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Say Goodbye to Dry Hair With Water Softeners

. Posted by in • San Antonio

Want your hair, skin and everything else to shine like it should?

At some point in your life, you’ve probably taken a shower that just didn’t make you feel very clean. It’s possible that the soap didn’t lather properly. Maybe your hair felt dry and frizzy as soon as you shook out the excess water. Whatever the effects of this unsettling experience, it’s likely that it was due to hard water. Many homes in the San Antonio area have hard water, but there’s a relatively easy fix that can preserve your sanity.

What Is Hard Water?

According to chemistry experts, hard water is any type of water that contains dissolved minerals. Just like there’s a pH scale to determine the concentration of oxygen and hydrogen ions in water, there’s a gradient scale that measures the “hardness” of water. Although municipal water is rarely as mineral-rich as water that occurs in nature, even small … Read Full Post »

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Are There More Where That Came From?

. Posted by in , , , • Austin

How to know when one pest is actually many

Finding a single pest might be just a fluke, but it might also be a sign of a serious infestation that needs professional attention. Once settled in a new home, roaches, ants, termites and other small pests get to work on expanding their colonies. Multiplying at a fast rate in a constrained space means that a few occupants will be accidentally squeezed out and left to wander your floors and walls in plain sight. Below, we’ve put together a handy pest-by-pest guide to help you learn how to tell the difference between an evicted resident and a random passerby.

Roaches

Roaches love hiding in dark and moist crevices, so you’ll need to do a little investigating to make sure that one roach isn’t a displaced member of a larger colony. Faucets, electrical appliances, hollow wall cavities, door frames, drains and cracks in furniture are … Read Full Post »

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How Composting Increases Grass Health

. Posted by in • San Antonio

Providing the best in nutrients for a beautiful lawn

A beautiful lawn or garden is a point of pride for your home. Adopting good lawn care practices is the best way to ensure that your grass will be beautifully green all summer long. Among the best lawn treatments you can choose is composting, or the application of beneficial organisms and organic matter to the soil.

How Composting Helps Your Lawn

When you choose compost for your lawn, you’re choosing one of nature’s most powerful nutrients. Compost is made from a wide variety of organic matter that’s allowed to decay and produce organisms and nutrients that are beneficial to the soil. This powerful, nutrient-rich mixture can be applied directly to the soil before planting or can be spread across the top of the grass.

One of the chief benefits of composting is that it adds nutrients to the soil, creating a rich growing medium for … Read Full Post »

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Flowering Evergreens That Deer Hate to Nibble

. Posted by in • Bryan-College Station

Choosing bushes that beat nature’s biggest plant predators

When it comes to improving the outside appearance of your home, nothing is more important than landscaping. The grasses, trees and shrubs that you choose for your yard can make a big impact on what your home looks like and how much you enjoy it. Unfortunately, choosing plants that deer don’t love eating can be a challenge. If you’re looking for deer-resistant plants for your home, consider beautiful, drought-resistant evergreens.

Choosing Viable Evergreens for Your Home

Choosing the right plants for your yard is essential to the success of your landscaping. Whether you’re just plotting out your yard or want to add to your current landscape, it’s important to look for plants and bushes that are well suited to the local area. Choosing native evergreens is a great way to create a gorgeous yard without worrying about how you’ll water and maintain sensitive plants.

As you … Read Full Post »

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History Lesson: Five Times Bugs Changed the World

. Posted by in , , • Austin

The impact of pests on human history

Whether you’re afraid of them or fascinated by them, it’s safe to say that bugs have had a big impact on the world around you. In fact, they’ve been responsible for everything from widespread deadly diseases to providing sustenance for soldiers. Learning the history of some of these pests can help showcase one of the many factors that have helped shape our culture, and it can also point out the importance of calling a professional pest control company when certain insects decide to become unwanted tenants in your home.

Five History-Changing Bugs

1. Oriental Rat Fruit Flea

Many people erroneously believe that rats were solely responsible for the Black Death bubonic plague that killed approximately 75 million people during the 14th century. However, scientists have discovered that the oriental rat fruit flea is actually the prime culprit for this massive loss of life. The fleas were infected … Read Full Post »

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Beat the Heat: What Summer Means for Your Pipes

. Posted by in • Austin

Plumbing trouble isn’t just a cold-season phenomenon

Winter isn’t the only season that can wreak havoc on your pipes. In central Texas, the mercury exceeds 100 degrees on dozens of days per year, and an unprepared plumbing system can take a serious hit as a result. Below, we outline some of the most common hot-season plumbing problems and offer some common-sense tips for dealing with them.

