Anyone have strong opinions on wax toilet seals vs the reusable rubber jobbers? I've always used the wax ones because my dad always used the wax ones, and recently we're having to admit that we haven't kept up on modern technology that much so there may be better ways to do things.
Anyone have strong opinions on wax toilet seals vs the reusable rubber jobbers? I've always used the wax ones because my dad always used the wax ones, and recently we're having to admit that we haven't kept up on modern technology that much so there may be better ways to do things.
If you don't think you'll have to take advantage of the reusable feature then I'd say that the wax seems just as slimy and gross when you're swapping out a really old toilet as a new ring, vs who knows how long until that rubber breaks down. It looks like it is the same stuff that the flaps are made out of and while those last a long time it is a lot less trouble to replace those than the toilet ring, not to mention the damage the latter would cause before you noticed.
Three weeks later, first woodworking bench is complete (enough).
I used a pretty basic plan meant for 2x4’s and plywood, but substituted the 2x6’s I had on hand, and managed to come up with my own dimensions that would do two things. One, match the height of my table saw so I can use this workbench as an in-feed/out-feed table, which would have been incredibly useful to have during this project. Two, keep the tabletops narrow enough to fit in my car’s trunk space with the backseats down, because I’m cheap and couldn’t bring myself to rent a truck for a couple sheets of plywood.
It’s not beautiful - some of the old wood I used had a bit of warping, and it took me a while to find a setup for holding the frame at a right angle while driving the pocket hole screws, so there’s some gaps and crevices I could probably avoid with better planning/materials/experience.
But it works! It’s the right height, it’s the biggest work surface I have, and I attached some heavy duty leveling casters so I can roll it around and tweak the height as necessary. For now I’m rolling it around just because I can.
And at least half of the frustrations involved with building this thing are solved by having it done - the biggest of which, trying to run a sheet of plywood balanced on a single in-feed roller through a table saw (and coming out on an out-feed ‘table’ made up of a pile of alternating 2x4’s with a sheet of hardboard on top) is not something I ever want to do again, and now I don’t have to.
Depending on what you're doing with the plywood sometimes I set it on the floor on scrap 2x4s or polystyrene and cut it with a circular saw and then straighten the now easier to handle piece on the table saw, but glad to hear your bench is ready to go!
Depending on what you're doing with the plywood sometimes I set it on the floor on scrap 2x4s or polystyrene and cut it with a circular saw and then straighten the now easier to handle piece on the table saw, but glad to hear your bench is ready to go!
yeah I have a half sheet of warped particle board that serves this function for me
full sheets are just nasty to try and move around
life's a game that you're bound to lose / like using a hammer to pound in screws
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
Depending on what you're doing with the plywood sometimes I set it on the floor on scrap 2x4s or polystyrene and cut it with a circular saw and then straighten the now easier to handle piece on the table saw, but glad to hear your bench is ready to go!
I had a full 8’ sheet cut roughly into thirds at the store, so it wasn’t too unwieldy, just awkward as hell. I still thought about using the circular saw, but I just didn’t trust myself (or my warped ‘straight’ edge) to keep it steady.
And I should have said it earlier, but thanks all for the tips and advice, this worked out really well, and I’m already thinking about upgrades.
To clarify, they can roll and level, but the leveling pops out some little legs that lift it slightly off the wheels, which you have to lower to move again. They’re not too much of a pain to adjust, thankfully, but it is a little tight - if my hands were bigger I’d probably have been cursing more while trying it out.
In the old house I made this door for my basement workshop out of maple with hand tools. I bought some "rustic white oak" at the sawmill for a double barn door for the new place and it is a lot harder to tongue and groove white oak by hand.
It's going to be pretty and I think I'll do it 'wrong' and have the braces and ledges be visible from the outside for more visual appeal but I only got one door grooved this weekend, we'll see if I get the other one done before the holidays or not.
Our house has been delayed till Feb/March due to material shortages (supposed to be ready early September). This whole process is increasingly frustrating, watching interest rates continue to tick up. The company has a great reputation, but given they have a dozen developments in flight, I don't understand why they couldn't rent a warehouse to order materials for each home at the time of sign off. Instead they are still trying to do this point in time supply chain crap.
Of course I know the reason they don't do that is that it cuts into their profits and our complaints aren't enough to justify that.
