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March home-maintenance checklistBecome a moisture detective to keep your house in good repair.
February home-maintenance checklistIt’s time to check your home’s energy efficiency and get the garden ready.
January home-maintenance checklistPrevent water damage from bursting pipes and leaks in your home.
Garages: From grime to glamSpruce up your parking palace with these 10 DIY improvements.
December home-maintenance checklistHere are a number of tasks for keeping your home cozy and secure.
October maintenance checklistNow's the time to get your home and yard ready for winter.
September home-maintenance checklistThis is a great month for tackling home projects.
August home-maintenance checklistFend off pests, pamper your lawn and clear those drains.
July home-maintenance checklistUse the good weather to make fixes outdoors and clean and repair.
© American Standard, Kyoto America and iRobot
© iRobot
© iRobot
© Kyoto America
© Control4
© Corbis
© Mike Kemp/Getty Images
© FirstSmart Sensor Corp.
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All right, all of you grade school teachers out there, just back off. I know I can't spell, or type for that matter, but, that doesn't make me a bad guy. i'm quite loveable, to tell the truth, just dumb.
Hello, I'm new here and just had a quick question for spring time. I hqave a lot of wildlife, Deep, Geese, Ducks, Rabits, Etc. in my yard. Is there anything I can put arround flowers to keep the animals from eating them? I love having my animals, but would also like having flowers. I'd appreciate any help I can get.
Company's name is Kyodo America.
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17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
By Marilyn Lewis of MSN Real Estate
Clever ideas, technology and materials are changing how we care for our homes — and how they will care for us. Home automation, domestic robots and a variety of intriguing products and approaches bring us closer to the ideal of a long-lasting, low-maintenance house.
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
1. Meet the robots
Think about automating your home maintenance and a picture of Rose, the Jetsons’ robot maid, may leap to mind. But robotics experts don’t all believe in such a tin-can servant. Some are betting on many single-purpose bots. Nancy Smith of iRobot, manufacturer of this waterproof Looj gutter-cleaning robot, envisions “lots of robots doing lots of individual tasks but doing them together.” She imagines a floor-mopping robot docking into the dishwasher and a vacuuming robot docking into the trash can to deposit its load and recharge. A vacuuming robot might detect a wine stain and summon a carpet-washing bot to remove it. Yet another bot would sort and place your clean, RFID (radio frequency identification) tagged clothes into the proper drawers. You’ll schedule all this to take place while you’re gone, Smith predicts. By the time you return, your little fleet would be hibernating. “It’s the idea of having a home that can maintain itself by having many robots that can do a task each,” Smith says. “We say that’s easier than having one robot that can do everything.” The Looj ($129.99 to $169.99 at the iRobot store.) is controlled by a wireless remote that doubles as a detachable handle. You climb the ladder, set the Looj into the gutter trough and wait as it works, covering a 60-foot section in 10 minutes. Its three-stage auger breaks up clogs and brushes needles, leaves and debris out of gutter pipe, climbing over gutter straps and downspout holes.
- Bing Shopping: Looj gutter-cleaning robot
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
2. Roomba: Inside the robot revolution
While iRobot’s upcoming products are a deep secret, it’s no secret that it’ll be some time before robots can take over dusting or unloading the dishwasher. Even simple human tasks are more complex than they seem, says Nancy Smith, iRobot spokeswoman. Constructing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, for example, involves a zillion little tasks and decisions: Where’s the peanut butter — in the fridge or the cupboard? Which cupboard? How’s a robot to know? The problems that designers must solve next include figuring out how to lift, identify and place things. “The amount of force you need to pick up a grape versus a rock is very different, and how does a robot autonomously figure it out?” Smith asks. Currently, iRobot has 4 million bots in homes worldwide, including a floor-washing robot, robotic pool cleaners and gutter cleaners, shop sweepers, a camera-and-communications bot and the popular Roomba robotic vacuum (prices range from $129.99 to $549.99 at the iRobot store; check out Roomba art on Flickr). Batteries are the most expensive component. About 80% of Roomba software is “about how not to be stuck,” Smith says. Designers of the iRobot have yet to make the Roomba vacuum stairs. One Roomba user, who says he’s happy with his robot, says that the machine is best for light maintenance and that he won’t replace his thorough weekly session with a vacuum cleaner.
