To do the press/vac test you have to seal the inlet and outlets allowing only the press/vac tester to insert or remove air from the crankcase. On the saw I did, I had to seal the exhaust port by the muffler and seal the intake port by the carb. I cut out a piece of plumbers rubber and made holes that fit the mounting studs for the carb and muffler. Muffler can be done easier though if you just loosen the muffler and slip a piece of rubber between the port and muffler and then retight the muffler. In my case, I took the muffler off, slid the rubber onto the studs then remounted the muffler. The carb is a little different. Because I wanted to use my impulse line as the press/vac input, I had to remove that part of my carb. I slipped the rubber onto the carb mounts and remounted the carb minus the carb's impulse input piece. I then hooked my tester up to the impulse input to the crankcase and did the test through that port. Optionally, you can purchase adapters that will cover the carb input and the impulse line. The press/vac tester hooks directly to the adapter. If I have to do another one, I might purchase the adapter. The pressure test for my saw states that it should hold pressure (0.5bar/7.5psi) for at least 20 seconds. The vacuum test for my saw states that it should hold vacuum (0.5bar/7.5psi) for 20 seconds. During that 20 seconds vacuum should rise to no higher than 0.3bar/4.25psi. This was for a Stihl MS026. It is important to do both tests. A seal may work one way but fail the other. I think it is that they are more likely to fail a vacuum test than a pressure test, but my memory might be wrong on that. If you can't identify by sound where the leak is, you can use soapy water at the seals to id the leak. Additionally if you still cannot id the leak, you can dunk the engine into a tub of water to see where the leak is coming from. You are better off doing a pressure test than a vacuum test if you use the dunk method. I don't think you would see any signs of a leak with a vacuum test in water. If you have electronics on the engine, you may want to remove them before dunking. It may not matter, but I did not want to chance making things worse so I took off my ignition module. I dried let my saw sit for 24 hours before reassembling. If you get a tester make sure you can do both pressure and vacuum tests. There are testers out there are meant to do vacuum only for brake bleeding.

Liv2learn, mold needs two things, moisture in the form of condensation, and food. Pretty much anything will suffice for food. Gypsum and steel excepted. Moisture in the form of condensation is caused by basically, having a cold surface that water can condense on. If mold is not currently a problem in the basement, as long as the cold room is well insulated, vapour barriered and well ventilated, mold will not be a problem. You need to make sure that there is a vapour barrier on the warm side of the cold room. For the ceiling, that means 6 mil poly wrapped around the joists and across the underside of the floor, then out across the king studs and taped to the exterior foam sheathing. With out a vapour barrier, the insulation won't do much for keeping areas warm (R5 instead of R14 for example), and will provide that perfect surface for condensation and mold growth. For the walls, the foamboard on the warm side of the basement needs to have its seams glued and sealed, Tucktape or foil tape if mylar clad will do the job. That will provide a good vapour barrier. It's a good idea to wrap the kingstuds and rim stud, along with any studs that contact the wall, with 6 mil poly and pull it outside, (into the basement) and tape it to the foam to prevent air intrusion along the concrete and ceiling. Acoustic and vapour barrier mastic, ( a black, gummy caulk) laid in beads along these studs before they are installed will also help a lot. Spray foam injected into the interior door will help insulate it, but by the time you add up the costs of a proper door frame, weather stripping, spray foam, labour,....... well, I can get a cosmetic damaged exterior metal clad insulated door and frame, for $69, suitable for use anywhere in Canada but the high Arctic. Might have a dent in it, more likely the primer coat will have been scratched. Galvanised steel studs will still rust. The rust will start where the screws penetrate the galvanising and will rot them out in, (in housing terms) no time. 5- 10 years in a damp basement. Keep in mind as well that basements often flood. While floods will ruin carpet, wallboard, etc, they will not damage timber studs, metal studs however will be toast. Neglected in my prior posts was ventilation. You need 2" of passive, or 1" of active ventilation for roughly every 32 square feet (4' x 8'). Active ventilation is easy. All you need is a cold air inlet near the floor, and a hot air outlet near the ceiling. For an 8' x 8' cold room, the easy way to do it is drill two 2" holes through the sill plate to the exterior. Run a lenght of ABS or PVC pipe through these holes. For the hot line, run it from just outside the exterior cladding to just inside the foundation wall. Cut two small 2" circles of metal screening. Place them each inside a 90 degree elbow and glue one on each end of the pipe, inside and out with the elbow pointing down, so that the screen is wedged between the pipe and the elbow. The screens will keep out pests. On the inside, run just enough pipe from the 90 elbow down, to pass through the finished ceiling of the cold room. Do the same for the cold line, but run it from the inside foundation wall, almost to the end wall of the cold room. Add the screened 90 elbows. Then glue a pipe that almost reaches to the floor. Warm air will rise out the hot line, and cold air will flow in the cold line. Natural convection will power the ventilation system. Recycled Cotton batting (Denim batts) will do fine for the stud voids and joists, just make sure that on the inside and outside of the cold room you sheath the walls well. The one major drawback of cotton is that rodents find it to be an exceptional nest material. A lot of people think, well, I have a cat who is an excellent mouser,..... and while that is great for killing the resident rodents, it does nothing to repair the damage that the rodents made trying to nest. Trust me on this one. I had to replace all the wall insulation and ceiling insulation in a house due to rodent damage. In one 24" x 8' wall cavity, there was less than 24" of insulation left in the wall, after the mice had finished shredding it for nest material. Half of the walls and all of the ceiling were like that. A R20 house was left with essentually 0 insulation when the mice were done. Might as well have been a tarpaper shack.

