All Forum Posts by: Matt R.

The service data sheet that came with the 10-year-old Hotpoint (GE) 18-cubic-foot top-mount no-frost in my house says that with the freezer knob at 5 (on a scale of 1 to 9) and the fresh-food knob (if equipped) at C, which is also the middle, you should have:

70 F ambient: Fresh food 33-39 F, freezer -4 to +2 F, percent run time 26 to 36%

90 F ambient: Fresh food 33-41 F, freezer -4 to +4 F, percent run time 40 to 56%

The service data sheet that came with my 3-year-old Frigidaire (Electrolux) 18-cubic-foot top-mount no-frost at my rental says that with no load, the doors closed, and the controls set in the middle, you should have:

65 F ambient: Fresh food 35-40 F, freezer +2 to +8 F, percent run time 25% to 35%

90 F ambient: Fresh food 35-40 F, freezer 0 to +5 F, percent run time 45 to 55%

Another rule of thumb I have heard is that if you have a box/tub of ice cream in the freezer, it should be soft enough that you can scoop it - not a solid block but not runny either.

Like @Jennifer Rysdam and @Joe Splitrock said, cleaning the coils can help.  If they're underneath, you can get a long skinny brush made for doing this; it looks kind of like a giant pipe cleaner or bottle brush.  The general store may not have it, but the hardware store might, and an appliance parts store definitely will.  Usually you take off the grille in the front and use the brush from the front.  Don't be afraid to unplug the fridge and take off the cover (sometimes cardboard) on the back at the bottom; usually you need a 5/16" nutdriver, and sometimes that gives you a good shot at the condenser coil. Some GEs have the coil rolled into a drum shape back there, and you can clean those off with a rag once you take off the back cover.

If you can see and reach the condenser fan, you can (carefully) use a brush or rag or vacuum cleaner on the fan blades; they tend to get dusty as well.  The fan blade is relatively thin aluminum (older models) or plastic (newer), so don't go crazy when cleaning it.

Tip: If you take the cover off, put the screws in your pocket, or put them in a plastic bag up on the kitchen counter.  That way you don't punt them under the fridge or cabinets, or down the sink drain, while you're working.  :)

(Aside: The Frigidaire is the first fridge I've owned that has had an electronic control board in it. It will beep at you if you leave the fresh-food door open for more than 5 minutes. You can also get it to do some other tricks by pushing the fresh-food door light switch a few times in a row, including starting a defrost cycle, and running the compressor, defrost heater, inside light, and evaporator (freezer) fan individually. This information is on the piece of paper that is folded up in an envelope behind the grille at the bottom front.

Because of the control board, I bought a small one-outlet surge protector, and plugged the fridge in through that.  Ask me in 5 or 10 years if I think it helped or not.)

I agree with your contractor's description of the process.

The engineer will probably charge several hundred dollars for a report, and when you get it, it might be that the rehab costs are too high to make the property a good deal.  If the seller is willing to negotiate, you might be able to use the report to get the price down; if not, you just spent $400+ on your own education.  :)

If you have worked with a home inspector or real estate agent in that area before, they can probably refer you to a structural engineer.  (A home inspector can verify what's wrong, but most of them aren't qualified to write up a report with recommendations on how to fix the problems.  An engineer can write that report.)  Keep in mind that the engineer may pay referrals to people that recommend him or her.

If you don't know anyone in the area, you might check at the local landlords' association or real estate investors' association.  They will either have members who are structural engineers, or members who have hired one before and can give you a recommendation.

Does it have one dial, or two?  On the two-dial kind, the "freezer" one sets how long the compressor runs (it's the thermostat), and the "fresh-food" one sets how much cold air from the freezer is allowed to leak into the fresh-food compartment (it controls a flap in the ducting).  Most people don't understand this.  If you start with both dials in the middle, it often works to leave the fresh-food dial in the middle, and turn the freezer dial a couple of steps towards "colder".

