Rant #1:
Our garage door opener is a Wayne Dalton iDrive system. It does some sort of RF communication between the button on the wall and the light in the ceiling and the actual door motor. The button on the wall is really just a battery-powered "accessory" no different than the button you put in your car.
Well, 4.5 years after our house was built, the ceiling light died. I changed the bulb. No dice. I disassembled the thing and it's a compact circuit board that's running the low-power digital section in close proximity to the 120V AC section. I'd love to hear Patrick's opinion on how one builds such a circuit properly, but I suspect this was never meant to last. There are no obviously fried parts on the board, but there are lots of tiny little surface mount resistors and the like, which aren't exactly easy to inspect.
The solution? Dropping $100 on a new ceiling light fixture, from the precisely one place on the Internet where I can seem to find it for sale. Warranty? One year. I had an unpleasant conversation with the Wayne Dalton warranty people (whose phone number isn't disclosed anywhere on their web site). For posterity, it's 866-759-8943. I tried to guilt them into sending me a replacement ("Do you consider a failure after 4.5 years of standard operation to be normal?"), which has worked brilliantly for me with other electronics vendors, but they stood firm. Wayne Dalton, indeed, considers short-term failure of their components to be absolutely within specification. (And don't even get me started on how it can cost $100 for a device with at most $20 of parts, probably much less, within it.)
Rant #2:
The floorboards in our house, near the downstairs bathroom, were slowly pushing themselves away from the wall. We investigated, prying the boards away, only to discover that below this the drywall was wet and moldy. Cutting away the wet drywall, there was a sheet of MDF behind that, also wet and moldy. Cutting through *that* led to the space between the walls with no obvious pooling of water.
After two rounds of "investigative plumbers", the first of which found nothing wrong, the conclusion is that the downstairs toilet, on the opposite side of the wall in question, had a small crack in its drain pipe. There's a bunch of blue pipe cement on the *inside* of the pipe. The investigator concluded that whoever had installed the pipe had attempted to cover up a crack with pipe cement, rather than replace the pipe. Net result? Every time you flush the toilet, some small amount of water leaks out the crack and under the floor. (There's maybe 3cm of the hardwood floor plus the boards they're mounted to below them. After that, it's the concrete slab foundation.) The MDF wallboard has been slowly siphoning this water up into the wall. The hardwood floors in the bathroom are also modestly uneven, which is consistent with this diagnosis.
The solution? Today I've got some flooring people coming out. They're going to need to remove significant chunks of the floor in and around the bathroom to sort out the degree to which the water has spread. This will then suggest how far we have to go tearing out wall boards and whatnot.
I suspect we're going to blow past our insurance deductible on this, but we'll have to see on that.
If there's a moral to this story, it's that it's better to pay a good deal more money for a smaller house if you've got a builder who sweats the small the stuff, hiring trades that take pride in doing their work properly, and having rigorous inspections to ensure as much, and specifying appliances and whatnot that may well cost more but are built to last.
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