"The last time it acted up i checked and had the 24 volts coming from the thermostat to the board but no voltage from the board to the contactor which is what made me think a pressure switch may be locking the voltage out" I want to be clear about something... When you say "the board", do you mean the control board that sits inside your furnace\blower? If so, that's what I mean as well. That board does a lot of things (including the timed shut-off delay mentioned below) but as far as I know, all it does to turn the condenser unit on or off is sent 24 volts over two lines to the unit, specifically the contactor within the unit. There certainly may be more complicated control systems out there but that's the way traditional A\C systems were set up. In such systems, the control board has absolutely no idea of what any "pressure switch" inside the condenser unit is doing, no idea of whether you have no coolant in the lines, no idea of any sort of problem or situation that might exist within the condensing unit. When that control board wants to turn on the condenser unit, it simply sends 24 volts down those little wires. If you turn your thermostat down far enough to signal that you want the room cooler, the thermostat sends a signal to the control board in the furnace, which then turns the blower on by the coils, and then sends the 24 volts to the condensing unit. If in fact you have "no voltage from the board to the contactor" despite you adjusting the thermostat to start the cooling cycle, then your first concern would be to understand why the board or the wires from the board aren't working properly. If, on the other hand, you mean some sort of control board within the condenser unit itself, one that acts as a second brain (third if you count the thermostat) in the system and takes into account information from within the condenser such as high and low pressure readings before sending the 24 volts along to the contactor, then sure, you might well have an issue with that particular board or the pressure sensors or perhaps a whole bunch of things. Don't know. What I do know is that if you are indeed talking about this sort of internal control within the condenser itself and when you think it should be triggering the contactor but you can't detect any juice between the internal board and the contactor, then your problem isn't the contactor. The only way you can determine whether a contactor is bad is to send 24 volts to it. If you do that but the 220 volt lines within the unit aren't energized, then it's the contactor and indeed, because contactor issues can be all about carbon buildup on the contacts, you might have the symptoms you describe. But if the contactor isn't getting the 24 volts at all, you need to look for another answer. I strongly suggest that you turn this over to a repair tech given that you're no longer talking about replacing a $12 contactor in 15 minutes. Nick in Palm Springs

Will you need the pump for the entire house or only a basement bath? If only for basement, why bother with a generator for only a few times a year? If the power is out, just use the upstairs facilities, unless, of course, you want backup electricity for the rest of the house too. If it's for the sewer line for the entire house, you may want to consider a heavy duty pump, not the typical home center store junk. I don't know what's available in the BC area, but in the Chicago area, we've got a local pump company that makes heavy duty pedestal sump and sewage pumps for residential use with a 10 year warranty and expected life of 30+ years. Of course, it's going to cost more than the $250 special from Home Depot. Tramco Pumps