Some thoughts: If you allow for a good flow, then the velocity will be high and the bugs will die on impact. So, consider removing the vacuum's filter for maximum suction.
Also: The wasps leaving the nest are in search of food and water to bring back to the queen and the drones. If they don't return to the nest with the food, eventually the queen gets hungry and has to leave in search of her own food and water. This suggests that it's still worthwhile to run the vacuum long after most of the wasps have left the nest — because if you get the queen, you win. We ran the vacuum about 3 or 4 hours, and that seemed to do it; they were gone for the season.
Finally, be sure to leave the wasp hole open for several days and watch it to make sure the nest is depleted. If you plug the hole right away, you'll never know, and the wasps will just move to hole No. 2 (which now you must locate).
This method is a little noisy with a shop-vac kept running for hours, but it does NOT involve squirting poisons in your house.
A: "A little disconcerting," you say? I bet! A shop-vac canister of wasp soufflé sounds like quite the mess. Thanks for writing.
Q: My hot and cold water are reversed at the bathroom sink. Hot is cold and cold is hot. Should I reverse the faucet's individual-type handles, or would this be dangerous?
A: Shut off the valves beneath the sink where the supply lines are connected. Remove the supply tubes from the valve, and cross them, making hot hot and cold cold. Hot should be on the left and cold on the right if the pipes were plumbed correctly.
If the lines were not crossed before you made the correction, it would have been an original construction error, leading to the conclusion that the toilet likely is using hot water also. Give it three or four flushes and check it out. If the toilet is running hot, the lines were definitely plumbed incorrectly upstream. For this you need a plumber.
Readers: Several months ago I wrote about my girlfriend, Lisa Brown. She got dressed in a hooded Tyvek bodysuit, donned rubber boots and gloves, snapped on a respirator and went diving down into a stinky catch basin that I was too big to physically access. She cemented-in a plastic "P" trap while sitting in the mud. Yikes! I was proud of her, never having heard of a woman doing sewer-diving work. Not only that, but I didn't have to pay someone of smaller stature to do the job! I took her picture while suited up, and it was printed alongside this column. While it may have been hard to decipher from the photo, she does clean up real well.
After the picture was printed, one reader e-mailed and wanted Lisa's phone number — and I don't think it was to ask her for catch-basin advice! Others told me to treat Lisa to dinner, buy her an expensive gift, take her on vacation, and no fewer than two people told me that I should definitely marry her after that demonstrable act of love. Thank you readers. I took your advice on all four counts two weeks ago — the last count, at a drive-thru window in Las Vegas, with an Elvis impersonator, no less.
Darrell Hay answers readers' questions. Call 206-464-8514 to record your question |
