Wireless Mini Dehumidifier

I bought this gadget from Ace Hardware shop at One Utama, costing me few ten bucks. Usually, I bought disposable Thirsty Hippo-something for absorbing excessive moistures at home, but it seems like going to incur relatively pricey ongoing $$.

Here is how it looks like.



In front, an indicator is available to show you the amount of moistures absorbed, relatively by different colours.






Back there, you get a socket to connect to power outlet to heat up the device to enable something called water crystal regeneration thingy



For first trial, I placed this in my very humid store room and one day after, the colour indicator turned to pink, phew! Then I went and recharged it for 7 hours and now back to purple colour and my store room got less moistures. Cheaper indeed.

More information here

http://www.olee.com.sg/prod_dehumid_reusablemini.html

Torturing this Pest!

To reward people who regularly visit my nerdy blog, please check out the 4th rat I've caught. Disgusting ya. :-p




Previous Post about Mouse Killing

Result of Weeds Killing - After 2 Weeks

The result is rather satisfying. Remember the trick to kill weeds is to apply appropriate dose of the herbicide. If overdosed, the leaves will die before it transports the venom to the root, on the other side the roots shall resist the poison if underdosed.

Previous Post on Weeds Killing

Typical Nerd in atypical Action - Mouse Hunt

I gotta admit home improvement process requires time, energy and persistency. It's like you're owning a very fragile kingdom castle and all sorts of missiles keep flying into your direction. Damn.

The weed problem is temporarily under control and the situation being monitored since the grasses turning yellowish as at today. There are 2 more trees I wanna chop down but the obstacle is they are further away into the bushes and I don't want to take the risk of being bitten by snakes or other ferocious creatures.

Not forget to mention too that my house was under attack by termites few months back but luckily I've discovered it early and forced back the offensive wave using DIY potions. Again, it will be kept under constant monitoring.

I've gave up about getting rid those little crippy and unwittingly numerious wall crawling things - lizards. They know where to hide, i.e. somewhere out of my reach, darn and they don't fall into the trap houses I bought, costing me RM10.00 with no apparent returns. Maybe someday I will just get a cat to do the work for me.

And then the Rats are(were?) here.

It started from downstair. First, these bastards bite their way through the washing machine's water outflowing plastic pipe. 1 meter long of pipe became 0.5 meter where 50% of it disappeared. Grgggg... I've used metal cable to form a barrier of entry to prevent them from reentrance.

They got brains! Then they almost crawled in through basin into the toilet from outside. I was like "What the hell". Grgggg.... again metal cable in action.

When I thought every possible "door" is closed, they struck one more time.

This time through the basin piping in the kitchen. They bite the pipe to nearly form a hole for them to enter. Thanks to my sensitivity to environmental changes, I've noticed the "security hole" before it is too late. It costs me RM20 to replace the basin pipes. I've put metal cables at the pipe hole outside but it seems to me will not be long lasting and I'm still in the middle of thinking a permanent solution.

So far, no more rat invasive activities detected at downstair. Peace.

Holy craps! I really need to shout. Suddenly at night I heard sounds of "things" running around above the ceiling. Googled about possiblities and found that they might be birds, rats, squirrels or others. Bought one box of ready-to-use 2 wood plates with glues and placed them above the ceiling. Guess what?! Both of the plates caught a rat, albeit small one. Emm... not really cost effective since the product is RM9 meaning I need to spend RM4.50 to catch a stupid rat? So I reverted to use conventional rat glue with manual application on corrugated cardboards. RM8 for 3 applications, roughly RM2.7 for a trap. 2 of it already being fruitful and the remaining one is still awaiting its precious owner.

Total rat killed so far: 4 in 3 months

The tough part during mouse trapping is that when you're going to hunt for them up the ceiling, you need to get ready for some body stretching and bending with excellent balancing. The roof structure is not a free to walk open space. Most spaces are limited by woods, joints and concretes. Also, you don't want to be misstep because you will be destroyed your gypsum ceilings and injured yourself. And prepare for lots of dusts and perhaps spiders.

Phew.. now I'm well trained in walking above there.

What's next? I need to strategize :-)

Get Ready for Massive Weeds Killing

Paint ball shooting? Nah, that's kid stuff.

I'm talking about killing real living beings here, even better they are just "sitting" around and let the massacre fall on them. MUAHAHAHA (Crazy laughing again).