Origin ID\ Steam ID: Warder45
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
edited December 2021
Going to post this in both Home threads, as at least on paper it's pretty significant:
Discusses big building but also how Big Gas have been running scare campaigns about The Guberment Taking Your Home Stove.
Some 40 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions come from boilers, furnaces, and hot water heaters.
Welp I guess we found the "you all did WHAT when you were younger?"
To be fair, in the northeast natural gas has been far cheaper to run than electric heating. Heat pumps stop working in many of the severe cold spells we get, and until recently they were fairly shit efficiency wise. For example, if my house went all-electric, our heating bill would probably double or more and we'd have to completely redo our panel and other services to switch from gas stove to electric. Also, our generator would no longer be big enough (I'm in rural NH where power goes out fairly regularly with major storms, and can often be a week until it returns, usually in dead winter where the pipes would freeze)
I donno how common this is, but I recognize that my own bias against electric comes from years of apartments providing the shittiest coil stove they can find and there being nothing I can do about it.
The new house has a gas stove was admittedly something I was looking for, but we ran into less of them as we were looking. The stove we inherited in the purchase is a Bosch, and the computer in it is having some sort of poltergeist level temperature read error, and randomly will turn off the oven and cease taking any inputs until we flip the braker, sometimes in the middle of cooking.
The experience makes me want to go for an even stupider gas stove rather than a smarter stove with more failure points, cause every repair guy our home warranty sends to look at it can change out a part in our drier, but has no idea what could possibly be wrong with the stove. They change out a random part (but not the logic board, which I imagine is what is failing) and shrug, in a way that I can only imagine would happen if I tried to take a tesla to a neighborhood shop because something was wrong with the auto pilot. Does anyone have experience with a smart stove failing and getting it fixed?
The coil electric stoves are dumb and they work forever, but I've never met one with a level surface. I'm not sure if thats just because the apartment ones are SO cheap.
We have gas that runs up to our twin pack heater/ac, up to our dryer, and up to our stovetop. Our long term projects are to replace the rooftop twin pack with an efficient combo heater/cooler that is electric only, replace the gas dryer with a new efficient electric dryer, and replace the stove top with an induction one.
Unfortunately, those projects are very long term and very expensive...but one day!
Discusses big building but also how Big Gas have been running scare campaigns about The Guberment Taking Your Home Stove.
Some 40 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions come from boilers, furnaces, and hot water heaters.
Welp I guess we found the "you all did WHAT when you were younger?"
To be fair, in the northeast natural gas has been far cheaper to run than electric heating. Heat pumps stop working in many of the severe cold spells we get, and until recently they were fairly shit efficiency wise. For example, if my house went all-electric, our heating bill would probably double or more and we'd have to completely redo our panel and other services to switch from gas stove to electric. Also, our generator would no longer be big enough (I'm in rural NH where power goes out fairly regularly with major storms, and can often be a week until it returns, usually in dead winter where the pipes would freeze)
Running gas in rural areas makes sense because of safety and reliability. It's really not part of the conversation.
I donno how common this is, but I recognize that my own bias against electric comes from years of apartments providing the shittiest coil stove they can find and there being nothing I can do about it.
The new house has a gas stove was admittedly something I was looking for, but we ran into less of them as we were looking. The stove we inherited in the purchase is a Bosch, and the computer in it is having some sort of poltergeist level temperature read error, and randomly will turn off the oven and cease taking any inputs until we flip the braker, sometimes in the middle of cooking.
The experience makes me want to go for an even stupider gas stove rather than a smarter stove with more failure points, cause every repair guy our home warranty sends to look at it can change out a part in our drier, but has no idea what could possibly be wrong with the stove. They change out a random part (but not the logic board, which I imagine is what is failing) and shrug, in a way that I can only imagine would happen if I tried to take a tesla to a neighborhood shop because something was wrong with the auto pilot. Does anyone have experience with a smart stove failing and getting it fixed?
The coil electric stoves are dumb and they work forever, but I've never met one with a level surface. I'm not sure if thats just because the apartment ones are SO cheap.
It blew my mind when I realized that my cooking was terrible because most recipes are written for a gas stove (and mention this nowhere).
I donno how common this is, but I recognize that my own bias against electric comes from years of apartments providing the shittiest coil stove they can find and there being nothing I can do about it.