- Bing Shopping: Find a Roomba
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
3. “How many times do I have to tell you to program the lawn mower, Junior?”
Every homeowner dreams of escaping the lawn-mowing chore. Several manufacturers make self-propelled, intelligent mowers that munch away while you attend to more important things. Most of Kyoto America’s line of LawnBott robotic lawn mowers ($2,299 to $2,799, depending on the model and the area to be mowed) use a perimeter wire tacked to the earth with plastic pegs to define the work area. Grass grows over the wire, making it unobtrusive. The wire is connected to the robot’s docking station, which sends instructions to the mower. “You program it for which days of the week and what times you want it to cut and just let it do its thing,” says John Tarvin of KA. “At my house, my robot is scheduled for Monday, Wednesday and Fridays, from 8 a.m. until noon. Each of those mornings it will leave its docking station automatically at 8 a.m. and cut.” The lithium-ion battery runs three to four hours, depending on yard conditions. At the end of its workday or if it runs out of battery life, the mower returns to the charging station. Robot mowers trim grass frequently so it doesn’t grow tall. In rain, built-in sensors send it home to dock. Already, 170,000 robots are chewing away on European lawns. American homeowners should catch up soon, Tarvin says. These quiet, zero-emissions robots use about $7 to $10 in electricity a year.
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
4. Self-scouring pool
Autonomous cleaners are perfect for swimming-pool maintenance. It’s a big market: 6 million U.S. homes have in-ground pools. There are pool-cleaning robots from several manufacturers, including Aqua Products’ Aquabot, iRobot and Pentair. Aquabot turns out two types ($700 to $2,000, depending on pool size and cleaning time): The 30-year-old bot type crawls on little tank treads, vacuuming and trapping dirt and debris in a microfilter. Most American home pools are in Sun Belt states where they’re used year-round, with four times the normal wear and tear on the cleaning machines. For these, newer jet cleaners keep up best, says Gil Erlich of Aqua Products. The jets scoot along on their own ejected streams of filtered water. With propulsion machinery eliminated, they are simpler, more reliable and more efficient. Erlich calls them virtual “mobile filtration systems” that can trim use of a pool’s main pump and filter system by as much as 70%, saving hundreds — even thousands -- of dollars on energy bills. Some day, he says, the robots will produce chlorine salts for pool cleaning and run on solar-powered batteries.
- Bing Shopping: Want to buy an Aquabot? Find one
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
5. Vacuum cleaner lite
Speaking of single-purpose tools, here is DrawerVac, which is just what it sounds like: a vacuuming drawer. Do you need this? Absolutely not. But it sure looks like fun. And it beats hauling out the vacuum cleaner to clean up a little mess. Install it as an accessory to a central home vacuum system or as a stand-alone appliance, in new or existing homes, in a kitchen, shop, bathroom or laundry; under a cabinet or inside a drawer. You pull out the drawer, drop or brush in light waste and debris, then close the drawer to activate the vacuum. The drawer is 12 inches wide, 22.6 inches long and 1.2 inches deep. The cost, installed, is about $200.
