.  Or we may use this as an opportunity to redesign our site.  We’ll see.