The thing is like this. These irritating and potentially harmful weeds not really grow within my house sovereignty territory but somehow you know that one day they are going to "invade" your place. Check out the behemoth of weeds below:



See how tall are these trees? Luckily they are kinda far from my backyard. But the problem is there are signs of little similar monsters start to come nearby. I didnt notice them at first, luckily my mother in-laws warned us about it. If bad things happen without you knowing it beforehand, that's bad luck. However if someone've already warned you and you failed to take action to prevent or rectify it, that's stupidity. I'm smart of course.





As usual, to do any tasks in effective, efficient and safe manners, using the right tools is of utmost important.

Defensive equipments:
Safety boot
Sunray protective hat, goggle, mask

And long pants and long sleeve shirt.


Melee weapons:

Steel axe - Chop Chop Chop


Ranged weapons:

Backpack sprayer

Poison add-on:

Final death blow to the weed trees.

For the spraying part


My stash:






Costs:





The actual cost for the above stuff is cheaper than I budgeted for it. The final price of RM265 include a 10 steps tall aluminium ladder. Cheap.

It was and still raining at this moment and what I need is a clear day to start the one sided windfall sure win war.

Typical Nerd in atypical Action - Fixing Sliding Windows

7 hours! That's the time that I took to fix 2 sliding windows rolling problem. The whole windows consists of 3 sliding window, i.e 3 movable compartments and apparently 2 out of 3 of it were unable to slide a.k.a roll. This problem already exists for roughly 12 months and I never got the mood or interest to do-it-yourself repairing until today when I was like kinda hand-itchy and forcefully "slide" one of the window and you know what happened? That window ran out from its' rail. What the heck! It's time for a nerd to rescue THE world again.

I got totally no prior experience on this sort of fixing exercise and thus I made the first mistake, which was taking the entire compartment out and put it on a table and did my Jeffersonian-style skeletal analysis. Geez.

Basically that compartment is made of a big piece of tinted glass where edges are surrounded by protective rubbers, with top and bottom fixed aluminium parts and removable left and right aluminium parts. There are 2 rollers under the compartment and one of it spoiled, so I get Mrs. Nerdy to go out and get a replacement while I continue my works.

O ya, by the way the compartment is kinda heavy, at least for a nerd standard.

Lesson learned #1: If you just need to fix the rolling problem caused by roller out-of-sync from its rail, do not remove the entire compartment.

Mrs. Nerdy came back with a new roller compartment (Tiny accessory. Shouldn't cost a bomb I guess) and now my job is to put all the things back in place.

I tighten all the nuts and movable parts on the compartment and tried to put the compartment back to its' original location. Hit another bumper. No extra space for me to "squeeze" the compartment in. Apparently the height of the left and right movable parts are taller the height above the rail, thus no way to put it in with these parts attached.

Lesson learned #2: Don't attach the left and right parts first. Make sure you can put the compartment back to its' rail, then you can attach the parts.

When everything seems fine and I'm gonna to proceed to the final chapter. Shoot. the roller part was misaligned with the holes for screwing the nut between the bottom part and the side movable part. Getting frustrated here. I tried many ways to align them but yet failed miserably and Mrs. Nerdy starting to get impatient and "threaten"
to get external helps from so-called professional (Ya right).

Finally managed to do the alignment by using a steel wire and some hardware to maintain the constant height for the alignment.

Lesson learned #3: Need a better way to do the parts alignment. I'm curious how those seasoned repairer do this task.

By the way, there is a screw on the roller and you shouldn't tighten it at first. Do the installment first then you can tighten it to suit your window rail.

Lesson learned #4: Tighten the roller's screw after the installation.

Yeah. I installed the first compartment and started the works for the second one. The job gets easier once you got some experiences from the first one.

Yeah again. I installed the second one.

And shoot, I unwillingly yelled. There is sequence to follow when installing the compartments due to the fact the the compartments come with metal hook to lock each other when you close the entire windows. Geez.

Lesson learned #5: Check compartment installment sequences before do anything.

Hey, I don't have the comprehensive administration guide to study. So what.

As a workaround, you can temporarily remove one movable part of the affected compartment, arrange them properly and put back the part.

Done. Everything is in sequence and ROLL.

