Videos show folks how to be handy
Remember the old advice “Don’t try this at home”?
Emboldened by YouTube, more than a few central Ohioans are defying the warning — with impressive results.
A recent So To Speak column about fixing a car airconditioner with help from the
video-sharing website (Life & Arts cover, April 4) elicited a host of responses from readers, who detailed similar tales
of triumph and, in fewer cases, near-disaster.
Some readers echoed this caution: consult more than one video before attempting a repair.
A YouTube search for a common home-repair problem might yield multiple videos — some made by companies selling replacement parts, some by tinkerers and some by people who put too much faith in duct tape.
In other words: The quality of the advice isn’t necessarily equal.
But success stories, it turns out, are easy to come by.
We heard from Dispatch readers who, with YouTube’s guidance, figured out how to un-dent a bumper, unclog a water dispenser, re-grease a mixer and — here’s where some do-it-yourselfers might draw the line — install a radonmitigation system.
On a spring Saturday, the day and season when many people tend to contemplate home repairs, perhaps these stories will provide motivation.
A slow thaw
She needed three tries, but Deb Hoffman, a retired FBI secretary living in southern Delaware County, fixed the water-and-ice dispenser on her refrigerator door.
“The water would freeze inside the door and not dispense, so I went to YouTube ... There were many videos to choose from.”
The one she chose recommended aiming a hair dryer at the dispenser for five minutes. (As the video warns, use caution when holding an electrical device near water.)
When that didn’t work, Hoffman tried five minutes more — with disastrous results: “I melted all the plastic workings.”
So she went back to YouTube to find replacements for the melted parts, which cost about $25.
“Once they came in the mail, with YouTube’s help, I put my water-ice dispenser back together,” she said. “It worked for about a year, then started freezing again.”
One more visit to YouTube revealed the existence of the Ice Surrender, a $13 syringe and tube that shoot hot water into the frozen line to thaw it.
The fix works great, Hoffman reports.
A mixer fix
When grease began leaking from Pat Bendick’s 15-year-old KitchenAid mixer, she knew she had three options: pay someone to fix it, buy a new one for about $300 or attempt a YouTube repair.
Bendick, a retired retail consultant who lives in Worthington, decided on the third option.
“I figured if I didn’t get it to work, nothing lost and I’d go buy a new mixer,” she said.
A nine-minute video she found on YouTube identified the problem as deteriorated grease leaking from the mixer head, and it demonstrated in detail how to remedy it. So she ordered new grease (food-safe grease is required) and a new gasket, costing a total of $8.
Then she took the machine apart, removed the old grease, applied the new grease, reassembled the mixer and took a deep breath.
“Moment of truth — but first, were there any parts left over? Then, will the mixer turn on once plugged in?” she said.
“The answers were no and yes. Success!”
A Wrangler rescue
Galena resident Chris Dalheim dented the plastic front bumper of his 2014 Jeep Wrangler when he got too close to the side of his garage while backing in.
Hoping the repair wouldn’t be too costly, the retired educator sought estimates from two auto-body shops.
“Both shops told me that it was impossible to pull the dent out and that the bumper would have to be replaced for $550 and $600, respectively,” he said.
Dejected, he went home and searched on YouTube for “how to pull a dent from a Wrangler front bumper.’”
The search turned up a video in which a man inserted a screw into the middle of the dent, heated the edges of the dent with a hair dryer, then grabbed the screw with a wrench and pulled.
When Dalheim tried it, the dent popped right out.
“It wasn’t perfect, but it was 90 percent fixed, and I am likely the only person to notice the imperfection,” he said. “I filled the hole by Super Gluing a black roofing nail over the hole, which was not You Tubeinspired but my own brilliant idea.”
Radon reduction
When Steve Dhuyvetter heard that his neighbor’s house had tested high for radon gas, he decided that he better check his own.
He bought a radon meter on eBay, and, sure enough, it showed high levels of the gas, a naturally occurring radioactive substance that can cause lung cancer and is common in parts of central Ohio.
“I didn’t want to spend $1,000 to $1,500 to have ours professionally mitigated, so I watched several videos to see how others did it,” Dhuyvetter said. “I found helpful ideas in many of them and combined those into my mitigation system.”
Dhuyvetter, a factory worker who lives in Columbus, already owned the sump pump to which he attached the radonremoval equipment. Supplies, including a radon pump and plastic piping, cost about $300. The scariest part was drilling a hole in the house to vent the radon outside.
When he tested for radon again, the level had fallen from 18 to 3.2 — well under the recommended maximum. YouTube did it again. Said Dhuyvetter: “Win-win.”