Do you have a backup?

Living in western NY, we’re used to snowy winters and wet springs.  It doesn’t have to be snowy for the ground to become saturated.  Unless you’re lucky enough to live on a hill, most people have a sump pump in their basement to prevent water from backing up into the foundation. A few weeks ago [...]

Netflix-Setting a good example

I love my Netflix. I admit it. I only need to drop the movie in my mailbox and never have to worry about late fees and no trips to the video store.  I have 475 movies in my DVD queue and 196 in my instant queue, with some overlap between the groups. I recently found [...]

Batteries, part II

Here’s a follow up on my post of a few weeks ago regarding maximizing battery usage. A gentleman I used to work with, Rick, offered up more info on batteries.  Rick pointed out that different battery chemistries produce different voltages. Here are the most common ones: Non-rechargeable: * Carbon-Zinc – 1.5V * Alkaline – 1.5V [...]

Invest in a multimeter

Our family eats through batteries pretty quickly.  Luckily the kids have graduated to hand-held devices with built-in rechargeable batteries, which save me some money and keep batteries from being disposed of prematurely. We still have devices that require the old AA and AAA batteries and my husband came up with a system that helps us [...]