David Trebacz Blog

I moved to Phoenix/Scottsdale Arizona area a couple years ago from the midwest and found a whole new group of creatures. The one that bothered my wife the most was scorpions. The day we moved into our house we found one lonely scorpion limping alone the baseboard in our living room. She freaked out a bit and I went to the internet to find a Do It Yourself (DIY) way to kill scorpions. Online I also found out that Arizona is home to the pretty nasty bark scorpions. First we bought a LED UV flashlight so we could easily see them. We used it to find scorpions at night and figure out where they may hide or nest nearby. It also was a fun "hunting" exercise for our nephews. Thankfully we only found a few scorpions on our property and weren't infested. LED UV Flashlight   Ultraviolet Black Light Flashlight  - Inexpensive aluminum LED UV flashlight from Amazon. Just remember to by the 3AAA batteries for it. Backpack Sprayer   Chapin 61800 4-Gallon ProSeries Backpack Sprayer ...

I'm still having issues with the Honeywell wifi thermostat (RTH9580WF) displaying "waiting for update" on when the wifi is routed through my proxy server, so I decided to do a deep dive into what the thermostat is doing when it's getting the weather updates. I also wanted to better understand how to trace traffic on my network. Here's what I learned about the thermostats weather updates system by tracing the communication between the thermostat and servers. Currently: Thermostat requests the current weather and 12 hour forecast from a server:  http://104.209.185.251 . This server appears to run code managed by Honeywell in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Every 15 minutes it makes two port 80 GET requests to the IP address: http://104.209.185.251/WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/current?appKey=b9db7a3d469892e8&language=en-us&locationKey=36691_PC  (return current weather for location) http://104.209.185.251//WeatherAPIProd/api/weather/forecasts/hourly/12hou...

I found a quick and easy way to setup a way to test network speed on my internal network using the linux command line tool netcat (or nc), I used this for node to node testing of my wireless network under a variety of conditions. It required no extra tools or software to be installed on my Ubuntu linux machines. It gives me transmit speeds I can understand and easily allows me to size the payload to the type of network I'm testing. Put the first machine in listening mode (this example machine 192.168.0.188): nc -lk 2112 >/dev/null Put the second machine in transmit mode to send packets to first machine 192.168.0.188: dd if=/dev/zero bs=16000 count=6250 | nc -v 192.168.0.188 2112 The first part of the command tells the machine to copy 100 MB of data from /dev/zero in 16 KB blocks. The part after the pipe tells it to send that to the first machine (192.168.0.188) over port 2112. The output for this test on the second machine returns: Connection to 192.168.0.188 2112...

We bought a new house in Fountain Hills, AZ. With the hot weather in the summer it just seemed to make sense. Being the science guy I really wanted to understand why all this pool chemistry stuff seemed so complicated. I'm a DIY guy and a scientist, so how hard can this stuff really be. The 4 main DIY tools to maintain my swimming pool chemistry and water clarity are: My friend Bill He's had pools in Arizona for many year, but not sure how to franchise his knowledge, so most of you can skip this one. Trouble Free Pools website http://www.troublefreepool.com  - great website with real information on pool chemistry and how simple it really is. I now effectively maintain my pool myself with Walmart bleach  (sidum hypochlorite and water), Muratic acid. When filling the pool I added  Cyanuric acid  as a Chlorine stabilizer and Borax as a buffer/mild anti algaecide. Now "knowing" my pool, It's a couple cups of bleach every morning and some acid on t...

Just bought my wife a new thermostat for our house. We missed the HAI home automation thermostats in our previous house and their ability to display outdoor temperature. The NEST removed too much of our ability to control our thermostat and didn't show outdoor weather conditions. We choose the Honeywell RTH9580WF  (from Amazon) for a few reasons: RTH9580WF Outdoor Temperature - shows waiting for update Pros: Ability to control from a remotely Easy WiFi connectivity Reliable thermostat company Good 4 star plus reviews from Amazon Ability to show outdoor temperature and humidity Easy to use touchscreen and nice design Cons: C wire required No external temperature sensor Replacing  our existing heat pump thermostat was uneventful. I just carefully followed the instructions from Honeywell on how to install it. Our system was new enough to have a C-wire run but not connected to the existing thermostat. Honeywell's online tools and video helped me through this ...