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
6. Forget gutter cleaning
Going back to the subject of gutters, Owens Corning has come up with a simple remedy to reduce — if not eliminate — gutter cleaning, one of every homeowner’s most-loathed chores. The RapidFlow gutter drainage protection system is simply a strip of treated, porous, polyurethane foam that’s inserted into the gutter cavity to fill it up, allowing water to run through. Leaves, twigs, tree needles and pine cones bounce or blow off rather than collecting to create clogs. The foam comes in 5-inch and 6-inch widths. It’s treated with a UV coating and a fire retardant. Owens Corning’s Bert Elliot says that because the foam fits snugly, it has stayed in place in tests of winds up to 110 mph. You’ll need to brush some leaves and sticks off the top of the foam every few months. RapidFlow (in hardware stores) costs roughly $3 a linear foot. Compare it with gutter screens, at $1 to $2 a linear foot, and professionally installed metal guards that enclose the top of the gutter, at roughly $20 to $25 a linear foot.
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
7. A low-maintenance, plunger-free toilet
Toilet designers have been hard at work on two mundane yet vexing home chores: toilet cleaning and unblocking clogged toilets that could overflow, causing thousands of dollars in damage to floors, subfloors and ceilings. American Standard, one manufacturer tackling these problems, builds a high-performance line with “no-plunge technology.” You can also choose the EverClean porcelain glaze, which the company says inhibits the growth of mold, mildew and the bacteria causing toilet stains and smells. The Champion 4 elongated one-piece toilet pictured ($546 to $839, depending on whether you choose black, silver, bone or white) dispatches 70% more material than usual in each flush thanks to a 4-inch flush valve. The valve eliminates the rubber flappers that are such a headache to replace, so you’ll need to find something else to do on Sunday morning. And — not that you’d ever try it — the company claims the Champion4 can flush a bucket of golf balls all at once.
- Bing Shopping: Buy your own Champion4 toilet
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
8. Goodbye skuzzy sink snake
Imagine never having to unclog a drain again. This self-cleaning drain sounds revolutionary, but the concept is head-smackingly obvious: The PermaFLOW drain pipe (from $20) is transparent, so you see exactly what’s happening in the pipe, which replaces the P-trap in kitchen and bathroom sinks. If your sink starts running slow, you can turn the knob on the outside of the drain pipe to rotate a flexible rubber paddle inside the drain, dislodging the clog and pushing the accumulated stuff into the water stream. You can even retrieve dropped jewelry without taking the drain apart (see a YouTube video demonstration here). The drain pipe’s slight angle creates turbulence that helps keep clogs from accumulating. Six gaskets around the knob tested watertight in 31,000 rotations, according to the maker, PF WaterWorks in Houston.
- Bing Shopping: Buy a PermaFLOW drain pipe
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
9. Fiberglass windows live long, require little and keep you warm
Fiberglass-trimmed windows combine the virtues of several windows in one. While they’re about as pricey as wood, they’re as easy to care for as vinyl: just a wipe-down now and then. The annual ritual of inspecting, refinishing, sealing and treating for mold and rot that goes along with wood is unnecessary. Also, unlike vinyl (but like wood), fiberglass can be painted or stained. Serious Materials, headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., makes green construction materials, including fiberglass (insulated up to R-11) and vinyl windows for homes. Fiberglass is still a small slice of the window market, says Valerie Jenkins of Serious Materials. But, increasingly, Jenkins says, it’s seen as a higher-end, eco-friendly choice, since fiberglass outlasts other materials and is immune to thermal leakage that results when aging wood, aluminum and vinyl mold, warp, crack, bubble, rot or corrode.
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
10. Long-lasting, fire-resistant wood decks
Wood decks are gorgeous but eventually decay and must be replaced. A 2007 study on the life expectancy of building components by the National Association of Home Builders found that wood decks last about 20 years, in general — as long as 30 years in north-facing and dry areas, as few as 10 facing south. Also, in hot, dry, fire-prone regions, decks can be a fire hazard when wind-blown embers and ash are in the air. TimberSIL treated lumber was chosen by Environmental Building News as one of its top 10 GreenSpec products in 2004. TimberSIL ($2.25 to $2.50 a linear foot, compared with roughly $2.75 to $3.75 for top-quality composites and $1.50 for kiln-dried wood decking) “petrifies wood by treating it with silica,” creating a wood product that’s nontoxic, noncorrosive and a Class A fire retardant, says EBN editor Peter Yost. The manufacturer calls the stuff “glass wood,” since the glass is infused into the spaces between the fibers in the wood, a Southern yellow pine. “You can have a raging fire and it just sits there and looks at you,” says TimberSIL representative Rick Dixon (view a test on YouTube). Maintenance is the same as with other wood decks, but TimberSIL is warrantied for 40 years against rot and decay. It should last three to four times longer than a conventional wood deck, Dixon says.