Also, was it turned down or off while the unit was vacant?  Most fridge user manuals I have seen say to allow the fridge to run for at least 24 hours before deciding that the temperature is wrong.

Are the bathrooms right on top of the crawl space?  If so, could you run a vent through the wall, down through the floor, through the crawl space, and out the side of the house?  It'd be kind of a long run, and you might need to check how long of a vent run the fan can take, but it might be an option.

Broan makes some fans that are thin enough to mount in a wall that has 2x4 studs.  However, they say that the vents must run up, not down - not sure why they spec that.  It might be worth asking them why.  If it's possible to run the vent down, you might be able to put one of those in the bathroom wall, fairly high up, and then run the vent down through the wall, into the crawl space, and through the side of the house.

You can also get "remote" bath fans, which work kind of like a central air conditioner - you install a small vent grille in the bathroom, put the motor and blower above the ceiling or under the floor, and run ductwork from the grille to the motor and from the motor to the outside.

Like the others said, light(s) and a camera.

If the house doesn't have an existing porch light or outdoor light in a good spot, but does have a window that has a good view of the dumpster, you can get a cheap clamp light (the kind with a socket, big aluminum bowl, cord and plug) at the hardware store, stick a floodlight lamp in it, clamp it to a chair or sawhorse or similar, and point it out the window.  Maybe plug it into a timer, so it only comes on at night.  (This trick won't work with a motion-detector floodlight; the motion detector won't work through glass.)

One option for the camera is a "trail cam" or "deer cam" - basically a digital camera in a waterproof box with a big battery.  You can have it take still pictures every X seconds, and some of them can take a picture when they detect motion.  Hunters strap a camera like this to a tree and use it to take pictures of deer and other critters at night.  If it can look through a window, you can put it inside the house; if there's a tree or bush outside where you can hide it, you might try that - but then you risk somebody stealing the camera, too, if they notice it.  The sporting-goods section of Wally World has a couple, and a sporting-goods store will have more.

@Pat L. Is it possible that the meter or service drop used to be there - maybe before the pool was installed, if the house didn't always have a pool?  Although for $1.5mil and built in 2005, maybe it always had a pool.

Usually there's a ground coming out of the meter to a ground rod pretty close to the meter.  If the meter got moved for some reason, I could see somebody wondering what to do with the now-unused ground wire, and deciding that making it "look attached" was better than letting it hang free or cutting it off.

Another idea - maybe the previous owner had some kind of antenna wire (TV, shortwave, ham radio) coming through this window, and this was a ground connection for that?  You could loosen the screw, slip another wire under the screw, and tighten it up to make a "good enough" connection for most radio purposes.  This assumes that the wire that disappears into the wall goes to ground, somewhere.

Disclaimer: I am not a professional electrician.

You had a loose connection at that receptacle, probably at the terminal screw for the badly charred white wire (the top screw in the first picture, the right screw in the second picture).  It might have also been at the small brass tab that links the two screws on that side of the receptacle - if it was damaged at some point, like somebody started to twist the tab off but then decided not to, it could also cause this problem.

The receptacle that you plugged the toaster oven into was "downstream" of this burned one.  One set of white and black wires at the burned one came from the breaker panel, and the other set of wires went to the receptacle where the toaster oven was plugged in.

When the heavy load of the toaster oven (probably 15 to 20 amps) was put on the circuit, that loose connection heated up, and caused the melting and charring.  The loose connection also limited the current that the toaster oven was drawing, which is probably why the breaker didn't trip.

If you had plugged in a small load (like a phone charger, or a table lamp, or similar - much less than 1 amp), instead of the toaster oven, you probably wouldn't have had this problem.

A GFCI probably wouldn't have helped you here, either.  All the GFCI cares about is that all the juice that goes out on the black wire comes back in on the white wire.  If any of the juice going out on the black wire goes somewhere else - like, through a nick in the wire insulation either inside the outlet or on the cord of an appliance, or into the water if you accidentally drop an appliance in the sink - then a GFCI will trip.

