If you have a question about how to make your home more comfortable, you may want to ask your thermostat. An innovative, programmable “talking” thermostat has been designed to make it easier for you to control your home comfort systems.

The EZ Talk feature of the “Talking Thermostat” from the Coleman® brand of York, a Johnson Controls Company, audibly guides homeowners through every step of programming a heating/cooling system thermostat. A Coleman Heating and Air Conditioning dealer can even customize the prerecorded messages in either a male or female voice.

If service is required, the thermostat can say the name and contact information of the dealer or contractor who installed the equipment. This provides homeowners with an easy, one-touch dealer locator that takes the guesswork out of who to call and saves time.

Separate weekday and weekend schedules allow you to set four different time/temperature settings each day, while a manual override feature makes it possible to change these settings. The thermostat is designed to protect your home comfort system with a number of alerts:

• A low-battery warning informs you when it is time to change the batteries, helping to maintain the efficiency of the system.

• In the event of a power outage, the backup battery saves the schedule and saves the homeowner from resetting the schedule.
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When was the last time your home had an electrical checkup?

The wonderful weather of Summer presents the easy opportunity to request that an electrician visit and have your home’s electrical system thoroughly checked. Similar to the way we as people go to the doctor for a physical, a home’s electrical system should receive annual or semi-annual inspections. The main reasons we would do this are to protect the longevity of the house, protect the inhabitant’s well being and maintain the best efficiency – which can save you money on your energy bill.

Throughout the year as electrical devices in the home wear and tear, make a list and store it in an accessible place. The more work that can be done in one visit by an electrician, the more you will save versus paying for several visits. Most electrical problems should only be handled by a professional. This is mainly due to the safety risk involved as well as any job not done correctly can cost time and money in the future if not up to code. Once you have enough items on your list to take action, review the home for any other electrical problems that may have been overlooked.

This is also a great time to do an evaluation of your electrical usage needs. Do you or your family need more power in the home? If so, include that on the list and ask the electrician if an upgrade is available. Finally, in preparing for your checkup, it may also be appropriate to determine if your home could use money saving electrical fixture upgrades. For example, you may want to upgrade frequently used rooms from common incandescent lights to fluorescent ones. This will reduce the electrical consumption and lower your energy bill.

The next step is to request an estimate and evaluate the electrician. To contact electricians many people use the internet. One website that focuses on the Virginia, Washington, D.C. and Maryland area provides brief descriptions of trusted Electrical Contractors is http://www.allaroundthehome.com/electricians.asp. This site allows the home-owner to make a decision on which electricians they wish to request a free estimate from, without the fear of having to field dozens of sales calls from contractors they didn’t select.
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Solid wood countertops are natural products made of wood from trees approximately 120 years old. Wood is a living material and the more moisture receives, the more the wood countertop will expand. The wood we used in solid wood worktops has been previously kiln dried to a humidity level of 6%, and it is therefore important that the worktop is not exposed to a constantly high level of humidity. Normally the humidity level in kitchens is approximately 50-70%.

The solid wood top must be attached to the cabinet box using only wood screws and washers. It is not recommended at all to glue the top on the cabinet box; the top and the box expand and contract at different rates, therefore cracks might eventually appear, most probably on the cabinets’ surface.

The proper way of installing a solid wood top is using metal fixings along the cabinet box (see our web page).
The metal fixings must be uniformly distributed throughout the length of the top, spaced at a 1′ – 1.5′ distance from each other. Across the width, the top is usually fixed to each metal support with three screws, one in the middle, one toward the front edge and one toward the rear edge. The supports must be perfectly leveled; otherwise tensions can develop in the wood, leading to warping, cupping, or cracks.
We recommend pre-drilling the screw holes into the wood countertop, in order to avoid cracks and splits. For the same reason, it is a good idea not to over tighten the screws. The finishing will considerably diminish the extent of such movements, but will not eliminate them altogether. Due to the panel’s laminated structure, the lengthwise movements are insignificant, so the installer should pay attention to the movements occurring across the panel’s width. In order to prevent the development of inner tensions, the holes in the metal fixings should be elongated in the direction of the movements (see our web page ).
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Toilets are an essential part of our everyday lives. We tend to take the toilet very much for granted and not really like to think about it too much until we find that we desperately need a toilet and none can be found. We forget that modern toilets are a luxury in a lot of under developed countries and find it a huge inconvenience if our toilet doesn’t work.

Toilets that we are used to using are a relatively recent invention, and used to be only affordable by the very wealthy. Even now the evolution of the toilet is still in progress with technological advances including automatic flushing controlled by sensors and economy settings to allow less water to be used when the toilet fills up. The issue of hygiene is a constant one and, along with all the different types of toilet cleaners and fragranced deodorizers there are even public toilets that clean
themselves after each visit.

The prevalence of indoor plumbing has been the main factor in the availability of toilets inside our homes. It is this plumbing that ensures the toilet keeps functioning correctly and we don’t have to do anything more than pull the chain or press the handle. Before this all toilets were separate from the main house in small outhouses. The water supply that these outhouses were connected to was totally detached from the ones used inside the house.
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