Sweating Pipes

When the weather warms up, your skin isn’t the only thing that sweats. Poorly insulated pipes can “sweat” excess water and create serious leaks that eventually threaten the integrity of your ceilings or floors. Due to contraction in the pipes themselves, sweating pipes that are already constrained by clogs can suffer catastrophic backups.

Sewer Backups

Although summer tends to be a fairly dry season in central Texas, occasional thunderstorms and unseasonable rains can cause unexpected sewer backups that devastate your home’s lower levels or yard. Likewise, tree … Read Full Post »

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10 Things You Should Never Put Down the Garbage Disposal

. Posted by in , • San Antonio

Save them for the trash bin—and save your garbage disposal’s motor

If you were fortunate enough to have a garbage disposal when you were growing up, you probably weren’t very careful about what you threw into it. After all, that scary motor seemed to take care of just about anything. Over time, though, you may have learned that garbage disposals are just as susceptible to clogs and breakdowns as other appliances. Now that you’re older and wiser, take care not to throw these 10 items down yours.

1. Non-Organic Trash

It might seem obvious, but plastic and metal can seriously damage your garbage disposal blades. Even smaller items like paper and cigarette butts can wreak havoc.

2. Grease and Animal Fat

Once it passes through the disposal, this stuff can congeal in your pipes. This often has devastating effects for your plumbing system.

3. Rice, Pasta and Other Starches

This stuff expands dramatically when soaked and is … Read Full Post »

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More Than a Trickle, Less Than a Flood: Achieving the Perfect Water Pressure

. Posted by in • Austin

It’s not as hard as it sounds!

We’ve all been there before. You turn on your faucet or shower and are blindsided by a deluge of fluid that practically knocks you off your feet. Alternatively, you’re greeted with a pathetic trickle that’s barely enough to get your skin wet. In either case, your home’s water pressure needs adjusting—and fast. While this might seem like a task for a professional plumber, it’s possible to do on your own. Your family is sure to thank you for it.

How Can You Adjust Water Pressure on Your Own?

Every residential structure that doesn’t use groundwater is outfitted with a pressure regulator that protects its water system from the industrial-strength flow of water through municipal pipes. This reduces the average flow into your home from about 200 psi—an extreme torrent—to about 50 psi. However, various factors can interfere with this flow, and your regulator can fail as … Read Full Post »

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Fleas and Ticks: Bugs With a One-Two Punch

. Posted by in , • San Antonio

Protecting your home, family and pets from an itchy situation

If the thought of fleas and ticks makes you itch, you’re not alone. These common parasites appear on dogs, cats and wild animals and can wind up on you or in your home. Fleas jump or crawl from host to host; ticks wait for a potential meal to walk by. In addition to being irritating, these bugs are a potential source of disease.

Flea-Borne Diseases

Fleas feed on the blood of both animals and humans, sometimes resulting in the transfer of bacteria between hosts. Certain diseases are passed through the bite itself while others may be transmitted through flea feces. Cat scratch fever, tapeworms, typhus and even the plague have been known to be spread by fleas.

Tick-Borne Diseases

Though they’re often associated with deer, ticks feed on a variety of hosts from dogs and cats to lizards and mice. There are different types of … Read Full Post »

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Create Flights of Fancy With a Butterfly Garden

. Posted by in • Bryan-College Station

Attracting butterflies with beautiful blossoms

Splashed with vibrant color and scented with wonderful fragrance, a garden is a delight to the senses. Perhaps these are the same reasons that butterflies are so often attracted to gardens as well. Just watching them flit from flower to flower is part of the pleasure of being in a garden. In fact, luring butterflies into your Central Texas garden is just a matter of growing flowers that they enjoy. The right colors and shapes make all the difference in creating a butterfly garden that attracts people, too.

Plants with clusters of tiny flowers where butterflies can perch for a moment and sip the nectar are their favorites. Vivid yellows, reds, oranges and purples are the colors that attract butterflies’ attention. White also works well. You can’t go wrong combining these colors in your garden.

Sunflowers are a great choice. Ranging from 1 to well over 12 feet … Read Full Post »

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