The new house has a gas stove was admittedly something I was looking for, but we ran into less of them as we were looking. The stove we inherited in the purchase is a Bosch, and the computer in it is having some sort of poltergeist level temperature read error, and randomly will turn off the oven and cease taking any inputs until we flip the braker, sometimes in the middle of cooking.
The experience makes me want to go for an even stupider gas stove rather than a smarter stove with more failure points, cause every repair guy our home warranty sends to look at it can change out a part in our drier, but has no idea what could possibly be wrong with the stove. They change out a random part (but not the logic board, which I imagine is what is failing) and shrug, in a way that I can only imagine would happen if I tried to take a tesla to a neighborhood shop because something was wrong with the auto pilot. Does anyone have experience with a smart stove failing and getting it fixed?
The coil electric stoves are dumb and they work forever, but I've never met one with a level surface. I'm not sure if thats just because the apartment ones are SO cheap.
My coils are under glass...or maybe I have an induction stove? I'm not sure. But it's flat, heats evenly and if I'm doing something real big that will take too long to heat up I probably should be using my outdoor propane jet burner anyway.
The only thing I'm bummed I can't really do on my stove is Wok stuff.
I donno how common this is, but I recognize that my own bias against electric comes from years of apartments providing the shittiest coil stove they can find and there being nothing I can do about it.
The new house has a gas stove was admittedly something I was looking for, but we ran into less of them as we were looking. The stove we inherited in the purchase is a Bosch, and the computer in it is having some sort of poltergeist level temperature read error, and randomly will turn off the oven and cease taking any inputs until we flip the braker, sometimes in the middle of cooking.
The experience makes me want to go for an even stupider gas stove rather than a smarter stove with more failure points, cause every repair guy our home warranty sends to look at it can change out a part in our drier, but has no idea what could possibly be wrong with the stove. They change out a random part (but not the logic board, which I imagine is what is failing) and shrug, in a way that I can only imagine would happen if I tried to take a tesla to a neighborhood shop because something was wrong with the auto pilot. Does anyone have experience with a smart stove failing and getting it fixed?
The coil electric stoves are dumb and they work forever, but I've never met one with a level surface. I'm not sure if thats just because the apartment ones are SO cheap.
My coils are under glass...or maybe I have an induction stove? I'm not sure. But it's flat, heats evenly and if I'm doing something real big that will take too long to heat up I probably should be using my outdoor propane jet burner anyway.
The only thing I'm bummed I can't really do on my stove is Wok stuff.
If it turns red and hot without a pot or pan on it it's normal electric. Induction only turns on when a pot is on the stovetop (and doesn't work with all materials)
I donno how common this is, but I recognize that my own bias against electric comes from years of apartments providing the shittiest coil stove they can find and there being nothing I can do about it.
The new house has a gas stove was admittedly something I was looking for, but we ran into less of them as we were looking. The stove we inherited in the purchase is a Bosch, and the computer in it is having some sort of poltergeist level temperature read error, and randomly will turn off the oven and cease taking any inputs until we flip the braker, sometimes in the middle of cooking.
The experience makes me want to go for an even stupider gas stove rather than a smarter stove with more failure points, cause every repair guy our home warranty sends to look at it can change out a part in our drier, but has no idea what could possibly be wrong with the stove. They change out a random part (but not the logic board, which I imagine is what is failing) and shrug, in a way that I can only imagine would happen if I tried to take a tesla to a neighborhood shop because something was wrong with the auto pilot. Does anyone have experience with a smart stove failing and getting it fixed?
The coil electric stoves are dumb and they work forever, but I've never met one with a level surface. I'm not sure if thats just because the apartment ones are SO cheap.
My coils are under glass...or maybe I have an induction stove? I'm not sure. But it's flat, heats evenly and if I'm doing something real big that will take too long to heat up I probably should be using my outdoor propane jet burner anyway.
The only thing I'm bummed I can't really do on my stove is Wok stuff.
Does the surface get hot/stay hot without a pan on it? If so, it's not induction. Induction stoves use magnetic fields to induce a current in the pan, which produces heat via electric resistance. The stove itself only gets warm due to conduction from the hot pot. They also heat up really fast. And are pretty pricey. My current and last-house ranges are both the electric-coils-under-glass type. They work well enough but I'd love to have induction instead. Gas was cool the couple of times I cooked on it but my fear of fire is strong and having just open flames on the cooktop wigs me out.
