If your welder is 115V then it almost certainly requires 20Amp service. Sounds like your garage service is only 15A, so you need an electrician to wire a 20A circuit. Things that need 115V/20A should have a cord where one prong is turned 90 degrees, but they don’t put these on the cheap hobbiest welders because they’d get a million returns from people that don’t know what the fuck to do with those. If you’ve ever looked at an outlet that had a weird T shaped hole for one of the prongs, that’s a 20A outlet. It’ll take a standard 15A plug or the 20A plug with the one turned prong.
But if you want to get into welding, I’d highly recommend investing in having a 230V/50A circuit as you’ll quickly out grow what even a 115V/20A circuit can provide. 230V is what all the decent welders require.
BUUUUUT before you do that, you should take a welding class at a local community college, they’ll have much more awesome welders you can use with the proper electrical service for them.
Since we’re on the topic of home A/C, I have a question:
My townhouse has HVAC for all four floors and ceiling fans in the bedrooms. I love it, especially having grown up in a house without AC at all. That being said, there is only one temperature control for the entire house. As a result, the top floor tends to be much hotter and the lower floors tend to be almost chilly in the summer.
How easy or hard would it be to get a temperature control for multiple floors? Is that even possible?
You need to call an HVAC guy and ask. They may be able to install dampers and controls to do what you want.
HOWEVER, a cheap thing to try first is set the HVAC fan to circulate constantly. Even when the AC isn’t on it’ll keep pushing relatively colder air up stairs. You’ll need to change your filters more often, like once a month.
Yeah, my mom used a combination of ducted AC (she had some attic space and wall space for thin ducts that could be retrofitted) and ductless mini-splits, depending on the room. The house fortunately was designed to allow air to flow pretty freely between rooms on the main floor, so that retrofit wasn’t too crazy, if more expensive than what proper central AC would’ve been.
For whatever reason, it’s not in New England, except for maybe houses built in the last 10-20 years or so. Maybe we’re just cheap-ass Yankee bastards up here. My neighborhood consists mostly of houses built in the early 90’s and, for whatever reason, it looks like my house one of only a few that have central AC. I see quite a few window units in the other houses during the summer.
Admittedly, I didn’t have AC in the house I grew up in, which was built in the late 70’s, so I got mostly used to dealing with the heat in the summer, though I’ve been spoiled by having central AC since then. Even now, I tend to keep the temperature pretty warm during the day at about 78 F, though I turn it down to about 74 at bedtime.
Yep, that’s a problem, though if the house happens to be built just right, you can do some sort of combo system of mini ducts and mini-splits.
There is also a mini duct system I looked at for her that’s often used in historical buildings as the ducts and openings in the walls are very small. The HVAC folks we talked to recommended against it as it was very expensive and was mostly aimed specifically at historical buildings or other situations where it wasn’t feasible to use mini-splits.
Pretty sure you can get servo-controlled dampers and an integrated multizone control box. But it would be semi-custom work, and I have no idea how much that costs.
The exception is when you’re in a burb that has exactly four distinct kinds of houses. You can usually get a contractor who has standard kit/plans for each of those four.
Think the class is worth it? I’m not looking to weld cars and honestly I’m pretty sure being good at omputers will work out for me so I’m not hunting a backup career,(I’m typing this from the cloud summit in Times Square) I just like making stuff and find stuff make of metal super durable and just like better. That said the opportunity to actually use a welder that doesn’t trip the breaker every 30 seconds has its appeal.
I’m taking a class right now and I’m loving it. It’s also frustrating as all get out, fillet welds are hard. I’m not going for a career in welding, I’m a computer person too. I just want to learn welding to work on my car projects. That said my spouse is already asking me to weld up some stuff for her garden. It’s just wicked fun to stick metal together with electricity. So yeah, I’d definitely recommend taking a class, you can learn so many little trick from an experienced welder. I’m taking a stick welding class.
Depending on how big your house is and how fancy the air handler is, expensive to VERY expensive. My father in law sells HVAC among other things for a living and a system like that is considered top of the line equipment not usually in normal single family homes, minimum $2000 iirc though I think I might be undershooting. The other way to do it is to have a separate unit, either a mini-split with the wall unit or another full system outside the building hooked into a discrete duct system for each zone. Again, expensive.
I strongly recommend it. George has been sharing some of his practice welds with me recently, and even over the course of a day, I’ve been seeing pretty impressive improvement in his welding.
I lived in a place where I noticed fairly immediately that the washing machine had my clothes coming out steaming, and they were also shrinking (I line dry). Since the washer had a steam function, I thought it was being turned on by accident, but it did not appear to be. It took a bit of pestering to get the owners to trace the Hot & Cold water lines… it was reversed from before I had moved in.
It was pretty annoying to say the least, especially since I had recently bought a lot of new clothes, that were subsequently of very limited usability.
My house is need of some maintenance and maybe some upgrades. I’m all thumbs when it comes to fixing anything. Could use some advice/ recommends on where to find good help to fix and update shit in my house.
Angie’s List is the only thing I can think of where you can find like certified and reviewed handyfolks and carpenters etc… but iirc it costs money to subscribe to it?
Not anymore, Angie’s list is free since a couple years ago. Well, free for homeowners that want to hire. It’s paid for by the contractors that are advertising to you through the site.