Lastly, make sure that when you close all the compartments, the intended locks actually work. For my case, some how the lock parts were misaligned, thus unable to lock one of the compartment. This is due to the fact that the rubbers enclosed the edges of the compartments were not properly adhesive to the glass.

Easy workaround. Take a hammer and knock on the sides of the compartments until the desired spaces are produced.

Lesson learned #6: You need a hammer.

Phew. What a day.

Added Some Pictures After Staying for 6 Months

I'm too smart, too nerdy and too lazy. There are tons of pictures I snapped inside my house but nevertheless lack the motivations to post them up. I changed my mind, so I decided to upload some of them for my own viewing pleasures. Don't criticise, I have done my best for the amount of time and resources granted.

FYI, when my house renovation was carried out, the cement price was RM9.50 per bag, now it is at least RM13.50. Almost 50% increase!, Phew luckily done this part earlier. Bang my head because kitchen cabinet and bedroom wardrobe are still in the list of todo, which I think will be darn expensive compared to previous quotations.


Shoe Shelve and a little plant on top of it.


That shelve costs me RM250, however I think it worth the money since it consists of a drawer for me to dump all stockings and 4 racks to place shoes.


A decorative item gave by my ex-colleague many years ago. Thanks again.



Mrs. Nerdy's work-out machine. I haven't try it out.... not yet.



Partial view of living room and staircase to upstair.




Viewing down from upstair.


Spent a whole day last weekend to clean up the mess in the store room. Now definitely looks organized.

Left hand side is the "gym" room and right is the corridor linked to the dining room and kitchen. I can actually hang up many decorative items or portrait pictures on the walls. Maybe sometimes soon.

"Open concept" kitchen, LOL. No kitchen cabinet to cover the lower part. Well, anyway I like "transparency", no matter cockroaches or rats, you can spot them with one single glance.

From the back view to the living room. See the empty wall at the left hand, that's the place I will put up something fancy in the future.

Internet connection today is so darn slow and uploading pics takes too long to sustain my mood to put up more images, well, will continue another time.

House: Maintenance Report for Q108

Summary of structural design flaws fixed:

The design flaw was apparent especially in this quarter because of excessive rain volumes in the region. The top of 1st floor's living area is directly connected to the roof with transparent roofing and open air design. The open air decision causes the rain drops to drip in when the wind is strong. A consequence from the flaw is
I was unable to place any furnitures or appliances at that area. The solution I adopted was to hire a vendor specialized in construction and engineering to seal the roofing with metal plates and silicon adhesive glues. So far, no sign of water found in the area.

Some cracks are visible on the wall/paint due to natural movement of the building. They are either repainted or covered by decorative items.

Rough expenses: RM400.00

Summary of items replaced due to malfunctions, inappropriateness or improvements:

3 units of 18 watts PLC lamp bulbs and 1 unit of PLC Ballast.

1 unit of rounded fluorescent lamp.

1 unit of standard fluorescent lamp and 1 unit of choke.

1 unit of water measurement meter replaced by Syabas for free.

Rough expenses: RM85.00

Summary home improvements:

1 unit of WD40.

1 unit of food processor.

1 unit of shoe rack with drawer.

1 unit of quilt cover set

1 unit of cool water storage tank

Rough expenses: RM1200.00

Summary of electrity, water, telecommunications and other utilities.

In Q1, there was no major electrity discruption.

However there were 1 or 2 (can't really remember) water shortages. Fortunately for the period of the shortages, the 2 in-house large water tanks supplied the water for our usages.

Streamyx as usual, being discrupted a few times (5 times?) during the period because of "maintenance/improvement" issues as reported by TMNet.

Risk provisions, mitigations and preventions.

I found some signs of termites near the storage room and dining area. The infestation is seem to be minimal at the time of discovery. Termites repellents were sprayed along the floor edges and so far no sign of termites appearing.

Due to seriousness of the issue, constant inspection is conducted and unnecessary corrugated paper boxes or unwanted paper-based materials were disposed outside the regime of the home. Plan B will be to hire specialized termites exterminators for our service if such incident reappear in the future.

Birds is another natural issue. On regular basis, some birds stop at the kitchen's window grilles and lay down their dungs. Beside aesthetic impedition, I'm worry about the hygienic risks those wastes carried. The solution is to cover the window grilles with pvc net so that birds can't hang around the metal.

Rough expenses: RM150.00