Discusses big building but also how Big Gas have been running scare campaigns about The Guberment Taking Your Home Stove.
Some 40 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions come from boilers, furnaces, and hot water heaters.
Welp I guess we found the "you all did WHAT when you were younger?"
To be fair, in the northeast natural gas has been far cheaper to run than electric heating. Heat pumps stop working in many of the severe cold spells we get, and until recently they were fairly shit efficiency wise. For example, if my house went all-electric, our heating bill would probably double or more and we'd have to completely redo our panel and other services to switch from gas stove to electric. Also, our generator would no longer be big enough (I'm in rural NH where power goes out fairly regularly with major storms, and can often be a week until it returns, usually in dead winter where the pipes would freeze)
Running gas in rural areas makes sense because of safety and reliability. It's really not part of the conversation.
It is though, as it's vastly cheaper to supply gas in cities (in our local city, you just tap into the street line compared to my buried tank) and has a meaningful effect on electrical infrastructure.
I think it makes a ton of sense for cities to go electric as it reduces building complexity, risk from CO poisoning/fire and concentrates more greenhouse gasses at electrical generation, but I hope they have money for grid investments. Also, just trying to provide some color as to why it was there in the first place.
I've noticed many of these discussions completely ignore that cities were once towns and have a lot of legacy infrastructure that's hugely expensive to replace and can place a burden on residents.
Discusses big building but also how Big Gas have been running scare campaigns about The Guberment Taking Your Home Stove.
Some 40 percent of its greenhouse gas emissions come from boilers, furnaces, and hot water heaters.
Welp I guess we found the "you all did WHAT when you were younger?"
To be fair, in the northeast natural gas has been far cheaper to run than electric heating. Heat pumps stop working in many of the severe cold spells we get, and until recently they were fairly shit efficiency wise. For example, if my house went all-electric, our heating bill would probably double or more and we'd have to completely redo our panel and other services to switch from gas stove to electric. Also, our generator would no longer be big enough (I'm in rural NH where power goes out fairly regularly with major storms, and can often be a week until it returns, usually in dead winter where the pipes would freeze)
Running gas in rural areas makes sense because of safety and reliability. It's really not part of the conversation.
It is though, as it's vastly cheaper to supply gas in cities (in our local city, you just tap into the street line compared to my buried tank) and has a meaningful effect on electrical infrastructure.
I think it makes a ton of sense for cities to go electric as it reduces building complexity, risk from CO poisoning/fire and concentrates more greenhouse gasses at electrical generation, but I hope they have money for grid investments. Also, just trying to provide some color as to why it was there in the first place.
I've noticed many of these discussions completely ignore that cities were once towns and have a lot of legacy infrastructure that's hugely expensive to replace and can place a burden on residents.
I've read that all new NYC buildings will have to use electric heat. Not only is gas cheaper here, but under the current setup landlords generally pay for heat. If we switch to electric I imagine that tenants will pay for it (wouldn't surprise me if insulation quality also drops significantly, but hopefully they've accounted for that in the building codes).
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
IMO a good glass top electric stove is going to work better than a cheap gas stove. Something I really like about my glass top is how evenly it heats. You don't get that telltale ring around your pan where the flame is hottest on a cheap gas stove. You get that even with higher end stoves. No so with my glass top. Having the coils heat the glass which in turn heats the pan really evens out the heat in a way the old ceramic coils and gas can't match. It's also way easier to clean. Induction stoves probably heat more evenly but they are $$$ and out of my price range.
ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
Honestly I just hate the oven on my electric. The stovetop is fine, but the oven is so uneven that food can sometimes take almost twice as long because the temperature control is crap.
I don't think I've ever had an oven that didn't do that.
I never had an oven that did until we bought our house 2.5 years ago. It's a pretty great feature coming from decades of "well, I guess I'll give it 20 minutes or so and then put the food in."
I've never had an issue with the electric stove/oven we have right now, but when I was a kid the one my parents had was abysmally bad.
I really wish more heat pump systems embraced a storage tank or geothermal, because my heat pump is practically useless below 20 F. I've got the thermostat set to switch to the furnace if outdoor temps get that low because the thing will run for 8 hours a day otherwise. It runs the defrost cycle 20% of that which runs the furnace anyways.