I try and clean my dryer vent at the house once a year in the springtime. Our gas dryer vent is over 24 feet long and has several elbows in it. I have always been concerned about it's long length potentially creating a fire hazard, if the metal duct ever became clogged with lint from our gas clothes dryer. A few years ago I invested in a Linteater from Amazon  and a 12 foot extension to clean out the dryer vent. It works well. This year I shot a video of the cleaning process. It only took about fifteen minutes to clean the whole run of aluminum rigid duct. Just make sure you always keep the drill spinning in the same direction, so you don't unscrew the brush in the middle of the run. I hope the video helps you understand how you can easily clean your dryer duct with a shop-vac, cordless drill, and the Linteater kit. UPDATE 2016-04-09: Several people have asked about the Shop Vac that I used. It was a 5 HP 16 gallon model by craftsman. Here is a link to a similar Wet/D...

Is your your Moen single handle kitchen faucet hard to use or leaking around the handle? If it is you can easily lubricate or replace the 1225 cartridge in the faucet. If you're the original owner owner of the faucet Moen warrants them to be leak-free for lifetime. I called the 800 number at 1-800-289-6636 and requested a replacement cartridge kit for the faucet (think ours is model 7730). They sent it out no charge in about 10 days. If your in a hurry you can also buy it from Amazon ( Moen 1225 One-Handle Replacement Cartridge ). Our Moen 7730 Single Handle Kitchen Faucet I shot a video of the dis-assembly and re-assembly of the kitchen faucet: The kit contained everything you need to replace the cartridge and get the faucet working like new again 1225 Cartridge Repair Kit 1225 Cartridge Kit Contents Here is a link to a pdf with the Moen 1225 cartridge installation instructions that came in the kit: Here are the components in the kit: Moen 122...

I decided to replace the failing chrome grill on my 2007 Dodge Durango. For whatever reason the chrome bubbled on the grill. You can see how wrinkled the chrome is in a couple of the pictures. It go so bad my wife noticed people looking at the car when it was parked -think the front end had gotten hit. The are many rumors on the internet why the chrome lifts off the plastic on the grille (cold temperature, rock pinholes, etc). My estimation is that the chrome expands and the plastic shrinks over time. Either way I decided to replace it and document it in this blog post. 2007 Dodge Durango Grill Chrome Bubbled Up   Right Side Showing Grill Chrome Wrinkling Left Side of Grill Showing Durango Chrome Bubbles I didn't expect the process of replacing the Durango grill to be tough, but there are a few covers covering up the bolts to replace the grill. First I pried up the black plastic cover in the picture below. There were 4 plastic plugs holding the front of it down. A...

I decided to try one of those DIY spray foam insulation kits to help insulate the heck out of my basement. One of the recommendations from a friend on Facebook said to "make sure you cover everything - including hair". I decided to choose the spry foam insulation kit from  http://www.sprayfoamdirect.com/ . The seemed to have a similar kit to many others and their warehouse was only a few miles from our house, which meant we could pick it up and save some shipping costs. Foam It Green 202 square feet kit Foam It Green 102 square feet kit I decided to use their spray foam 102 kit , since I only needed to do about 60 square feet of rim joist insulation. They have a good video showing the rim joist spray insulation process on their website. I should have know better and ended up buying the 202 kit  to finish the job, probably because I put it on thicker and also made sure the area was well covered. There were a...

So our light in our kitchen decided to drop onto our glass electric cooktop. We suspect that the glass retainer ring wasn't screwed on all the way, and the globe light bulb just gave out. Either way our nice Whirlpool 30 inch (Model RCC3024) stove cooktop was broken. Here's the pictures of my broken cooktop and the rest of this blog post shows how simple it is to replace (I didn't find a good pictures or video on the web of the process). Hopefully this helps you do it yourself.     I immediately went online to see if I could get a replacement cooktop glass from the fine folks at   http://www.repairclinic.com . I had bought several appliance parts over the years and they have always had the parts and been fair on the pricing and shipping. After typing in my model number (Whirlpool RCC3024LB01) I got to this page  http://www.repairclinic.com/Shop-For-Parts/a13b5d622616/Model-RCC3024LB01-Whirlpool-Range-Stove-Ov...

Making your own Permethrin based mosquito spray good up to 30 days – using an Orthro Dial’nSpray and 10% Permethrin solution. I had previously used a Permethrin based spray from Cutter Backyard Free to keep down the mosquitoes in our yard. We are in a heavily wooded area and the commercial Permethrin based hose spray worked well for us. It usually kept the mosquito population to almost 3-4 weeks depending on the amount of rain we had. For the most part this made our yard usable during the summer. These sprays have become difficult to buy, so I figured why not make my own. As best I can tell Permethrin properly applied is a safe mosquito reduction chemical. So I decided to make my own using commonly available Ortho Dial n spray and 10% Permethrin used for cutting down pest in animal barns. I found the 10% Permethrin for $14.44 from Amazon  or (see 8/30/2016 update below for more economical 36.8% Permethrin solution ). I just needed to figure out the proper dilution and delive...