Diagnose it, size it, fix it

What This Site Is

Most home-repair information online is a video you have to watch for eleven minutes to reach one number, or an article that circles the question without answering it. This site is built the other way round: the answer is a diagram, a table or a figure, and it is near the top.

Every illustration here is drawn rather than photographed. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. When you are trying to work out why a water heater is leaking, a photograph of a water heater tells you nothing. What you need is a cutaway showing the five places it can leak from and what each one means. The same is true of a tape measure, a three-way switch or a joist span. Where a drawing genuinely answers the question better than prose, there is a drawing.

How the Guides Are Organized

Three kinds of page, and they link into each other in the order a real repair happens.

• Diagnose starts from the symptom, because the symptom is all you have when you go looking. Each guide narrows to a cause and tells you which cases are safe to handle.
• Reference covers the numbers: wire gauges, span tables, standard heights, how to read the tools. These are the pages you land on mid-project.
• What it costs gives price ranges with the line items separated, so you can tell a fair quote from one that will grow once work starts.

A leaking water heater runs through all three: find the leak point on the cutaway, decide whether it is a twenty-dollar valve or a dead tank, then check what a replacement should cost before anyone quotes you.

What We Will Not Do

We will not tell you that a job is straightforward when it involves gas, a service panel, or water above a finished ceiling. Those pages exist to help you understand what is wrong and judge the quote, not to talk you into doing the work. Where the right answer is to call an electrician, that is what the page says.

Codes vary by jurisdiction and every figure here is a general reference rather than a substitute for a licensed trade or your local building department. Where a page gives a code requirement, it says which standard it is drawn from, and confirming against the edition your area has actually adopted is always the last step before you build anything.