Category Archives: Yard & Outdoors

Tools Every Do-It-Yourself Landscaper Needs

August 26, 2022   Matt

Tools Every Do-It-Yourself Landscaper Needs

There is no doubt that choosing to do your own landscaping is the best way to go for many people. Not only do you save a lot of money by not hiring professionals to do the work, you also will get to enjoy a lot of time outside. Landscaping is good exercise and a great way to spend an afternoon.

Any do-it-yourself landscapers will require a variety of tools, from basic to high tech, in order to get the job done right. Here are some of the tools that are essential for doing your own landscaping.

Software: Yes, believe it or not, a good landscaping program can be essential when you are designing the layout of your lawn and garden. I use the Master Landscape & Home Design by Punch! Software. I bought this program for my wife back in 2003, and we have used it a lot ever since. The 3D Photoview technology allows us to put in digital pictures of our home and garden and then implement any changes on the screen before we put them into effect in our yard. The PlantFinder allows us to find plants that are the most appropriate to the soil and climate conditions where we live, and it even has a calculator to help us estimate the costs of the plants from different stores. This is about as high tech as I get when it comes to landscaping, though.

Lawn mower: You might not realize it, but mowing the lawn is an essential part of any landscape. A lawn mower is therefore a critical part of doing your landscaping yourself. Buying a lawn mower can be a tricky business- you can get models with everything included but the kitchen sink. The fact is, a second hand lawn mower that works can be just as good as a brand new model straight from the catalogues. If you have a large area to mow, you will probably want to invest in a riding lawn mower to save time and aching muscles.

Weed Whacker: There are points on your lawn that your mower just won’t reach, around fences and right beside patios, around any fruit trees or berry canes. For these, you will need a good weed whacker. The best models come with several attachments, appropriate to chopping down a variety of weeds- especially if you have slacked off and allowed some of the hardier varieties to grow up. These can be death for the average string-and-coil whacker, and you will need some good plastic to stand up to them.

There are several other tools that every landscaper needs, most of them relatively low tech in comparison to those above. A variety of shovels, rakes, and pruning instruments are all essential, as are a good pair of gloves. All of these tools will be dependent on what you have planted in your landscaping, and more complicated designs may even require some basic knowledge of electricity, carpentry, and hydroponics.

Read More

Plumbing Like A Pro: Tips, Tricks, And Techniques 5

August 21, 2022   Matt

Plumbing Like A Pro: Tips, Tricks, And Techniques

Plumbing is a lot more that just fixing a leak under the sink. It is truly a huge system that needs to be maintained. It has so many techniques and equipment that require research and hard work. Do you have what it takes? Regardless of your answer, here are some tips to help you.

Try to limit the amount of hair that goes down your drains. Hair can become tangled up in the pipe and end up blocking up the them, preventing water from flowing smoothly. Buy a cheap screened drain cover to put over your drain to stop any hair from going down and clean it off regularly.

Set the temperature on your hot water heater to a temperature that does not exceed 120 degrees. This helps to save energy and prevents the water from becoming too hot and potentially scalding someone in your household. Older models that do not have a temperature setting should be set on Medium.

One of the things that you can do to safeguard your home from any serious plumbing issues is to install a flood alarm. This is a device that will sound when it comes in contact with water, alerting you if there are any issues in a particular area in the house.

If water backs up from one sink to another, it is because the lines are connected. The part of the branch line for one device might be higher than another, but most likely there is also a blockage in the branch line connecting the two devices as well. This blockage must be cleaned.

Check the plumbing in your home. If your home has the flexible gray polybutylene water pipes, you need to have a plumber come out and assess their condition. These types of pipe are prone to failure and can lead to very costly repairs if they have a failure within your home.

Always keep your garbage disposal clean. You can do this in many ways. Pour some dish soap in and let the disposal run for a few minutes with some cold water. Be sure to run it regularly, if not, it can cause rust. To eliminate foul odors, grind lemon or other citrus peels. You can clean the walls of the disposal by grinding small fruit pits or egg shells.

