Portable Air Conditioners for Casement Windows

I get a lot of questions on how to install portable A/Cs in casement windows. Good news, it can be done, and it's not expensive. It will require some basic fabrication skills. Here's the article.

You Want It When??? Some Musings on Appliance Deliveries

Summer has descended upon us in force here on the Cape, and 2 million people are crossing the Bourne and Sagamore bridges. Many of these people are headed for their summer homes, fully expecting everything to be shipshape so that they may enjoy a tranquil summer here in our popular paradise. Not a few of these people will discover that their refrigerator/dishwasher/washing machine/dryer/water heater has decided to punish you for abandoning it during the winter by ceasing to function. Appliances appear to have feelings, too.

At Sears, where I escape the ennui of Cape Cod life by occasionally selling appliances, I have met a lot of these people in the past several weeks. I feel their pain...sometimes. Not so much because they might have to hand wash their dishes for a few days, but you can get pretty tired of pizza and restaurant food,  trips to the laundromat, or cold showers due to a broken fridge, washer/dryer, or water heater. Sears (and our competitors) maintain warehouses here on the Cape. We try to keep a small but representative inventory of appliances on hand for these sorts of situations, but none of us could afford to keep a large inventory here. Large inventories are kept in warehouses that are central to multiple stores where real estate costs are relatively low. Hyannis isn't central to anything except Barnstable and Dukes counties. It is also very expensive real estate. It is also, essentially, an island, especially in the summer when even the bears swim the canal rather than deal with bridge traffic. Try to imagine a warehouse on Wianno Ave in Osterville. Remember, we're essentially an island.

As a result, it's fairly unlikely that the lovely $3000 Samsung french door double drawer fridge that you want is sitting around in our local warehouse (unless we happened to get one that was returned - you never know. Ask, we'll check). And no, I can't sell you the floor model. Why, you ask? Well, it's the floor model. If I sell it to you (of course, you're going to demand a discount because it's the floor model, aren't you?) I have to replace it with a new one, which instantly becomes another floor model. Do the math.

We do have clearance items on the floor, frequently in the cartons, and those can be sold directly. Unfortunately, we can't deliver them... yet. You have to pick them up. All our deliveries are from our regional warehouse in Westwood. We are working on potential ways to implement store deliveries that still meet our delivery standards, but we haven't settled on anything as of this writing.

As I mentioned earlier, we also have some items in our warehouse available for pickup, but, for reasons explained earlier, this is a limited list. We can have an installer (ours or yours) pick up an item from the warehouse for installation, and this gets done on occasion for emergency installations such as water heaters. If an emergency installation is required, we will try to accommodate you.

If you read the fine print in ads which talk about same-day delivery, they will also say "of items in stock." Unless you get lucky or your needs are extremely flexible, this may not have a whole lot of value.

There is a saying that goes "don't dig your well when you're thirsty." You don't always have a lot of choice when you have to replace an appliance. (Hopefully, you are following some of the maintenance suggestions in the blog.) That's why Hyannis and Falmouth have so many laundromats and good restaurants. Too bad the ice houses are either gone or converted to condos...

Buying a New Fridge? Here's Help...

Our old friend Consumer Reports has put together a refrigerator buying guide which looks really useful. To get refrigerator ratings, you have to be a subscriber, but the rest is helpful nonetheless.

OK, All You Kitchen Remodelers...

I know you're out there. (You're reading this blog, right?) A pretty good write-up on Remodeling Your Kitchen for Less in Consumer Reports.

We're going to be doing this at our home in the reasonably near future, so it literally hits close to home for me.

Going Green in the Kitchen...It's not just the Fridge.

For those of us who are concerned about energy usage (shouldn't that be ALL of us?) HD Living has an excellent article on making your kitchen greener. Back in 1990, when we first moved back to Massachusetts, my wife and I rented a house in Andover with avocado appliances. That's not what I'm talking about. Did look nice with the burnt orange countertops, though...

It Won't Help You Select an Appliance, But...

For 15 years,we Americans have been pummeled with the loss of manufacturing jobs to lower-cost countries, primarily China, although Malaysia, India, Vietnam, and other play a part as well. (Korea and Japan are no longer considered low-cost labor markets.) Well, appliance fans, that's all starting to change. There's a great article in Appliance Magazine that discusses the turning of the tide.

When you combine this with the long term economic advantage that the US will gain with the rapidly declining cost of natural gas (which powers a lot of manufacturing processes), we could be looking at a resurgent manufacturing sector. Big Time. Wonder if those Whirlpool and Maytag plants in Ohio are hiring???

Maybe a Fridge for Households with Teens...

Austrian Design Student Wins Electrolux Design Lab 2008Oct. 13, 2008. Stefan Buchberger, from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, won the Electrolux Design Lab 2008 competition for inventing Flatshare, a modular fridge with individual compartments for people who live with several roommates. Flatshare consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules. The modules allow each user to have his or her own refrigerator space and can be customized with various colorful skins as well as with add-ons like a bottle opener. Handles mounted on the side make it easy to transport the modules. "I got the idea to create the Flatshare fridge because in many shared flats there is a problem with the refrigerator," says Buchberger. "It gets filthy because no one person feels responsible for cleaning it." The Design Lab 2008 award is a prize of approximately US$7,000 and a six-month internship at one of Electrolux global design centers.