The GutterBrush Blog

You’ve got a few extra minutes so you grab your watering can and dump a bunch of water on your dry flowers. Simple enough.

Or is it? If you water your annual and perennial flowers badly, you’ll waste time – and have sickly plants. Water them well and you’ll save yourself time and be rewarded with healthy, beautiful blooms.

1. Water early in the day. Watering in the cool of morning (even before dawn) minimizes evaporation if you’re using a sprinkler. It also allows foliage to dry off quickly, preventing fungal diseases.
2. Avoid wetting the blooms. Some blooms close up if wet or fall off in a hard spray.
3. Water occasionally and deeply rather than often and lightly. You want water to soak in as deeply as possible, encouraging the plant to send down deep roots. The soil should be moist to the bottom of the plant’s roots when you insert your finger into the soil.
4. Learn to look for signs of dryness before flowers wilt, including a loss of sheen on leaves and hard soil surrounding the plant. Never let flowers wilt. This weakens them and makes them more prone to a host of diseases.
5. Check flowers in containers once or even twice a day, since they can need watering that often in hot, sunny or windy weather.
6. Let technology help you. If you have difficulty keeping up with watering needs, check out your local garden center’s supplies of soaker hoses, drip emitters (including some for containers), and timers to connect to your outdoor faucet. Or try adding water-absorbing polymer crystals to your containers – the crystals can cut watering needs significantly.
7. Mulch. Not only does this suppress weeds, but it keeps the soil around your flowers cool and moist, minimizing the need for water.

Helpful Tips

• In optimum (loamy) soil conditions, most plants need 1 to 2 inches of water per week.
• As you design and plant your garden, try to cluster plants according to watering needs.
• Avoid planting flowers whose watering needs will be difficult to keep up with. If you live in New Mexico, for example, it’s silly to fight nature by planting water-guzzling plants. Source: eHow.com

You may have heard people complaining about how much electric energy are their air conditioners consuming. Ever wondered why does this happen? In most of the cases, it is because the air conditioner isn’t the proper one for that room, and therefore, it is either overloaded.

So, how to choose the best air conditioner?

As the users of air conditioning systems may be aware, the capacity of these machines is measured in BTUs, or more likely, British Thermal Units and, in order to choose the most suitable one for a room/hall, people should respect a few principles.

First of all, they should know exactly the sizes of the hall/room, and that’s because there are multiple air conditioners. Some of them have a small capacity – for small rooms, most likely, a capacity that can go up to just 3500-5000 BTU – while some of them have a big capacity. Though, the last ones are mostly used in industrial purposes and are only for hypermarkets, deposits and halls.

As well, people should also know how many people will be living or passing by through that room, how many of the walls have windows and what is the usual temperature in a sunny day, when the room/hall is at its peek of insulation. This is because, usually, if the room meet different characteristics than the regular ones, the air conditioners should have a little higher capacity.

Therefore, before buying an air conditioner it is important to find out what is the minimum BTU that we are in need of. In normal conditions, for a room, it should be enough somewhere near 5000 BTU. But even more important, is the EER coefficient.

What’s EER? It’s the abbreviation for Energy Efficiency Ratio and basically, it measures the efficiency of the tower. For the usual household air conditioners, the perfect EER should be near 11. If it’s lower, then these machines shouldn’t be bought even if they may be cheaper. Though, they will require a lot of electric energy for functioning and the results won’t be astonishing.

Of course, the larger air conditioners should have an EER of 13, but in reality, this coefficient is way beyond this number. Though, an 13 EER is commonly accepted to be suitable for most of the large spaces. Though, for one room, or maybe too, a 11 EER with 5000 BTU would be more than enough.

Source

We’ve had a few days of warm weather here on the East Coast lately and we have been running the ceiling fans in our offices to keep the rooms cool without having to turn on our central air conditioner quite yet. Even though its been relatively mild outside we have a few rooms that get a lot of sun and warm up rather quickly.

While sitting in the office yesterday I commented that even though the fan above me was on medium speed that it didn’t feel as though it was cooling the room very well. It was at that moment that I realized I had forgotten to switch the fan direction from “warming” to “cooling.”

You see, most ceiling fans will go in two directions: clockwise and counter-clockwise. Most ceiling fans sold these days have a small switch right “above” the blades (between the fan blades and the ceiling, on the “stem” of the fan) that control the fan blade blowing direction: right or left. Some fan manuals call these directions “forward” and “reverse” but I can never remember which direction is which. This fan direction switch is a pretty important feature because the ceiling fans will move air differently for each direction. You usually just need to flip the switch on the fan to change direction, but remember to use the same safety methods you used when you were cleaning your ceiling fan.

You can tell which way you fan is blowing by turning it on low and watching which way the blades spin. If the fan blades start moving to the right, then your ceiling fan is blowing clockwise. If the ceiling fan blades start moving to the left then your ceiling fan is blowing counter-clockwise. Simple so far… but which direction do you want for most fans?

Ceiling Fan Spinning Counter-Clockwise: Makes a room cooler by blowing the air downward. When the fan is spinning in a counter-clockwise direction you should feel a cool breeze coming down and around the room.

Ceiling Fan Spinning Clockwise: Makes a room warmer by creating subtle updraft which pushes the warm air near the ceiling down along the walls and into the room. When the fan in spinning in a clockwise direction you should not feel as much of a breeze.

Need to remember on the fly? Here’s a phrase that helps the memory: Counter-Clockwise Cooler (You just need to remember there are three C’s when it comes to ceiling fans!)

Stay cool this summer!

As the weather keeps getting warmer, home improvement projects keep getting added to many people’s to-do lists. From cleaning out gutters to painting to cleaning the house from top to bottom, the project list seems never ending. Here are some new tools and tips to make the most common summer home improvement projects a breeze so you can enjoy the warm weather with family and friends.

1. Painting Projects

Once you’ve determined whether you are doing simple indoor touch-ups or completely changing the paint scheme outside of your home, you need the right tools to help make the job easier and mess-free.  For bigger projects use a ladder pail that makes larger painting projects a snap. Fill the pail with up to a gallon of paint and attach it to your ladder with a fixed bracket. This tool prevents you from making multiple trips up and down the ladder.

2. Gutter Cleaning

Cleaning out gutters can be an annoying task, especially when using all sorts of homemade contraptions that dangle from ladders or sit unsteadily on rooftops. Be sure to use a large spoon or specific gutter cleaning scoop to get the debris out. Use water to loosen up caked on dirt and use a gutter scoop to remove. Make sure to flush your gutters with water once you’ve removed the debris — it’ll help them flow during those inevitable summer showers! You might also want to consider using a gutter protection system at the time you clean out your gutters.

Finally, while you’re working on your summer home improvement projects, make it fun! Open the windows, put on some music, and let the warming sun motivate you to get through the tasks so you can enjoy doing something else.