Steam - Synthetic Violence | XBOX Live - Cannonfuse | PSN - CastleBravo | Twitch - SoggybiscuitPA
IMO a good glass top electric stove is going to work better than a cheap gas stove. Something I really like about my glass top is how evenly it heats. You don't get that telltale ring around your pan where the flame is hottest on a cheap gas stove. You get that even with higher end stoves. No so with my glass top. Having the coils heat the glass which in turn heats the pan really evens out the heat in a way the old ceramic coils and gas can't match. It's also way easier to clean. Induction stoves probably heat more evenly but they are $$$ and out of my price range.
This is interesting, We are pretty much a cast iron skillet household for nearly everything, and since the whole pan just gets hot I dont notice this as much. I assume you dont use cast iron on your glass top, but I also assume that my ideas of them being insanely scratch-able is dated.
In general, I'm not usually one to reject tech innovation, but since I personally dont find great joy in cooking I get pretty easily frustrated in the kitchen when shit goes wrong. Going back to gas, which is how I grew up and learned to cook, was comforting, But I'm not against researching and considering electric in future upgrades, personally.
Having an appliance glitch out because of a computer issue is way more frustrating than just having a computer problem, though. I have 8 devices in this house that can just get me to the internet if my PC explodes, but no back up if my stupid stoves motherboard wasn't designed to DETECT HEAT accurately (ITS ONLY JOB! ARG!!), We still have pretty dumb cars, dumb refrigerator/washer and dryer/dishwasher, and I worry about more complex failure points if my my laundry needs updates wifi all of a sudden. It makes me feel like an old lady to type this, but it is how I genuinely feel.
Most of the pots and pans I use are stainless steel but I use cast iron on my glass stovetop to sear meats and cook a few specific dishes. I've never had an issue with it scratching anything. I mean, when I accidentally spill something that burns onto the glass I use a razor to scratch the carbon off, so if that doesn't scratch the surface I think pans are unlikely to do it.
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MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
IMO a good glass top electric stove is going to work better than a cheap gas stove. Something I really like about my glass top is how evenly it heats. You don't get that telltale ring around your pan where the flame is hottest on a cheap gas stove. You get that even with higher end stoves. No so with my glass top. Having the coils heat the glass which in turn heats the pan really evens out the heat in a way the old ceramic coils and gas can't match. It's also way easier to clean. Induction stoves probably heat more evenly but they are $$$ and out of my price range.
This is interesting, We are pretty much a cast iron skillet household for nearly everything, and since the whole pan just gets hot I dont notice this as much. I assume you dont use cast iron on your glass top, but I also assume that my ideas of them being insanely scratch-able is dated.
In general, I'm not usually one to reject tech innovation, but since I personally dont find great joy in cooking I get pretty easily frustrated in the kitchen when shit goes wrong. Going back to gas, which is how I grew up and learned to cook, was comforting, But I'm not against researching and considering electric in future upgrades, personally.
Having an appliance glitch out because of a computer issue is way more frustrating than just having a computer problem, though. I have 8 devices in this house that can just get me to the internet if my PC explodes, but no back up if my stupid stoves motherboard wasn't designed to DETECT HEAT accurately (ITS ONLY JOB! ARG!!), We still have pretty dumb cars, dumb refrigerator/washer and dryer/dishwasher, and I worry about more complex failure points if my my laundry needs updates wifi all of a sudden. It makes me feel like an old lady to type this, but it is how I genuinely feel.
Same. It sure seems like a lot of times features are added solely to increase the chance of repairs or replacement. Or in order to make them reliable, the initial cost would be too high so they install the $.02 thermostat instead of the $.10 one.
I've had the same experience as many - grew up with gas, only electrical were terrible coil stovetops.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
IMO a good glass top electric stove is going to work better than a cheap gas stove. Something I really like about my glass top is how evenly it heats. You don't get that telltale ring around your pan where the flame is hottest on a cheap gas stove. You get that even with higher end stoves. No so with my glass top. Having the coils heat the glass which in turn heats the pan really evens out the heat in a way the old ceramic coils and gas can't match. It's also way easier to clean. Induction stoves probably heat more evenly but they are $$$ and out of my price range.
This is interesting, We are pretty much a cast iron skillet household for nearly everything, and since the whole pan just gets hot I dont notice this as much. I assume you dont use cast iron on your glass top, but I also assume that my ideas of them being insanely scratch-able is dated.
