Advice The Home Improvement/Automation Thread

Only if you have an investment that you know can beat the mortgage rate. For sure, no quesitons asked.

Pay off mortgage the day after you buy the house... losses = the price of the house
Pay it off after 30 years, losses = double to triple the price of the house

If you have an investment that you will put the payoff money into that regularly gets higher than the mortgage rate is the only time it makes sense.
And generally that investment is called the stock market. Is there long-term risk involved? I suppose so if the entire US crashes, but your house probably isn't going to be worth much anyway at that point anyway.
 
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And generally that investment is called the stock market. Is there long-term risk involved? I suppose so if the entire US crashes, but your house probably isn't going to be worth much anyway at that point anyway.[/QUOTE]
Exactly. I'm about to sell a piece of vacant land. The wife wants to use the proceeds to pay down the current mortgage. I want to sit on it beyond paying a small amount of CC debit. I figure if I want to move during the downturn it will be like trading places with someone else who has had taken a hit on theirs also.:iono:
 
Exactly. I'm about to sell a piece of vacant land. The wife wants to use the proceeds to pay down the current mortgage. I want to sit on it beyond paying a small amount of CC debit. I figure if I want to move during the downturn it will be like trading places with someone else who has had taken a hit on theirs also.:iono:
If you have credit card debt, yes get rid of that shit. Or play the 0% whack-a-mole, where you play the cards against each other and end up paying 0% interest.
 
Having almost 3k of insulation and air sealing work done starting tomorrow.

To prep for it I had to

1) tear out the plywood flooring in 200sqft of attic
2) Build up a 10 inch frame above that to allow for the extra insulation (blow in cellulose)

Should bring me from roughly r12 to r60 up there, and ill lose headroom, but by framing it out Ill be able to put the plywood back down and not lose too much storage space

1) Tear out the drop ceiling, vinyl siding type ceiling, and underlying wood slat ceiling on what used to be a 8x18 exterior porch long ago (now laundry room)
2) Frame in a new sub ceiling/rafters cause aint nothing above all that crap remotely flat enough for drywall. Some of the rafters were off by 4 inches from eachother, or from end to end. This thing was framed by a drunken orangutan and then rammed a couple of times by a rhino to put stuff off skew.
3) The room has no electrical, so ran 6 new outlets, and put in recessed lighting to get rid of the old flickery fluorescent tube.
4) Ran a couple of ethernet drops
 
Make sure you test the outlets before you put the drywall up.

Yep, for sure.

That other problem i had which i may or may not have mentioned to you guys (which you may be referencing in a subtle jab) where i thought i had a bad wire behind sealed drywall turned out not to be. It was a loose neutral in a previous outlet.
 
Just like all homeowners, ive done a lot of learning over the years. Some of the first outlets i did, I didnt pre-twist the wires with a set of linemine pliers. I relied on the wire nuts to make proper contact between them and keep them tight.

NEC code doesnt recommend pre-twisting, and electricians were like 60/40 split on should not/should. So i didnt.

That was a poor choice, wire nuts alone are not good enough to keep wires together reliabily imo. I now pretwist everything.
 
Just like all homeowners, ive done a lot of learning over the years. Some of the first outlets i did, I didnt pre-twist the wires with a set of linemine pliers. I relied on the wire nuts to make proper contact between them and keep them tight.

NEC code doesnt recommend pre-twisting, and electricians were like 60/40 split on should not/should. So i didnt.

That was a poor choice, wire nuts alone are not good enough to keep wires together reliabily imo. I now pretwist everything.
:wtf: Are you sure you're using the wire nuts correctly?
 
:wtf: Are you sure you're using the wire nuts correctly?
pair wire together, twist until wire nuts grip, twist until two twist show beyond the nut.

I pigtail everything, so i have a minimum of 3 wires per nut (appropriately sized yellow or red, and in the failure case, one of them didnt make it into the twist, it just spun in the nut while the other two twisted.
 
pair wire together, twist until wire nuts grip, twist until two twist show beyond the nut.

I pigtail everything, so i have a minimum of 3 wires per nut (appropriately sized yellow or red, and in the failure case, one of them didnt make it into the twist, it just spun in the nut while the other two twisted.

I've never once used or seen anyone use a wirenut without twisting the wires together first. I might be misreading something here but that doesn't even make sense to me.
 
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I've never once used or seen anyone use a wirenut without twisting the wires together first. I might be misreading something here but that doesn't even make sense to me.
They are supposed to twist the wires for you. Problem imo, is that the two wires often won't get into the nut even at the ends, so the one just winds around the outside of the other, instead of into an evenly twisted pair. Some people hold the wires even and do one turn of electrical tape so they stay that way until the wire nut is on. It's also slightly courteous for the next guy.
I don't pre-twist.
 
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https://www.mikeholt.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/005609-2.html

Check it out, about 50/50 there, and most folks on mikeholt are licensed electricians.

So it seems.
I'm the guy that says the wire nut secures and insulates the twist, does not perform the twist.

Licensed electricians I've either worked with or whose work I came after all saw it that way too. That would be a small-ish sample in the grand scheme of things though.
 
agreed. the 221s look way better for that though. Theyre 40% smaller than the 222s.
Yeah, I'm still living in the "let's stuff 8 ga. aluminum branches into boxes" life, though.

Even if the wagos were UL listed for mixed wire fittings, they'll be bigger than the double pigtails I have to put into my boxes (n aluminum to 1 aluminum, then 1 aluminum to 1 copper).