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
11. X-ray vision at home
South Mountain’s innovation: Each new home comes with a “roughing” book filled with photos of all walls and ceilings -- keyed to a set of plans — shot after the wiring, plumbing and other fixtures are installed but before the walls are closed in. The books give homeowners and the professionals who work on their finished homes “perpetual X-ray vision” into the building’s walls and ceilings. “All new cars have an owner’s manual. Why don’t houses?” asks builder-designer John Abrams, in “Companies We Keep,” the story of his innovative residential building and home-design firm, South Mountain Co., in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Abrams tells of one client who returned home one evening to the sound of water dripping into the cellar from the wall above. A plumber used his roughing book to find the leaking pipe and spot exactly where to locate a joint in the pipe. Sure enough, when he made a neat cut into the drywall, the plumber went right to the leak and resoldered the pipe, eliminating the usual messy, expensive diagnostic search. Roughing books also help when adding a room, moving a wall and installing built-ins. Abrams says that if all homeowners, bankers, real-estate agents, insurers and building-code inspectors demanded similar documentation for homes they buy or work with, the costs of insurance, home maintenance, repairs and upgrades could be cut drastically. Or does that just make too much sense?
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
12. Wired home maintenance
Much of home maintenance in the future will be in the hands of appliances that communicate electronically and the networks that “talk” to them. Many high-end homes already use digital networks connected to the Internet to monitor and control functions such as security, interior and exterior lighting, landscape irrigation, entertainment and temperature control. Here’s the dashboard for the Control4 home-automation company, which uses an open platform through which developers can add home-control applications. Linking in home maintenance would be a next step, says Eric Smith, Control4’s chief technology officer. For example, your home’s network could e-mail you an alert when outside temperatures drop to a specified point so you can cover tender landscaping plants or insulate outdoor faucets. It could tell you when a light bulb needs changing by tracking the hours used against the product’s expected life and point you to the correct fixture. Intelligent appliances will tie into home networks: Your refrigerator, for example, could inventory radio-tagged groceries, phoning you at work to tell you to pick up ice cream or reach the grocery store to place an order for delivery of groceries. Control4 links its users' home networks to their utility companies so clients can watch their energy consumption and schedule their peak consumption for times of day when energy is priced lowest. “If it’s going to be really hot, you can use the wired home system to proactively cool your house before the peak-price hours hit,” Smith says. Other leaders in digital home networks are Lucid Design Group and AgileWaves.
- Video: 5 top home-maintenance tips
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
13. Smart fridge with a heartbeat
Upcoming generations of home appliances will be “intelligent.” GE, a leader in this area, is testing prototypes of refrigerators, clothes washers and dryers, microwaves, ranges and water heaters in the homes of selected company employees such as Mark and Dana Brian, here in their Louisville home’s smart kitchen. This washer-dryer pair (inset) reads signals from the utility company so the machines can schedule their use during times of day when electricity is cheapest. Appliances will be connected to home digital networks and, eventually to the Internet, predicts Gordon van Zuiden, president of cyberManor, a custom home-electronic integration company in Los Gatos, Calif. “Everything in the future will have a heartbeat that you can watch,” van Zuiden says. “There will be a little chip in there that tells the manufacturer or service company, ‘I’m doing great’ or ‘I’m not doing so well’ or ‘It would be good if you could help remotely and, if not, please send somebody out to fix me.’" The repair person might appear at your doorstep even before you saw a problem. There are security implications, though: Two-way digital communication among homes, utilities, security companies and other manufacturers and services opens channels that, despite precautions, might be exploited by outsiders. Prototypes of smart appliances have not yet made it to mass market, experts say, because they will generally cost more than most consumers are willing to pay.