Tank-less water heaters are a great space saving alternative to traditional tank units. They are available in many models, some for indoors and some models are capable for outdoor mounting. Tank-less water heaters are known as great money savers when it comes to your water bill.

Got a leaky pipe? In many cases you can repair this yourself without the expense of a plumber. If a joint is leaking, tighten it with a pipe wrench. If the leak is coming from a damaged section of pipe, you can try repairing with a store-bought patching kit. One method involves applying waterproof tape to the section of pipe where there is leakage. Before applying the tape, make sure the pipe is thoroughly dry. Make sure that the tape covers two to three inches on either side of the breakage in the pipe.

Now you see that plumbing is a lot more than haphazardly fixing a tiny leak. It takes skill and work. You don’t want to create more problems, so why not take some time to learn how to do it right? The above tips should have given you some pointers on how to do that.

Read More

The Challenge of Landscaping Small Yards

August 16, 2022   Matt

The Challenge of Landscaping Small Yards

Landscaping projects, no matter how big or small, requires thorough research and advanced planning. This is also true in landscaping small yards. One should be meticulous in doing such because of the limited space requires just the exact and perfect fitting ornaments so that the project would look good despite its size.

Modification
Landscaping is all about changing the land’s appearance, modifying such for personal satisfaction or to upgrade the land’s value in the market. The change could vary from simply changing the plants in it or arranging the structures in the area to hauling up, digging further and constructing materials that could really drastically change the landscape.

Perfect Fit
In doing the modifications for small yards, one must first assess the size or the part of the land to be used. Based on the calculated size, you may proceed with research first and then you can plan.

In researching, the same rule applies as to those projects with big landscapes. You must first know about the place well enough, its weather conditions, the type of soil in it and the plants that would grow in the place.

Information as abovementioned could be gathered in landscaping books and magazines. The Web has also vast information and pictures for such projects that you may want to see first to have an idea of the different styles that you may opt to replicate or combine one or two styles. You may also create your own if you are knowledgeable in the process. And asking around will also a lot, especially when you get to talk with people whose landscaping are excellent. You would really get an idea of what to do and also what not to do in the process so that you’d have minimal errors once you sit down on your project.

When you have a small yard, planning should be simple yet very detailed. The type of plants that you may opt to use should be placed accordingly. Be mindful of the color and the sizes of the plants, as well as the positioning of each because you can actually make the land appear larger than it is through the use of such ornaments.

Structuring Each Element
When you plan on landscaping for a small yard, you need to have a structure for everything. You need to know how much space would each ornament consume because in the process, you need to maximize everything. You need to utilize each free space to make the land appear larger than it really is and so that no one could actually fault the place as to having to much at such its small size.

You may still have other materials in the area like some fence or a water element such as a small pond or simple fountain maybe, this just depends on the placing of each material. All these could be laid out in the plan, but you can still do minor changes once you’re already into the process and is actually seeing what the blueprint looks like in reality.

Landscaping small yards may be quite a challenge. But when one is equipped with the right knowledge and the proper materials, mistakes would be minimal. The advantage of having a small yard is that it is easy to maintain so you are free to choose from a wide variety of ornaments as long as you’re sure that those would survive in the place’s conditions.

Read More

The Secret Of Successful Fiber Optic Cable Management

August 11, 2022   Matt

The Secret Of Successful Fiber Optic Cable Management

Why is proper fiber optic cable management so critical?

Service providers have deployed more and more fiber optic cables for their high bandwidth, low costs, greater reliability and flexibility. But just deploying is not enough; a successful fiber network also requires a solid infrastructure based on a professional fiber optic cable management system.

Fiber optic cable management affects a network’s reliability, performance, cost and maintenance. It provides the ability to reconfigure network, restore service and implement new services quickly.

Four goals to achieve with professional fiber optic cable management

1. Protect fiber optic cable from microbends and macrobends loss

Microbends are small deformities in the optical fiber and macrobends are larger bends of the fiber cable. Fiber bends beyond the specified minimum bending radius can cause signal loss or even break the fiber, causing service disruption.