In general, I'm not usually one to reject tech innovation, but since I personally dont find great joy in cooking I get pretty easily frustrated in the kitchen when shit goes wrong. Going back to gas, which is how I grew up and learned to cook, was comforting, But I'm not against researching and considering electric in future upgrades, personally.
Having an appliance glitch out because of a computer issue is way more frustrating than just having a computer problem, though. I have 8 devices in this house that can just get me to the internet if my PC explodes, but no back up if my stupid stoves motherboard wasn't designed to DETECT HEAT accurately (ITS ONLY JOB! ARG!!), We still have pretty dumb cars, dumb refrigerator/washer and dryer/dishwasher, and I worry about more complex failure points if my my laundry needs updates wifi all of a sudden. It makes me feel like an old lady to type this, but it is how I genuinely feel.
Back when I had a gas stove I was mostly using cheap stainless steel pans. These days I mostly use nonstick aluminum pots/pans these days. However I have a nice cast iron dutch oven I use a bunch. My current stove is around 11 years old and is a bit scuffed but there are no big scratches. I tend to do the shake flip thing with my pans so there is plenty of opportunity to get scratched.
We have a glass top combo in our apartment and it works fine. The plus side is it's 100% easier to clean than gas. My old gas stove you had to take apart to clean and was always a pain. Other than giving large veggies a roast, I'm not sure I can really tell the difference between the 2.
The major game changer was induction. Sadly our new townhome didn't have an induction option, but I'll get one eventually. I was able to cook on one at a friends house and it was amazing. From what I can tell, the only major downside is that the large stove versions have more electronics in them than are probably needed (touch controls...) and seem to have decent issue rate.
My old electric stove would boil water so much faster than my current gas one. Weak little flames are no match for direct contact with a solid red coil.
My old electric stove would boil water so much faster than my current gas one. Weak little flames are no match for direct contact with a solid red coil.
That's interesting... we got a gas stove for the first time when we moved and we have some of those copper core pots and everything cooks so fast you have to really be on your toes if you're trying to sauté onions and garlic or stuff like that.
My old electric stove would boil water so much faster than my current gas one. Weak little flames are no match for direct contact with a solid red coil.
That's interesting... we got a gas stove for the first time when we moved and we have some of those copper core pots and everything cooks so fast you have to really be on your toes if you're trying to sauté onions and garlic or stuff like that.
well for any actual cooking with stuff in a pan or pot, I never use maximum heat. Medium high at the most even for a sear on a steak. It really only matters for water boiling imo.
And also the flames on my gas stove are not large...
Gas stoves aren't necessarily better for the time it takes to heat something up, but rather the time it takes to adjust heat up or down. Induction stoves are as responsive as gas, but are 2-4x the price of traditional gas or coil stoves.
But I will say that for some areas it makes sense to go to electric heat with heat pump technology, but still nowhere near ready for others. Here in Chicago where it can regularly hit -10F, electric resistance heating would be 2-3x more expensive than gas (meaning $5-600+/mo for 4-6 months a year), and heat pumps just don't work well enough at those temperatures to be a primary/sole heat source.
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That_GuyI don't wanna be that guyRegistered Userregular
I reckon geothermal is the real future for home heating and cooling. A heat pump is at its most efficient when it's exchanging heat with a substance about ground temperature. The upfront cost needs to come down a lot but drilling holes straight down is a pretty straightforward task that should become easier with better automation. We're already seeing it used with the latest oil wells so it's only a matter of time before it trickles down to the average home builder.
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If you don't think you'll have to take advantage of the reusable feature then I'd say that the wax seems just as slimy and gross when you're swapping out a really old toilet as a new ring, vs who knows how long until that rubber breaks down. It looks like it is the same stuff that the flaps are made out of and while those last a long time it is a lot less trouble to replace those than the toilet ring, not to mention the damage the latter would cause before you noticed.
I used a pretty basic plan meant for 2x4’s and plywood, but substituted the 2x6’s I had on hand, and managed to come up with my own dimensions that would do two things. One, match the height of my table saw so I can use this workbench as an in-feed/out-feed table, which would have been incredibly useful to have during this project. Two, keep the tabletops narrow enough to fit in my car’s trunk space with the backseats down, because I’m cheap and couldn’t bring myself to rent a truck for a couple sheets of plywood.