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
14. Your eyes, everywhere
Increasingly, wired homeowners use remote cameras like this Panasonic BL-C111A, typically used in home security, to monitor conditions that could damage the home. Gordon van Zuiden of cyberManor, a custom home-electronic integration company, says such wireless surveillance minicameras can be a homeowner’s (or maintenance company’s) eyes in spots where it’s hard to reach or see: on a rooftop, for example. They’re also useful to watch a property when the owner is absent. “In second homes, we put in IP (Internet protocol) based networked cameras. We can look at the lawn (and) see if it needs mowing or watering,” van Zuiden says. “People also use them in second homes in ski-resort areas so they can see when a lot of snow has collected on the roof and they need to call someone to remove it.”
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
15. Contact sensors do home work
Cheap, readily available sensors can help with routine home-maintenance tasks or warn of potentially catastrophic home conditions. Eric Smith, the Control4 chief technology officer, schedules his Control4 home system to remind his teenage son to take the garbage can to the curb each week on pickup day. Smith attached a sensor to the can so that, if it hasn’t been moved on schedule, the son receives an e-mail alert. He could even set the system to nag the boy continually until the can is moved, which triggers the sensor, but so far has refrained. Mailbox sensors tell you when your mail has arrived. Homeowners can use contact sensors to remind them of regularly scheduled tasks, such as changing the furnace filter. If you have the means, you can route your alerts to a home concierge who comes in and performs the maintenance.
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
16. Moisture sensors that can save your bacon
Battery-operated sensors can be placed in a room to alert the homeowner to changes in temperature, lighting, occupancy and other conditions. GE’s wireless water/flood sensor alarm($53) is triggered when water contacts the sensor. It can be used to monitor the effectiveness of a sump pump or in a basement, bathroom or crawl space to monitor for floods, leaks or pipe breaks. Contact with water causes the device’s wireless transmitter to send you an e-mail or dial a phone number to alert you. A home automation network could also make it start up a sump pump. Another digital tool that can be used in home maintenance is a digital hygrometer, which measures humidity in the atmosphere. This Mold Alert Thermo-Hygrometer ($34) sounds the alarm when humidity climbs over 50% and increases the growth of mold, mildew, rot and dust mites, to which many people are allergic. To send communications, a sensor must be connected to a digital gateway like the iControl broadband home management network, ZigBee Home Automation or ZWave, which routes alerts to a computer, phone or a wireless iPod Touch.
17 innovative ways to take the grunt work out of home maintenance
17. Smart flood control
The FloodStopper System (about $800 to $1,500 installed) takes the job of moisture detection a step beyond sensors: It automatically shuts off your home’s water supply when a leak is detected from hoses, plumbing, water appliances or accidental overflows. It also detects water coming in from outside the house — sewage backups, a sump-pump failure or flooding in the neighborhood — and lets you know (although it doesn’t shut off the water supply when the trouble originates elsewhere). FloodStopper employs low-profile sensors, hard-wired and remote, at key points such as the water heater, floor drain, furnace, humidifier, air conditioner, bathroom, kitchen sink, dishwasher, refrigerator ice maker and laundry room. They’re linked to a control panel and a Honeywell shut-off valve on the main water line into the home. The system is the brainchild of FirstSmart Sensor Corp., based in Kelowna, British Columbia, and can be purchased from dealers or A-leak-detector.com. Another twist on this idea is the LiquidBreaker leak-detection system (about $1,000 on average), which electronically controls a series of valves installed in the home’s plumbing system, alerting you to problems through the Internet so you can shut off the water yourself.
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