Some electricians like to "pigtail" the outlets.  Instead of using both screws to feed power to the rest of the outlets "through" this outlet, they will run the wire from the breaker panel, the wire to the rest of the outlets, and a short wire into a wire nut.  The other end of the short wire connects to one of the screws on this outlet. You can still have the same problem if the wire nut is loose (applying a load downstream will melt the wire nut), and you can have a problem at the pigtailed outlet if the screw for the short wire is loose - but only if you plug something into the pigtailed outlet.

Some home inspectors have a plug-in gadget made by Ideal or Fluke that allows them to find things like this.  This gadget measures the voltage at an outlet, applies a heavy load for a short time, measures the (lower) voltage under load, and calculates the percent voltage drop.  You can watch the measured voltage drop go up as they test outlets that are further along in the string from the breaker panel.

You can DIY this test with a voltmeter and either a small space heater or a hair dryer. The voltmeter can be any digital voltmeter that will read 120 V AC. It helps to get a 2-prong plug with some cord on it (cut it off of a dead appliance), strip the ends of each wire a half-inch or so, wrap each wire around one test prod, and then tape it up really good with electrical tape - that way you don't need three hands for the next part. Or, if your meter leads unplug at both ends, get a replacement set of leads, cut off the test prods, and wire the red and black wires directly to a 2-prong plug. If you like gadgets, get a "Kill-a-watt" or similar plug-in meter online, or at some hardware stores, for about $30 to $40.

Go to an outlet, plug in your meter, and write down the reading. It's normal for it not to be exactly 120.0 V AC, and it's normal for it to bounce around a few tenths of a volt while you watch it. If it's consistently way low (below maybe 110.0 V) or way high (above maybe 125.0 V), you may want to seek help from an electrician before proceeding. Now, plug in the space heater or hair dryer, and crank it up to high. Watch the  voltmeter while you do this. It is totally normal for the voltage to drop down when the heater/dryer kicks in, but let the heater/dryer run for a couple of minutes and write down the lowest voltage you see. Then, turn the heater/dryer off and do some math. If the voltage dropped 5% or less (like, it was 120.0 V with the heater off, and 114.0 V at its lowest with the heater on), then the circuit from the breaker panel to that outlet is in pretty good shape. If it's between 5% and maybe 8%, that's not as good, but it might be OK. If it's over 10%, then you should investigate further, or have an electrician investigate - you've got a loose connection somewhere between that outlet and the breaker box, which is potentially dissipating a lot of heat inside the wall somewhere. Back-stabbed connections, loose wire nuts, and terminal screws that aren't tightened all the way down on receptacles and switches can cause this problem.

Is that way more than you wanted to know about it?  :D

I had Ron's Roofing out of Independence replace the roof on my residence right after I bought it, about ten years ago.  The previous roof wasn't done right and leaked; after it was replaced, no more leaks.

They also did my parents' house a couple of years later and they have been happy with that roof as well.

http://www.ronsroofingcompany....

I am not affiliated with Ron's Roofing, other than as a customer.

Hello all!

I have one rental so far, and each month, I set aside 1/12th of the gross rent for future vacancies.  Since my property has been rented for two years now, I have enough money in the vacancy fund to pay myself the full retail rent for two months.

It's not a problem for me to keep putting money in the vacancy fund at this rate, but I was just curious what other landlords do - how many months of vacancy reserve do you consider to be "enough"?

Thanks!

Disclaimer: I only have one property so far. I am not affiliated with any sites mentioned.

I use Cozy.co for background checks and collecting rent. The tenants have Cozy pull the money out of their checking account, and then Cozy puts it in my bank account a few days later. This doesn't cost me anything. Cozy also offers a credit report and background check service that costs money. I wrote a detailed post about it here:

https://www.biggerpockets.com/...

They did pay cash for the security deposit and first month's rent. They asked about this ahead of time and I agreed; I printed up a receipt and then dated and signed it once I had the cash in hand.