It’s not beautiful - some of the old wood I used had a bit of warping, and it took me a while to find a setup for holding the frame at a right angle while driving the pocket hole screws, so there’s some gaps and crevices I could probably avoid with better planning/materials/experience.
But it works! It’s the right height, it’s the biggest work surface I have, and I attached some heavy duty leveling casters so I can roll it around and tweak the height as necessary. For now I’m rolling it around just because I can.
And at least half of the frustrations involved with building this thing are solved by having it done - the biggest of which, trying to run a sheet of plywood balanced on a single in-feed roller through a table saw (and coming out on an out-feed ‘table’ made up of a pile of alternating 2x4’s with a sheet of hardboard on top) is not something I ever want to do again, and now I don’t have to.
yeah I have a half sheet of warped particle board that serves this function for me
full sheets are just nasty to try and move around
fuck up once and you break your thumb / if you're happy at all then you're god damn dumb
that's right we're on a fucked up cruise / God is dead but at least we have booze
bad things happen, no one knows why / the sun burns out and everyone dies
I had a full 8’ sheet cut roughly into thirds at the store, so it wasn’t too unwieldy, just awkward as hell. I still thought about using the circular saw, but I just didn’t trust myself (or my warped ‘straight’ edge) to keep it steady.
And I should have said it earlier, but thanks all for the tips and advice, this worked out really well, and I’m already thinking about upgrades.
What kind of casters did you use? I'd love to get some that are leveling.
Thanks - the most obvious mistakes (mostly one board sticking out awkwardly from the top frame) are hidden in those pics, but I’m happy with it.
As for the casters, I used these:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08PVFJ14B?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
To clarify, they can roll and level, but the leveling pops out some little legs that lift it slightly off the wheels, which you have to lower to move again. They’re not too much of a pain to adjust, thankfully, but it is a little tight - if my hands were bigger I’d probably have been cursing more while trying it out.
Of course I know the reason they don't do that is that it cuts into their profits and our complaints aren't enough to justify that.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/12/new-york-city-bans-new-natural-gas-hookups-in-step-toward-all-electric-future/
Discusses big building but also how Big Gas have been running scare campaigns about The Guberment Taking Your Home Stove.
Welp I guess we found the "you all did WHAT when you were younger?"
To be fair, in the northeast natural gas has been far cheaper to run than electric heating. Heat pumps stop working in many of the severe cold spells we get, and until recently they were fairly shit efficiency wise. For example, if my house went all-electric, our heating bill would probably double or more and we'd have to completely redo our panel and other services to switch from gas stove to electric. Also, our generator would no longer be big enough (I'm in rural NH where power goes out fairly regularly with major storms, and can often be a week until it returns, usually in dead winter where the pipes would freeze)
The new house has a gas stove was admittedly something I was looking for, but we ran into less of them as we were looking. The stove we inherited in the purchase is a Bosch, and the computer in it is having some sort of poltergeist level temperature read error, and randomly will turn off the oven and cease taking any inputs until we flip the braker, sometimes in the middle of cooking.
The experience makes me want to go for an even stupider gas stove rather than a smarter stove with more failure points, cause every repair guy our home warranty sends to look at it can change out a part in our drier, but has no idea what could possibly be wrong with the stove. They change out a random part (but not the logic board, which I imagine is what is failing) and shrug, in a way that I can only imagine would happen if I tried to take a tesla to a neighborhood shop because something was wrong with the auto pilot. Does anyone have experience with a smart stove failing and getting it fixed?
The coil electric stoves are dumb and they work forever, but I've never met one with a level surface. I'm not sure if thats just because the apartment ones are SO cheap.
Unfortunately, those projects are very long term and very expensive...but one day!
Running gas in rural areas makes sense because of safety and reliability. It's really not part of the conversation.
It blew my mind when I realized that my cooking was terrible because most recipes are written for a gas stove (and mention this nowhere).
My coils are under glass...or maybe I have an induction stove? I'm not sure. But it's flat, heats evenly and if I'm doing something real big that will take too long to heat up I probably should be using my outdoor propane jet burner anyway.
The only thing I'm bummed I can't really do on my stove is Wok stuff.