As a rule of thumb, the minimum bending radius should be bigger than ten times the outer diameter of the fiber cable. Telcordia recommends a minimum 38mm bending radius for 3mm fiber optic patch cords.

Fiber optic cable management system should provide bend radius protection at all points where a fiber optic cable makes a bend. This helps ensure the network’s long-term reliability; thus reduces the network operation cost by reducing network down time.

2. Well defined fiber optic cable management routing paths

The leading cause of fiber optic cable minimum bend radius violation is improper routing of fibers by fiber installation technicians.

In a proper fiber cable management system, routing paths are clearly defined and easy to follow; such that the technician has no other option but to route the cables properly.

Well defined routing paths reduce the training time required for technicians and increase the uniformity of work done. It also makes accessing individual fibers easier, quicker and safer.

3. Easy access to installed optical fibers

Allowing easy access to installed fibers is critical in maintaining proper bend radius protection. The system should be designed to ensure that individual fibers can be installed or removed without inducing a macrobend on an adjacent fiber. Accessibility is critical during network reconfiguration.

4. Physical protection of installed optical fibers

Well defined fiber optic cable management system physically protects the fibers from accidental damage by technicians and equipment throughout the network.

Fiber optic cable management system procurement

When making the decision on purchasing your fiber optic cable management systems, the goal is getting the most cost-effective system that provides the best cable management, flexibility, and growth capabilities.

Going with the cheapest approaches for fiber optic cable management can cost more money in the long run. A strong fiber cable management system will enable you to extract the maximum value from your installed optical fiber networks.

Specifying Fiber Cable Management Systems: Cost and Value

As a means of keeping operational costs down, service providers around the world are increasingly turning to systems integrators to install their networks.

This practice allows the service provider’s technicians to focus on operations and maintenance, rather than network installation. There is, however, an inherent risk in this practice.

As the purchasing decision for the fiber cable management system moves from the service provider’s engineering group to the systems integration prime contractor, the cable management features of the distribution system are generally not specified.

What can happen, then, is the equipment installed may lack key features and functionalities. In light of the importance of proper cable management within the ODF, the service provider needs to specify the basic requirements for the cable management system.

There are several industry-standard specifications that can assist service providers in writing specifications for their cable management systems. Two of these specifications are:

• Telcordia Generic Requirements for Fiber Distribution Frames GR-449-CORE, Issue 2, July 2003

• Network Equipment Building System (NEBS) Generic Equipment Requirements, TR-NWT-000063

Read More

Cold Weather and Frozen Pipes

August 06, 2022   Matt

Cold Weather and Frozen Pipes

Cold weather is a big problem for home and property owners- especially if you’ve moved and your home is setting empty. Why? PLUMBING!
If your home gets too cold, the water in your pipes can freeze overnight and then burst in the day when it warms back up. This leaves the potential for extensive flooding and water damage to your home. The pipes you need to be most concerned about are those that have the most exposure to the cold — outdoor hose faucets, swimming pool supply lines, underground sprinkler systems, and plumbing in unheated basements, crawl spaces, attics and garages. Pipes that run against exterior walls are also at risk.
What to do…
When it’s cold outside, you should periodically check all the faucets in your home. If it doesn’t work or water is just a trickle you may have frozen water in your pipes. Attempt to locate the frozen area by looking in the area most likely to freeze- i.e. the coldest. Use a heat lamp, space heater, hair dryer or electrical heat pad to begin to thaw out the pipes. Remember to keep the faucet open as you work. That’s because running water will help melt the ice faster. Apply heat until full water pressure is restored, then consider going to your neighborhood hardware store to purchase insulation for the areas of the pipe that froze (to help prevent it from happening again).
DO NOT use any sort of blow torch or open flame to warm the pipes. I can not stress this enough, so let me say it again. DO NOT use an open flame. First off, an open flame is a fire hazard and if you are working in a confined area there is a threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Every year there is a story in the news of some person burning down their home or suffocating themselves to death while working on frozen pipes.
The second reason not to use an open flame is if it gets too hot you can melt your pipes (especially PVC plastic pipes). Third, too much heat too quickly creates the potential for an explosion. That’s because water expands as it gets hot. A blow torch or other device will cause the water to boil, and boiling water trapped in the middle of a frozen pipe has no place to expand- so it explodes.
The last piece of advice is always the best… If you fail to unthaw the pipe, call a licensed plumber before the pipe breaks.
How to keep it from happening…
– Your home should have inside valves on your outdoor water supply lines. Close them, then open the outside faucet and let the water drain. Leave the outside faucet open all winter.
– Drain and store outside garden hoses.
– If you haven’t already done so, drain the water from your swimming pool and lawn sprinkler system. As mentioned above, insulate plumbing that’s most susceptible to freezing. You can find supplies at your local hardware store, Home Depot, or Lowes.
– During severe cold weather, let the faucets drip. Although it’s no guarantee, even a trickle of water can help prevent pipes from freezing and an open faucet gives the water someplace to run once it starts to warm up.
– Keep the home temperature set to no lower than 55 degrees Fahrenheit. I know it’s tempting to turn the thermostat down when you leave town for a few weeks or if you have an unsold home that is setting empty, but the higher heat bill is quickly offset by the cost of repairing a pipe and cleaning up water damage.
– Lastly, if you experience flooding or water damage from a broken pipe, be sure to watch the home for mold or mildew. Black mold can be a serious after effect to a flooded home that’s far worse to deal with than the actual water damage.

Read More

Fiber Optics Technician Jobs

August 01, 2022   Matt

Fiber Optics Technician Jobs

Knowledge in fiber optics practical applications can be a huge ticket to any rewarding profession. It should be obvious, with the number of optical fiber pipes being laid underground, the innumerable requests for materials concerning fiber optics, and the ever innovating practical uses of fiber optics. That makes fiber optics technician jobs the most coveted and highly rewarding entries in the job market as of today.

Here’s a compilation of fiber optics technician jobs available in the job market.

Optical Fiber Cable Manufacturing

The work of the Optical Fiber Cable Manufacturing involves the production of: optical fiber, fiber optic amplifiers, attenuators and filters, fiber optic receiver, transmitter, transceivers, fiber optic terminals and terminators, optical fiber polishing machines and all sorts of products that is used directly in optical fiber installation and optical fiber systems.

The fiber optics technician jobs are the fiber optics cable design engineer, fiber optics production engineer, fiber optics test engineer, fiber optics cable technician, fiber optics test and measurement technician, fiber optics marketing specialist, fiber optics sales engineer, and the fiber optics installation technician. Most requirements for these fields aside from 1 to 2 years relevant work experience would be a college degree, preferably engineering, electrical, or relevant technical majors. You can also enhance your chances by entering the Fiber Optic Training Program at Corning Cable Systems (at: www.corningcablesystems.com). This training program gets you acquainted with practical fiber optics, installation, maintenance and design, as well as testing and troubleshooting.

Optical Fiber Sources and Detectors

Since fiber optics has extensive usage as sensors and detectors on a number of sensor equipment including SONAR, fiber optics technician jobs on optical fiber sources and detectors are becoming a job market regular.

The fiber optics technician jobs are the fiber optic source researcher, fiber optic source engineer, fiber optics source technician, fiber optics source application engineer, fiber optics sales engineer and fiber optics marketing specialist. Like the optical fiber cable manufacturers, the fiber optics technician jobs for optical fiber sources and detectors requires 1 to 2 years relevant work experience and a college degree, preferably from engineering, electrical, or relevant technical majors. Though any college degree may be acceptable, technical know-how gain from these courses would help practical job applications. Of course you can alos opt to delve into fiber optic training such as those listed on the online FOA Board (at www.thefoa.org/instructors/class-reqs.htm).

Read More
« Older posts
Newer posts »

  • Subscribe

Support us!

If you like this site please subscribe