If it turns red and hot without a pot or pan on it it's normal electric. Induction only turns on when a pot is on the stovetop (and doesn't work with all materials)
Does the surface get hot/stay hot without a pan on it? If so, it's not induction. Induction stoves use magnetic fields to induce a current in the pan, which produces heat via electric resistance. The stove itself only gets warm due to conduction from the hot pot. They also heat up really fast. And are pretty pricey. My current and last-house ranges are both the electric-coils-under-glass type. They work well enough but I'd love to have induction instead. Gas was cool the couple of times I cooked on it but my fear of fire is strong and having just open flames on the cooktop wigs me out.
It is though, as it's vastly cheaper to supply gas in cities (in our local city, you just tap into the street line compared to my buried tank) and has a meaningful effect on electrical infrastructure.
I think it makes a ton of sense for cities to go electric as it reduces building complexity, risk from CO poisoning/fire and concentrates more greenhouse gasses at electrical generation, but I hope they have money for grid investments. Also, just trying to provide some color as to why it was there in the first place.
I've noticed many of these discussions completely ignore that cities were once towns and have a lot of legacy infrastructure that's hugely expensive to replace and can place a burden on residents.
I've read that all new NYC buildings will have to use electric heat. Not only is gas cheaper here, but under the current setup landlords generally pay for heat. If we switch to electric I imagine that tenants will pay for it (wouldn't surprise me if insulation quality also drops significantly, but hopefully they've accounted for that in the building codes).
I mean it'll still be +5-10 minutes before I actually deal with it. But it's the thought that counts.
I never had an oven that did until we bought our house 2.5 years ago. It's a pretty great feature coming from decades of "well, I guess I'll give it 20 minutes or so and then put the food in."
I really wish more heat pump systems embraced a storage tank or geothermal, because my heat pump is practically useless below 20 F. I've got the thermostat set to switch to the furnace if outdoor temps get that low because the thing will run for 8 hours a day otherwise. It runs the defrost cycle 20% of that which runs the furnace anyways.
This is interesting, We are pretty much a cast iron skillet household for nearly everything, and since the whole pan just gets hot I dont notice this as much. I assume you dont use cast iron on your glass top, but I also assume that my ideas of them being insanely scratch-able is dated.
In general, I'm not usually one to reject tech innovation, but since I personally dont find great joy in cooking I get pretty easily frustrated in the kitchen when shit goes wrong. Going back to gas, which is how I grew up and learned to cook, was comforting, But I'm not against researching and considering electric in future upgrades, personally.
Having an appliance glitch out because of a computer issue is way more frustrating than just having a computer problem, though. I have 8 devices in this house that can just get me to the internet if my PC explodes, but no back up if my stupid stoves motherboard wasn't designed to DETECT HEAT accurately (ITS ONLY JOB! ARG!!), We still have pretty dumb cars, dumb refrigerator/washer and dryer/dishwasher, and I worry about more complex failure points if my my laundry needs updates wifi all of a sudden. It makes me feel like an old lady to type this, but it is how I genuinely feel.
Same. It sure seems like a lot of times features are added solely to increase the chance of repairs or replacement. Or in order to make them reliable, the initial cost would be too high so they install the $.02 thermostat instead of the $.10 one.
I've had the same experience as many - grew up with gas, only electrical were terrible coil stovetops.
Back when I had a gas stove I was mostly using cheap stainless steel pans. These days I mostly use nonstick aluminum pots/pans these days. However I have a nice cast iron dutch oven I use a bunch. My current stove is around 11 years old and is a bit scuffed but there are no big scratches. I tend to do the shake flip thing with my pans so there is plenty of opportunity to get scratched.
The major game changer was induction. Sadly our new townhome didn't have an induction option, but I'll get one eventually. I was able to cook on one at a friends house and it was amazing. From what I can tell, the only major downside is that the large stove versions have more electronics in them than are probably needed (touch controls...) and seem to have decent issue rate.
That's interesting... we got a gas stove for the first time when we moved and we have some of those copper core pots and everything cooks so fast you have to really be on your toes if you're trying to sauté onions and garlic or stuff like that.
well for any actual cooking with stuff in a pan or pot, I never use maximum heat. Medium high at the most even for a sear on a steak. It really only matters for water boiling imo.
And also the flames on my gas stove are not large...
But I will say that for some areas it makes sense to go to electric heat with heat pump technology, but still nowhere near ready for others. Here in Chicago where it can regularly hit -10F, electric resistance heating would be 2-3x more expensive than gas (meaning $5-600+/mo for 4-6 months a year), and heat pumps just don't work well enough at those temperatures to be a primary/sole heat source.